by Robert Fisk
The al-Haq college stood for everything the Americans and Russians most feared: a Taliban factory, an ideological school run by seventy teachers from Pakistan and Afghanistan for thousands of international Islamists eager to struggle for a united Muslim nation in south-west Asia. And if that Muslim nation was to include most of the former southern Soviet republics, Afghanistan and even Pakistan, then the Haqqania will have played its role. As twenty-two-year-old Abdul-Raouf put it when I asked about his former Chechen classmates, “they are our brothers and if they need help, we can give it to them.”
The madrassa, founded by Rashed al-Haq’s grandfather in 1974, was school to all of the Taliban leadership now ruling in Kabul, and a new four-storey boarding hostel for 3,000 students proved that this was an expanding project rather than a dying ideal. If President-General Pervez Musharraf and his Pakistani authorities liked to assure Western leaders that such institutions were a thing of the past, it was instructive to note that eight black-uniformed and armed Pakistani policemen lived within the complex, guarding Mullanah Sami al-Haq—Rashed’s father—and his students. They arrived here in 1998, on the orders of the now-deposed prime minister Nawaz Sharif, for “security reasons.” Nor was this huge college steeped in the past. If its Koranic volumes were studied with exceptional reverence, the madrassa ran its own publishing house and had gone high-tech, its computer room next to the library and managed by Sajjat Khan, who was already constructing a website. Rashed al-Haq, walking me round the campus in his robe and soft Pashtun hat, insisted that the college cost only a million rupees to run—a mere $20,000 a year—but agreed that its funding came from around the world. “Not from countries, just from individuals.” I thought, of course, of Saudi Arabia.
“All the major Islamic leaders in this area were students of my grandfather and father,” al-Haq said. “Especially the Taliban. The Islamic revolution is very near, Inshallah, God willing.” Rashed al-Haq’s grandfather, whose bound works have an honoured place in the college library, is buried in a plot beside the college, along with his wife and sister. The soft pebble-rush of pouring concrete emerged from the hostel next door where workmen were completing a new fourth floor. The military takeover of Pakistan in October 1999 had left the college untouched. “In fact, we were happy [at this] because the majority of members of the assembly were dishonest people,” Rashed al-Haq said. “This was not a real democracy—and a real democracy is what we are struggling for in Islam. For fifty years since the foundation of Pakistan, we have been waiting for real Islamic law to be introduced.” And suddenly, the voice of Rashed al-Haq sounded like that of General Musharraf, the military ruler of Pakistan. For were not their aims similar? Did they not both demand an end to corruption? Did they not both denounce Nawaz Sharif’s rule as a fake democracy? So why should Pakistan heed Washington’s demand by closing down the Taliban factory in Akora Khattak?
Yet other remarks showed how far the college had gone in espousing everything the Americans—and Russians—hate. As we walked past the madrassa’s delicate blue-and-white tiled mosque, Rashed al-Haq, who spent a year at the Islamic university of Al-Azhar in Cairo and spoke Arabic with a thick Egyptian accent, became emotional. “There is, believe me, going to be an Islamic revolution. The more the United States and the Western world and the nations that murder Muslims oppress us, the sooner there will be an Islamic republic. Our morale is high and it’s possible to have an Islamic Union all over this area and we want to create such a union—like the EU and NATO.”
NATO, I asked? NATO? Rashed al-Haq was thinking in military as well as ideological terms. “If India and other Western countries make a nuclear bomb, everyone accepts this, it’s OK. But if one poor Muslim nation like Pakistan makes a bomb, then everyone is against it and it becomes an Islamic bomb. If the Hindus make a bomb, it’s not a Hindu bomb. But the Muslims who make a bomb are called fundamentalist terrorists.” And so I found another point of contact between the al-Haq college and General Musharraf. For Rashed al-Haq and his students and for the Pakistani general, the bomb was a symbol of pride that was there to stay.
