Authors: Jason Burke
Standing in front of the hospital, al-Owhali checked his pockets for money. All he found were the keys to the back of the truck and three bullets from the pistol he had left in the jacket. He went back inside the hospital, found the men’s toilets and washed the keys and the bullets in a sink to remove fingerprints. Then he tried to flush them down a cistern. When they wouldn’t go he fished them out and stood there.
It was just after eleven o’clock in the morning. He had spent the last week preparing for death. Less than a mile away his friend had blown himself up along with an embassy and thousands of people. He was standing in a hospital full of badly injured casualties, casualties of the bomb he had delivered. He had no money and no passport and no one knew he was alive.
1
Late in the afternoon of 18 May 1996, two planes landed at the airstrip east of Jalalabad. They were carrying Osama bin Laden, his three wives, at least three of his ten children and around thirty male followers. Three local warlords had driven out onto the pitted tarmac in front of the old Soviet-built airport buildings to meet them. All three, Maulvi Saznoor, Fazl Haq Mujahed and Engineer Machmud, had been to see bin Laden in Khartoum a month earlier. Each had fought with a different faction in the war against the Soviets. Saznoor was roughly aligned with Abd al-Rab al-Rasul Sayyaf’s Ittehad-e-Islami group, the others with Hekmatyar and Maulvi Younis Khalis respectively.
2
Now each commander hoped to use bin Laden, his wealth and his international connections, to gain leverage in the complex manoeuvring for power in post-war Afghanistan. It was the old Afghan game, played by leaders at every level from the village to the palace, of accessing resources from overseas for local advantage.
Bin Laden moved into the Bagh Zahera, a two-storey villa set in gardens close to the river in Jalalabad. It had been built as a royal lodge and had been used as a military headquarters under the Soviets. There was plenty of room for ‘the sheikh’ and his entourage. Bin Laden spent
most of his time there or in one of the houses of the three men who had invited him back to Afghanistan.
3
There were others, though, who were interested in bin Laden. A few weeks after he had arrived, strangers started approaching the children of commanders who had had contact with bin Laden’s own children. They showed them pictures of bin Laden’s sons and asked where the boys lived. Bin Laden decided that Jalalabad, a small but busy city, was not safe and in late June he moved his family up to a
qala
, a traditional Pashtun fortified compound, owned by Younis Khalis near the former Soviet collective farm at Hadda, about five miles south of the city. A month after that they moved further south, up to the Melawa valley in the foothills of the Spin Ghar mountains where Engineer Machmud was using the old mujahideen base at Tora Bora as a supply dump. It was from there, on 23 August, that bin Laden issued an 8,000-word ‘message… unto Muslim brethren all over the world generally and in the Arab peninsula specifically’. It was entitled: ‘A declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places’.
This lengthy and sometimes rambling document was the first in a series of public statements and interviews over the next nine months that set out bin Laden’s objectives and methodology. Bin Laden’s short-term aim was immediately clear. Most of the Declaration of War is taken up by a lengthy diatribe against the House of al-Saud. It is in fact largely a re-write of Communiqué 17, ‘an open letter to King Fahd’, issued almost a year earlier through associates of bin Laden in London. The only difference was that bin Laden excised many of the references in the communiqué to the early Wahhabis to make it more resonant to a wider audience outside Saudi Arabia.
In religious language and with references to early Islamic history, the Qur’an and the hadith, bin Laden voices a series of very specific and very modern grievances. So, within four paragraphs, bin Laden has referred to the battles of the pre-Islamic warlords in Arabia, Somalia in 1993, the suicide bombings directed at American troops in Beirut in 1983 and the battle of Badr of 624. He announces that he has returned to the high Hindu Kush mountains of ‘Khorasan’, using the name given to modern-day Afghanistan during the great days of Islamic expansion
under the Abbasid dynasty where, he says, ‘the greatest infidel military force of the world [the Soviets] was destroyed and the myth of the superpower withered in front of the mujahideen cries of Allah u akbar’.
