Al-Qaeda (16 page)

One of the biggest was at Zhawar Khili, a dry gully in the mountains southwest of Khost, about four miles over the border from Pakistan.
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It was constructed in 1985 by mujahideen loyal to Jalaluddin Haqqani, the alim and local warlord, on the orders of the ISI and with Saudi funds.

It was a massive complex. Bulldozers and explosives were used to dig seven tunnels into the side of a mountain valley. The tunnels had brick entrances with iron doors and were big enough to shelter a
mosque, a garage, an armourer’s shop, a small first aid post equipped with American medical equipment including ultrasound apparatus, a radio station, a library with English and local books, a kitchen, a ‘Hotel’ and stores. A generator provided power for the aid post, mosque and guests’ tunnel and a video recorder.
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A similar base, only marginally less extensive, was constructed, again with Saudi money and under the direction of the ISI (the CIA were not allowed to enter Afghanistan), in a natural cave complex called Tora Bora, 30 miles south of Jalalabad, by Engineer Machmud, one of Younis Khalis’ commanders. Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami constructed a large complex at Jaji, just over the border from the Pakistani town of Parachinar. In addition to the military training base (the ‘seekers of martyrdom’ camp) and the ‘University of Da’wa and Jihad’ he had built at Pabbi, near Peshawar, Sayyaf constructed another large training facility at Khaldan in the no man’s land where Pakistan’s Kurram tribal agency ends and before Afghanistan begins. In all camps, particularly Sayyaf’s, small groups of Arabs trained alongside the mujahideen. These camps were to be the basis for the infrastructure developed by the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ in the late 1990s. At no point between their construction and their demolition in autumn 2001 by American bombs were they empty.
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But by 1989, though bin Laden had helped build other camps and shipped in equipment from his family’s firm in Saudi Arabia to assist the work, he had built only one base for his own exclusive use.
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It was known as
al-Ma’asada
, the ‘Lion’s Den’, and had been constructed near Hekmatyar’s complex at Jaji. The exact date of its construction is unclear, though work on it may have started as soon as late 1986.
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It was one of only two camps used exclusively by Arabs. The other was constructed by an Egyptian group near Khost and was known as Khalid bin Waleed camp, named after the Prophet Mohammed’s most effective general. Most Arabs continued training and fighting alongside Sayyaf, Hekmatyar and even Massoud as individuals, not in coherent groups.
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Bin Laden himself continued his support for the Afghans, as well as the Arabs, appearing regularly in rear areas around Khost to hand out food, shoes and coats to fighters.
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It was among the slate-brown hills of Jaji that bin Laden first saw
real combat. The village had been the focus of concerted efforts by Soviet troops to cut the mujahideen supply lines from Pakistan for several years. By early 1986, the ISI had become concerned that their effort to keep Soviets away from border areas was failing and that the enemy had gained the initiative. Their operations had been hampered by infighting, the frequent absence of senior Afghan commanders and Soviet air superiority.
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In a change of strategy, ISI officers issued instructions to dig in to fight around three fortified points in a line set just forward from the border, Jaji, the base at Zhawar Khili and a third site, the hill village of Ali Khel.
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The battles through the summer of 1986 were fierce, with both the mujahideen and the Soviets and their Afghan conscript support suffering heavy casualties. Bin Laden and a group of several hundred Arabs were involved in the fighting. Mujahideen remember the 29-year-old Saudi, Kalashnikov in hand, under heavy bombardment.
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Over the next three years, contrary to claims by his detractors, bin Laden fought hard, often exposing himself to extreme physical danger during combat around Khost, Jalalabad and elsewhere. Though the stories bin Laden tells of seizing weapons from Soviet generals may be exaggerated, there is no doubt that he did take part in a large number of operations.
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Soon bin Laden was spending up to eight months of the year in Afghanistan, visiting fronts all along the Pakistani border, from Kandahar to Kunar. He used the
kunya
, or honorific, Abu Abdullah, the father of Abdullah, his oldest son, then aged about 11.
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Bin Laden built up his contacts among the mujahideen, developing close relations with a number of commanders including Sayyaf, Haqqani, Younis Khalis and Engineer Machmud. These connections were to prove of crucial importance in the future. There is also an indication that his political thinking was maturing too. By 1987, he was lecturing the Arabs in Peshawar that American goods should be boycotted in support of the first Palestinian
intifada
, which had started that year.
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Bin Laden’s reputation among the mujahideen remained mixed. His attitude towards local Islamic practices had hardened during his time in Afghanistan and, whereas once he had been happy to follow local rituals of prayer when in local mosques, by 1988 he was telling
Mohammed Said Pahlwan, a senior mujahideen commander in Nangahar province, that he would not cooperate with him on military operations because Pahlwan was clean-shaven and smoked.
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Bin Laden’s shift to a more cohesive, more aggressive ideology was typical of the Arab volunteers. In the last years of the Afghan war, clashes between the Arab Afghans and locals became more common, particularly in the northeastern Afghan border province of Kunar, where hardline Wahhabis had declared an independent state. Nor did bin Laden’s willingness to rough it make him particularly popular among the Afghans. It attracted the scorn of senior Afghan commanders used to a degree of luxury in their big University Town villas and the incomprehension of the Afghan fighting men, to whom a display of luxury and consumption was an essential part of the authority of a leader.

