The Looming Tower (41 page)

T
HIS TIME
M
ULLAH
O
MAR
sent a helicopter to Jalalabad and summoned bin Laden to Kandahar. It wasn’t clear whether bin Laden would prove to be an ally or a rival. In either case, Omar couldn’t afford to leave him in Jalalabad, on the opposite side of the country, in an area that the Taliban only marginally controlled. The talkative Saudi obviously had to be restrained or expelled.

The two men met at the Kandahar airport. Omar told bin Laden that the Taliban intelligence service claimed to have uncovered a plot by some tribal mercenaries to kidnap him; whether or not the story was true, it provided the excuse for Mullah Omar to order bin Laden to evacuate his people from Jalalabad and relocate to Kandahar, where the Taliban could keep an eye on him. Omar personally extended his protection to bin Laden, but he said that the interviews must come to a stop. Bin Laden said he had already decided to freeze his media campaign.

Three days later, bin Laden flew all of his family members and supporters to Kandahar, and he followed by car. Once again his entire movement had been uprooted; once again discouraged followers drifted away. Omar gave bin Laden and al-Qaeda the choice of occupying a housing complex built for the workers of the electric company, which had all the necessary utilities, or an abandoned agricultural compound called Tarnak Farms, which had none, not even running water. Bin Laden chose the dilapidated farm. “We want a simple life,” he said.

Behind the ten-foot walls of the compound were about eighty mud-brick or concrete structures, including dormitories, a small mosque, storage facilities, and a crumbling six-story office building. Bin Laden’s three wives were all crowded into a walled compound where they lived, according to one of bin Laden’s bodyguards, “in perfect harmony.” Outside the walls, the Taliban stationed two T-55 Soviet tanks.

As always, bin Laden drew strength from privation and seemed oblivious to the toll such circumstances took on others. When a Yemeni jihadi, Abu Jandal, went to his chief complaining that there was nothing for the men to eat, bin Laden replied, “My son Jandal, we have not yet reached a condition like that of the Prophet’s companions, who placed stones against their middles and tightened them around their waists. The Messenger of Allah used two stones!”

“Those men were strong in faith and God wished to test them,” Abu Jandal protested. “We, on the other hand, have sinned, and God would not test us.”

Bin Laden laughed.

Meals were often little more than stale bread and well water. Bin Laden would dip the hard bread in the water and say, “May God be praised. We are eating, but there are millions of others who wish that they could have something like this to eat.” There was little money to buy provisions. One of the Arabs came to bin Laden asking for funds for an emergency trip abroad; bin Laden went into the house, collected all the cash he could find, and emerged with about $100. Realizing that bin Laden was emptying the treasury, Abu Jandal complained, “Why did you not leave a part of that money for us? Those who are staying here are more deserving than those who are leaving.” Bin Laden replied, “Do not worry. Our livelihood will come to us.” But for the next five days, there was nothing to eat in the camp except the green pomegranates that grew around bin Laden’s house. “We ate raw pomegranates with bread, three times a day,” Abu Jandal recalled.

A
FTER
Z
AWAHIRI LEFT
S
UDAN IN
1996, he became a phantom. Egyptian intelligence agents tracked him to Switzerland and Sarajevo. He allegedly sought asylum in Bulgaria, but an Egyptian newspaper also reported that he was living luxuriously in a Swiss villa near the French border and that he had $30 million in a secret account. At the same time, Zawahiri nominally edited the al-Jihad newspaper,
Al-Mujahideen,
which had its office in Copenhagen. Neither Swiss nor Danish intelligence knows whether Zawahiri was ever actually in either country during this time. A fake passport he was using shows that he traveled to Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. He was reported to have been in Holland talking about establishing a satellite television channel. He said he was backed by wealthy Arabs who wanted to provide a fundamentalist alternative to the al-Jazeera network recently launched in Qatar. Zawahiri’s plan was to broadcast ten hours a day to Europe and the Middle East, using only male presenters, but he never pursued it.

