Intercept (3 page)

The lines of hooded, blindfolded prisoners pictured kneeling in their shackles under a pitiless sun shocked most of the agencies for the humanities who tried, without much success, to demand an instant relaxing of this apparently brutal U.S. regime of capture and interrogation.

It looked, of course, rather different to military personnel, men who’d had friends, colleagues, and sometimes relatives, blown to smithereens by terrorist bombs and booby traps while on active duty on behalf of the United States—men from whom the sorrow would never pass, but who were now faced on a daily basis with these killers, these jihadists, with their sneering hatred and loathing of the western world.

Today the old camp is an overgrown jungle. In its place has emerged a smoothly efficient modern prison—no longer a throwback to the Dark Ages, but the very epitome of an iron-clad, high-security jail. The hatreds are still there, and the determination, by some, to stand tall against their American captors, remains undiminished. But no one has ever escaped.

Yousaf and Ibrahim both understood their predicament, particularly the no-escape clause. So far as they could tell there was not a chance of release. Of course they both knew they had committed heinous crimes against the U.S. military, but the light of battle had not entirely dimmed in their minds. Theirs was a Holy War, and they had fought it with similar heroism to that of the mighty Kurdish warrior, Saladin.

And deep in their most private dreams they each heard again the words of the immortal Sheikh Osama Bin-Mohammed bin Laden—the words that were spoken only to the glory of Allah—and the Prophet Mohammed-stated: “I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but God is worshipped. God who put my livelihood under the shadow of the spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.”

Yousaf and Ibraham understood those orders. Because they were not temporary orders. They were lifelong commands to wage war against the
Infidel. Prison could shackle them, but it could never wash away the commands of Allah through his Servant Osama.
“We will avenge the American wars on the Muslim world. We will attack them, strike at them at random in Europe and then America. We have bled, and now they will bleed. Never say that those slain in battle in the cause of God are dead. Because they will never die. They are alive, but you are not aware of them. Again I beseech you, in the name of God, you will fight the Infidel!”

And not all the influence of the University of London nor Harvard could remove these truths from the minds of Yousaf and Ibrahim. They did not need it to be set down on parchment. It was branded into their hearts. But even so, each man had written down the resounding words in Arabic, on the first blank page at the front of his American-supplied copy of the Koran.

Yousaf had added the phrase, again in Arabic: “What can you possibly know about our pain?” He could not recall why, and indeed when, he had written it, because the years of deprivation had left him mentally numb in any number of ways. He did not even know which year it was, forget days and times. But his phrase stood out in the holy pages of the Koran, and he stared at it often, linking his own personal pain with that of his people. And in these quiet times he swore vengeance upon the Great Satan, even in the certain knowledge that he could never get out of this place.

And his dreams were sometimes illuminated by the vision of the Great Osama, sword drawn and mounted on a battle camel thundering across this hot, dusty coastal wilderness at the head of a marauding jihadist army, which would blast away all of the Americans and spirit him, Yousaf, back to the place where he belonged, in the unending service of Allah.

Inside the camp, there were only a few like Yousaf, men for whom the Dream would never die, men whom those in the west could neither recognize nor understand. So many in the United States believed that
everyone
was sick to death of the War on Terrorism; that the American people just wanted it over, and that their enemy was as tired of it as they were. He’s not. His perception of time is different. Beyond the razor wire of Guantanamo there were thousands who believed what Yousaf believed. Men who seethed against poverty, and burned with frustration, anger, and passion.

In Guantanamo their thoughts were sometimes expressed in murmured defiance, in the strange mutterings of the permanently incarcerated, spoken softly as if to another self, the person they once were, and which now gave the impression of encroaching madness.

It was these slender indications of continued rebelliousness that kept an ever-watchful force of guards on the very edge of vigilance. Occasionally personnel fluent in Arabic were inserted into the exercise areas to listen and try to comprehend the current mindset of the prisoners. And they would hear the suppressed jihadist phrases of the camp’s toughest inmates.
“We will not negotiate, neither will we rest, nor put down the sword until every infidel across the face of the earth is either converted to the true faith, or lies dead at our feet. Allah is great.”

These swarthy captives had been taken prisoner on the battlefield. They were illegal combatants, guilty as all hell, and ought rightfully to have been executed by military firing squad. But right now U.S. law did not permit that, and here they must stay, in Guantanamo, until, if necessary, the end of time.

Which left Ibrahim and Yousaf somehow stranded with their dreams and beliefs. Of the two, the dark, powerfully built Ibrahim was more the warrior. For him, much like the SEAL team that had captured him, there were very few of the world’s major problems that could not be solved with high explosive, a science upon which he was an expert. Yousaf was the more thoughtful, the planner, the strategist, always ready to assist Ibrahim in the manufacture of an Improvised Explosive Device to attack the enemy. But he was more at home at the feet of bin Laden, or Ayman al-Zawahiri, sipping coffee, studying data, and scheming.

Now, however, he did not know whether The Sheikh was even alive. And his innermost thoughts remained rooted in the mountains, in the high caves and hollows, where al-Qaeda and the Taliban came together, in secret, unseen councils of war.

Yousaf never allowed himself to consider that all might be lost, and that The Sheikh had been killed by the Americans. He was forbidden to tune in to any form of news program on the radio, and he was not allowed to read newspapers or to watch television. He was a man in a vacuum, out of the loop, alone with his memories, with the minimum of human contact.

