The Looming Tower (23 page)

Few people in the room realized that al-Qaeda had already been secretly created some months before by a small group of bin Laden insiders. Bin Laden’s friend from Jeddah, Medani al-Tayeb, who had married his niece, had joined the group on May
17,
the day after Ramadan, so the organizational meeting on August 11 only brought to the surface what was already covertly under way.

On Saturday morning, August
20,
the same men met again to establish what they called al-Qaeda al-Askariya (the military base). “The mentioned al-Qaeda is basically an organized Islamic faction, its goal is to lift the word of God, to make His religion victorious,” the secretary recorded in his minutes of the meeting. The founders divided the military work, as they termed it, into two parts: “limited duration,” in which the Arabs would be trained and placed with Afghan mujahideen for the remainder of the war; and “open duration,” in which “they enter a testing camp and the best brothers of them are chosen.” The graduates of this second camp would become members of the new entity, al-Qaeda.

The secretary listed the requirements of those who sought to join this new organization:

•
Members of the open duration.

•
Listening and obedient.

•
Good manners.

•
Referred from a trusted source.

•
Obeying statutes and instructions of al-Qaeda.

In addition, the founders wrote an oath that the new members would recite upon joining al-Qaeda: “The pledge of God and his covenant is upon me, to energetically listen and obey the superiors who are doing this work, rising early in times of difficulty and ease.”

“The meeting ended on the evening of Saturday, 8/20/1988,” the secretary noted. “Work of al-Qaeda commenced on 9/10/1988, with a group of fifteen brothers.” At the bottom of the page, the secretary added, “Until the date 9/
20,
Commandant Abu Ubaydah arrived to inform me of the existence of thirty brothers in al-Qaeda, meeting the requirements, and thank God.”

Bin Laden attached no special meaning to the name of the new group. “Brother Abu-Ubaydah al-Banshiri—God rest his soul—formed a camp to train youth to fight against the oppressive, atheist, and truly terrorist Soviet Union,” he later stated. “We called that place al-Qaeda—in the sense that it was a training base—and that is where the name came from.”

Bin Laden’s associates had mixed reactions to the formation of al-Qaeda. Abu Rida al-Suri, the mujahid from Kansas City, claims that when he first heard about the international Arab legion that bin Laden was creating, he asked doubtfully how many had joined. “Sixty,” bin Laden lied.

“How are you going to transport them?” Abu Rida asked. “Air France?”

The formation of al-Qaeda gave the Arab Afghans something else to fight over. Every enterprise that arose in the sparsely populated cultural landscape was contested, and any head that rose above the crowd was a target. The ongoing jihad in Afghanistan became an afterthought in the war of words and ideas that was being fought in the mosques. Even the venerable Services Bureau, which bin Laden and Azzam had established to assist the Arabs in their desire to join the jihad, was slandered as a CIA front and Azzam as an American stooge.

At the root of these quarrels was the usual culprit—money. Peshawar was the funnel through which cash poured into the jihad and the vast relief effort to help the refugees. The main pool of funds—the hundreds of millions of dollars from the United States and Saudi Arabia doled out by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) each year to the Afghan warlords—was drying up as the Soviets prepared to leave. Scarcity only fed the frenzy over what remained: the international aid agencies, private charities, and bin Laden’s pockets.

From the beginning, the Egyptians who were sponsoring bin Laden saw Azzam as a formidable obstacle. No one among the Arabs enjoyed equal prestige. Most of the young men who had gravitated to jihad were responding to his fatwa, and they regarded Azzam with awe. “He was an angel, worshipping all night, crying and fasting,” recalled his former assistant, Abdullah Anas, who married Azzam’s daughter just to be close to his mentor. For most of the Arabs who passed through Peshawar, Azzam was the most famous man they had ever met. Many of them—including bin Laden—had spent their first nights in Peshawar sleeping on his floor. They spoke movingly of his wisdom, generosity, and courage. He had come to personify the noble spirit of the Arab Afghans, and his shadow reached around the world. Destroying such a celebrated icon would be a treacherous task.

The Egyptians were not the only ones interested in bringing down Azzam. The Saudis worried that the charismatic leader would convert their young jihadis to the Muslim Brothers. They wanted an “independent body”—one that was run by a Saudi—that could be entrusted to manage the affairs of the mujahideen while keeping the Kingdom’s interests in mind. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were seen as a proper Salafist alternative managed by a loyal son of the Saudi regime.

