The Looming Tower (42 page)

Umm Abdullah was extremely jealous of their relationship. Although she was first in the rank of wives, and the mother of eleven of bin Laden’s children, she was also the youngest and least educated. Her beauty was her only advantage, and she worked hard to keep herself attractive. Whenever other women traveled, especially to Western countries, Umm Abdullah gave them a shopping list of brand-name cosmetics and lingerie, preferring American products that no one else would consider buying. Bin Laden’s wives all lived within a small inner court in the larger compound, and Umm Abdullah would put on a jogging suit and run around the perimeter to keep in shape. “She would always be fighting with Osama,” her friend Maha Elsamneh recalled. “I would tell her this man could be taken away from you in the blink of an eye. You should enjoy him while he is with you. Don’t make him so miserable every time he’s around.”

The girls sometimes played childish pranks on each other. On one occasion, when Fatima didn’t want Zaynab to go home, she cajoled her younger sister Iman into hiding Zaynab’s shoes and her head covering until the curfew sounded, so she was stuck there all night.

Bin Laden’s children did not see him as being nearly as pious and intransigent as the rest of the community did. When Fatima wanted to borrow several cassette tapes, Zaynab told her, “I’ll give them to you on one condition. Your dad shouldn’t hear them, because some men are very strict.”

“My dad is not going to destroy them,” Fatima protested. “He’s not really that hard. He just acts like that in front of the men.”

“He actually listens to songs?” Zaynab asked, amazed.

“Oh, yeah, he doesn’t mind.”

Reflecting his love of horses, bin Laden kept a library of books on the subject in Umm Khaled’s house, and even tolerated coloring books and calendars with pictures of horses on them, although no one else in the community allowed pictures on the walls. Zaynab concluded, “The Sheikh was pretty broad-minded.”

The older bin Laden boys were usually with their father nearby in Tora Bora. Among the teenagers, there was a strange, unstable mix of boredom and mortal danger. Unlike the girls, the boys had the opportunity to go to school, but they did little other than memorize the Quran all day. Bin Laden let his younger sons play Nintendo because there was not much else to entertain them. The boys were quite wild and inclined to reckless behavior to escape the monotony. One of Zaynab’s younger brothers, Abdul Rahman, became friends with bin Laden’s son by the same name. They were the only two boys in the compound whose fathers could afford a horse for them. Sometimes, instead of riding, they would goad their animals into fighting each other. Abdul Rahman bin Laden’s horse was a spirited Arabian, but when Abdul Rahman Khadr brought a stronger horse that nearly killed the Arabian, the bin Laden boy chambered a bullet in his gun and pointed it at Khadr, saying he would shoot him if he didn’t pull his horse off. Murder and mayhem were always brewing.

In the afternoons, the boys often played volleyball, and Osama would sometimes join in the game. He was apparently in excellent health. Once, he bought a horse from the Taliban, who said they had captured it from Ahmed Shah Massoud. It was a large golden stallion with three white stockings. Nobody could ride it until bin Laden jumped on its back and galloped off. Twenty-five minutes later, he rode back into the compound with the horse completely under his control.

The men who were so feared and despised in the rest of the world did not seem so terrifying in their own homes, where they roughhoused with the children and helped with their homework. Zaynab remembered one occasion when her family was at the Zawahiris’ house in Kandahar and the father came in carrying his machine gun. As he was going up the stairs, Zaynab’s ten-year-old brother grabbed Zawahiri’s legs and begged him to give it to him. “Abdul Kareem, just wait until we go to the room!” said Zawahiri. The boy wouldn’t let go; he kept begging and grabbing for the weapon. Zawahiri finally relented and let the boy examine his weapon. This struck Zaynab and the others as a tender moment. “And this is the man, they make him seem like a monster!” she exclaimed.

The four Zawahiri daughters were bright, outspoken, and beautiful, particularly Nabila. When she turned twelve, she became a subject of intense interest among the bride-shopping mothers in the community. Mohammed, the Zawahiris’ only son, was also very attractive, the pet of his older sisters. As he got older, however, he was spending more time with the men and with his classmates. It was a rough environment for such a delicate, well-mannered boy, and he was constantly teased and bullied. He preferred to stay at home and help his mother.