For him this terrible place was a daily nightmare. Cuba has rock-steady temperatures of above 80 degrees F, give or take a half-dozen degrees to distinguish summer from winter. Guantanamo lies just a fraction north of the twentieth parallel, while Yousaf’s home village above the Chitral Valley on the Pakistan side of the frontier high in the mountains, was almost sixteen degrees further north, and subject to very different seasonal changes.

The mountains there, spectacular among the awesome peaks of the Hindu Kush, lie well beyond the clutches of the monsoon, and the lower
valleys are just deserts. High up however, the villages are irrigated by wide mountain streams that come rushing out of the heart of the range, fed by melting snows.

This cool temperate zone was home to the lean, hook-nosed Yousaf, and the constant high temperatures of the eastern Cuban prison camp almost drove him mad. He longed for a respite from the heat, but the only time he got it was in the rainy season when the occasional hurricane swept in on the veering northeastern trades and almost blasted the place to hell and back. But it was mercifully cooler and Yousaf lay on his back in his cell, listened to the wild wind and contemplated his far-lost homeland.

And always in his mind were the words of the Great Osama, and Yousaf tried his best to remember them, and when eventually he had arranged these innermost thoughts into the order that The Great One had recounted them, he spoke softly in his cell, more a murmur than a mantra.

And he knelt down and clasped his hands together as if seeking comfort from the Prophet. And he said the words solemnly, and he begged Allah to hear his cry, that he was not finished, and within him there still beat the heart of a loyal jihadist warrior:

These sentiments, which probably would not stand up under serious historical scrutiny, were originally part of the Fatwah “Urging Jihad
Against Americans,” and published on bin Laden’s orders on February 23, 1998. Since then the Saudi-born terrorist godfather had rewritten them in many forms, and Yousaf Mohammed had read them many times.

And now, in a soft monotone, he repeated them over and over. And despite the religious overtones with which he invested the text, he never once gave a thought to those he had personally blown up and killed.

If he ever got out of Guantanamo, Yousaf was destined for high command in al-Qaeda, whether or not bin Laden still lived. His name was remembered with immense respect in the high caves of the Hindu Kush. Not as a fanatic, but as a highly educated battle commander, of the quality required for the jihad. In the minds of the al-Qaeda elders, Yousaf Mohammed was temporarily
hors de combat
. But one day he would return.

Ibrahim Sharif, too, was in the thoughts of the senior jihadists who formed the leadership of al-Qaeda. Since the 2003 attacks on Baghdad, there had been a tightening of the alliance between bin Laden’s councils and the leadership of the Taliban, but they had drafted top commanders into Iraq and they had died by the dozen in the face of the U.S. onslaught on the terrorist enclaves.

Men like Ibrahim were still valued, and the memory of them was still vivid, if only because so many had died. At least Ibrahim and Yousaf had lived, although where and how was unclear. According to the intelligence network of al-Qaeda, they were both held captive in Guantanamo, but maybe not forever.

Forces were gathering worldwide to have the place closed. And this was despite the granite resolve of the Pentagon that it could not, must not, ever be shut down, because there was nowhere else to hold the world’s most dangerous illegal forces, without trial.

And the situation in the mountain villages of Afghanistan was becoming more and more complex. The regular Pashtun communities, with their two-thousand-year-old tribal customs, did not approve of the unrelentingly harsh doctrines of the Taliban, nor did they see much point in staging some kind of nutcase war against the most powerful nation in the world—one that had already proven it could smash them to pieces any time it felt so inclined, like in Tora Bora, 2001.

Which left both the Taliban and al-Qaeda in a never-ending quandary. They had little success in recruiting senior men from the villages, and could only find new followers among the very young, impressionable kids, thrilled by the prospect of one day becoming warriors for the jihad.

By that method al-Qaeda had recruited Ibrahim, but in the law-abiding communities it was not approved, and as the years had passed there was much disquiet among the village elders about both al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and the manner in which they located potential freedom fighters.

Indeed it was a Pashtun village, way up there in the Hindu Kush, which in 2005 decided to save the badly wounded Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, in the face of stringent opposition from the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The villagers remained defiant to the end, saved Marcus, and flatly refused to surrender him.

The problem with the jihadists in the ensuing years was they were becoming tougher and more aggressive all the time, with an unmistakably threatening swagger to their approaches to the villages. They stopped short of announcing they would burn the place down if families were not prepared to hand over their young males to undergo an indoctrination process.

But there was an unseen line, across which both sets of armed fighters were unprepared to venture: the fact was they needed these tribal villages for food, water, and shelter during their long months in the mountains, avoiding U.S. troops. They could afford to threaten, but not to declare war, since one such incident might easily cause dozens of Pashtun communities to shun them permanently.

The Pashtuns were by nature a peace-loving group, but, when roused, were apt to declare blood-pacts to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and fight their enemy until no one was left alive. This held no appeal whatsoever to the tired and dispirited Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters who sought only allies, not enemies, on the high slopes of northeastern Afghanistan.

Across the border, in the northern provinces of Pakistan, the Pashtuns were known as the Pathans, the world’s largest tribal society. The ancient beliefs and folklore of this group was not far removed from the rigorous codes of behavior of the Taliban—in many ways just as harsh and similar in doctrine.

Yousaf Mohammed was a Pathan, with deep Pashtun roots stretching back through centuries in Afghanistan. His family had crossed the border into Pakistan in 1973, and twenty-five years later, the young Yousaf had re-crossed, back into Afghanistan, recruited into bin Laden’s mountain strongholds at seventeen. Both he and Ibrahim were devout, lifelong Muslims and trusted above all else the words of both the six-foot-five modern-day Sheikh and the ancient Prophet Mohammed. The bonds of Islam have always held together both of these adjoining countries.