boasting that he had 40,000 mujahedeen in Saudi Arabia alone and
could raise an army of more than 100,000 in three months. 7 Prince Turki
recalled that bin Laden “ believed that he was capable of preparing an
army to challenge Saddam’s forces.” Turki also noted a disturbing difference
in bin Laden. “ I saw radical changes in his personality as he
changed from a peaceful and gentle man interested in helping Muslims
into a person who believed that he would be able to amass and
command an army to liberate Kuwait,” Turki remembered. “ It revealed
his arrogance.” 8 Given the small numbers and, at best, mediocre performance
of the Afghan Arabs in the war against the Soviets and in the
struggle to overthrow the puppet government the Soviets left behind
after withdrawing, it would have been sheer folly to rely on this band
of zealots for any signifi cant military operation. With no formal military
training and only limited experience commanding small units in
irregular warfare, bin Laden must have been delusional or a religious
fanatic to believe he would be taken seriously. The Saudis wisely called
upon their U.S. ally. The United States assembled a coalition of half
a million troops to expel Saddam from Iraq in less than one hundred
hours of ground combat following a lengthy air campaign.
EXILE
Coming on the heels of his disappointment over South Yemen, the
Persian Gulf War further disillusioned bin Laden about his government.
Not only had the monarchy dismissed his offer of help out of hand; it had
invited the hated Americans onto the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, where
once the feet of the Prophet had trod. Although bin Laden had yet to declare
the house of Saud unfi t to govern Muslims, these events accelerated
the process of alienation that would lead him to that fateful step. In the
meantime, he decided on voluntary exile. To leave the kingdom, however,
he would need to retrieve his passport. According to one account,
he asked for his passport and exit visa on the pretext of returning to Pakistan
to help refugees from the Afghan war. 9 Another story maintains he
wanted to mediate among the competing factions in the Afghan civil
war. 10 A third source asserts that he journeyed to Pakistan to “ liquidate
his investments there.” 11 This disagreement illustrates just how much
mystery surrounds even relatively recent events in bin Laden’s life. No
74 OSAMA BIN LADEN
doubt believing that, with the Yemeni problem solved and the Iraqis
removed from Kuwait, bin Laden could do little harm, the government
complied with his request. Bin Laden did make the journey to Peshawar,
where he found that he no longer controlled the Arab fi ghters who remained
there. They had been incorporated into Hekmatyar’s forces
fi ghting for control of Afghanistan in the vacuum left by Soviet withdrawal.
Bin Laden decided to relocate with his family to Sudan, where
Colonel Omar al-Bashir had staged a coup in 1989. Along with Hassan
Turabi, al-Bashir turned the country into an authoritarian Islamist state.
Before he left Pakistan, however, bin Laden wrapped up his operations
there. “ Before [Osama] decided to go to Sudan, he decided that everything
is fi nished [in Pakistan],” one of his associates, Osama Rushdi,
explained.
This is 1992. They sell everything in Peshawar and they said al
Qaeda is fi nished. I have seen that. The Pakistani government [exerted]
a lot of pressure against Arab people. So most of the Saudi
Arabia people [ sic ] went to their country. Some of them went to
Bosnia. Osama bin Laden didn’t order them to go to Bosnia or
Chechnya or any other place. He ordered people that can go peacefully
back to their country to go back, but the problem is for the
people who cannot go back to their own country, and bin Laden
[felt] some responsibility about those people. 12
At least some of the Afghan Arabs for whom he felt responsible came
with him to Sudan. They would form the nucleus of a revived al-Qaeda,
although he may initially have wanted little more than to provide them a
place to live.
Uncertainty surrounds bin Laden’s activities in Sudan and even his
reasons for going there. According to Lawrence Wright, the Sudanese
government invited him to settle in the country through a letter it sent
him in 1990. The Sudanese assured him that he would be welcome in
their Islamist state governed by true sharia and offered the added enticement
of lucrative construction contracts for the Binladen Group. 13
No other source corroborates the letter, but the Binladen Group got a
contract to build an airport at Port Said. The family may have sent its
FIGHTING THE GREAT SATAN 75
wayward brother there in order to kill two birds with one stone. It needed
someone to manage the Sudanese projects, and it understood that sending
bin Laden would keep him happy living in an Islamist state and
out of trouble. If that was indeed the family’s aim, it would be sorely
disappointed.
Whatever his reasons, bin Laden decided to settle in Khartoum, at
least for the time being. He probably sent some of his Afghan followers
to Sudan ahead of him to rent farms and houses. 14 He moved to the
Sudanese capital with his four wives and many children, opened an offi
ce there, and bought a farm outside the city. Was he looking for a new
base from which to prepare and eventually launch more jihad operations,
as some analysts believe, or simply seeking to start over in a land
ruled according to the teachings of the Prophet, as others have proposed?
Whatever his original intent, the Saudi millionaire soon heard the
call to jihad once again. The social environment of his new home facilitated
his radical activities. In the early 1990s, Sudan provided a safe
haven for Islamist extremists from groups throughout the Arab world. 15
His later notoriety makes it easy to forget that in the 1990s bin Laden
was but one of many jihadist leaders in the Arab world. The U.S. focus
on bin Laden and al-Qaeda has blinded Americans to the extent and
depth of the radical element in what scholars call the “ Islamic Awakening”
or the “ New Islamic Discourse.” 16 This movement seeks an Islamic
solution to the challenges of modernity, a solution that does not
involve Westernization. Islamists wish to embrace the technological
and other advantages of the West without accepting the values of the
culture that produced them. Because this ideological movement began
as a challenge to the belief that secular nationalism provided the best
way to modernize, Islamists met with repression, especially in Egypt. Repression,
in turn, bred extremism. Denied legitimate avenues of political
participation, Islamists turned to violence. The 1970s and 1980s saw a
proliferation of extremist groups throughout the Muslim world, many
of them developing within the Middle East. While only a small percentage
of Islamists advocated violence, those that did demonstrated a
willingness to use force indiscriminately against men, women, and children
in attacks designed to cause mass casualties. Collectively as well
as individually, these Islamist extremists posed a serious threat to their
own governments and to the Western nations that supported them.
76 OSAMA BIN LADEN
Sudan’s willingness to host so many members of extremist organizations
created an opportunity for them to cooperate with one another
and to create networks that have persisted to the present. In 1991,
Turabi hosted a conference of Islamists from around the world, many of
them members of the most violent Islamist groups. Bin Laden attended
but was neither an organizer nor a central fi gure at the meeting. 17 However,
either at the conference or in its aftermath, he re-engaged with
some of his allies, particularly the Egyptian medical doctor Ayman al-
Zawahiri. Zawahiri’s al-Jihad group had broken with the Muslim Brotherhood
over the use of violence. He had treated refugees in Afghanistan
and been involved with the creation of al-Qaeda, though his organization
remained separate. Sometime during bin Laden’s stay in Sudan,
the two groups merged.
AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI
The relationship between bin Laden and Zawahiri is complex and ambiguous.
The Egyptian has been content to remain the number two
man in al-Qaeda, but many analysts consider him the brains of the operation.
Perhaps he understood that, given bin Laden’s ego, it was wiser
to the let the Saudi be the titular leader and public face of the movement.
One author insists that “it was bin Laden’s vision to create an
international jihad corps” and that, without him, Zawahiri and his followers
would have remained preoccupied with overthrowing the government
of Egypt. 18 Former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel insists that it
was the other way around: Zawahiri had the global vision bin Laden
lacked. 19 Riedel’s argument is far more plausible. Zawahiri is far better
educated and more widely traveled than bin Laden. He is also probably
smarter. Bin Laden has never shown signs of sweeping original thought.