ZIAD JARRAH’S FATHER sat beside me and opened his palms in that gesture of innocence that is also a form of special pleading. “He called just two days before the planes crashed to tell me he’d received the two thousand dollars I’d sent him.” Still recovering from open-heart surgery, Samir Jarrah sat, half slumped, sick and traumatised in a green plastic chair beneath the vines of his Lebanese garden. “Ziad said it was for his aeronautical course. He had told me last year that he had a choice of courses—in France or in America—and it was me who told him to go to the States. But there are lots of Ziads. Maybe it wasn’t him? He was a good, kind boy . . .” At which point, Samir Jarrah leaned forward, brought his hands to his face and broke down in tears. Ziad Jarrah was the pilot of United Airlines flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania when its passengers apparently tried to storm the flight deck, wrestling with the hijackers, perhaps with Ziad Jarrah as he gripped the aircraft controls.
Everyone knew. Around us, a bunch of middle-aged men sat on identical chairs, all Sunni Muslims, all appalled that a crime against humanity should have stained the tiny but wealthy village of Almarj in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley. A massive new village mosque—I’d never seen so big a mosque in so small a town— stood scarcely 200 metres from the front door, but both friends of the family and Ziad Jarrah’s uncle insisted that he was neither religious nor political. “He was a normal person,” Jamal Jarrah said. “He drank alcohol, he had girlfriends. Only last August, his Turkish girlfriend Aysel came to meet our family here because she wanted to meet her future in-laws. He wasn’t able to come with her because he said he was too busy with his studies.” It is now 15 September 2001, four days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the suicide hijackers’ plane crash in Pennsylvania.
Too busy to bring his fiancée to meet his family? Busy doing what? And what was the $2,000 for? To continue studies at his Miami aeronautical school? Or to buy air tickets for the Boeing 757 flight to California, for him perhaps, and maybe for the other hijackers on the flight. Aysel was in Germany, freely giving evidence to the Bochum city police who had just searched her apartment, discovering “aircraft-related documents” in a suitcase belonging to one of three men named by Washington as hijackers. All of them—something the Jarrah family could not explain or would not believe—lived together in Hamburg. Aysel had already reported Ziad missing—just as she had eighteen months before when Ziad Jarrah disappeared for up to five weeks. And what she told the Jarrah family over the telephone then gave them their first suspicion that something was terribly wrong with their only son.
For according to a family friend, Aysel told the Jarrahs that her fiancé, who would visit her each weekend from his university in Hamburg, might have gone to Afghanistan. Jamal Jarrah told me that this is what Aysel had feared. “But it turned out that he had been moving from his first university in Greifswald to his new courses in Hamburg and had not been in contact with Aysel during that time.” Five weeks to change universities? Without telling his fiancée?
The details of Ziad Jarrah’s life were as simple—or so the family said—as his death was obscure to them. He was twenty-six, born—according to his Lebanese identity documents—on 11 May 1975, a village boy from a wealthy family. His father was a civil servant in the Beirut Department of Social Security, his mother a schoolteacher. Ziad Jarrah attended the Evangelical School in the Christian town of Zahle, about 20 kilometres from his home, and his father paid thousands to put his son through university. He travelled to Hamburg on a student visa in 1997, later attending the city’s Technical University. He briefly went missing in 1999, just before setting off for the United States on his father’s advice. “Whenever he asked for money, I would send it,” Samir Jarrah said. “He needed money—he had a private home in Germany and a girlfriend to look after. He had to fund his studies.”
In February, Ziad J
arrah returned to Lebanon for the last time to be present during his father’s open-heart surgery. “He looked after his dad and went to the hospital every day to see him,” Jamal, the uncle, told me. “He was so normal. His personality and his life bore no relation to the kind of things that happened . . . He had girlfriends, he went to nightclubs, he went dancing sometimes.” Everyone I spoke to in Almarj said the same thing: Ziad Jarrah was a happy, secular youth, he never showed any interest in religion and never visited the mosque for prayers, he liked women even if he was at times reserved and shy. Mohamed Atta, who lived in Hamburg with him and flew the American Airlines plane into the World Trade Center, was known to knock back five or six stiff drinks in an evening. Surely such behaviour would lead to banishment from the ranks of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda movement. Or was this an attempt to blind any American intelligence agencies that might be watching the men? Who would believe that a young man drinking in a bar—with a Turkish girlfriend back in Germany with whom he’d been living— would be planning to crash an airliner with thirty-three innocent passengers aboard into—where? Congress? The White House?
