by Aimen Dean
* The battle would later become known as the Battle of Vozuća and was known as ‘al-Badr al-Bosna’ among the mujahideen.20
* In the following years, Babar Ahmad would pioneer placing jihadi content on the Internet. After 9/11, he famously fought and lost an eight-year battle against extradition to the United States, where he was convicted of terror offences. He returned to the UK in 2015 after a US judge decided he should serve only a short additional period of time in prison.
* After the victory, Shaaban was among the commanders greeted by Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović. The moment was filmed and later featured in a jihadi video posted online. While the international community was putting pressure on the Bosnians to rein in jihadi fighters, the Bosnians saw them as useful.
* I later learned Shabaan’s rationale was that a large number of Serbs could pose a strategic danger if they were let go.
** I was told the dead were buried in mass graves a few miles from the camp. In 2015, at a press conference held with a Serb association working for the families of war victims, Zoran Blagojević, a local Serbian politician, said: ‘Twenty years ago a horrific crime was committed in Vozuća that a human mind cannot grasp – ritual murders including beheadings committed by the Mujahideen.’ He said that more than 400 Serb soldiers were killed during Battle for Vozuća and the days that followed and more than 130 were still missing.22
* The International Tribunal documented the killing at the camp near Kamenica of around 50 Serb soldiers who had been taken prisoner after the Battle of Vozuća. According to court documents, most of them were killed by the Mujahideen Brigade at the camp between 11 and 17 September 1995.24
** My understanding at the time was that more than 100 of the 251 prisoners condemned to death were killed at the camp near Kamenica, a higher number than so far documented by the UN. I do not know what happened to the others, but it is possible they were executed elsewhere.
* Al-Ayeri told me that, in Sudan, bin Laden had kept in touch with jihadis on other fronts including Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia through radio transmissions using coded references. A biography later posted on an al-Qaeda website stated al-Ayeri became a bodyguard to bin Laden before travelling with him to Sudan. He never mentioned his role as a bodyguard to me. He told me he travelled to Somalia to assess the potential for jihad there but did not fight there.26
* The Bojinka plot unravelled in January 1995 when Yusuf’s bomb-making operation was discovered in the Philippines. KSM had previously spent time fighting in Bosnia in 1992 according to the 9/11 Commission Report. He did not tell me about this earlier trip when I met him. Born into a family from the Baluchistan region in Pakistan near Iran, KSM had grown up in Kuwait, attended university in the US and participated in the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. Between 1992 and late 1995 he held a government job in Qatar while moonlighting as an international terrorist. His animus towards the United States stemmed from his anger over US support for Israel. His earliest contribution to international terrorism was contributing funds for his nephew Ramzi Yousef’s attack against the World Trade Center in New York in 1993. When I met him in 1995, KSM was travelling to various countries from his base in Qatar on behalf of the jihadi cause. No mention of his autumn 1995 trip to Bosnia is made in the 9/11 Commission Report.27
* When I first met him in Afghanistan in 1996, Osama bin Laden also said he viewed jihadi efforts in Bosnia as a ‘sideshow’. Bin Laden felt that the primary role of jihad was not to protect Muslim lives but to protect their souls. If at the end of jihad no Islamic State could be created then precious resources would be wasted.
** Also listening were Mohammed al-Madani, the Saudi jihadi who had teased me about my uniform size, and Abu Zubayr al-Hayali, a senior Saudi figure in the Bosnian jihad I would later be reunited with in London. The Bosnian jihad was an incubator of the global jihadi movement. Around 900 foreign jihadi fighters fought there in the course of the war. Around 300 died, while 600 went home or moved on to other fronts. The atrocities of Christian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims, and the perception of Western indifference, increased hostility against the United States and the West.28
* In Sarajevo, shortly after the prisoner handover, I met Qasim al-Raymi, who later become the leader of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, as well as Naser al-Ansi, another future senior figure in the group. Al-Raymi told me he had spent time in Afghanistan, where he met bin Laden and had fought against the forces of South Yemen in the 1994 war. Other graduates of the Bosnian jihad were Ramzi Binalshibh, the link between Bosnia veteran KSM and the 9/11 hijackers, the 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, and the Finsbury Park cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri.