Zawahiri also traveled to Chechnya, where he hoped to establish a new home base for al-Jihad. “Conditions there were excellent,” he wrote in a memo to his colleagues. The Russians had begun to withdraw from Chechnya earlier that year after achieving a cease-fire with the rebellious, largely Muslim region. To the Islamists, Chechnya offered an opportunity to create an Islamic republic in the Caucasus from which they could wage jihad throughout Central Asia. “If the Chechens and other Caucasian mujahideen reach the shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea, the only thing that will separate them from Afghanistan will be the neutral state of Turkmenistan,” Zawahiri observed in his memoir. “This will form a mujahid Islamic belt to the south of Russia that will be connected in the east to Pakistan, which is brimming with mujahideen movements in Kashmir.” Thus the caliphate would begin to re-create itself. The world he was making seemed very much at hand.

At four in the morning on December
1, 1996,
Zawahiri crossed into Russia in a minivan with two of his closest assistants—Mahmoud Hisham al-Hennawi and Ahmed Salama Mabruk, who was head of the al-Jihad cell in Azerbaijan. Traveling without visas, they were detained at a roadblock and taken to the Federal Security Service, which charged them with entering the country illegally. Zawahiri carried four passports, each from a different country and with a different name. The Russians were never able to establish his real identity. They found $
6,400
in cash; some other forged documents, including graduation certificates for “Mr. Amin” from the medical school of Cairo University; a number of medical textbooks; and a laptop, fax, and satellite phone. At the trial, Zawahiri posed as a Sudanese merchant. He claimed he was unaware that he had crossed the border illegally and maintained that he had come to Russia “to find out the price for leather, medicine, and other goods.” The judge sentenced Zawahiri and his companions to six months in jail. They had nearly completed the term by the time of the trial, and a few weeks later they were taken to the border of Azerbaijan and sent on their way. “God blinded them to our identities,” Zawahiri boasted in an account of his trip to his disgruntled supporters, who had wondered where he was.

This fiasco had a profound consequence. With even more defectors from his membership and no real sources of income, Zawahiri had no choice but to join bin Laden in Kandahar. Each man saw an advantage in linking forces. Al-Qaeda and al-Jihad were both very much reduced from their salad days in Sudan. However, the Pakistani intelligence service had persuaded the Taliban to return the al-Qaeda camps in Khost and elsewhere to bin Laden’s control in order to train militants to fight in Kashmir. With ISI subsidizing the cost, the training camps had become an important source of revenue. Moreover, bin Laden was still able to call upon a few of his donors from the days of the Soviet jihad. So at least there was a modest income, enough for bin Laden to be able to purchase some expensive vehicles for Mullah Omar and his top commanders, which made him more welcome. Despite the still dire financial circumstances, Zawahiri believed that his fortunes were better served with bin Laden than without him.

M
ANY OF THE
E
GYPTIANS REGROUPED
in Afghanistan, including Abu Hafs, who was appointed the al-Qaeda military chief after Abu Ubaydah’s drowning. Al-Qaeda was able to provide only a hundred-dollar-per-month stipend, half of what it had paid in Sudan. The leaders of the Islamic Group came, and some other Islamists from Pakistan and Bangladesh. At first they gathered in Jalalabad in the same compound with the al-Qaeda families—about 250 people altogether—and most of them followed bin Laden when he moved to Kandahar. They were dismayed by the squalor, the awful food, the noxious water, and especially the lack of facilities. Hepatitis and malaria were epidemic. “This place is worse than a tomb,” one of the Egyptians wrote home. Eventually their leader, Zawahiri, joined them.