Bin Laden says that the consequence of his homeland straying from the correct Islamic ‘way’ is ‘injustice’, which has affected ‘civilians, military and security men, government officials… students… as well as… hundreds of thousands of unemployed graduates’. The results of this ‘injustice’, bin Laden says, include poorly paid, indebted government employees, the devaluation of the Rial, the ‘miserable situation of the social services’ and ‘especially the water service’ and the nonpayment of bills by the government to ‘great merchants and contractors’. The government, bin Laden says, had ignored peaceful means of protest. Now violence is the only alternative. The mixing of complaints about sanitation provision and invoicing problems with accusations of zulm, or tyranny, is utterly unselfconscious. This is a political manifesto, springing from a sense of social injustice that is blamed on bad government and expressed in religious terminology and with reference to religious myths.
Following ibn Taimiya (whom he quotes repeatedly) and Qutb (whom he doesn’t, though his influence is clear), bin Laden says that because the house of al-Saud follow a ‘pagan’ legal code and have not implemented the Shariat they can no longer be considered Muslims and are thus hypocrites and unbelievers, who must be resisted. This resistance, as ibn Taimiya and Abdallah Azzam stressed, is not a collective duty but an individual duty for every Muslim. ‘It is a duty on every tribe in the Arab peninsula to fight jihad and cleanse the land from these occupiers,’ bin Laden says. This is jihad as resistance and is thus a defensive, and therefore just, war. Though there are disagreements among Islamic theorists over when ‘pagans’ or unbelievers should be attacked, there is consensus over the justification for defensive military actions. Here bin Laden, whose own preference is for the more radical interpretation of jihad found in the sword verses, is at pains to justify his planned campaign in more moderate terms that appeal to the widest possible audience.
If, in the short term, bin Laden is focused on Saudi Arabia, he clearly has a broader aim too: to end the repression of the Islamic world
by the hypocrite governments and the ‘Crusader–Zionist’ alliance supporting and manipulating them. That the West and the Jews want to maintain the Islamic world in a state of weakness, division and poverty is taken as a given. Bin Laden ignores the Islamic injunction for tolerance towards the ‘people of the book’. In his world (and the world of Azzam, Qutb, al-Zawahiri
et al
.) the Crusades never finished. For bin Laden, the hostility of the Crusader–Zionist alliance is manifested both in their support of munafiq governments and in their own repression of Muslims. ‘It should not be hidden from you,’ warns bin Laden in his Declaration of War:
that the people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist–Crusaders alliance and their collaborators… [Muslim] blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, the Philippines… Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya and Bosnia-Herzegovina… send shivers in the body and shake the conscience.
This is a ‘difficult period in the history of the umma’, bin Laden points out. The reason for the current tribulations and humiliations suffered by the Muslim community is that they have allowed the holy places (including the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem) to be occupied, in contravention of the will of Allah. The only solution to this humiliating situation, he believes, is a jihad. This is the essence of the creed of aggressive Sunni militant Salafism.
In the Declaration, bin Laden also outlines the means by which his aims are to be achieved. After 4,000 words on the current ills of Saudi Arabia and the problems of the umma in general, he turns to address his ‘Muslim brothers (particularly those of the Arab peninsula)’ who he hopes will ‘today have started your jihad in the cause of Allah to expel the occupying enemy out of the country of the two holy places… in order to re-establish the greatness of the umma and to liberate its occupied sanctuaries’. Bin Laden admits that there is an imbalance in forces. The answer is to use ‘fastmoving light forces that work under complete secrecy’. These forces will ‘hit the aggressor with an iron fist… re-establish the normal course and give the people their rights’.
Most of the Declaration is explicitly directed at ‘the youth’ of Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden calls for a vanguard, who will martyr themselves. Despite his complete lack of scholarly credentials, bin Laden makes the controversial assertion that those who die in such a way will go ‘to the highest levels of paradise’. That so few have so far come forward as volunteers is easily explained. It is the ‘corrupt media’ who have been used to ‘trick’ many Muslims into loving ‘this materialistic world’. Many of the ulema in Saudi Arabia have been fed falsehoods, which they have passed on to the faithful. Others have been wilfully misleading to further their own interests. Predictably, bin Laden says, this is the work of the ‘Zionist–Crusader alliance’ which:
moves quickly to contain and abort any corrective movement appearing in Islamic countries. Different means and methods are used… Sometimes officials from the Ministry of the interior who are also graduates of the colleges of the shari’at are [sent] to… confuse the nation and the umma… and to circulate false information.