* Croat forces denied Shaaban was deliberately targeted. It is possible he was killed because of his role in orchestrating a suicide bombing against Croatian police two months previously.31
** Years later, after I started working for British intelligence, I learned from the Saudi jihadi Abu Zubayr al-Hayali that Shaaban had begun planning a campaign of attacks against a NATO-led implementation force which was expected to be deployed once the Dayton Accords were signed. Shaaban and other jihadis felt these forces were being sent by the West to weaken the mujahideen and stop Bosnia from becoming a safe haven for the Gama al-Islamiya.32
My Second Life: Jalalabad and the Jungle
1996–1997
The quickest way to the Caucasus, it seemed, was through the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, now an oil-rich dictatorship. I wanted to go with Khalid, who seemed to have recovered some equilibrium after his descent into psychosis in Bosnia, but his best efforts to get a visa came to nought. By contrast, I quickly found part-time work with a Saudi charity, the Haramain Foundation. And so, early in 1996, I arrived alone in the windswept Azeri capital, Baku, on the shores of the Caspian Sea.
I had what can only be described as a memorable welcome to Azerbaijan. There were three taxis waiting when I finally exited the dingy arrivals terminal in the early hours of the morning. Three heavily mustachioed cab drivers with bulging waistlines sprang out to secure the fare. Two of them started wrestling for my bag. Fisticuffs followed and soon they were on the ground mauling each other.
The third driver saw his chance and bundled me and my luggage into his taxi.
Unfortunately, this was not the end of the drama. We had barely driven ten minutes when a taxi pulled up alongside us at a stop light. The evident winner of the heavyweight wrestling bout at the airport sprang out and marched towards us. He did not look happy. Within moments another fight was underway.
Unsure how long it would be before a winner was declared, I hailed a passing car.
‘Can you take me into town?’ I asked in a mixture of Arabic and sign language, brandishing the Azeri currency I had collected at the airport. The unshaven, bleary-eyed driver motioned me to the back seat. My relief was short-lived; the stench of cheap alcohol infused the car. After swerving through the streets of Baku, he screeched to a halt and looked at me unsteadily.
‘Hotel’ was the only word.
The Haramain Foundation had an office and three staff in Baku, in a pleasant if somewhat shabby villa with a garden. It was more than a charity.* Its staff – a Tunisian dentistry student called Fathi and two Palestinian students from Lebanon – had a direct link to the leadership of the Chechen resistance and were organizing supply convoys through Dagestan to a commander called Ibn al-Khattab.** The Azeri authorities seemed well aware that the Baku branch of Haramain was doing more than caring for refugees, but a senior intelligence officer and a prominent politician were also on the payroll, to the tune of $70,000 a month. We were not harassed.
The snows of the Caucasus Mountains made travel to Chechnya impossible for several months, but the staff needed my help in the office – to cook the books. I spent my first few days there inventing the names of volunteers so we could get more funding. There were plenty of other book-keeping tricks, and they worked well until we heard that someone was coming from Haramain head office
to check on the operation. We had claimed to be looking after 11,000 refugees; in fact it was closer to 5,000. So once the delegation had visited one camp, we moved thousands of bewildered refugees to another to ‘make up the numbers’.**
We also made the most of Baku’s reputation as the windy city by pulling down tents and making children cry, then videoing the fabricated calamity and sending it to Haramain’s headquarters with a plea for more money for shelters. A pliable local doctor falsified certificates for various fictional procedures, with invoices attached. We were raking in six figures every month, enough to pay off our Azeri patrons and buy supplies for the Chechen resistance.
As soon as the snows began to melt, a truck made the trek twice a week through Dagestan to Chechnya laden with food and medical supplies. Among the inventory were bags of American rice and stacks of mayonnaise. Al-Khattab insisted it was the perfect fuel, when mixed with rice, to power jihad against the Russians.
There were very few Arab mujahideen making their way to Chechnya at this stage; al-Khattab said he preferred local fighters. But he made exceptions for those with useful skills, and once the winter eased we managed to smuggle in two Saudis who knew how to handle anti-aircraft guns. I was disappointed not to join them, but hoped I would be allowed to follow in their footsteps.