However, the image of the rich boy living the life of the fighting soldier played well in the Middle East among potential donors and recruits. Bin Laden carefully managed documentaries filmed of him to show him in his best light, eating poor food and living in caves or rudimentary shelters in the Afghan hills. He continued to fund newspapers in University Town and was careful to cultivate influential journalists. His asceticism was not faked, however. Former associates remembered that bin Laden would eat only yoghurt, vegetables, a little meat and flat Afghan bread when in Peshawar even though far better food was available. Though aware of his growing status and fame, he went out of his way to be accessible and informal. ‘We used to sit down and eat together like old friends. You would never know how rich he was unless someone told you,’ said one former fighter.
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In early 1989, the Soviets completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving a puppet regime behind them in Kabul, propped up by cash subsidies and weapons shipments. It was run by Dr Mohammed Najibullah, a senior PDPA cadre and former head of the hated Khad secret police. Though General Zia had been killed in an air crash a year previously, his Afghan policy had outlived him in Islamabad. The ISI were still committed to installing a pro-Pakistan, Islamist government in Kabul. The collapse of Najibullah’s administration within months was predicted and the ISI were anxious to force a successful outcome to the war they had run for ten years.
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In February 1989 they convened a shura of the mujahideen groups in Pakistan. With the help of $25m in Saudi funds, they got Sayyaf accepted as the prime minister of a putative Afghan government. The next stage, the ISI believed, was to seize a city that could act as a seat for the new administration. Once the mujahideen were installed on Afghan soil, they hoped, the resistance of the Kabul regime would collapse. In March 1989, massed fighters from almost every faction attacked Jalalabad. The ISI, however, had made a catastrophic miscalculation.

Bin Laden’s war climaxed at the battle of Jalalabad. Though the mujahideen made early gains, poor organization, factional infighting, a lack of supplies and tactical inadequacy meant that they were swiftly forced onto the defensive. More than 1,000 Afghan fighters were killed, several thousand more injured and the Kabul regime received a huge boost.

Bin Laden was mainly involved in combat around the town of Chaprihar, southeast of Jalalabad. Mujahideen leaders remember bin Laden holding a position under heavy bombardment after being surrounded by Soviet soldiers. Many mention bin Laden’s lack of concern for his own safety.
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His fanaticism was shared by his men. ‘I took three Afghans and three Arabs and told them to hold a position,’ one mujahidden leader remembered.

They fought all day, then when I went to relieve them in the evening the Arabs were crying because they wanted to be martyred. They were saying, ‘I must have committed some sin for Allah has not chosen me to go to heaven.’ I told them that if they wanted to stay… and fight then I wasn’t going to stop them. The next day they were killed. Osama said later that he had told them that the trench was their gate to heaven.
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Shortly after the battle of Jalalabad, the differences between the mujahideen factions flared again. Bin Laden, like many Arabs, was deeply frustrated by the infighting. It was
fitna
, or division and faction, which the Prophet Mohammed had expressly forbidden. Though ideologically closer to Hekmatyar and Sayyaf, bin Laden was also an admirer of Massoud and for the last nine years had devoted considerable effort to
reconciling the factions, even paying the rent for a building at 38 Syed Jamal al-Din Afghani Road in Peshawar that acted as a neutral venue for discussions between the groups.
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Bin Laden told the mujahideen commanders that they had defeated the Soviet empire alone because they were united and Allah had blessed them. If they did not join together, he said, they could not do Allah’s will.
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But the failure to capture Jalalabad, and Pakistan’s role in running the fighting, had depressed him greatly. Through the autumn of 1989, bin Laden, now aged 32, split his time between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In November 1989, Abdallah Azzam was killed by a car bomb in Peshawar, an attack that is often blamed on bin Laden. Though he made no secret of his irritation at Azzam’s placement of relatives in key jobs in MAK, there is little evidence to implicate him in the assassination and a host of more likely suspects. Among the Arabs themselves there was further fitna. One consequence of rejecting the authority of the ulema was that anyone, usually someone educated in the new Saudi-funded Islamic centres that had sprung up separately from the traditional medressas and the universities all over the Islamic world, could claim leadership of a group and a degree of religious authority. Now, with the Soviets gone, the Arab Afghans, never a homogeneous body, split into scores of different groups each focused on the problems of their own homeland.
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For bin Laden, the jihad in Afghanistan was over by the first months of 1990.

For the Afghans, of course, the struggle was far from finished. Their country was in ruins, warlords were running riot and the most radical elements in Afghan Islam, marginalized before the war, were now in a position to make a serious push for power. For the next five years it would be the fighting among the Islamist groups, once peripheral to Afghan politics, that would dominate the political scene.

For the Pakistanis, too, the jihad continued. In broad terms Islamabad’s policy aim was unchanged: to secure a pliable government in Kabul. But Pakistan itself had been altered irrevocably by ten years of the Afghan war. The hardliners of the ISI and the army were in as strong a position as they had ever been. Over the next years, as attempts to re-establish democracy and the rule of law in Pakistan foundered, the war’s pernicious effects on Pakistan itself would be revealed.

And for Abdallah Azzam’s foreign legion the jihad also went on. The last years of the war had seen the creation of something entirely new. The hardened Arab veterans of the war against the Soviets had evolved an ideology themselves. Afghani, the Muslim Brotherhood, Maududi, even Qutb, had been left far behind. Instead, the new worldview was constructed from the rigorous Salafi reformism of the Wahhabis, from Azzam’s call for martyrdom in a pan-Islamic international jihad against oppression, from the very real experience of the brutal violence and chaos of modern warfare and from the empowering confidence founded in the belief, however wrong, that Islam alone had defeated the Soviets and their munafiq stooges among the Afghans. The gradualism of Maududi, the social reformism of al-Banna, even Qutb’s political and ideological focus, had gone.