Despite his religious fanaticism, he has always seemed to be deeply
impressionable. If his wealth and standing in the Arab world had not
made him so much more valuable alive, he is exactly the sort of man
who would have been recruited in his youth as a suicide bomber.
Because of his important role in al-Qaeda and his infl uence on
Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri merits careful consideration. After the 9/11
attacks, he produced a lengthy treatise detailing his theology and strategy
for global jihad. Zawahiri divided the world into two armed camps.
FIGHTING THE GREAT SATAN 77
“ This point in Islamic history is witness to a furious struggle between
the powers of the infi dels, tyrants, and haughtiness, on the one hand,
and the Islamic uma and its mujahid vanguard on the other,” he declared.
20 He forbade befriending the infi dels and preached undying hatred
of them. He also preached the need for jihad against pro-Western
rulers of Muslim countries. “One of the greatest and most individually
binding jihads in this day and age is jihad waged against those apostate
rulers who reign over Islamic lands and govern without sharia—the
friends of Jews and Christians,” he proclaimed. 21
Zawahiri also opposed popular democracy as un-Islamic. “ Know that
democracy, that is the ‘rule of the people,’ is a new religion that defi es
the masses by giving them right to legislate without being shackled
down to any other authority,” he wrote. 22 The other authority to which
he referred was sharia as interpreted by the ulema . “ The bottom line regarding
democracies is that the right to make laws is given to someone
other than Allah Most High,” he reasoned. “So whoever is agreed to
this is an infi del—for he has taken gods in place of Allah.” 23
Like most revolutionaries, Zawahiri could justify any excess in the
name of his righteous cause. Killing the innocent, even other Muslims,
in order to kill the enemy was permissible because “the tyrants and enemies
of Allah always see to it that their organizations and military
escorts are set among the people and populace, making it diffi cult to
hunt them down in isolation,” he explained. 24 He also justifi ed deceit
against the infi dels. “ Deception in warfare requires that the mujahid wait
for an opportunity against his enemy, while avoiding confrontation at
all possible costs,” he counseled. “ For triumph in almost every case is
[achieved ] through deception.” 25 Like most religious fanatics, Zawahiri
could use legalistic argument to justify anything. Finally, Zawahiri extolled
martyrdom above all else. “ The best of people, then, are those
who are prepared for jihad in the path of Allah Most High, requesting
martyrdom at any time or place,” he concluded. 26
A DECADE OF TERRORISM
The years Osama bin Laden spent in Sudan witnessed an upsurge in
Islamist terrorist activity, but his role in a series of attacks during that
time ( like so much of his life) remains unclear. In 1993, Ramsey Yousef
78 OSAMA BIN LADEN
and Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman ( known as “the Blind Sheik”) detonated
a truck fi lled with ammonium nitrate in the parking garage beneath the
World Trade Center in New York City. The blast killed six people and
caused several million dollars’ worth of damage. The perpetrators were
quickly apprehended. Bin Laden may have funded the Sheik’s group,
but he does not appear to have been involved in the attack or even to
have known about it ahead of time. In October of that same year, Somali
insurgents shot down a Blackhawk helicopter and then ambushed
army rangers sent in to rescue the helicopter’s crew, dragging the bodies
of dead Americans through the streets of Mogadishu. Bin Laden later
praised the operation and claimed that Arab Islamists had fought in
Somalia. “ With Allah’s grace,” he asserted in a 1997 interview, “ Muslims
in Somalia cooperated with some Arab warriors who were in Afghanistan.
Together they killed large numbers of American occupation
troops.” 27 As usual, bin Laden exaggerated the Arab presence and its
effect. He did not, however, claim that the Arabs belonged to al-Qaeda
or that he personally had had anything to do with the attacks. The Somali
fi ghters have denied that he participated in the operation that
downed the helicopter. 28
Islamist extremist attacks continued throughout the mid-1990s, but
bin Laden has not been linked defi nitively to any of them. In 1995,
Saudi terrorists bombed the Saudi National Guard training facility in
Riyadh, killing fi ve Americans who worked there. During their trial,
the four terrorists captured by the Saudis admitted that bin Laden’s
statements had infl uenced them. However, Saudi intelligence confi ded
to CIA analyst Bruce Riedel that bin Laden had not been personally
involved. The terrorists’ admissions, however, illustrate that, as an ideological
movement inspiring others to act, al-Qaeda could be just as
deadly as when it mounted its own operations. The following year, terrorists
used a truck bomb to blow up the U.S. military barracks at the
Khobar Towers at Dharan Airbase, in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans.
Once again, bin Laden was initially suspected, and once again (according
to Riedel, who helped in the investigation), the Saudis determined
that he had not been involved, although he would later praise the operation.
29 In 1995, Zawahiri’s al-Jihad group tried to assassinate Egyptian
president Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Bin Laden, of
course approved, but he does not seem to have been involved.
FIGHTING THE GREAT SATAN 79
MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY
Whatever his original intentions in relocating to Sudan, living there
reinforced Osama bin Laden’s commitment to violent jihad, if it had
ever really waned. By early 1994, he had set up new al-Qaeda cells in
several countries, including Somalia, Kenya, Yemen, Bosnia, Egypt, Libya,
and Tajikistan. 30 His criticism of the Saudi regime also intensifi ed. The
bin Laden family, which had long depended on royal patronage, at fi rst
distanced itself from its wayward brother and then, in February 1994,
repudiated him. “ I myself and all members of the family, whose number
exceeds fi fty persons, express our strong condemnation and denunciation
of all the behavior of Osama, which behavior we do not accept or
approve of,” bin Laden’s older half-brother, the family patriarch Bakr bin
Laden, announced.
As said Osama has been residing outside the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia for more than two years despite our attempts to convince
him to return to the right path; we, therefore, consider him to be
alone responsible for his statements, actions, and behavior, if truly
emanating from him. 31
The bin Ladens also claimed to have cut their wayward relative off from
Binladen Group profi ts. He was, no doubt, bad for business. Whether
the family truly turned off the money tap completely is less certain. Bin
Laden had spent a small fortune on the Afghan jihad, and, by some
accounts, he lost more in Sudan. However, he always seemed to have
enough funds to support his large family in Sudan, to relocate them
to Afghanistan, and to support them there. He also continued to lead
al-Qaeda, which would have been unlikely had he been reduced to
poverty. When he immigrated to Afghanistan in 1996, he had enough
money to shower local sheikhs with gifts. This evidence suggests that,
whatever they may have said to the contrary, the bin Ladens did not
cut off his income completely.
If bin Laden’s own family could no longer ignore his belligerent behavior
and infl ammatory rhetoric, neither could the Saudi authorities.
The same month that Bakr issued his statement, Libyan gunmen fi red on
bin Laden’s house in Khartoum. He blamed the CIA for the attack,
80 OSAMA BIN LADEN
but the real culprit behind it may have been Saudi intelligence, though
it denied any involvement. 32 In March 1994, the Saudi government
revoked bin Laden’s citizenship. This drastic measure either left bin
Laden unshaken or strengthened his resolve to resume the cause of
jihad. In December 1994, he wrote a scathingly critical letter to Sheik
Abdul-Aziz bin Baz, the mufti (leading cleric) of Saudi Arabia. The letter
presented a laundry list of complaints against the sheik and, by implication,
against the monarchy. Bin Laden accused bin Baz of issuing
fatwas (religious proclamations) to justify whatever the royal government
wanted to do. In particular, he objected to one fatwa calling for
peace with the Jews. He singled out for special condemnation the Saudi
cleric’s willingness to back the regime in support of what bin Laden saw
as the communist government of Yemen and especially its decision to
open the country to “ Jewish and Crusader occupation forces [the Americans
and their allies].” Perhaps for the fi rst time, bin Laden openly referred
to “apostate rulers who wage war on God and his Messenger [and
who] have neither legitimacy, nor sovereignty over Muslims.” 33
In addition to angering the Saudis, bin Laden attracted the attention
of the United States. Although he had as yet conducted no act of terrorism
against it or against Americans, his connection to so many terrorist
groups and his professed sympathy for their actions caused concern in
Washington. Meanwhile, the government of Sudan faced mounting criticism
over its open-door policy toward extremists. In the spring of 1996,
the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling upon the government
in Khartoum to desist
from engaging in activities of assisting, supporting and facilitating
terrorist activities and from giving shelter and sanctuary to terrorist
elements; and henceforth acting in its relations with its neighbours
and with others in full conformity with the Charter of the
United Nations and with the Charter of the OAU.
