Authors: Jason Burke
The Taliban, with few exceptions, had no conception of how footage of young men lashing out at women in burqas with leather straps or lengths of rubber hose was viewed in the West. That inability to imagine the effect on politicians or the public elsewhere is indicative of the narrowness of the Taliban’s worldview. On one occasion, in December 1998, I was waiting to interview Maulvi Qamaluddin, the minister in charge of the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue, outside his residence in Kabul. A group
of young religious policemen was standing nearby. I began talking to them in Urdu which, as most were educated or had lived in Pakistan, they understood. I asked them if I could join the religious police. They conferred for a few moments and then told me they could see no reason to prevent me. Did it matter that I was not a Muslim, I asked. There was some consternation at this unexpected news, more conferring and then an answer. It did not matter; I could come with them to the mosque for dawn prayers the next morning, become a Muslim and all would be fine.
These were, of course, foot soldiers. But the vision of more senior men was as narrow and parochial. The jihad that they believed themselves to be engaged in was conceived of as being within the bounds of Afghanistan only. Even some ministers had shaky ideas about the exact geography of Asia, let alone the location of Europe or the USA. Some, such as the worldly Taliban ambassador to the United Nations, Hakeem Mujahed, were relatively well travelled. But they were a minority. Mullah Omar had certainly rarely been outside the immediate environs of Quetta and Kandahar. In seven years as the head of the Taliban, he visited Kabul twice. Bin Laden and the other ‘Jihadi Salafis’ in the new Islamic militant movements saw their internationalism as a fundamental tenet prescribed by the Qur’an. They were committed to overcoming national and tribal borders and reuniting the umma. For the first four years of the movement’s existence, senior Taliban rarely referred to the umma or indeed to any events overseas. Even their anti-Americanism was muted. The issue of Kashmir, let alone Chechnya, Iraq or Palestine, was never raised. Long after their capture of Kabul in 1996, senior Taliban officials were plaintively asking visiting journalists why their movement was yet to be recognized as the legitimate government of Afghanistan by the United Nations. This was all to change dramatically.
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Home
Prince Sultan stood up, walked across the sumptuously decorated room and stood next to Osama bin Laden. He touched bin Laden on the shoulder and turned to face the guests who had been admitted into his home in Riyadh an hour previously. In his hand he held the five-page document bin Laden had handed him a few minutes earlier. ‘The bin Laden family have always been loyal friends of our family,’ the Crown Prince said emolliently. ‘I look forward to many more years of that friendship.’ Bin Laden’s face was black with anger.
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It was September 1990. The 33-year-old had approached Prince Sultan, the Saudi minister for defence, with an offer. Accompanied by a group of senior Afghan mujahideen leaders and prominent veterans of the war in Afghanistan, he had submitted a detailed proposal of how he could raise a force of Islamic militants who could protect the kingdom. That the kingdom needed protecting was indubitable. On 2 August, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and appeared to be threatening Saudi Arabia itself. A week after the invasion, the Saudi Arabian government had accepted an American offer of assistance. Within days, the first US military forces had begun to arrive in the land of the two holy places. Bin Laden’s plan for an Islamic army was a non-starter. His interview with Sultan was short. His scheme was summarily rejected.
When bin Laden had returned to Saudi Arabia in late 1989, he was fêted in Islamic activist circles as a brave mujahid. His pious ascetism during the war against the Soviets was well known and had won him substantial support. He continued to shun the luxurious lifestyle of the Saudi elite and moved into a house in Jeddah which was barely
furnished.
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But, though he maintained his contacts with Afghanistan, talking regularly to commanders from both Hizb-e-Islami factions and Abd al-Rab al-Rasul Sayyaf’s group and paying for many Afghan leaders to travel to Saudi Arabia for haj or religious conferences, his relations with the Saudi government were cordial.
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His family had welcomed him back, even making arrangements for him to take up a managerial position in the bin Laden group. During his first months back in Saudi Arabia, his political activities were limited to promoting a boycott of American goods because the profits were used to ‘repress Palestine’.