The Zawahari girls would often get together for games or exercise. Azza, their mother, liked to have small parties, although there was little to offer her guests—sometimes no more than noodles and tomatoes. When Zaynab visited the Zawahiris for the engagement of their second daughter, Umayma, the girls talked and talked through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Late at night, they were still singing, making so much noise that they couldn’t hear Dr. Ayman knocking on the door asking them to keep it down. “I thought about how this guy scares the whole world but he doesn’t even scream at us. We see them as nice and gentle.”

Despite her modest manner, Zawahiri’s wife insisted on retaining a certain elegance. Azza sewed her own clothes, preferring classical styles. She obtained some patterns from Iran, and she taught herself enough Persian to understand the instructions. She also sewed nightgowns to raise money, usually donating a portion of her income to various needful projects. She and the girls made floral strands out of candy wrappers and strung them on the wall, and arranged stones in a pleasing design in front of their humble mud cottage.

In 1997 Azza had a surprise: She was pregnant again, almost a decade after the birth of her last child. The baby was born in the winter, severely underweight. Dr. Ayman realized at once that his fifth daughter suffered from Down syndrome. Azza, already pressed by the responsibility of taking care of a large family in extraordinary circumstances, accepted this new burden as well. They named the baby Aisha. Everyone loved her, but Azza was the only one who could attend to all her needs.

Looking back at her friendships with the bin Laden and the Zawahiri children, Zaynab observed that the families “had their ups and downs, but they were pretty much normal kids. They had pretty much a normal childhood.”

I
N
J
ULY
1997, two months after Zawahiri returned to Afghanistan, he was infuriated by a development in Egypt that threatened to undermine his entire movement. The Islamist lawyer Montassir al-Zayyat had brokered a deal between the Islamic Group and the Egyptian government. The nonviolence initiative, as it was called, had originated in the same prisons where Zayyat and Zawahiri had been incarcerated together sixteen years before. With twenty thousand Islamists in Egyptian custody, and thousands of others who had been cut down by the security forces, the fundamentalist movement had been paralyzed, and it was clear to the leaders of the Islamic Group that unless they formally renounced violence they would never see daylight.

After the initiative was declared, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman added his imprimatur from his prison cell in the United States. While denying that a deal had been struck, the government released two thousand members of the Islamic Group within the following year. Many senior members of Zawahiri’s own al-Jihad joined the movement to reconcile with the regime.

At first, Zawahiri was alone in his dissent. “The political translation of this initiative is surrender,” he raged. “In which battle is a fighter forced to end his fighting and incitement, accept captivity, and turn in his men and weapons—in exchange for nothing?” The barrage of letters over this matter between Zawahiri and other Islamists to the editor of an Arabic paper in London came to be called the War of the Faxes. Zawahiri said he understood the suffering of the imprisoned leaders, but “if we are going to stop now, why did we start in the first place?”

Zawahiri’s stance divided the Egyptian Islamists between those still in the country, who wanted peace, and those outside Egypt who opposed reconciliation. Zawahiri enlisted Mustafa Hamza, the new emir of the rival Islamic Group, and its military leader, Rifai Ahmed Taha, both of whom were in Afghanistan, to join him. (As for the blind sheikh’s participation in the initiative, he may have thought of it as a bargaining chip with the Americans, whom he hoped would set him free. When it later became clear that would not happen, he retracted his support.) The Egyptian exiles decided to justify the continuing use of violence through a single transformative blow.

The attack may have been intended for a performance of
Aida,
Verdi’s opera of ancient Egypt, which was staged in October 1997 in front of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor. The splendid ruin is one of the great artifacts of the New Kingdom. Suzanne Mubarak, the president’s wife, hosted the opening-night gala.