The resolution also called upon all member states to reduce their diplomatic
interaction with Khartoum. 34 The international pressure had its
effect. The Sudanese asked the Saudis to let bin Laden return to the
kingdom. They agreed provided he apologized for his infl ammatory rhetoric
and ceased his extremist activity. Not surprisingly, he refused.
FIGHTING THE GREAT SATAN 81
GUEST OF THE TALIBAN
For the second time in a decade, Osama bin Laden was without a home.
No country was particularly eager to take him—with one exception, Afghanistan.
After years of civil war, the ultraconservative Taliban had
captured 90 percent of the country. The group’s leader, Mullah Mohammed
Omar, held near absolute power, and his religious police unleashed
a reign of terror throughout the country, insisting that men wear beards
and that women be covered from head to toe in burqas while in public.
While these measures exceeded even bin Laden’s notion of Muslim
purity, he and Mullah Omar held common views of jihad and a shared
hatred of the West. Bin Laden’s still considerable wealth made him an
acceptable guest, just as it had during the Afghan war against the Soviets.
He smoothed his transition into the country and placated Taliban
critics with lavish gifts such as new automobiles. 35 This largesse
clearly indicates that bin Laden had plenty of money, from the family’s
businesses, its individual members, or al-Qaeda sources —probably all
three. In May 1996, bin Laden left Sudan with his family and moved
into a complex near Kandahar.
Taliban leaders asked him to refrain from the behavior that had gotten
him expelled from Sudan. However much they might agree with
him in principle, they did not want the repercussions of Western anger
any more than had the Sudanese. Mullah Omar and his follows had far
more interest in consolidating power in Afghanistan than in launching
a global jihad. The Saudi government, which supported the Taliban,
may also have asked them to keep bin Laden quiet. For a while, bin
Laden honored the wishes of his host, but his silence did not last long.
THE FATWA AGAINST JEWS AND CRUSADERS
The years spent in Khartoum with other Islamist radicals had focused
and clarifi ed Osama bin Laden’s jihadist worldview. The teachings of
the Prophet allowed violence in defense of Islam. Bin Laden understood
this teaching as a call to wage war until all of the religion’s enemies had
been defeated. The apostate regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well
as any other Muslim government that did not implement strict sharia,
should be attacked and overthrown. Because it supported these
82 OSAMA BIN LADEN
regimes, exploited the resources of Muslim countries, and interfered in
Muslims affairs in countless other ways, the United States must also be
attacked. In referring to the U.S. threat, bin Laden used the terms “crusader”
and “ Zionist crusader.” In his mind (and those of many Islamist
extremists), Israel and the United States were inexorably linked. He
maintained that Zionists dictated U.S. policy toward the Muslim world
and that Israel did the bidding of the United States in the Middle East.
Bin Laden’s theory of jihad reached its fullest expression in two fatwas,
one issued in 1996 and the other in 1998.
The 1996 fatwa, “ Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying
the Land of the Two Holy Places,” detailed a long list of grievances
against the West and against what bin Laden now considered a Saudi
regime that functioned as a U.S. client. “ It should not be hidden from
you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and
injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-crusader alliance and their
collaborators,” he proclaimed, “to the extent that the Muslims blood
became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies.
Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq.” The Iraqi casualties
to which bin Laden referred were not those killed in the Gulf War but
the many Iraqi civilians, most of them children, who died as a result
of the U.S.-led embargo, which kept medicine and other necessities out
of the country. Worst of all, U.S. troops remained on Saudi soil long
after the threat from Saddam Hussein had receded. Bin Laden called
for a boycott of U.S. goods and demanded that U.S. troops leave Saudi
Arabia. Fort the fi rst time, he declared the United States to be the
greatest enemy of Islam:
The regime is fully responsible for what had been incurred by the
country and the nation; however the occupying American enemy
is the principle and the main cause of the situation. Therefore efforts
should be concentrated on destroying, fi ghting and killing
the enemy until, by the Grace of Allah, it is completely defeated. 36
Both the title and the content of the 1996 fatwa suggest that bin
Laden still distinguished between combatants and noncombatants. He
called for attacks on U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia but fell
short of declaring all Americans legitimate targets or even of advoFIGHTING
THE GREAT SATAN 83
cating violence against military personnel outside Muslim countries.
Those restrictions would disappear in his next fatwa, “ Jihad against Jews
and Crusaders,” issued in February 1998. The new fatwa reiterated the
complaints of its predecessor, adding to U.S. crimes the “devastation infl
icted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite
the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million,” another
reference to the lethal effects of the embargo. He then issued the
following proclamation:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and
military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in
any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the
al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and
in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated
and unable to threaten any Muslim. 37
In its call to kill any and all Americans wherever and whenever possible,
bin Laden’s new fatwa deviated from more than 1,000 years of Islamic
just-war theory and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, which instructed
Muslim fi ghters to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants
and to spare women and children.
Bin Laden later explained the logic behind the call for indiscriminate
killing of Americans. While Zawahiri argued that women and children
would be collateral damage in attacks aimed at military personnel
who lived and worked among them, bin Laden justifi ed targeting civilians.
“ We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms
and civilians; they are all targets in this fatwa,” he explained.
American history does not distinguish between civilians and military,
not even women and children. They are the ones who used
bombs against Nagasaki. Can these bombs distinguish between infants
and military? America does not have a religion that will prevent
it from destroying all people. 38
This bizarre circular reasoning recalled Hitler’s justifi cation of the Holocaust.
Germany persecuted Jews and engaged in aggressive war, which
led to the creation of a powerful anti-German coalition. The Jews were,
84 OSAMA BIN LADEN
therefore, to blame for the coalition and must be persecuted further.
Bin Laden issued the 1998 fatwa on behalf of a new organization, the
“ World Islamic Front.” This group may have been a new coalition or
merely a new name for al-Qaeda. Whatever the case may be, al-Qaeda
continues as the most common name for bin Laden’s organization and
its affi liates.
Bin Laden’s fatwas contradicted Islam’s long-standing distinction
between combatants and noncombatants. After the 9/11 attacks, bin
Laden spoke at some length on this subject. In an October 2001 interview,
he explained that al-Qaeda had killed civilians in retaliation for
the civilians that the United States had allegedly killed. “ The killing of
innocent civilians, as America and some intellectuals claim, is really
very strange talk,” he concluded.
When we kill their innocents, the entire world from east to west
screams at us. Who said that our blood is not blood, but theirs is?
Who made this pronouncement? Who has been getting killed in
our countries for decades? More than one million children died
in Iraq and others are still dying. Why do we not hear someone
screaming or condemning, or even someone’s words of consolation
or condolence? We kill civilian infi dels in exchange for those of our
children they kill. This is permissible in law and intellectually.