Abdullah Anas, the greatest exemplar of the Arab Afghan warriors, had just returned to Peshawar after fighting beside Ahmed Shah Massoud in northern Afghanistan. He was astounded to learn that there was to be a meeting among the Arab leaders to replace his father-in-law, Abdullah Azzam. When Anas talked to him about it, Azzam assured him that the election was strictly cosmetic. “The Saudi authorities are not pleased that I am leading the Arabs in Afghanistan,” Azzam explained. “All the money that comes for orphans and widows and schools comes from Saudi Arabia. They are unhappy to see the young Saudis being organized under my leadership. They fear they will become a part of the Muslim Brotherhood.” The Saudis wanted one of their own in charge. With Osama bin Laden as the new emir, Azzam continued, the Saudis would feel safe. “They will relax, because when they feel Osama is out of control, they can stop him. But I am a Palestinian. They have no way of stopping me.”

It was even more difficult for Azzam to persuade his old friend Sheikh Tameem to support this proposal. Although Azzam had told him the election was only a charade to gain Saudi approval, it was clear that others in the meeting had a different agenda. They heatedly used the occasion to slander Azzam’s reputation with charges of theft and corruption and mismanagement of the Services Bureau. Sheikh Tameem was outraged and turned to bin Laden. “Say something,” he demanded.

“I’m the emir of this meeting,” bin Laden responded. “Wait for your round.”

“Who told you that you are my emir?” Tameem began weeping. “Sheikh Abdullah persuaded me to support you, but how do you let these people say these things?” Tameem refused to endorse the vote, which overwhelmingly selected bin Laden as the Arabs’ new leader.

Azzam was philosophical and apparently unconcerned. “Osama is limited,” he reassured his supporters. “What can Osama do to organize people? Nobody knows him! Don’t worry.”

Azzam was more weakened than he realized. One of Zawahiri’s men, Abu Abdul Rahman, a Canadian citizen of Egyptian origin, lodged a complaint against Azzam. Abu Abdul Rahman headed a medical and educational project in Afghanistan. He alleged that Azzam’s men had snatched the project out of his hands by confiscating the funds that were earmarked for it. He further accused Azzam of spreading rumors that he was trying to sell the humanitarian project to the American embassy or a Christian organization.

The charges created a sensation in Peshawar. Placards were handed out and posters pasted on the walls demanding that Azzam be brought to trial. Fights broke out in the mosques among the different camps of supporters. Behind the charges being thrown at Azzam were the takfiri doctors at the Kuwaiti Red Crescent hospital—Zawahiri and his colleagues. They had already managed to expel him from the leadership of the hospital’s mosque, and now they were gleefully predicting his downfall. “Soon we will see the hand of Abdullah Azzam cut off in Peshawar,” Dr. Ahmed el-Wed, the Algerian, exclaimed in a meeting.

They formed a court to hear the charges, with Dr. Fadl acting as the prosecutor and the judge. This takfiri court had sat before to consider another mujahid whom they judged guilty of being an apostate. His body was found, chopped to pieces, inside a burlap bag on a street in Peshawar.

On the second day of the trial, after midnight, bin Laden rushed out to fetch his closest Saudi friend, Wa’el Julaidan, who was in bed with chills and a high fever, suffering from malaria. Bin Laden insisted that Julaidan come at once. “We cannot trust the Egyptians,” he declared. “I swear by God those people, if they have the chance to make a resolution against Dr. Abdullah Azzam, they will kill him.” Julaidan followed bin Laden back to the meeting, which lasted another couple of hours. The judges found against Azzam and ordered the charity returned to Abu Abdul Rahman’s control, but thanks to bin Laden’s intervention, they spared Azzam the disgrace of public mutilation. From the perspective of Azzam’s enemies, however, it was an inconclusive verdict, since it allowed Azzam to remain as a figurehead, and they were determined to finish him off.

G
ENERAL
B
ORIS
V. G
ROMOV,
the commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan, walked across the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan on February
15, 1989.
“There is not a single Soviet soldier or officer left behind me,” the general remarked. “Our nine-year stay ends with this.” The Soviets had lost fifteen thousand lives and suffered more than thirty thousand casualties. Between a million and two million Afghans perished, perhaps 90 percent of them civilians. Villages were razed, crops and livestock destroyed, the landscape studded with mines. A third of the population sheltered in refugee camps in Pakistan or Iran. The Afghan communist government remained in Kabul, however, and the jihad entered a confusing new period.