But Samir Jarrah’s son did board the plane with a knife and a box-cutter— a woman’s last phone call from the flight revealed that these were the hijackers’ only weapons—and the intention to kill himself, along with the passengers, crew and, quite possibly, President George Bush and his staff. What, then, did he learn at his Zahle school and the Christian Patriarchate college where he also studied in Beirut? He was only seven when the Israeli army surrounded him and tens of thousands of other Lebanese civilians in the siege of Beirut in 1982. He was never involved in the civil war, his neighbours told me. He was never interested in militias. “We are ready to cooperate with the authorities,” Jamal Jarrah said to me wearily. “We all regard what happened in America as a terrorist act. It’s a tragedy for Americans, for us, for all people in the world . . .” Samir kept shaking his head, going through a creed of refusal. “My boy was just a normal person. He would never do this. Why, there may have been another ‘Ziad Jarrah’ on the plane.” But the men and women gathering at the family home that morning understood and had come dressed in black.
WHEN THE AIR BOMBARDMENT of Afghanistan began on 7 October 2001, there were no Western journalists inside the Taliban’s three-quarters of Afghanistan, only in the sliver of north-eastern territory held by Massoud’s Northern Alliance. The sole picture of life—and death—inside Kabul was Qatar’s Al-Jazeera satellite channel, which not only broadcast the statements of bin Laden but showed a tape of bomb damage to civilian areas of the capital. A few months earlier, my old friend Tom Friedman had set off for the small Gulf emirate, from where, in one of his imperial columns for The New York Times, he informed the world that the tiny state’s television channel was a welcome sign that democracy might be coming to the Middle East. Al-Jazeera had been upsetting some of the local Arab dictators— Mubarak of Egypt for one—and Tom thought this a good idea. So did I. But by early October the story was being rewritten. Colin Powell was now rapping the emir of Qatar over the knuckles because—so he claimed—Al-Jazeera was “inciting anti-Americanism.”
The Americans wanted the emir to close down the channel’s office in Kabul, which was scooping the world with its tape of the U.S. bombardments and bin Laden’s televised statements. The most wanted man in the whole world had been suggesting that he was angry about the deaths of Iraqi children under sanctions, about the corruption of pro-Western Arab regimes, about Israel’s attacks on Palestinian territory, about the need for U.S. forces to leave the Middle East. And after insisting that bin Laden was a “mindless terrorist”—that there was no connection between U.S. policy in the Middle East and the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington—the Americans needed to close down Al-Jazeera’s coverage.
Needless to say, this tomfoolery was given little coverage in the Western media, whose editors knew they did not have a single correspondent in the Taliban area of Afghanistan. Al-Jazeera did. Bin Laden’s propaganda was pretty basic. He taped his own statements and sent one of his henchmen off to the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul. No cross-questioning, of course, just a sermon. We didn’t see any video clips of destroyed Taliban equipment, the ancient MiGs and even older Warsaw Pact tanks that had been rusting across Afghanistan for years. Only a sequence of pictures—apparently real—of bomb damage in a civilian area of Kabul.
As usual, the first reports of the U.S. missile attacks were covered without the slightest suggestion that innocents were about to die in the country we planned to “save.” Whether the Taliban were lying or telling the truth about thirty civilians dead in Kabul, did we reporters really think that all our bombs fell on the guilty and not the innocent? To be sure, we were given Second World War commentaries about Western military morale. On the BBC we had to listen to an account of “a perfect moonless night for the air armada” to bomb Afghanistan. We were told on one satellite channel of the “air combat” over Afghanistan. A lie. The Taliban had none of their ageing MiGs aloft. There was no combat.
Of course, there was a moral question here. After the atrocities in New York and Washington, how could we be expected to “play fair” between the ruthless bin Laden and the West? We couldn’t make an equivalence between the massmurderer’s diatribes and the American and British forces who were trying to destroy the Taliban. But that was not the point. It was our viewers and readers with whom we had to “play fair.” Because of our rage at the massacre of the innocents in America, and because of our desire to kowtow to the elderly “terrorism experts,” did we have to lose all our critical faculties? Why at least not tell us how these “terrorism experts” came to be so expert? And what were their connections with dubious intelligence services?