Little of bin Laden’s thought is original. Most of his ideas can be found repeated in thousands of similar ‘Salafi’ tracts distributed over the last decade. His lack of a clear political programme is a feature of most modern Islamic extremist ideology too. In a revealing moment in an interview with CNN early in 1997, bin Laden was asked what kind of society would be created if the Islamic movement takes over Arabia. Though he had viewed the questions in advance he still failed to articulate any vision of the practical instrumentalities of his Islamic state and merely referred once more to the primary Islamic texts and the example of the earliest Islamic community:
We are confident, with the permission of God, praise and glory be to Him, that… God’s religion, praise and glory be to Him, will prevail in this peninsula. It is a great pride and a big hope that the revelation received by Mohammed, peace be upon him, will be resorted to for ruling. When we used to follow Mohammed’s revelation, peace be upon him, we were in great happiness and in great dignity.
4
What is new in bin Laden’s thought, however, is the shift in target. The Declaration makes clear that the priority for bin Laden is to attack
the Crusader–Zionist alliance, even if the focus on Saudi Arabia in most of the document makes it clear that such an attack is merely, in his mind, the means to a specific and local end. Previously, Islamic groups had largely targeted their own governments, the hypocrites and the apostates, directly, not their supporters. Bin Laden may have been interested in forming an international group of militants that would restore Islam to its rightful superiority in the world, but hitherto this was to be effected by targeting the regimes that ruled Muslim countries, not the USA or other representatives of global kufr. This shift in strategy was radical and controversial and there is evidence that it was opposed by al-Zawahiri and senior figures in Islamic Jihad who feared a diversion of attention from their campaign against the Egyptian government. In his statement, bin Laden argues that the ‘greater enemy’ must be overcome before ‘the lesser enemy’. The focus on the USA, a common foe, is a useful way of overcoming the particularism that had hobbled extremist, and less radical, Islamic reformist movements over the preceding three decades. It would also bind together the disparate groups and individuals that comprised the Islamic militant movement at the time. In the Declaration, he goes to great lengths to justify the shift, even employing an uncharacteristic bit of analogical reasoning:
The situation cannot be rectified, as the shadow cannot be straightened when its source, the rod, is not straight either, unless the root of the problem is tackled. Hence it is essential to hit the main enemy who divided the umma into small and little countries and pushed it for the last few decades into a state of confusion.
Here he had hit upon one of the key elements that would allow the rapid spread of the ‘al-Qaeda’ message in the next few years. In an interview published in October 1996 in a radical Islamic magazine,
Nida’ul Islam
, bin Laden is more explicit: ‘It is crucial to overlook many of the issues of bickering to unite our ranks so we can repel the greater kufr.’
5
Bin Laden realized that tapping the profound and widespread resentment in the Islamic world of Western supremacy and policy would enable him to overcome fitna and unite radical Islamists under his banner. The failure of the more moderate political Islamists to move beyond parochial local interests had left a huge gap that bin
Laden with his explicitly supranational message, which was left vague enough not to clash with any group’s local agenda, was able to exploit. This internationalization was to become progressively more marked in the coming years.
However, bin Laden still needed to find an effective way to mobilize the vanguard he had so often talked about. Al-Banna, Maududi and Qutb had all faced similar problems. They had decided to patiently build popular networks and organizational structures that would allow them to achieve their aims, albeit over a long period. Bin Laden, hunted by a dozen security services and stuck in a mountainside cave complex without electricity or running water in a country without a proper telephone network, did not have that luxury. The hugely enhanced capacity of the modern media could help, but words have to be backed by deeds to be effective. Bin Laden’s associates in Islamic Jihad had learned the power of a single, stunning strike with the assassination of Sadat. Such a strike would get massive publicity, bring in more recruits and inspire more attacks. Bin Laden was aware of the difficulties facing him, telling Abdul Bari Atwan, the London-based editor of
al-Quds al-Arabi
, during an interview at Tora Bora in November 1996 that: