Authors: Jason Burke
In the early 1980s Pakistan’s previously unpoliticized Shia groups had formed a union against what they saw as Zia’s (Saudi-backed) Sunni hegemony. They had obtained financial support from Tehran and had organized a series of demonstrations, some of which turned violent. The leaders of Pakistan’s Sunni religious parties had decided to fight this new threat. Debates over how this should be done were overtaken by events in the hot, dusty southern Punjabi city of Jhang. In September 1985, Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, a local radical religious leader known for his hardline speeches, had announced the formation of a group called Sipa-e-Sahaba. Jhangvi was acting as a frontman for a group of local Sunni businessmen who hoped to exploit sectarian resentment among Sunni landless labourers and urban poor of the hugely wealthy Shia ‘feudals’ who dominated politics in the area.
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Over the next five years, Iran helped set up a series of increasingly violent Shia groups in Pakistan. Perhaps predictably, Saudi Arabian and Gulf funds were channelled, sometimes through the Pakistani government, sometimes independently, to the growing raft of hardline Sunni organizations set up to counter them. Soon hundreds were dying in bombings, grenade attacks on mosques and assassinations.
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The parallels with the proxy war contemporaneously being fought between clients of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran in Afghanistan are obvious. Unsurprisingly, Haq Nawaz Jhangvi was an alim of the Deobandi
school, as were the vast majority of the recruits to the new Sunni sectarian groups.
In 1994, Ramzi flew to Thailand and swiftly recruited a group of devout young Muslims in Bangkok for an attack on the Israeli embassy there. When that failed, Ramzi fled back to Pakistan and then flew to the Philippines.
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There he set about implementing the so-called ‘Bojinka plot’, a plan to simultaneously destroy as many as twelve passenger jets in the air and, possibly, hijack a plane and fly it into an American target. The plotters also wanted to assassinate the Pope when he visited Manila. Ramzi managed to place a small, if technically sophisticated, bomb on a Japanese plane in December 1994, killing a passenger. A fire in his safe house and laboratory in Manila in early January forced him to flee back to Pakistan, where he was betrayed by a new recruit and arrested by a joint FBI and Pakistani team in the Su-Casa guesthouse in Islamabad on 7 February 1995.
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Ramzi is often described as an ‘al-Qaeda’ agent. Bin Laden himself has said that ‘he did not know’ Ramzi.
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A close examination reveals broad associative links, mainly through mutual acquaintances, but little more.
There are several alleged links between the two men. The first is through Mohammad Jafal Khalifa, the husband of one of bin Laden’s half-sisters, who, in 1988, flew from Jeddah to Manila, the Philippines’ capital, to establish a branch of the Saudi-based International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO). The charity, as well as running a rattan furniture business, is alleged to have channelled bin Laden’s funds to Islamic militants in the region. Again, it is certainly possible that the IIRO, or even Khalifa, provided resources to Janjalani’s group, and even Ramzi, but there is nothing to indicate that those monies included funds from bin Laden himself. There would have been no need for Khalifa to be in touch with bin Laden. His own connections were broad-ranging. In 1994, Khalifa was accused by Jordan of involvement in plots to bomb public places, including cinemas, in the country. According to the FBI, two of the alleged bombers had spent time with Khalifa in the Philippines. At his trial in Jordan, Khalifa was acquitted
but admitted he had known the bombers and had sent them money, though he said the cash was for past services.
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Furthermore, the IIRO is a huge organization that receives donations from a variety of sources, private and governmental, and has been implicated in the funding of terrorism all over the world. Khalifa denies the charge of supporting terrorism, has since returned to Saudi Arabia and has publicly criticized bin Laden’s activities.
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It is worth remembering that Khalifa’s family link with bin Laden is less close than it may first seem. Bin Laden has at least fifty siblings, many of whom have lived separately from him since childhood.