Not surprisingly, bin Laden failed to say precisely which Islamic law
permits such tit-for-tat killing of innocent people. He went on to explain
that, since the 9/11 hijackers “did not intend to kill babies,” those
who died were collateral damage. 39
In an October 26, 2002, letter to the American people, bin Laden
offered an even more convoluted explanation for the murder of civilians.
“ You may then ask why we are attacking and killing civilians because
you have defi ned them as innocent,” he asserted.
Well this argument contradicts your claim that America is the
land of freedom and democracy, where every American irrespective
of gender, color, age or intellectual ability has a vote. It is a
fundamental principle of any democracy that the people choose
their leaders, and as such, approve and are party to the actions of
FIGHTING THE GREAT SATAN 85
their elected leaders. So “ In the land of freedom” each American
is “free” to select their leader because they have the right to do so,
and as such they give consent to the policies their elected Government
adopts. This includes the support of Israel manifesting
itself in many ways including billions of dollars in military aid. By
electing these leaders, the American people have given their consent
to the incarceration of the Palestinian people, the demolition
of Palestinian homes and the slaughter of the children of Iraq. 40
Since the United States is a popular democracy, all of its citizens share
responsibility for their government’s actions. According to this perverse
logic, there is no such thing as an American noncombatant. Bin
Laden fails to explain how the children who died on 9/11 fell under the
same death sentence as their parents. Nor did he consider that there
are six million loyal Muslim American citizens.
AL-QAEDA ATTACKS
Despite his increasingly infl ammatory rhetoric, bin Laden had yet to
actually attack the United States or its citizens. At the time of his 1998
fatwa, plans were already afoot to turn words into deeds. On August 7,
1998, terrorists launched near simultaneous attacks on the U.S. embassies
in Nairobi, Kenya, and Darussalam, Tanzania. The Nairobi embassy
bombing killed 291 people, most of them Kenyans, and injured 5,000.
The Darussalam embassy attack killed 10 and injured 77. 41 Despite efforts
to deny involvement, bin Laden could not escape blame for the
devastating attacks. One of the Tanzanian terrorists was captured and
revealed under interrogation that al-Qaeda had planned and conducted
the operation.
On the basis of this and other evidence, the Clinton administration
decided that it must act decisively against the terrorist organization. The
United States launched cruise missiles at al-Qaeda training camps in
Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The camp attacks
killed few and did little permanent damage. The attack on the factory
was based on faulty intelligence that it was a dual-use facility that manufactured
both chemicals for use in weapons and medicine. The embassy
attacks did, temporarily at least, heighten U.S. awareness of the
86 OSAMA BIN LADEN
terrorist threat. As a result, customs and law enforcement offi cials did
manage to foil a plot to attack targets in the United States during the
millennium celebrations on New Year’s Eve 1999/2000, including a plan
to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. This successful interdiction
may have led to overconfi dence about the security of U.S. borders.
On October 12, 2000, al-Qaeda struck again, this time against a military
target. As the destroyer USS Cole lay at anchor in Aden harbor,
Yemen, where it had stopped to refuel, suicide bombers piloted a small
boat loaded with explosives up to the ship and detonated it. The attack
killed 19 sailors and wounded several others. Only skillful damage
control by its captain kept the vessel afl oat. These overseas attacks did
not produce the alarm they should have. Americans had grown used to
attacks on military forces overseas, which had been occurring since the
1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, Lebanon. The State Department
further hardened its embassies, but few in government took the
threat of an attack on the U.S. homeland very seriously. As an indication
of this complacency, airlines rigorously screened passengers and
baggage on foreign fl ights but were noticeably lax on domestic ones.
MYTHIC HERO
The success of al-Qaeda operations and the ability of the United States
inability to respond to them effectively emboldened bin Laden and increased
his stature in the Muslim world. Some of his closest associates
attest to the U.S. role in strengthening the bin Laden myth. “ Do you
know what made him famous? ” one Guantanamo Bay detainee asked
rhetorically. “ I will tell you: America. By the media and television and
by magazines. Everybody is talking about Osama bin Laden.” 42 The
head of a Peshawar madrasa from which members of the Taliban had
graduated corroborated this conclusion:
I think America has made Osama a supernatural being. Wherever
the terrorism occurs, right away they think of him. I don’t think
he has such infl uence, or such control and resources. Osama bin
Laden has become a symbol for the whole Islamic world. All those
outside powers who are trying to crush Muslims interfering with
them. Yes, he is a hero to us, but it is America itself who fi rst made
him a hero. 43
FIGHTING THE GREAT SATAN 87
This statement indicates that bin Laden was on the way to achieving
one of his major goals. He wished to portray America’s war against him
and al-Qaeda as a war against Islam.
9/11
The events of September 11, 2001, have been etched into the memory
of every American alive at the time. The planning and execution of
the attacks have been exhaustively studied by the 9/11 Commission
and a host of academic and popular works. While much information
remains classifi ed and more remains to be discovered, the event itself is
fairly well understood. Bin Laden and his associates had been planning
the operation for several years and had smuggled in the terrorists as much
as a year prior to the attack. The morning of the attack, 19 hijackers
boarded four aircraft. They fl ew two into the twin towers of the World
Trade Center in New York City and a third into the Pentagon. Courageous
passengers prevented the fourth fl ying missile from being delivered
to its target by forcing the hijackers to crash the plane into a Pennsylvania
fi eld.
As with previous al-Qaeda operations, the idea for the 9/11 attacks
does not seem to have originated with Osama bin Laden. The Report
of the 9/11 Commission credits the Egyptian Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
(KSM) with proposing and developing the plan. He had fi rst intended
to blow up a number of planes departing Manila’s airport over the Pacifi
c in 1994, but authorities foiled that plot. In 1996, he met bin Laden
in Afghanistan.
KSM briefed [ Mohammed Atef-9/11 hijackers] and bin Laden on
the fi rst World Trade Center bombing, the Manila air plot, the
cargo carriers plan, and other activities pursued by KSM and his
colleagues in the Philippines. KSM also presented a proposal that
would involve training pilots who would crash planes into buildings
in the United States. This proposal eventually become the
9/11 plot. 44
The conclusion that KSM masterminded the 9/11 plot corroborates a
considerable body of evidence indicating that bin Laden has never
been the brains of al-Qaeda. The chief investigative reporter for the
88 OSAMA BIN LADEN
Al Jazeera television network, Yosri Fourda, offered a poignant assessment
of bin Laden’s abilities and his role in al-Qaeda. “ It doesn’t surprise
me [that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed organized 9/11],” Fourda observed.
It’s not exactly bin Laden’s territory. He’s not very fond of details,
looking at details. He’s the enigma; he’s the chairman of the company,
so to speak. He is the symbol of the organization. He would
still need people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be advising
him on certain operations, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would,
in turn, need people to execute things. 45
AFTERMATH
Operationally, the 9/11 attacks were brilliantly planned and almost
fl awlessly executed. The attackers struck economic and military targets
of great strategic and symbolic importance, achieving the dramatic effect
all terrorists seek. Estimates place the number of viewers who saw
video footage of the attacks at one billion. The 9/11attacks also represented
the culmination of Osama bin Laden’s jihadist journey. He had
begun as a pious young man who had been swayed by Islamist teaching
in school. Azzam recruited him to the cause of jihad during the Afghan
war against the Soviets. He returned a hero, only to be rebuffed by his
own country following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The Saudis turned
to the United States for defense against Saddam Hussein rather than
accept bin Laden’s offer to raise a force of mujahedeen fi ghters to defend
the kingdom. After the Gulf War, he went into voluntary exile, fi rst in
Sudan and then in Afghanistan. During that exile, he came to believe
that jihad must be waged against apostate Muslim regimes as well as the
United States, which backed them. The U.S. response to 9/11 would
change his fortunes but not end his campaign of terror. Nothing could
dampen his ardor for aggressive jihad.
could raise an army of more than 100,000 in three months. 7 Prince Turki
recalled that bin Laden “ believed that he was capable of preparing an
army to challenge Saddam’s forces.” Turki also noted a disturbing difference
in bin Laden. “ I saw radical changes in his personality as he
changed from a peaceful and gentle man interested in helping Muslims
into a person who believed that he would be able to amass and
command an army to liberate Kuwait,” Turki remembered. “ It revealed
his arrogance.” 8 Given the small numbers and, at best, mediocre performance
of the Afghan Arabs in the war against the Soviets and in the
struggle to overthrow the puppet government the Soviets left behind
after withdrawing, it would have been sheer folly to rely on this band
of zealots for any signifi cant military operation. With no formal military
training and only limited experience commanding small units in
irregular warfare, bin Laden must have been delusional or a religious
fanatic to believe he would be taken seriously. The Saudis wisely called
upon their U.S. ally. The United States assembled a coalition of half
a million troops to expel Saddam from Iraq in less than one hundred
hours of ground combat following a lengthy air campaign.