In some cases, in America, the men giving us their advice on screen were the very same operatives who steered the CIA and the FBI into the greatest intelligence failure in modern history: the inability to uncover the plot, four years in the making, to destroy the lives of nearly 3,000 people. President Bush said this was a war between good and evil. But that was exactly what bin Laden was saying. Wasn’t it worthwhile to point this out and to ask where such theories might lead?
In the Middle East, Osama bin Laden was already gaining mythic status among Arabs; his voice, repeatedly beamed into millions of homes, articulated the demands and grievances—and fury—of Middle Eastern Muslims who had observed how their pro-Western presidents and kings and princes wriggled out of any serious criticism of the Anglo–American bombardment of Afghanistan. Viewing bin Laden’s latest videotape, Western nations concentrated—if they listened at all—on his remarks about the atrocities in the United States. If he expressed his approval, though denied any personal responsibility, didn’t this mean that he was really behind the mass slaughter of September 11th? Arabs listened with different ears. They heard a voice that accused the West of double standards and “arrogance” towards the Middle East, a voice that addressed the central issue in the lives of so many Arabs: the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and the continuation of Israeli occupation. Now, as a long-time resident of Cairo put it to me, Arabs believed that America was “trying to kill the one man ready to tell the truth.”
But the response of Arab leaders to both the atrocities in America and the American bombing of Afghanistan was truly pathetic. Listening to the speeches of the Muslim leaders at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference emergency summit on 10 October, it was possible to believe that bin Laden represented Arabs more faithfully than their tinpot dictators and kings. Please give us more evidence about September 11, besought the emir of Qatar. Please don’t forget the Palestinians, pleaded Yassir Arafat. Islam is innocent, insisted the Moroccan foreign minister. Everyone—but everyone—wished to condemn the September 11 atrocities in the United States. No one—absolutely no one—wanted to explain why nineteen Arabs decided to fly planeloads of innocent people into buildings full of civilians.
The very name “bin Laden” did not sully the Qatar
conference hall. Not once. Not even the name “Taliban.” Had a Martian landed in the Gulf—which looks not unlike Mars—he might have concluded that the World Trade Center in New York was destroyed by an earthquake or a typhoon. Was it not President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt who said, back in 1990, that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait would blow over “like a summer’s breeze”? Delegates condemned to a man the slaughter in America without for a moment examining why it might have come about. Like the Americans, the Arabs didn’t want to look for causes. Indeed, the conference hall was a miraculous place, in which introspection included neither guilt nor responsibility.
Arafat demanded an international force—a good idea for a new Afghanistan— but it quickly turned out that he was talking about an international force to protect Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza which, according to the map, was about 3,000 kilometres from Kabul. Of course, he condemned the World Trade Center massacre. So did Sheikh Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, and Mohamed bin Issa, the Moroccan foreign minister, and Abdelouahed Belkeziz, the Islamic Conference’s secretary-general. But that was about it. Indeed, the collected speeches amounted to a chorus: please don’t kill innocent Afghans, but—whatever happens—don’t bomb Arab countries. For much of the day, Afghanistan appeared a faraway country of which they knew little—a mendacious thought, given that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were midwives to the Taliban—and wanted to know even less.
Only Farouq al-Sharaa, the Syrian foreign minister, stated frankly that attacking Muslim states was “forbidden.” This meant, he said, “that all Arabs and Muslims will stand with the country that is attacked.” Which must have made them shiver in their boots on board the U.S. carriers in the Gulf. There was the usual rhetoric bath from other conference delegates. The communiqué from the fifty-six conference members claimed that they rejected “the linking of terrorism to the Arab and Muslim people’s rights, including the Palestinian and Lebanese people’s right to self-determination, self-defence and resisting Israeli and foreign occupation and aggression.” Translation: Please, America, don’t take the Israeli side and bomb Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Lebanese Hizballah, Damascus, Tehran et al. “Resistance is not terrorism” had become as familiar a slogan in the Arab world as “war against terrorism” had in the Western world.