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Ramzi is also meant to have stayed in one of bin Laden’s guesthouses in Peshawar. Again, this is plausible but hardly a solid link to the Saudi. Many hundreds of young militants stayed at bin Laden’s guesthouses during this period. That is what they were for. Bin Laden himself was in the Sudan at the time of Ramzi’s alleged stay and it is hardly likely that he knew personally all of the guests at the various establishments he funded in Pakistan.
Also militating against a bin Laden link is the difference between Ramzi’s beliefs and lifestyle and those of most followers of bin Laden. Ramzi prided himself on his womanizing, did not fast during Ramadan and was anything but ascetic. His worldview was modern, and he used none of the references to early Islamic history that bin Laden is so fond of. The myth and eschatology of Abdallah Azzam and his ideological heirs is almost entirely absent from Ramzi’s statements. Instead, as the demands his group issued after his World Trade Center attack show, his language was far closer to that of the left-wing terrorists of the 1970s than that of the followers of modern militant Salafi Islam:
We, the fifth battalion in the Liberation Army, declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building. This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel, the state of terrorism, and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region.
Our demands are: 1) Stop all military, economical and political aids to Israel 2) All diplomatic relations with Israel must stop 3) Not to interfere with any of the Middle East countries’ interior affairs.
We invite all of the people from all countries and all of the revolutionaries in the world to participate in this action with us.
It is significant that many American analysts have alleged that Ramzi, far from being linked to bin Laden, was actually an Iraqi agent. There is no space to examine this fairly esoteric debate here, but it is interesting that the evidence of a link to bin Laden is seen to be so thin that a link to another backer, a state, is supposed. There is, of course, a more straightforward answer. Ramzi was connected to neither bin Laden nor the Iraqis. All that he needed in terms of expertise, training, funding and logistical assistance was available through the myriad individuals and groups of which the broad movement of Islamic militancy was composed at the time. Ramzi was a highly motivated man who, like any successful political campaigner, was able to bring together a series of different backers, activists and specialists at different times in order to complete different projects. To look for a single line of command or resource is to totally misunderstand the nature of what Ramzi, and thousands of other men, were doing then and are doing now.
One particular link is worth pursuing: Ramzi’s dealings with his uncle by marriage, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. At the time of his involvement with Ramzi, Shaikh cannot be considered an associate of bin Laden, though he would go on to play an important role in bin Laden’s group towards the end of the 1990s and in the 11 September attacks. After the war in Afghanistan of 2001, Shaikh’s importance was recognized. He was dubbed ‘the new bin Laden’ or ‘the new leader of al-Qaeda’. This was, of course, a fundamental misconception of the nature of both al-Qaeda and Shaikh’s activities before his capture. He was merely one of the many hundreds of men who, after the war against the Soviets ended, had followed Azzam’s instructions and had turned his attention to a new series of targets. With the destruction of his secure base in Afghanistan, and the resources that his relationship with bin Laden and others gave him, Shaikh had merely returned to doing what he did before, albeit in slightly altered circumstances.
Shaikh was born in Kuwait in 1964 or 1965,
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three years before Ramzi, and raised in Fahaheel, a booming and cosmopolitan oil town south of Kuwait City packed with foreign workers. His family appears
to have been devout, though details of his sister, Ramzi’s mother, are scant. Nor is it known whether Shaikh or other members of Ramzi’s extended family were close to the same group of religious conservatives who influenced Ramzi’s father. However, Shaikh’s older brother, Zahed, was the leader of the Kuwait University branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s.
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Shaikh’s background shows many of the elements typical in those of political Islamists: devout parents, rapid social and economic change around the family, exposure to new environments, a university education in technical disciplines.
