The Longest War (7 page)

Traditional Islamic theology recognizes five pillars of faith: the daily prayers, fasting during Ramadan, charitable donations, the profession of faith that there is only one God and his Prophet is Mohammed, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. But bin Laden claims that jihad is
an additional pillar
of the faith: “No other priority except faith, could be considered before [jihad].”

The standard interpretation of jihad down the centuries is
religiously sanctioned warfare
. And this is hardly surprising; the Prophet Mohammed was not only a religious figure but also
an able military commander
. Mohammed took part in some two dozen military campaigns and he revolutionized the conduct of war in the Arab world with the concept of jihad and martyrdom in the service of Islam. Religiously sanctioned warfare is a constant theme of the Koran and in the model life of the Prophet.

It is not surprising, therefore, that bin Laden, who styles himself after the Prophet, taps into this tradition. One of his Afghan training camps was named
Al-Badr
, after one of the Prophet Mohammed’s most famous battles, and the guesthouse that bin Laden established for Arab volunteers in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the mid-1980s was known as the
Beit al-Ansar
, the House of Supporters, after those who helped the Prophet when he fled his native Mecca for Medina in 622.

Bin Laden is not, of course, a religious scholar, and so when on May 26, 1998, he held a press conference in Afghanistan to announce that he had formed “the International Islamic Front to do jihad against the Crusaders and Jews,”
also present were the sons
of the Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, “the Blind Sheikh.” They distributed small cards to the journalists attending the conference, on which was printed their father’s “will,” which Rahman had supposedly written while serving
a life sentence
in an American prison for his role as the inciter of terrorist plots in New York in the mid-1990s.

The cleric’s will read, “
Extract the most violent revenge
. … Cut off all relations with [the Americans, Christians, and Jews], tear them to pieces, destroy their economies, burn their corporations, destroy their peace, sink their ships, shoot down their planes and kill them on air, sea, and land.” Sheikh
Rahman’s will/fatwa seems to be the first time that a Muslim cleric had given his religious sanction to attacks on American aviation, shipping, and economic targets. The fatwa, with its exhortations to “shoot down their planes,” “burn their corporations,” and “sink their ships,” would turn out to be a slowly ticking time bomb that would explode on October 12, 2000, when a suicide attack blew a hole the size of a small house in the USS
Cole
in Yemen, and it would explode again with even greater ferocity on 9/11.

To understand the significance of Sheikh Rahman’s will/fatwa, it is crucial to understand the spiritual authority that its author exercises over al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda may be led by bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, but neither of them has any standing as a religious authority, while Sheikh Rahman has a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Harvard of Sunni Islamic thought. Indeed, Sheikh Rahman has long been the spiritual guide of Egypt’s Jihad Group, members of which occupy senior leadership positions in al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda’s leaders wanted to exact revenge on the United States for the imprisonment of their spiritual guide; at the same time, Sheikh Rahman gave his followers his spiritual sanction for terrorist attacks on American civilians. His fatwas are the nearest equivalent that al-Qaeda has to an ex cathedra statement from the pope. Sheikh Rahman, for the first time in al-Qaeda’s history, ruled that it was permissible, and even desirable, to carry out attacks against American planes and corporations—not coincidentally, exactly the type of attacks that took place on 9/11. Indeed, up until 9/11 al-Qaeda had confined its attacks to American governmental and military targets. With Sheikh Rahman’s fatwa, al-Qaeda now had clerical cover for its plans to kill American civilians.

As a result, the 9/11 hijackers saw themselves as taking part in a heroic religious war. When a number of the key plotters based in Hamburg, Germany, moved into a dingy, modern apartment block on Marienstrasse, they grandiloquently referred to it as
Dar al-Ansar
, or the Abode of the Supporters. The 9/11 conspirators also awarded themselves
kunya
s, Islamic honorific names, which often referred to figures from Islam’s heroic early history. The lead hijacker, the dour Egyptian Mohammed Atta, was known as
Abu Abdul Rahman
, after an Egyptian who was told by the Prophet that he would go to Paradise.

The certainty that Paradise awaits those “martyred” in the defense of Islam is something that has long pervaded Muslim thought. In his August 1996
declaration of war
against the United States, bin Laden approvingly quoted a
hadith
,
a saying attributed to the Prophet: “The martyr has a guarantee from God … [He] marries him to seventy-two of the pure virgins of paradise.” Al-Qaeda took the idea of martyrdom, which had traditionally been death in battle, and applied it to suicide operations against civilian targets, a serious leap of faith since suicide is a grave sin in Islam punishable by eternal torment in hell. (From a theological perspective, engaging in one of al-Qaeda’s “martyrdom” operations that kills civilians is quite risky, because what if Allah chooses to see the operation as a simple suicide compounded by the murder of many innocents?)

In luggage that Atta left in a car at Boston’s Logan Airport on the morning of 9/11, authorities discovered an Arabic document titled “
Manual for a Raid
,” which used the Koranic word
ghazwah
for raid, demonstrating that the hijackers firmly believed that commandeering passenger jets and killing everyone on board was all in the great religious tradition of the heroic battles fought by the Prophet. In the manual, the hijackers were urged to invoke God as they entered the aircraft and were told they “will be with your heavenly brides soon.” The manual mentions the “martyrs’” ascension into heaven twelve times, underlining that the hijackers were religious fanatics aflame with the belief that they were doing God’s will and would shortly be in Paradise.

Making the elementary point that al-Qaeda’s jihad is literally a holy war that has something to do with Islam is not to imply that Muslims are inherently more violent than the adherents of any other religion. Christianity has, of course, been used as the justification for any number of crusades, pogroms, wars, and imperial adventures in Christ’s name. And it was from Christian countries that the monstrous secular political religions of Nazism and communism arose; in their relatively brief tenancies on the planet, these two arguably created more human misery than any of the other creeds that had preceded them.

Of course, not all of al-Qaeda’s terrorists are religious fanatics. Some seem to be more in the game because they think it is a blast. Typical of this group is the 9/11 operational commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). KSM is a burly Pakistani born in Kuwait, who earned a degree in engineering from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. In the mid-1990s, KSM lived in the Philippines, where he consorted with a number of girlfriends—unusual behavior for a committed jihadist militant. KSM’s taste for terrorist theatrics could be seen in his
initial scheme
for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, which involved hijacking ten planes, nine of which were to be flown into buildings on both the west and east coasts. The tenth plane was to be hijacked to an American airport, and after all the adult male passengers
had been killed, KSM would himself emerge from the plane to deliver to the assembled media a speech blasting American support for Israel. Tellingly, KSM cast himself as the superhero of his terror-snuff movie, a jihadist James Bond. Bin Laden ordered KSM’s grandiose plans to be scaled back, but entrusted him with the overall execution of the attacks on Washington and New York.

But even those Islamist terrorists like KSM who get a kick out of planning epic terrorist operations share a deep and aggrieved sense with their more religiously motivated cadre that the Muslim-Arab world is under siege. All around the region a host of authoritarian kleptocracies have held on to power for decades. Those Middle Eastern authoritarian governments have been an important factor in incubating jihadist militants. Sayyid Qutb, the Lenin of the militant jihadist movement, and later Ayman al-Zawahiri were radicalized by their time in the jails of Cairo. And al-Qaeda draws many of its men from closed societies that are intolerant of dissent. In al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan before the fall of the Taliban, according to KSM,
70 percent of the recruits were Saudi
, 20 percent from Yemen, and the final 10 percent from elsewhere.