The Islamic Group’s strategy was to attack tourism, the life force of the Egyptian economy and the main source of foreign exchange, in order to provoke the government into repressive, unpopular responses. Al-Jihad had always disdained this approach as counterproductive. But with so many VIPs and government officials in attendance, including the president himself, the performance also presented the opportunity to accomplish al-Jihad’s goal of decapitating the government. The presence of three thousand security officers initially deterred this attack, however.

On November 17, 1997, the glorious ruin looked out on the amber sand of the southern desert as it had for thirty-five centuries—long before Jesus or Mohammed or even Abraham, the father of the great monotheistic religions. The summer heat had ebbed, marking the beginning of the high season, and hundreds of tourists were strolling through the grounds, some in groups with Egyptian guides, others snapping photos and shopping in the kiosks.

Six young men dressed in black police uniforms and carrying vinyl bags entered the temple precinct shortly before nine in the morning. One of the men shot a guard, and then they all put on red headbands identifying themselves as members of the Islamic Group. Two of the attackers remained at the gate to await the shoot-out with the police, who never arrived. The other men crisscrossed the terraced temple grounds, mowing down tourists by shooting their legs, then methodically finishing them off with close shots to the head. They paused to mutilate some of the bodies with butcher knives. One elderly Japanese man was eviscerated. A pamphlet was later found stuffed in his body that said, “No to tourists in Egypt.” It was signed “Omar Abdul Rahman’s Squadron of Havoc and Destruction—the Gama‘a al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group.”

Caught inside the temple, cowering behind the limestone colonnades, the tourists tried to hide, but there was no escape. It was a perfect trap. The screams of the victims were echoed by cries of “Allahu akhbar!” as the attackers reloaded. The killing went on for forty-five minutes, until the floors streamed with blood. The dead included a five-year-old British child and four Japanese couples on their honeymoons. The ornamented walls were splattered with brains and bits of hair.

When the job was done, the attackers hijacked a bus, looking for more tourists to kill, but at last they ran into a police checkpoint. In the shoot-out that followed, one of the attackers was wounded. His companions killed him, then fled into the hills, chased by tour guides and villagers on scooters and donkeys, who had little more to fight with than shovels and stones.

The attackers’ bodies were later found in a cave, arranged in a circle. The Egyptian press speculated that they had been murdered by the outraged village posse, but they apparently killed themselves in a ritualistic suicide. One of the men had a note in his pocket, apologizing for not carrying out the operation sooner.

Fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians had died, not counting the attackers. It was the worst act of terror in modern Egyptian history. The majority of the victims—thirty-five of them—were Swiss; others came from Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Bulgaria, and Colombia. Seventeen other tourists and nine Egyptians were wounded. One Swiss woman had seen her father’s head cut off in front of her eyes.

The following day, the Islamic Group claimed credit for the attack. Rifai Taha said that the attackers were supposed to take hostages in order to free the imprisoned Islamist leaders, but the systematic slaughter put the lie to that claim. The death of the killers showed the influence of Zawahiri; until this point, the Islamic Group had never engaged in suicide operations. The Swiss federal police later determined that bin Laden had financed the operation.

Egypt was in shock. Revolted and ashamed, the population decisively turned against the Islamists, who suddenly began issuing retractions and pointing fingers in the usual directions. From prison, the blind sheikh blamed the Israelis, saying that Mossad had carried out the massacre. Zawahiri blamed the Egyptian police, who he said had done the actual killing, but he also held the victims responsible for coming to the country. “The people of Egypt consider the presence of these foreign tourists to be aggression against Muslims and Egypt,” he said. “The young men are saying that this is our country and not a place for frolicking and enjoyment, especially for you.”

Luxor proved to be the turning point in the counterterrorist campaign in Egypt. Whatever the strategists in Afghanistan had thought would come of their one great blow, the consequences had landed on them, not on their adversaries. Their support evaporated, and without the consent of the population, there was nowhere for them to hide. In the five years before Luxor, Islamist terror groups in Egypt had killed more than
1,200
people, many of them foreigners. After Luxor, the attacks by the Islamists simply stopped. “We thought we’d never hear from them again,” one Cairo human-rights worker observed.