EXILE
Coming on the heels of his disappointment over South Yemen, the
Persian Gulf War further disillusioned bin Laden about his government.
Not only had the monarchy dismissed his offer of help out of hand; it had
invited the hated Americans onto the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, where
once the feet of the Prophet had trod. Although bin Laden had yet to declare
the house of Saud unfi t to govern Muslims, these events accelerated
the process of alienation that would lead him to that fateful step. In the
meantime, he decided on voluntary exile. To leave the kingdom, however,
he would need to retrieve his passport. According to one account,
he asked for his passport and exit visa on the pretext of returning to Pakistan
to help refugees from the Afghan war. 9 Another story maintains he
wanted to mediate among the competing factions in the Afghan civil
war. 10 A third source asserts that he journeyed to Pakistan to “ liquidate
his investments there.” 11 This disagreement illustrates just how much
mystery surrounds even relatively recent events in bin Laden’s life. No
74 OSAMA BIN LADEN
doubt believing that, with the Yemeni problem solved and the Iraqis
removed from Kuwait, bin Laden could do little harm, the government
complied with his request. Bin Laden did make the journey to Peshawar,
where he found that he no longer controlled the Arab fi ghters who remained
there. They had been incorporated into Hekmatyar’s forces
fi ghting for control of Afghanistan in the vacuum left by Soviet withdrawal.
Bin Laden decided to relocate with his family to Sudan, where
Colonel Omar al-Bashir had staged a coup in 1989. Along with Hassan
Turabi, al-Bashir turned the country into an authoritarian Islamist state.
Before he left Pakistan, however, bin Laden wrapped up his operations
there. “ Before [Osama] decided to go to Sudan, he decided that everything
is fi nished [in Pakistan],” one of his associates, Osama Rushdi,
explained.
This is 1992. They sell everything in Peshawar and they said al
Qaeda is fi nished. I have seen that. The Pakistani government [exerted]
a lot of pressure against Arab people. So most of the Saudi
Arabia people [ sic ] went to their country. Some of them went to
Bosnia. Osama bin Laden didn’t order them to go to Bosnia or
Chechnya or any other place. He ordered people that can go peacefully
back to their country to go back, but the problem is for the
people who cannot go back to their own country, and bin Laden
[felt] some responsibility about those people. 12
At least some of the Afghan Arabs for whom he felt responsible came
with him to Sudan. They would form the nucleus of a revived al-Qaeda,
although he may initially have wanted little more than to provide them a
place to live.
Uncertainty surrounds bin Laden’s activities in Sudan and even his
reasons for going there. According to Lawrence Wright, the Sudanese
government invited him to settle in the country through a letter it sent
him in 1990. The Sudanese assured him that he would be welcome in
their Islamist state governed by true sharia and offered the added enticement
of lucrative construction contracts for the Binladen Group. 13
No other source corroborates the letter, but the Binladen Group got a
contract to build an airport at Port Said. The family may have sent its
FIGHTING THE GREAT SATAN 75
wayward brother there in order to kill two birds with one stone. It needed
someone to manage the Sudanese projects, and it understood that sending
bin Laden would keep him happy living in an Islamist state and
out of trouble. If that was indeed the family’s aim, it would be sorely
disappointed.
Whatever his reasons, bin Laden decided to settle in Khartoum, at
least for the time being. He probably sent some of his Afghan followers
to Sudan ahead of him to rent farms and houses. 14 He moved to the
Sudanese capital with his four wives and many children, opened an offi
ce there, and bought a farm outside the city. Was he looking for a new
base from which to prepare and eventually launch more jihad operations,
as some analysts believe, or simply seeking to start over in a land
ruled according to the teachings of the Prophet, as others have proposed?
Whatever his original intent, the Saudi millionaire soon heard the
call to jihad once again. The social environment of his new home facilitated
his radical activities. In the early 1990s, Sudan provided a safe
haven for Islamist extremists from groups throughout the Arab world. 15
His later notoriety makes it easy to forget that in the 1990s bin Laden
was but one of many jihadist leaders in the Arab world. The U.S. focus
on bin Laden and al-Qaeda has blinded Americans to the extent and
depth of the radical element in what scholars call the “ Islamic Awakening”
or the “ New Islamic Discourse.” 16 This movement seeks an Islamic
solution to the challenges of modernity, a solution that does not
involve Westernization. Islamists wish to embrace the technological
and other advantages of the West without accepting the values of the
culture that produced them. Because this ideological movement began
as a challenge to the belief that secular nationalism provided the best
way to modernize, Islamists met with repression, especially in Egypt. Repression,
in turn, bred extremism. Denied legitimate avenues of political
participation, Islamists turned to violence. The 1970s and 1980s saw a
proliferation of extremist groups throughout the Muslim world, many
of them developing within the Middle East. While only a small percentage
of Islamists advocated violence, those that did demonstrated a
willingness to use force indiscriminately against men, women, and children
in attacks designed to cause mass casualties. Collectively as well
as individually, these Islamist extremists posed a serious threat to their
own governments and to the Western nations that supported them.
76 OSAMA BIN LADEN
Sudan’s willingness to host so many members of extremist organizations
created an opportunity for them to cooperate with one another
and to create networks that have persisted to the present. In 1991,
Turabi hosted a conference of Islamists from around the world, many of
them members of the most violent Islamist groups. Bin Laden attended
but was neither an organizer nor a central fi gure at the meeting. 17 However,
either at the conference or in its aftermath, he re-engaged with
some of his allies, particularly the Egyptian medical doctor Ayman al-
Zawahiri. Zawahiri’s al-Jihad group had broken with the Muslim Brotherhood
over the use of violence. He had treated refugees in Afghanistan
and been involved with the creation of al-Qaeda, though his organization
remained separate. Sometime during bin Laden’s stay in Sudan,
the two groups merged.
AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI
The relationship between bin Laden and Zawahiri is complex and ambiguous.
The Egyptian has been content to remain the number two
man in al-Qaeda, but many analysts consider him the brains of the operation.
Perhaps he understood that, given bin Laden’s ego, it was wiser
to the let the Saudi be the titular leader and public face of the movement.
One author insists that “it was bin Laden’s vision to create an
international jihad corps” and that, without him, Zawahiri and his followers
would have remained preoccupied with overthrowing the government
of Egypt. 18 Former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel insists that it
was the other way around: Zawahiri had the global vision bin Laden
lacked. 19 Riedel’s argument is far more plausible. Zawahiri is far better
educated and more widely traveled than bin Laden. He is also probably
smarter. Bin Laden has never shown signs of sweeping original thought.