Shaikh went to a modern and relatively secular school, where teachers remember him as a studious boy who concentrated on science. His family were clearly wealthy for, like many other rich Middle Eastern men, he travelled to the USA for his further education. After a year improving his English at a college in North Carolina, Shaikh enrolled on an engineering course at a state university. In 1986 he graduated but, instead of returning to Kuwait, headed to Peshawar, where his brother, Zahed, was running a large aid agency, the Kuwaiti charity,
Lajnat al-Da’wa al-Islamia
, the Committee for the Call to Islam. The charity had more than 1,000 employees and was spending $4m each year in Pakistan. By 1989, Shaikh was in Peshawar, teaching engineering at Sayyaf’s University of Da’wa and Jihad in Pabbi. The Shaikh brothers were very much part of the local ‘Arab Afghan’ community, worshipping at the mosque on Arbat Road where Ayman al-Zawahiri and Sayyaf occasionally preached.
In 1992, Shaikh moved to Karachi, posing as a businessman. His activities are unclear but he appears to have been acting as a fundraiser and intermediary between wealthy jihadi sympathizers in the Gulf and the young men who were prepared to act but lacked funds. One of these young men was Ramzi. Quite who approached whom is unclear, but it is likely that Shaikh was the mysterious ‘Khaled’ (which is the usual Pakistani rendering of Khalid) named by Pakistani investigators as the man who supplied the finance for Ramzi’s 1993 attempt, in conjunction with the Sipa-e-Sahaba, to kill Benazir Bhutto. The involvement of Shaikh completes the jigsaw. The attack on Bhutto was paid for by wealthy Gulf donors. The money was delivered by Shaikh to Ramzi, who had been temporarily recruited by the SSP. The equipment
for the attack, as mentioned above, was provided by Sayyaf. This is how modern Islamic militancy works. Benazir Bhutto likes to claim that it was bin Laden who was trying to kill her.
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The truth, as ever, is a lot more complicated.
Indeed there is the intriguing possibility that Ramzi and his uncle may have collaborated earlier. Both men had been in Sayyaf’s university in Pabbi, one as a student, one as a teacher, in 1989 and, according to Reeve, as early as 1991 Yousef was linked to a mysterious Karachibased Saudi businessman who used the import of holy water from Mecca as a cover for more nefarious activities. The businessman, Reeve says, was keen to congratulate Ramzi on his return from New York after the WTC attack.
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An authoritative report in the
Los Angeles Times
mentions that while in Karachi, Shaikh ‘told people he was a holy water salesman, an electronics importer and a Saudi oil sheikh’. If Shaikh is Reeve’s mysterious Saudi then he may have had some involvement with the WTC attack itself.
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Shaikh next surfaced in the Philippines. According to Philippine intelligence, Shaikh was in Manila at the same time as Ramzi, who was there planning the Bojinka plot. The exact relationship between the two is unclear, though it was clearly close. When Ramzi was forced to flee, Shaikh left too.
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It is possible that Shaikh, like Ramzi, returned to Pakistan. A close inspection of the register at the Su-Casa guesthouse reveals that one of the guests present when Ramzi was seized by the FBI was a Karachi-based businessman who had signed in under the name of Khaled Sheikh. No one paid him any attention.
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Ramzi’s arrest in 1995 came at a good time for the Pakistani government. Bhutto’s second administration was under massive international pressure to crack down on the foreign militants in Peshawar. In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack, Egypt, the USA and Saudi Arabia had all given Islamabad lists of radicals and suspected terrorists who were living in Pakistan. The Egyptians were particularly incensed at what they saw as the Pakistanis’ reluctance to act against the numerous Islamic Jihad activists in Pakistan or in Afghanistan. They included Mohammed Shawky al-Islambouli, who had been sentenced to death
in absentia
in 1992 for plotting to overthrow the government of Sadat’s successor, President Hosni Mubarak. Another wanted man was Saif
al-Adel, a former special forces officer who was a trainer at al-Farooq.
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When the Pakistani government finally set about registering the ‘Arabs’ they gathered more than 5,000 names, including 1,142 Egyptians, 981 Saudis, 946 Algerians, 771 Jordanians, 326 Iraqis, 292 Syrians, 234 Sudanese, 199 Libyans, 117 Tunisians and 102 Moroccans.
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