As the weather turned more spring-like we had an unannounced visitor. He was Egyptian and clean-shaven but for a pencil-thin moustache, with beady eyes that peered through thick-rimmed spectacles. His name was Ayman al-Zawahiri and he was then leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terror group seeking to topple the Mubarak regime in Egypt.*
After a failed attempt to assassinate President Mubarak in Ethiopia the previous year, Zawahiri’s group had been ejected from their perch in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, where they had found shelter alongside Osama bin Laden.** To have gone home would have invited immediate arrest and probably a death sentence. Zawahiri and his lieutenants had been on the run ever since (hence the loss of the beard), looking for a place to pitch their tents.
‘Dr Ayman’, as we called him, was not an easy guest, constantly carping about our lack of security (he was unaware of our arrangement with local officials), given to pomposity and insisting, despite the Russian checkpoints, that he must get to Chechnya immediately.* I found it difficult to believe Zawahiri led an organization with such credentials as EIJ, not least when he let loose his high-pitched laugh. He also had a curious dress sense, wearing a high-buttoned grey tunic and matching trousers that made him look like a member of the Egyptian Communist Party or Dr Evil in the Austin Powers films.
It was difficult to know whether he had travelling companions; we never saw any. He took a room at the villa and nagged us daily. At his insistence, we sent a message to al-Khattab, who asked us to try to dissuade him. If that didn’t work, he said, Zawahiri could only come if the driver (a trusted aide) was willing to carry him.
The driver was Mohammed Omar, who had good relations with some of the police in Dagestan, no doubt oiled by some hard cash. The problem was the mobile checkpoints set up by the Russians, particularly for a prominent Arab jihadi travelling on a Sudanese passport without a visa. There was also the growing presence of Russian regular forces in the republic. To try to deter him, we provided Zawahiri with a greatly inflated estimate of the troop presence.
None of it worked. Omar eventually relented and the Egyptian VIP clambered into his truck for the long and difficult journey into Dagestan and across the mountains. We chuckled at the thought of him wedged between cartons of mayonnaise.
Three days later Omar returned with a batch of fresh orders from al-Khattab.
‘Oh,’ he added casually. ‘The Egyptian – he was arrested.’
Zawahiri had barely made it into Dagestan before being detained at a mobile checkpoint twenty miles from Derbent. We let him stew for a while to teach him a lesson, but we eventually asked Omar to open negotiations with the local police to secure his release. After thirteen days he was a free man thanks to $10,000 that we raised, most of which probably did not make its way to the Justice Ministry. Such a sum demanded some imaginative accounting. Had I not been able to scrape the money together, the man who would become bin Laden’s deputy and then his successor as leader of al-Qaeda might have had a very different career path.
Zawahiri appears to have been persistent; when he returned to Baku he set up shop in the office of a charity linked to his group. Months later, he tried to get into Chechnya again, this time with two other veterans of Egyptian Islamic Jihad.4 All were travelling as businessmen on false passports – but not very convincingly. This time Zawahiri and his associates were transferred to the custody of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and spent several months in detention in the Dagestani capital, Makhachkala, before being freed for ‘time served’.
‘God blinded them to our identities,’ Zawahiri poetically wrote later.5
Zawahiri’s tenacity appears to have stemmed from his belief at the time that the Caucasus could become the foundation of an Islamic state, a belief encouraged by the ceasefire in 1996 that included a partial withdrawal of Russian troops from the region. From there, jihad could spread throughout Central Asia.6 But his second abortive journey would be the last instalment of Zawahiri’s obsession with Chechnya.7 Shortly thereafter he abandoned efforts to establish his own brand of jihad and headed for Afghanistan to deepen his fateful alliance with bin Laden.
Like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had decamped to Afghanistan a few months after I had met him in Bosnia,8 and Osama bin Laden, who arrived there in the late spring of 1996, Zawahiri saw Afghanistan as jihad’s safe haven.