Despite his religious fanaticism, he has always seemed to be deeply
impressionable. If his wealth and standing in the Arab world had not
made him so much more valuable alive, he is exactly the sort of man
who would have been recruited in his youth as a suicide bomber.
Because of his important role in al-Qaeda and his infl uence on
Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri merits careful consideration. After the 9/11
attacks, he produced a lengthy treatise detailing his theology and strategy
for global jihad. Zawahiri divided the world into two armed camps.
FIGHTING THE GREAT SATAN 77
“ This point in Islamic history is witness to a furious struggle between
the powers of the infi dels, tyrants, and haughtiness, on the one hand,
and the Islamic uma and its mujahid vanguard on the other,” he declared.
20 He forbade befriending the infi dels and preached undying hatred
of them. He also preached the need for jihad against pro-Western
rulers of Muslim countries. “One of the greatest and most individually
binding jihads in this day and age is jihad waged against those apostate
rulers who reign over Islamic lands and govern without sharia—the
friends of Jews and Christians,” he proclaimed. 21
Zawahiri also opposed popular democracy as un-Islamic. “ Know that
democracy, that is the ‘rule of the people,’ is a new religion that defi es
the masses by giving them right to legislate without being shackled
down to any other authority,” he wrote. 22 The other authority to which
he referred was sharia as interpreted by the ulema . “ The bottom line regarding
democracies is that the right to make laws is given to someone
other than Allah Most High,” he reasoned. “So whoever is agreed to
this is an infi del—for he has taken gods in place of Allah.” 23
Like most revolutionaries, Zawahiri could justify any excess in the
name of his righteous cause. Killing the innocent, even other Muslims,
in order to kill the enemy was permissible because “the tyrants and enemies
of Allah always see to it that their organizations and military
escorts are set among the people and populace, making it diffi cult to
hunt them down in isolation,” he explained. 24 He also justifi ed deceit
against the infi dels. “ Deception in warfare requires that the mujahid wait
for an opportunity against his enemy, while avoiding confrontation at
all possible costs,” he counseled. “ For triumph in almost every case is
[achieved ] through deception.” 25 Like most religious fanatics, Zawahiri
could use legalistic argument to justify anything. Finally, Zawahiri extolled
martyrdom above all else. “ The best of people, then, are those
who are prepared for jihad in the path of Allah Most High, requesting
martyrdom at any time or place,” he concluded. 26
A DECADE OF TERRORISM
The years Osama bin Laden spent in Sudan witnessed an upsurge in
Islamist terrorist activity, but his role in a series of attacks during that
time ( like so much of his life) remains unclear. In 1993, Ramsey Yousef
78 OSAMA BIN LADEN
and Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman ( known as “the Blind Sheik”) detonated
a truck fi lled with ammonium nitrate in the parking garage beneath the
World Trade Center in New York City. The blast killed six people and
caused several million dollars’ worth of damage. The perpetrators were
quickly apprehended. Bin Laden may have funded the Sheik’s group,
but he does not appear to have been involved in the attack or even to
have known about it ahead of time. In October of that same year, Somali
insurgents shot down a Blackhawk helicopter and then ambushed
army rangers sent in to rescue the helicopter’s crew, dragging the bodies
of dead Americans through the streets of Mogadishu. Bin Laden later
praised the operation and claimed that Arab Islamists had fought in
Somalia. “ With Allah’s grace,” he asserted in a 1997 interview, “ Muslims
in Somalia cooperated with some Arab warriors who were in Afghanistan.
Together they killed large numbers of American occupation
troops.” 27 As usual, bin Laden exaggerated the Arab presence and its
effect. He did not, however, claim that the Arabs belonged to al-Qaeda
or that he personally had had anything to do with the attacks. The Somali
fi ghters have denied that he participated in the operation that
downed the helicopter. 28
Islamist extremist attacks continued throughout the mid-1990s, but
bin Laden has not been linked defi nitively to any of them. In 1995,
Saudi terrorists bombed the Saudi National Guard training facility in
Riyadh, killing fi ve Americans who worked there. During their trial,
the four terrorists captured by the Saudis admitted that bin Laden’s
statements had infl uenced them. However, Saudi intelligence confi ded
to CIA analyst Bruce Riedel that bin Laden had not been personally
involved. The terrorists’ admissions, however, illustrate that, as an ideological
movement inspiring others to act, al-Qaeda could be just as
deadly as when it mounted its own operations. The following year, terrorists
used a truck bomb to blow up the U.S. military barracks at the
Khobar Towers at Dharan Airbase, in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans.
Once again, bin Laden was initially suspected, and once again (according
to Riedel, who helped in the investigation), the Saudis determined
that he had not been involved, although he would later praise the operation.
29 In 1995, Zawahiri’s al-Jihad group tried to assassinate Egyptian
president Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Bin Laden, of
course approved, but he does not seem to have been involved.
FIGHTING THE GREAT SATAN 79
MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY
Whatever his original intentions in relocating to Sudan, living there
reinforced Osama bin Laden’s commitment to violent jihad, if it had
ever really waned. By early 1994, he had set up new al-Qaeda cells in
several countries, including Somalia, Kenya, Yemen, Bosnia, Egypt, Libya,
and Tajikistan. 30 His criticism of the Saudi regime also intensifi ed. The
bin Laden family, which had long depended on royal patronage, at fi rst
distanced itself from its wayward brother and then, in February 1994,
repudiated him. “ I myself and all members of the family, whose number
exceeds fi fty persons, express our strong condemnation and denunciation
of all the behavior of Osama, which behavior we do not accept or
approve of,” bin Laden’s older half-brother, the family patriarch Bakr bin
Laden, announced.
As said Osama has been residing outside the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia for more than two years despite our attempts to convince
him to return to the right path; we, therefore, consider him to be
alone responsible for his statements, actions, and behavior, if truly
emanating from him. 31
The bin Ladens also claimed to have cut their wayward relative off from
Binladen Group profi ts. He was, no doubt, bad for business. Whether
the family truly turned off the money tap completely is less certain. Bin
Laden had spent a small fortune on the Afghan jihad, and, by some
accounts, he lost more in Sudan. However, he always seemed to have
enough funds to support his large family in Sudan, to relocate them
to Afghanistan, and to support them there. He also continued to lead
al-Qaeda, which would have been unlikely had he been reduced to
poverty. When he immigrated to Afghanistan in 1996, he had enough
money to shower local sheikhs with gifts. This evidence suggests that,
whatever they may have said to the contrary, the bin Ladens did not
cut off his income completely.
If bin Laden’s own family could no longer ignore his belligerent behavior
and infl ammatory rhetoric, neither could the Saudi authorities.
The same month that Bakr issued his statement, Libyan gunmen fi red on
bin Laden’s house in Khartoum. He blamed the CIA for the attack,
80 OSAMA BIN LADEN
but the real culprit behind it may have been Saudi intelligence, though
it denied any involvement. 32 In March 1994, the Saudi government
revoked bin Laden’s citizenship. This drastic measure either left bin
Laden unshaken or strengthened his resolve to resume the cause of
jihad. In December 1994, he wrote a scathingly critical letter to Sheik
Abdul-Aziz bin Baz, the mufti (leading cleric) of Saudi Arabia. The letter
presented a laundry list of complaints against the sheik and, by implication,
against the monarchy. Bin Laden accused bin Baz of issuing
fatwas (religious proclamations) to justify whatever the royal government
wanted to do. In particular, he objected to one fatwa calling for
peace with the Jews. He singled out for special condemnation the Saudi
cleric’s willingness to back the regime in support of what bin Laden saw
as the communist government of Yemen and especially its decision to
open the country to “ Jewish and Crusader occupation forces [the Americans
and their allies].” Perhaps for the fi rst time, bin Laden openly referred
to “apostate rulers who wage war on God and his Messenger [and
who] have neither legitimacy, nor sovereignty over Muslims.” 33
In addition to angering the Saudis, bin Laden attracted the attention
of the United States. Although he had as yet conducted no act of terrorism
against it or against Americans, his connection to so many terrorist
groups and his professed sympathy for their actions caused concern in
Washington. Meanwhile, the government of Sudan faced mounting criticism
over its open-door policy toward extremists. In the spring of 1996,
the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling upon the government
in Khartoum to desist
from engaging in activities of assisting, supporting and facilitating
terrorist activities and from giving shelter and sanctuary to terrorist
elements; and henceforth acting in its relations with its neighbours
and with others in full conformity with the Charter of the
United Nations and with the Charter of the OAU.