After the 9/11 attacks it became commonplace to say that bin Laden had only latched on to
the issue of Israel and Palestine
belatedly, as if saying this would somehow reduce the importance of the Palestinian issue as a rationale for al-Qaeda’s attacks. Nothing could be further from the truth, as even the most casual reading of bin Laden’s statements demonstrates. The al-Qaeda leader’s first public declaration that he was at war with the United States was issued on August 23, 1996, and he was quite clear about where he stood on the issue of Palestine: “I feel still the pain of [the loss of] Al-Quds in my internal organs.” Al-Quds—the name is Arabic name for Jerusalem—is the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest place of pilgrimage in Islam, and which was annexed to Israel in 1967. Bin Laden went on to say that he felt the loss of Jerusalem “
like a burning fire
in my intestines.”

Bin Laden also had a strong personal connection to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, since his father Mohammed’s construction company was
responsible for its restoration
during the 1960s. And bin Laden has relished telling interviewers that his father would pray at all three of Islam’s holiest sites in one day. Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir recalls the al-Qaeda leader telling him it “was
a routine of his father
, once or twice in a month; he used to offer his morning prayers in Medina, afternoon prayers in Mecca, and then the evening prayers in Jerusalem, because he had a plane.”

In 1982 the Israelis invaded Lebanon, an event that received wide coverage in the Arab world at a time when bin Laden was already quite politicized. Years later he would recall his hatred for the Americans, whom he blamed for Israel’s policies: “The event that affected me personally began in 1982 when America gave the Israelis
the green light
to invade Lebanon. … I cannot forget those unbearable scenes of blood and severed limbs. … They produced an intense rejection of tyranny and a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.”

And so in May 1998, when bin Laden held his
first and only press conference
to announce the formation of his “World Islamic Front,” he said it was formed “to do jihad against the Crusaders and Jews.”

Al-Qaeda’s first videotape production
, which was posted to the Internet in June 2001, focused heavily on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the videotape bin Laden said, “Jews are free in Jerusalem to rape weak Muslim women and to imprison those young cubs who stand up to them.” He then made the connection explicit between the suffering of the Palestinians and supposed American complicity, saying, “The American government is an agent that represents Israel inside America. Look at sensitive departments like the Defense Department or the State Department, or sensitive security departments like the CIA and others; you find that Jews have the first word in the American government.”

Bin Laden is also a pathological anti-Semite. He told the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir that one of his wives had a baby girl after 9/11 named Safia. Mir asked him, “Why Safia?” Bin Laden replied, “I
gave her name of Safia
who killed a Jew spy in the days of Holy Prophet. … She will kill enemies of Islam like Safia of the Prophet’s time.”

The very basis of al-Qaeda’s campaign of murder against Americans and their allies derives, then, in part from U.S. support for the Jewish state. So intense are bin Laden’s feelings about the Palestinian issue that he wrote
two letters
to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of 9/11, urging him to move the attacks on Washington and New York forward to June or July 2001 to coincide with a planned visit to the White House by the right-wing Israeli politician Ariel Sharon.

What is striking about the accounts of those who know him, whether they are close family members or mere acquaintances, is that bin Laden is a retiring, even shy man who is polite and deferential in his dealings with others and quick to forgive failings in his followers. Even his critics within the jihadist
movement describe
a humble man
who leads by example and has abjured every material comfort for a life dedicated to defending his conception of Islam. So given this consistent portrait of him, why did bin Laden mastermind 9/11? After all, it was hardly the act of a humble or empathetic person. For that we must return to where we began with bin Laden: religion.

Bin Laden firmly believes that he is an instrument of God’s will, as was made clear in the videotape he released after his near-death experience at the battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan in December 2001, in which he said, “I am just
a poor slave of God
. If I live or die, the war will continue.” Arguably no man has been closer to the Saudi militant than Jamal Khalifa, who was his best friend at university. Bin Laden encouraged Khalifa to marry his half sister Shaikha, to whom he is close, as she is the other particularly religiously observant member of his family. Khalifa explains the key to understanding bin Laden: “Especially when you come to a religious issue—Osama is very sensitive and he really likes to implement Islam. And he’s very much at the same time
afraid that if he does not
, God will punish him.”

For bin Laden, not to defend Islam from what he believes to be its most important enemy, the United States, would therefore be to disobey God; an unimaginable act for him.