It was never likely though that bin Laden was going to spend the rest of his life organizing the construction of motorways or airports. He had returned to his homeland full of confidence and zeal. With him were several of the most experienced and committed of the militants he had known in Afghanistan. They included Mohammed al-Zawahiri, the brother of Ayman, and several other senior Egyptian activists. These men, and those of the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ who had sworn allegiance to bin Laden in Peshawar in late 1989, had done so in order to access the funds that they knew bin Laden could raise. They had no intention of allowing the blandishments of his family or the state to divert their new patron from the course he had pledged to follow.
Yet if there was ever a chance that bin Laden might have succumbed to the temptations of life as a super-rich Saudi businessman, it was gone when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Bin Laden had warned that Saddam, the very incarnation of a secular ‘hypocrite’ leader, might threaten the land of the two holy places. When the Iraqi tanks moved into Kuwait City, he saw it as the first opportunity to put Azzam’s idea of an international army of militants, exactly what he had hoped to create through the foundation of al-Qaeda a year previously, into action. When his own government refused his assistance it came as a profound shock.
The events of late 1990 had jolted many Saudis and many Muslims. They are comparable in their seismic effect to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian Revolution or Juhaiman’s seizure of the grand mosque in Mecca. The Saudi Arabian regime had always based its legitimacy as rulers on its religious credentials. This involved sponsoring
the export of Sunni Wahhabi strands of Islam throughout the world, bankrolling much of the jihad in Afghanistan and protecting and maintaining
al-Haramain
, the holy places of Mecca and Medina. The acceptance of the American offer of military aid, and the subsequent stationing of hundreds of thousands of men and women in their country, stunned many Saudi Arabians. The Prophet Mohammed himself, according to an oft-quoted hadith, had ordered that ‘there be no two religions in Arabia’. The construction of synagogues or churches was banned as a result. Now the defence of the kingdom, of the ka’aba itself, was in the hands of the Americans. This was a savage indictment of the regime’s competence, particularly given the vast funds lavished on military equipment. Economic factors played a significant part in the discontent of the general populace. After years of boom, the oil price had crashed in 1986 and the massive and sudden drop in income had exposed gross mismanagement of the economy. Attempts to remove many of the benefits Saudi citizens had come to expect to be free in the years running up to the Gulf War had been deeply unpopular, particularly while the thousands of royal princes continued to live lives of lavish decadence. This resulted in unprecedented discussions in Saudi Arabia of many issues that had previously been confined to the private domain. The Saudi political system and the legitimacy of the regime had never been questioned in such a way before. When, in January 1991, Sheikh Abdelaziz bin Baz, the most senior alim in the kingdom, delivered a fatwa authorizing jihad against Saddam even if it involved the assistance of non-believers, anger turned on the establishment ulema as well.
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Many were disgusted at what they saw as the pathetic compliance of the government-funded clergy.
The growing aggression of the Islamist opposition was part of this general ferment. The strongest criticism came from the ‘rank and file’ of young religious ulema. They used their
khutba
, or Friday sermon, to attack the regime’s decision to allow in American troops. In September 1990, Dr Safar al-Hawali, dean of the Islamic college of Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, released a tape claiming that the real enemy was not Iraq but the West. ‘We have asked the help of our real enemies in defending us,’ he said. ‘The point is that we need an internal change. The first war should be against the infidels inside and then we will be
strong enough to face our external enemy. Brothers, you have a duty to perform. The war will be long. The confrontation is coming.’
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Years later, bin Laden said that it was the government’s imprisonment of al-Hawali and Salman al-Auda, a faculty member at Imam Mohammed ibn Saud University in Riyadh, that turned him against the royal family as much as their rejection of his proposal for an armed international brigade of Islamic militants. He hinted at some reluctance in opposing the benefactors of his father: ‘When the Saudi government transgressed in oppressing all voices of the scholars and the voices of those who call for Islam I found myself forced… to carry out a small part of my duty of enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong.’
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Bin Laden may have been lacking in scholastic credentials, but his war record and his obvious and public rejection of luxury brought its own authority. His own lectures, reiterating his earlier call for a boycott of American goods in protest at their support for Israel, were popular. By the end of 1990, his tapes had become more radical, calling, in increasingly strident terms, for action against kufr and any regimes that supported, or were supported by, kufr.
In Saudi Arabia, however, bin Laden was not a major figure in the early 1990s. His influence was marginal compared to that of better-known radical clerics. A small group, willing to die for bin Laden and his cause, was dedicated to him as a leader and bound to him by a bayat. Then there were the ‘Arab Afghans’, the Saudi youths who had been to Afghanistan and had different degrees of allegiance to him but generally saw him as a hero. Finally there were those who were not close to him but saw him as an inspirational force and considered him, however erroneously, ‘the godfather’ of Islamic activism in Arabia.
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This tripartite division, into a ‘hardcore’, a network of networks and a broad movement of sympathizers and militants with roughly coincident aims, is repeated again and again, at a national, regional and international level, when one examines bin Laden’s position within the broader movement of modern Islamic militancy. It is also interesting to note how almost all the prominent dissidents in Saudi Arabia in this period were somehow socially marginalized. Many suffered under the strict tribal hierarchy of the kingdom. Bin Laden’s
own Yemeni roots mean that his
deera
, or land, is not considered to be Saudi Arabian and so, in spite of his family’s incredible wealth, he is thus not considered truly Saudi. For this alone even the poor of the Najd, the most dominant Saudi province, look down on him.
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A key cause of the frustration of bin Laden’s supporters in Saudi Arabia was the gulf between the state-sponsored rhetoric of jihad that had taken so many of them to Afghanistan and the total lack of appreciation shown for their efforts when they returned home. They had come back expecting to be lauded as the victors of the war on Communism. Many hoped to be rewarded financially. They felt badly let down by both the Saudi Arabian public and the elite.
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For thousands of angry young men, bin Laden’s rejection by the regime in the autumn of 1990 epitomized their betrayal. This sense of humiliation, disappointment and hurt, sublimated into violent hatred, was to be a leitmotif of bin Laden’s own statements over the next decade.
There were other clues to what was to come in the future. In May 2001, bin Laden issued a communiqué to ‘members of al-Qaeda’. Not only was this one of the very rare instances where bin Laden himself refers to ‘al-Qaeda’ but in the communiqué, signed ‘your brother in Islam’, bin Laden also explained the group’s project. ‘I bring you good news,’ he said. ‘The moment is right for the formation of a single pure and Muslim army… of 10,000 soldiers who would be ready, at a moment’s notice, to march to liberate the land of the two holy places.’ This is the realization of an idea that ‘germinated ten years ago’, bin Laden said, ‘in the earth of the Yemen’.
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The reference to the Yemen seems, at first sight, slightly confusing. After all, bin Laden was based in Saudi Arabia between late 1989 and 1991 and, though he may have visited the Yemen, certainly spent no great amount of time there. However, following his interview with Prince Sultan, it seems that the first experiment in organizing militancy overseas that he undertook was in the impoverished Arabian coastal state.
Bin Laden did, of course, have a longstanding interest in the Yemen. One of his wives was Yemeni, his father’s roots lay in the southern Hadramawt province and he had contacts among the many thousands of Yemenis who had fought the Soviets, particularly with Sayyaf’s
faction.
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The Yemenis had been known as fierce fighters and had distinguished themselves at the battle of Jalalabad in 1989. In Afghanistan, they had been led by a major Yemeni tribal chief called Tariq al-Fadhli. Al-Fadhli’s father had been stripped of his sultanate by the British and denied restitution by the Moscow-backed Marxist government that succeeded the colonial regime. While in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 1987 and 1989, al-Fadhli had become friendly with bin Laden. On returning to their homeland, the Yemeni veterans, led by al-Fadhli, headed for the remote north, close to the unmarked border with Saudi Arabia, where they set up several training camps.
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