The resolution also called upon all member states to reduce their diplomatic
interaction with Khartoum. 34 The international pressure had its
effect. The Sudanese asked the Saudis to let bin Laden return to the
kingdom. They agreed provided he apologized for his infl ammatory rhetoric
and ceased his extremist activity. Not surprisingly, he refused.
FIGHTING THE GREAT SATAN 81
GUEST OF THE TALIBAN
For the second time in a decade, Osama bin Laden was without a home.
No country was particularly eager to take him—with one exception, Afghanistan.
After years of civil war, the ultraconservative Taliban had
captured 90 percent of the country. The group’s leader, Mullah Mohammed
Omar, held near absolute power, and his religious police unleashed
a reign of terror throughout the country, insisting that men wear beards
and that women be covered from head to toe in burqas while in public.
While these measures exceeded even bin Laden’s notion of Muslim
purity, he and Mullah Omar held common views of jihad and a shared
hatred of the West. Bin Laden’s still considerable wealth made him an
acceptable guest, just as it had during the Afghan war against the Soviets.
He smoothed his transition into the country and placated Taliban
critics with lavish gifts such as new automobiles. 35 This largesse
clearly indicates that bin Laden had plenty of money, from the family’s
businesses, its individual members, or al-Qaeda sources —probably all
three. In May 1996, bin Laden left Sudan with his family and moved
into a complex near Kandahar.
Taliban leaders asked him to refrain from the behavior that had gotten
him expelled from Sudan. However much they might agree with
him in principle, they did not want the repercussions of Western anger
any more than had the Sudanese. Mullah Omar and his follows had far
more interest in consolidating power in Afghanistan than in launching
a global jihad. The Saudi government, which supported the Taliban,
may also have asked them to keep bin Laden quiet. For a while, bin
Laden honored the wishes of his host, but his silence did not last long.
THE FATWA AGAINST JEWS AND CRUSADERS
The years spent in Khartoum with other Islamist radicals had focused
and clarifi ed Osama bin Laden’s jihadist worldview. The teachings of
the Prophet allowed violence in defense of Islam. Bin Laden understood
this teaching as a call to wage war until all of the religion’s enemies had
been defeated. The apostate regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well
as any other Muslim government that did not implement strict sharia,
should be attacked and overthrown. Because it supported these
82 OSAMA BIN LADEN
regimes, exploited the resources of Muslim countries, and interfered in
Muslims affairs in countless other ways, the United States must also be
attacked. In referring to the U.S. threat, bin Laden used the terms “crusader”
and “ Zionist crusader.” In his mind (and those of many Islamist
extremists), Israel and the United States were inexorably linked. He
maintained that Zionists dictated U.S. policy toward the Muslim world
and that Israel did the bidding of the United States in the Middle East.
Bin Laden’s theory of jihad reached its fullest expression in two fatwas,
one issued in 1996 and the other in 1998.
The 1996 fatwa, “ Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying
the Land of the Two Holy Places,” detailed a long list of grievances
against the West and against what bin Laden now considered a Saudi
regime that functioned as a U.S. client. “ It should not be hidden from
you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and
injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-crusader alliance and their
collaborators,” he proclaimed, “to the extent that the Muslims blood
became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies.
Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq.” The Iraqi casualties
to which bin Laden referred were not those killed in the Gulf War but
the many Iraqi civilians, most of them children, who died as a result
of the U.S.-led embargo, which kept medicine and other necessities out
of the country. Worst of all, U.S. troops remained on Saudi soil long
after the threat from Saddam Hussein had receded. Bin Laden called
for a boycott of U.S. goods and demanded that U.S. troops leave Saudi
Arabia. Fort the fi rst time, he declared the United States to be the
greatest enemy of Islam:
The regime is fully responsible for what had been incurred by the
country and the nation; however the occupying American enemy
is the principle and the main cause of the situation. Therefore efforts
should be concentrated on destroying, fi ghting and killing
the enemy until, by the Grace of Allah, it is completely defeated. 36
Both the title and the content of the 1996 fatwa suggest that bin
Laden still distinguished between combatants and noncombatants. He
called for attacks on U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia but fell
short of declaring all Americans legitimate targets or even of advoFIGHTING
THE GREAT SATAN 83
cating violence against military personnel outside Muslim countries.
Those restrictions would disappear in his next fatwa, “ Jihad against Jews
and Crusaders,” issued in February 1998. The new fatwa reiterated the
complaints of its predecessor, adding to U.S. crimes the “devastation infl
icted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite
the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million,” another
reference to the lethal effects of the embargo. He then issued the
following proclamation:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and
military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in
any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the
al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and
in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated
and unable to threaten any Muslim. 37
In its call to kill any and all Americans wherever and whenever possible,
bin Laden’s new fatwa deviated from more than 1,000 years of Islamic
just-war theory and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, which instructed
Muslim fi ghters to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants
and to spare women and children.
Bin Laden later explained the logic behind the call for indiscriminate
killing of Americans. While Zawahiri argued that women and children
would be collateral damage in attacks aimed at military personnel
who lived and worked among them, bin Laden justifi ed targeting civilians.
“ We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms
and civilians; they are all targets in this fatwa,” he explained.
American history does not distinguish between civilians and military,
not even women and children. They are the ones who used
bombs against Nagasaki. Can these bombs distinguish between infants
and military? America does not have a religion that will prevent
it from destroying all people. 38
This bizarre circular reasoning recalled Hitler’s justifi cation of the Holocaust.
Germany persecuted Jews and engaged in aggressive war, which
led to the creation of a powerful anti-German coalition. The Jews were,
84 OSAMA BIN LADEN
therefore, to blame for the coalition and must be persecuted further.
Bin Laden issued the 1998 fatwa on behalf of a new organization, the
“ World Islamic Front.” This group may have been a new coalition or
merely a new name for al-Qaeda. Whatever the case may be, al-Qaeda
continues as the most common name for bin Laden’s organization and
its affi liates.
Bin Laden’s fatwas contradicted Islam’s long-standing distinction
between combatants and noncombatants. After the 9/11 attacks, bin
Laden spoke at some length on this subject. In an October 2001 interview,
he explained that al-Qaeda had killed civilians in retaliation for
the civilians that the United States had allegedly killed. “ The killing of
innocent civilians, as America and some intellectuals claim, is really
very strange talk,” he concluded.
When we kill their innocents, the entire world from east to west
screams at us. Who said that our blood is not blood, but theirs is?
Who made this pronouncement? Who has been getting killed in
our countries for decades? More than one million children died
in Iraq and others are still dying. Why do we not hear someone
screaming or condemning, or even someone’s words of consolation
or condolence? We kill civilian infi dels in exchange for those of our
children they kill. This is permissible in law and intellectually.
Not surprisingly, bin Laden failed to say precisely which Islamic law
permits such tit-for-tat killing of innocent people. He went on to explain
that, since the 9/11 hijackers “did not intend to kill babies,” those
who died were collateral damage. 39
In an October 26, 2002, letter to the American people, bin Laden
offered an even more convoluted explanation for the murder of civilians.