The end of the occupation coincided with a sudden and surprising influx of Arab mujahideen, including hundreds of Saudis who were eager to chase the retreating Soviet bear. According to Pakistan government statistics, more than six thousand Arabs came to take part in the jihad from 1987 to
1993,
twice the number who came for the war against the Soviet occupation
.
These young men were different from the small cadre of believers who had been lured to Afghanistan by Abdullah Azzam. They were “men with large amounts of money and boiling emotions,” an al-Qaeda diarist noted. Pampered kids from the Persian Gulf came on excursions, staying in air-conditioned cargo containers; they were supplied with RPGs and Kalashnikovs, which they could fire into the air, and then they could return home, boasting of their adventure. Many of them were newly religious high school or university students with no history and no one to vouch for them. Chaos and barbarism, which always threatened to overwhelm the movement, sharply increased as bin Laden took the helm. Bank robberies and murders became even more commonplace, justified by absurd religious claims. A group of takfiris even held up a truck from an Islamic aid agency, absolving their action by saying that the Saudis were infidels.

Now that he was the emir of the Arabs, bin Laden held himself above the riotous competition for recruits among the rival Islamic groups that were elbowing each other at the airport as they hustled the newcomers onto their buses. The wrangling was especially nasty among the Egyptians. The two main Egyptian organizations—the Islamic Group, led by Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, and Zawahiri’s al-Jihad—set up competing guesthouses, and they began publishing magazines and broadsides with little purpose other than to vilify each other. Among the accusations made by the Islamic Group against Zawahiri were that he had sold arms for gold, which he deposited in a Swiss bank account, and that he was an agent for the Americans—the universal charge of treason. In turn, Zawahiri wrote a tract attacking Sheikh Omar titled “The Blind Leader,” in which he recapitulated their prison quarrels for control of the radical Islamist movement. The unstated cause of these slanderous salvos was the question of who was going to control bin Laden, the golden Saudi goose. Bin Laden made his preference known by awarding $
100,000
to al-Jihad to begin its operations.

Meantime, a new battle was taking shape in Jalalabad, the strategic entry point on the Afghan side of the Khyber Pass, where all the roads and valleys and footpaths converged. The adversary was no longer the Soviet superpower. Now it was the communist Afghan government, which refused to collapse as so many had predicted. (One of the ugly ironies of the Arab Afghan crusade is that it was made up, by a large majority, of Muslims who came to fight Muslims, not Soviet invaders.) The siege of Jalalabad was supposed to close the curtain on communist rule in Afghanistan. Emboldened by the Soviet withdrawal, the mujahideen had contemptuously decided to mount a frontal assault on the Afghan position. The city, which stood behind a river and a wide corridor of Russian mines, was defended by thousands of Afghan government troops, who were demoralized by the articles in the Pakistani press of the impending mujahideen attack and the inevitable rapid victory that was supposed to follow.

The initial assault came in March
1989,
with five to seven thousand Afghan mujahideen charging down Highway 1. Eight different commanders led the men, not counting the Arabs, who followed bin Laden. After overrunning the airport on the outskirts of town, the mujahideen fell back against a powerful counterattack; then matters settled into an unexpected stalemate, with the various mujahideen commanders involved in the siege refusing to coordinate with one another.

Bin Laden and his military staff occupied a small cave in the mountains, four kilometers above the city. He had fewer than two hundred men under his command. Once again, he was ill.

His biographer, Essam Deraz, arrived, bringing with him a supply of vitamins and twelve boxes of Arcalion, a drug bin Laden always requested. He told Deraz that it was to help with his concentration. Arcalion is normally prescribed for a marked decrease in muscle strength or stamina, which might be caused by vitamin deficiencies or lead poisoning, among other things. Bin Laden’s health, which had been so robust when he was a desert youth, had endured several blows in the harsh mountain environs. Like many of the men, he had contracted malaria; then in the severe winter of
1988–89,
he nearly died of pneumonia when an intense snowfall buried him and several companions in their vehicle for a few days. The prolonged and unanticipated siege of Jalalabad taxed his weakened constitution further, and he was nagged increasingly by puzzling spells of back pain and paralyzing fatigue.