I shared the Egyptian doctor’s frustration. After the sense of purpose and exhilaration that I had in Bosnia, months of book-keeping and tedious administration in Baku had left me stale and impatient. There were no heavenly rewards for good accountancy. And, as a callow teenager, I had misunderstood the Chechen struggle. It was more a nationalist uprising than a front for jihad. There were a few foreigners there, including a Jordanian cleric who had reportedly won over a destitute village with a free feast every week. But the Chechen separatists were wary of funds and recruits from Arab countries; their presence would help Moscow paint the rebellion as Islamist extremism.
I began to despair of ever getting to Chechnya.*
‘What can I do?’ I asked Fathi on a breezy afternoon as we weeded the villa’s neglected flower beds.
‘Afghanistan,’ he replied simply.
KSM had said the same. Afghanistan would become the base for a much larger project. No longer would jihad nibble at the edges of conflicts in remote mountains. It would become the guiding light towards the eventual establishment of a new Islamic order, a place of purity that Qutb would recognize.
‘KSM said I should go to Khalden,’ I said. Khalden was the main camp near the city of Khost.
‘No,’ said Fathi, drawing out the word in warning. ‘Darunta.’
I had never heard of the place.
‘Near Jalalabad. The brothers there are more intelligent and educated.’
He gave me a number to call in Pakistan.
The city of Peshawar is capital of the then aptly named North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan. Like Casablanca in the Second World War, it was full of spies, smugglers, refugees and schemers. Its crowded streets reverberated to the screeching of two-stroke mopeds and the monotonous calls of street traders. The ordered suburbia of Khobar, the wooded mountainsides of Bosnia, the howling winds of Baku – none prepared me for the teeming chaos of Peshawar.
Peshawar had become a gateway for jihadis seeking to enter Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Islamist militants had brought a new dimension to the city. Despite my efforts to blend in, dressed in the flowing salwar kameez, I felt as if I was wearing a sign that read ‘visiting jihadi’.
Fathi’s contact number belonged to a guest house used by the Hezb-e-Islami, a fearsome militia led by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar which operated several training camps
for Arab fighters in Darunta. Hekmatyar was a legendary figure whose fighters had been lavishly funded by Pakistan’s military intelligence – the formidable ISI – during the Soviet occupation. Most of the money had come from the CIA but was distributed by the Pakistanis. Hekmatyar had provided support to Arab foreign fighters like Osama bin Laden in the belief they would reinforce his power base. For Hekmatyar it was all about power.*
The talk in Peshawar in the spring of 1996 was all about a fundamentalist movement in Afghanistan led by a mysterious cleric called Mullah Omar. The Taliban had emerged from the madrassas of Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early 1990s before seizing most of southern Afghanistan. They now had their eyes on taking the capital, Kabul.
The rise of the Taliban had divided Arab opinion in Peshawar. At the Hezb-e-Islami guest house I met a fair-haired Iraqi Kurd sympathetic to the Taliban cause. His name was Abu Said al-Kurdi.
‘Just be careful,’ he told me one evening. ‘Hekmatyar wants us to fight against the Taliban.’
‘I have no intention of picking sides. I just want to get the best training I can,’ I said. I wanted the specialist skills that would guarantee a place on the front lines of jihad, not in its back office.
He looked at me intently, his dark green eyes trying to work me out.
‘I want you to meet somebody,’ he said.
He led me across town to a villa with high walls. Once we entered the courtyard a tall metal gate clanged shut behind us.
An unsmiling man came towards us; he wore round spectacles that magnified small, sharp eyes and had a neatly groomed beard. He might have passed for a university professor, but he was one of the most influential figures in the world of jihad. His name was Abu Zubaydah.* Abu Said al-Kurdi, it turned out, was his deputy.
Abu Zubaydah was an ‘operator’; he managed travel flows between Peshawar and the camps, including the Khalden camp KSM had recommended. He also helped Kashmiri militant groups, which afforded him some protection from the ISI. Abu Zubaydah would soon become the bank manager and quartermaster for al-Qaeda without formally joining the group. The arrangement suited al-Qaeda, which felt that having its own office in Peshawar would invite trouble.