“ You may then ask why we are attacking and killing civilians because
you have defi ned them as innocent,” he asserted.
Well this argument contradicts your claim that America is the
land of freedom and democracy, where every American irrespective
of gender, color, age or intellectual ability has a vote. It is a
fundamental principle of any democracy that the people choose
their leaders, and as such, approve and are party to the actions of
FIGHTING THE GREAT SATAN 85
their elected leaders. So “ In the land of freedom” each American
is “free” to select their leader because they have the right to do so,
and as such they give consent to the policies their elected Government
adopts. This includes the support of Israel manifesting
itself in many ways including billions of dollars in military aid. By
electing these leaders, the American people have given their consent
to the incarceration of the Palestinian people, the demolition
of Palestinian homes and the slaughter of the children of Iraq. 40
Since the United States is a popular democracy, all of its citizens share
responsibility for their government’s actions. According to this perverse
logic, there is no such thing as an American noncombatant. Bin
Laden fails to explain how the children who died on 9/11 fell under the
same death sentence as their parents. Nor did he consider that there
are six million loyal Muslim American citizens.
AL-QAEDA ATTACKS
Despite his increasingly infl ammatory rhetoric, bin Laden had yet to
actually attack the United States or its citizens. At the time of his 1998
fatwa, plans were already afoot to turn words into deeds. On August 7,
1998, terrorists launched near simultaneous attacks on the U.S. embassies
in Nairobi, Kenya, and Darussalam, Tanzania. The Nairobi embassy
bombing killed 291 people, most of them Kenyans, and injured 5,000.
The Darussalam embassy attack killed 10 and injured 77. 41 Despite efforts
to deny involvement, bin Laden could not escape blame for the
devastating attacks. One of the Tanzanian terrorists was captured and
revealed under interrogation that al-Qaeda had planned and conducted
the operation.
On the basis of this and other evidence, the Clinton administration
decided that it must act decisively against the terrorist organization. The
United States launched cruise missiles at al-Qaeda training camps in
Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The camp attacks
killed few and did little permanent damage. The attack on the factory
was based on faulty intelligence that it was a dual-use facility that manufactured
both chemicals for use in weapons and medicine. The embassy
attacks did, temporarily at least, heighten U.S. awareness of the
86 OSAMA BIN LADEN
terrorist threat. As a result, customs and law enforcement offi cials did
manage to foil a plot to attack targets in the United States during the
millennium celebrations on New Year’s Eve 1999/2000, including a plan
to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. This successful interdiction
may have led to overconfi dence about the security of U.S. borders.
On October 12, 2000, al-Qaeda struck again, this time against a military
target. As the destroyer USS Cole lay at anchor in Aden harbor,
Yemen, where it had stopped to refuel, suicide bombers piloted a small
boat loaded with explosives up to the ship and detonated it. The attack
killed 19 sailors and wounded several others. Only skillful damage
control by its captain kept the vessel afl oat. These overseas attacks did
not produce the alarm they should have. Americans had grown used to
attacks on military forces overseas, which had been occurring since the
1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, Lebanon. The State Department
further hardened its embassies, but few in government took the
threat of an attack on the U.S. homeland very seriously. As an indication
of this complacency, airlines rigorously screened passengers and
baggage on foreign fl ights but were noticeably lax on domestic ones.
MYTHIC HERO
The success of al-Qaeda operations and the ability of the United States
inability to respond to them effectively emboldened bin Laden and increased
his stature in the Muslim world. Some of his closest associates
attest to the U.S. role in strengthening the bin Laden myth. “ Do you
know what made him famous? ” one Guantanamo Bay detainee asked
rhetorically. “ I will tell you: America. By the media and television and
by magazines. Everybody is talking about Osama bin Laden.” 42 The
head of a Peshawar madrasa from which members of the Taliban had
graduated corroborated this conclusion:
I think America has made Osama a supernatural being. Wherever
the terrorism occurs, right away they think of him. I don’t think
he has such infl uence, or such control and resources. Osama bin
Laden has become a symbol for the whole Islamic world. All those
outside powers who are trying to crush Muslims interfering with
them. Yes, he is a hero to us, but it is America itself who fi rst made
him a hero. 43
FIGHTING THE GREAT SATAN 87
This statement indicates that bin Laden was on the way to achieving
one of his major goals. He wished to portray America’s war against him
and al-Qaeda as a war against Islam.
9/11
The events of September 11, 2001, have been etched into the memory
of every American alive at the time. The planning and execution of
the attacks have been exhaustively studied by the 9/11 Commission
and a host of academic and popular works. While much information
remains classifi ed and more remains to be discovered, the event itself is
fairly well understood. Bin Laden and his associates had been planning
the operation for several years and had smuggled in the terrorists as much
as a year prior to the attack. The morning of the attack, 19 hijackers
boarded four aircraft. They fl ew two into the twin towers of the World
Trade Center in New York City and a third into the Pentagon. Courageous
passengers prevented the fourth fl ying missile from being delivered
to its target by forcing the hijackers to crash the plane into a Pennsylvania
fi eld.
As with previous al-Qaeda operations, the idea for the 9/11 attacks
does not seem to have originated with Osama bin Laden. The Report
of the 9/11 Commission credits the Egyptian Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
(KSM) with proposing and developing the plan. He had fi rst intended
to blow up a number of planes departing Manila’s airport over the Pacifi
c in 1994, but authorities foiled that plot. In 1996, he met bin Laden
in Afghanistan.
KSM briefed [ Mohammed Atef-9/11 hijackers] and bin Laden on
the fi rst World Trade Center bombing, the Manila air plot, the
cargo carriers plan, and other activities pursued by KSM and his
colleagues in the Philippines. KSM also presented a proposal that
would involve training pilots who would crash planes into buildings
in the United States. This proposal eventually become the
9/11 plot. 44
The conclusion that KSM masterminded the 9/11 plot corroborates a
considerable body of evidence indicating that bin Laden has never
been the brains of al-Qaeda. The chief investigative reporter for the
88 OSAMA BIN LADEN
Al Jazeera television network, Yosri Fourda, offered a poignant assessment
of bin Laden’s abilities and his role in al-Qaeda. “ It doesn’t surprise
me [that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed organized 9/11],” Fourda observed.
It’s not exactly bin Laden’s territory. He’s not very fond of details,
looking at details. He’s the enigma; he’s the chairman of the company,
so to speak. He is the symbol of the organization. He would
still need people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be advising
him on certain operations, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would,
in turn, need people to execute things. 45
AFTERMATH
Operationally, the 9/11 attacks were brilliantly planned and almost
fl awlessly executed. The attackers struck economic and military targets
of great strategic and symbolic importance, achieving the dramatic effect
all terrorists seek. Estimates place the number of viewers who saw
video footage of the attacks at one billion. The 9/11attacks also represented
the culmination of Osama bin Laden’s jihadist journey. He had
begun as a pious young man who had been swayed by Islamist teaching
in school. Azzam recruited him to the cause of jihad during the Afghan
war against the Soviets. He returned a hero, only to be rebuffed by his
own country following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The Saudis turned
to the United States for defense against Saddam Hussein rather than
accept bin Laden’s offer to raise a force of mujahedeen fi ghters to defend
the kingdom. After the Gulf War, he went into voluntary exile, fi rst in
Sudan and then in Afghanistan. During that exile, he came to believe
that jihad must be waged against apostate Muslim regimes as well as the
United States, which backed them. The U.S. response to 9/11 would
change his fortunes but not end his campaign of terror. Nothing could
dampen his ardor for aggressive jihad.
No comments:
Post a Comment