Since there was no more schooling in Afghanistan, the children spent a lot of time with each other. Zaynab Ahmed Khadr, a Canadian citizen and the strong-willed daughter of one of Zawahiri’s prominent supporters, was upset when her family left Peshawar, where they had lived comfortably for fifteen of her eighteen years. Afghanistan was just across the steep ridge of mountains that blocked the sunset, and yet it seemed anchored in another century. Although she already covered herself completely, even wearing gloves and a
niqab
over her face, she detested the burka, which Afghan women were forced to wear. Her parents promised that she would be happy in this country, where the true Islam was being practiced, and that she would soon find new friends to replace the schoolmates she’d grown up with. Zaynab moodily declared that she didn’t want to make any friends.

Two days later, her mother said they were going to meet the bin Ladens. “I don’t want to meet
anybody!
” she said defiantly.

“If you don’t behave yourself, you’ll never dream of going to Peshawar again,” her father said impatiently.

As it turned out, bin Laden’s daughters became some of Zaynab’s closest friends. Fatima, the oldest, who was fourteen in
1997,
was the daughter of Umm Abdullah, and Khadija, thirteen, was the daughter of Umm Khaled. (Fatima was the name of one of the Prophet’s daughters, and Khadija the name of his first wife.) The age difference between Zaynab and the bin Laden girls was something she simply accepted, since they were living in such a small community.

Bin Laden’s three wives and their children lived in separate houses inside their compound. All the children of al-Qaeda were dressed in rags, and the effort to keep even minimal levels of cleanliness often came to naught. Zaynab observed that each of the bin Laden houses was clean and distinctly different. Umm Abdullah was poorly educated but fun and good-hearted, and she loved to decorate. Whereas the houses of the other wives were neat and well scrubbed, hers was also beautiful. There were flowers and posters, and coloring books for the younger children. Her daughter Fatima had to do a lot of cleaning, Zaynab noticed, because the mother “was not raised to work.”

Fatima was fun but a little slow. She confided to Zaynab that she would never marry any of the men around her father, because “he’d be wanted everywhere in the world.”

“His crime would be marrying you, Fatima,” Zaynab said.

“Oh, right.”

Zaynab was not joking. In the world the girls lived in, marriage was a union of families, not just individuals. It seemed to Zaynab that Fatima had forgotten who she was. (Of course, Fatima had no say about whom she would marry; her eventual husband—one of bin Laden’s followers—would be killed four years later in the evacuation of Kandahar.)

Life was very different in Umm Khaled’s house—quieter and more organized. Unlike Umm Abdullah, Umm Khaled made an attempt to educate her three daughters and one son. A private school for the Arab boys started up in the compound, but the girls studied at home. Umm Khaled, who had a doctorate in the subject, helped Zaynab study Arabic grammar, and she often pitched in with the girls to make dinner. Bin Laden taught his daughters math and science, spending time with them every day. Sometimes he would give them quizzes to make sure they were keeping up.

Umm Khaled’s oldest daughter, Khadija, liked to read history and biography. Although in Zaynab’s opinion none of the children were well educated, she thought that Khadija was “very, very bright.”

Umm Hamza had only one child—a son—but in Zaynab’s opinion, compared to the other wives “Umm Hamza was the greatest.” She was also the oldest, and seven years older than her husband. Her eyesight was weak and her constitution frail. She suffered frequent miscarriages. As a Saudi woman from a wealthy and distinguished family, she exuded a regal quality, but she was deeply committed to the cause. When bin Laden had proposed to her, Umm Hamza’s family was deeply offended because she would be his second wife, but she consented because she wanted to marry a true mujahid. Umm Hamza was very popular in the al-Qaeda community. Other women felt that they could go to her, and she would talk to them as if their problems were important to her. “We knew things might collapse around us, and we’d get depressed,” said Zaynab. “She’d keep everybody going.”

Bin Laden also depended on her. Although he tried to treat his wives equally, as the Quran commands, everyone knew that Umm Hamza was his favorite. She was not beautiful, but she was sensible and devoted. Her house was always the neatest. There was a bed in the house and a box that contained all her clothes. She would have a
shalwar kameez
(the typical Afghan gown) on the back of the door clean and ready for bin Laden. In the bathroom there was a small shelf with a bottle of perfume for her and one for her husband.