Al-Qaeda (28 page)

The crackdown of the early 1980s, and the distraction of Afghanistan, kept the militants in Egypt quiet until the middle of the decade. Sadat’s assassins had hoped their spectacular act would provoke a huge spontaneous uprising. Though nothing of the sort occurred, the root causes of the appeal of the Islamic radicals had not disappeared. In the mid 1980s, Egypt entered another period of acute economic crisis exacerbated by obvious corruption and ostentation on the part of the elite and government officials. From 1984 to 1994, the proportion of Egyptians living beneath the poverty line increased from 42 to 54 per cent.
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Despite successive government crackdowns, the Muslim Brotherhood and its various associated splinter groups grew rapidly, particularly on the university campuses. By 1985, the year a young engineering student called Mohammed Atta enrolled at Cairo University, almost all the student unions were dominated by Islamists who were pressing authorities to ‘Islamicize’ curricula and enforce segregation.

From the late 1980s, the violence in Egypt, particularly in the upper Nile, grew. Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya had recruited heavily among the unemployed young graduates of the new rural universities of the Nile valley and these new cadres were able to mobilize the rural or recently urbanized poor using, in an echo of contemporaneous anti-Shia agitation in Pakistan, violent rhetoric directed at local Coptic Christians. As in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Yemen and elsewhere, the return of Afghan veterans from 1989 onwards lent a hardened, fanatical edge to an existing conflict. During the first half of the 1990s, Egypt would be plunged into a welter of violence. Terrorist attacks, mostly perpetrated by al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, killed more than a thousand people.

Quite when al-Zawahiri reached Khartoum is unclear. According to Jamal al-Fadl, Islamic Jihad were training cadres in Sudan before bin Laden arrived in 1992 so it is likely that al-Zawahiri preceded the Saudi.
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However, ‘the doctor’ appears to have travelled widely in the early 1990s, so determining quite how much time he spent in Khartoum is difficult. In addition to the funds that bin Laden could access (on one occasion the Saudi bought two large consignments of Kalashnikovs
in Omdurman and gave them to Islamic Jihad to be sent on camel trains across the border into Egypt), the safe haven that the Saudi’s good relations with the Sudanese allowed was also crucial to al-Zawahiri’s operations.
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Though the vast bulk of the attacks in Egypt were committed by al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, Islamic Jihad were soon able to start launching operations, trying, in August 1993, to kill the Egyptian interior minister.

In April 1995, al-Zawahiri chaired a meeting in Khartoum attended by members of both al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya and Islamic Jihad. The continuing violence in Egypt had provoked a massive response from the authorities and the militant groups were suffering heavy losses as tens of thousands of Islamic activists, few of whom were actually connected to terrorists, were rounded up. Despite al-Zawahiri’s efforts, the groups failed to reconcile their differences and al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya decided to attempt a spectacular attack on President Mubarak.
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Mubarak’s motorcade was shot up during a state visit to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, but the Egyptian premier escaped injury. Islamic Jihad switched their focus. In November, they successfully bombed the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. Al-Zawahiri was committed to fighting ‘the near enemy’, i.e. the Egyptian regime, before ‘the far enemy’, i.e. Israel, the USA and global kufr. In an article published in 1995 he stated baldly that ‘the way to Jerusalem passes through Cairo.’

This attack and the attempted assassination of Mubarak are often wrongly blamed on bin Laden. So too are the bomb blasts in 1995 and 1996 in Saudi Arabia that killed a total of twenty-four Americans. The first of the two Saudi bombings took place on 13 November 1995, when a 220 lb car bomb exploded in Riyadh outside a building leased by the Pentagon for American military contractors. It killed five American officers and two Indian civilians and was the first such attack in Saudi Arabia’s history. In April 1996, Saudi Television broadcast the confessions of the four men accused of the attack. They all appeared to be Saudis, spoke Saudi Arabic and had Saudi tribal names. Though the confessions could have been beaten out of the four, their statements contradicted Riyadh’s previous claims that the blast was the work of ‘outside forces’, possibly Iraq or Iran, and seem likely to be genuine.
Three of the four were 24 years old and had fought in the war in Afghanistan; one, slightly older, was a veteran of combat in Bosnia too. All four came from modest backgrounds and had started their activism with the Jamaat Tablighi, the pacifist missionary group whose membership runs into millions across the Islamic world and whose activities are not only legal in Saudi Arabia but positively encouraged. The experience of the Afghan jihad had clearly radicalized all four. Each of them admitted links to radical Islamic leaders, including Mohammed al-Massari, the British-based chair of the Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights, and bin Laden. Their connection to bin Laden comprised reading his writings after being faxed them from London, along with al-Massari’s publications and periodicals of the Egyptian al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya.
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All four were executed.

The second attack in Saudi Arabia came seven months later, on 25 June 1996, when a bomb in a fuel truck parked outside the Khobar Towers military complex in Dhahran exploded, ripping the front off the building and killing nineteen US servicemen. Though suspicion initially focused on Afghan veterans in the country, 600 of whom were arrested, investigations swiftly showed that an Iranian-backed Shia group within Saudi Arabia was responsible. Shias within Saudi Arabia have suffered significant repression and have a long history of active resistance, if not terrorism on the scale of the Dhahran attack. The Americans indicted thirteen members of Saudi Hizbollah for the attack and even a cursory look at the extraordinarily detailed indictment, which includes timings of phone calls from senior Iranian officials to the conspirators and long descriptions of the bombers’ movements over a period of months and even years, is enough to convince all but the most adamant that neither bin Laden nor any other of the various Sunni radical militants operating in the region at the time were involved in the attack.
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In his 1997 interview with CNN, bin Laden praised as ‘heroes’ those behind the bombings but denied responsibility. ‘What they did is a big honour that I missed participating in,’ he said.
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By late 1995, al-Turabi and other senior figures in the Sudanese government were beginning to think that their bid to turn Sudan into a centre for Islamic radicalism was a miscalculation. Their attempt to counter Riyadh’s pre-eminence in the Islamic world had failed.
Relations with the Saudis, who had stripped bin Laden of his citizenship and frozen his assets in 1994, were at a new nadir. Cairo was incensed at the protection offered to men who had tried to murder the President and were responsible for scores of other attacks. The continuing presence of Algerian GIA, Lebanese Hizbollah, Palestinian Hamas and others had badly damaged Khartoum’s overseas image. America had listed Sudan as a state sponsor of terror in 1993 and the big Western oil firms who, it was hoped, would pour money into the country’s infrastructure were leery of any investment as a result. It was becoming increasingly clear that the benefits of bin Laden’s presence in their country did not outweigh the international opprobrium it brought. The Sudanese were particularly angry when it emerged that men close to bin Laden had murdered a young boy suspected of collaborating with the Egyptian intelligence services. Sudanese intelligence put bin Laden on notice. He was not the only one to be warned that the time had come to leave. Officers went round the various militant groups in their country and told them that if they did not go of their own accord they would be expelled.
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There was a deeper problem too. Al-Turabi’s brand of Islamism was very different from the radical internationalist Azzam-influenced jihadi Salafism evolved by bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and their associates. For al-Turabi, the priority was gaining and retaining political power to allow an Islamic society to be created. Bin Laden’s presence jeopardized that project. Early in 1996, informal approaches were made to the US State Department, which responded with demands that included access to the training camps and the provision of details about various individuals associated with terrorism, including bin Laden. There was, apparently, no explicit demand that bin Laden be handed over. The Sudanese said they were prepared to deliver him to Riyadh but the Saudi government, fearful of domestic unrest, refused the offer.
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At the time, Washington was not inclined to accept custody of bin Laden on the basis that, as he was yet to be indicted, there would be no grounds to hold him in the USA.
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Before contacting the Americans, Khartoum had tasked an intelligence official attached to their embassy in Pakistan but based in Peshawar with finding out if Afghanistan might be a feasible destination for
bin Laden should he leave Sudan. The official had learned Pashto and built up excellent contacts among Afghan commanders during the war against the Soviets. He focused his efforts on three commanders around Jalalabad. Bin Laden, no doubt aware of his precarious position, had already got in touch with two old friends from his time among the mujahideen, Maulvi Younis Khalis and Jalaluddin Haqqani. On 18 May 1996 he returned to Afghanistan.

11
Struggle

Just after eleven o’clock on 7 August 1998, Mohammed Rashid Daoud al-Owhali, a slim-shouldered, bearded 22-year-old from Saudi Arabia, was standing in front of a toilet bowl in the men’s lavatories on the ground floor of a private hospital in the suburb of Nairobi called Parklands. He was holding a set of keys and three bullets. His clothes (jeans, a white, patterned shirt, socks and black shoes) were soaked with blood. The keys fitted the lock on the rear doors of a light brown Toyota pick-up truck which, half an hour earlier, had ceased to exist when the huge bomb it had been carrying had exploded, demolishing the American embassy, an adjacent secretarial college and badly damaging a nearby bank. The explosion killed 213, wounded 4,600 and effectively vaporized the driver of the truck, another young Saudi called Azzam. He and al-Owhali had been friends and had sung songs of martyrdom in Arabic as they had driven the truck to the embassy. Azzam was killed when, still sitting in the driver’s seat, he pressed a detonator button taped to the dashboard. But al-Owhali ran. And so was standing in the toilet holding the keys and the bullets.

One hour and 15 minutes earlier, al-Owhali and Azzam had left a small detached house in a suburb on the outskirts of Nairobi and driven their truck towards its centre. The truck contained several wooden crates containing TNT, aluminium nitrate, aluminium powder and a detonator that was wired to three or four large vehicle batteries which themselves were connected to the dashboard button. Al-Owhali sat in the passenger seat wearing a lightweight jacket in the pocket of which he had placed a 9mm Beretta pistol. He had wedged three homemade stun grenades, made from a quarter finger of TNT,
some aluminium powder and black tape, in his belt. As they drove along Haile Selassie Avenue, Azzam suggested that the jacket might make it difficult to reach the stun grenades, so he took it off and put it on the seat beside him. Because neither man knew Nairobi well they were following another jeep driven by a local called Harun. It was mid morning on a Friday and the streets were busy.

The American embassy was a five-storey building set in a compound by a roundabout where Moi Avenue meets Haile Selassie Avenue. Azzam drove the truck to the drop bar at the entrance to the car park at its rear. Harun drove his vehicle past the embassy and disappeared into the heavy traffic. It was 10.38. At the drop bar, Azzam stopped the truck. Al-Owhali opened his door, stepped to the ground and moved towards the guard on the gate. The plan was for him to force the guards to lift the bar by threatening them with his pistol. He was then to follow the truck through the gate into the car park so that if Azzam was for some reason unable to detonate the bomb once in position under the embassy, al-Owhali could do so himself by unlocking the rear of the truck and throwing in a grenade.

But things went wrong. As he approached the guard at the drop bar al-Owhali realized his pistol was in his jacket, which was on the seat in the truck. He hesitated, decided it would take too long to get it and threw a stun grenade instead, shouting in English. The guards scattered and the drop bar stayed down. Azzam rammed the truck up close to the embassy wall. Al-Owhali saw the vehicle against the embassy and decided his job was done and he didn’t need to die after all. He turned to his right and started sprinting. Azzam pressed the dashboard button.

The blast knocked al-Owhali to the pavement and cut the centre of his back, his right hand and his forehead. When he picked himself up, Haile Selassie Avenue was a shambles. There were bits of concrete and twisted metal, broken glass and papers everywhere. Acrid smoke filled the air. There was a terrific amount of noise. Several buses lay burning with corpses hanging from the windows.

He walked to a first aid station, noticing when he got there that he still had a stun grenade tucked into his belt, which he dropped in a rubbish bin. After some initial treatment, an ambulance drove him to MP Shah Hospital where his wounds were stitched. Then he went out
onto the street and wondered what to do. As he was supposed to die, there had been no escape plan for him. He had left his plane tickets and false passport at the bomb factory.