Authors: Jason Burke
Al-Owhali told the FBI that he had met bin Laden for the first time in mid September 1996. Along with several others, he had been nominated by Sayyid al-Kurdi for an audience with ‘the emir’ because he had done well in training. Bin Laden spoke to the group and, according to al-Owhali, had ‘impressed upon them the need to fight the Americans and cast them out of the Arabian peninsula. Bin Laden had also recommended that they get further training. Al-Owhali spent the next six months in three different camps, including al-Farooq, where he received training in ‘security and intelligence, how to gather information, how to protect information from being divulged, how to conduct hijackings on buses or planes, how to do kidnappings and how to seize and hold buildings’. Al-Owhali had done well. Such training was highly sought after. In a letter addressed to Faidullah al-Turkestani, Abu Hadaifa al-Jazairi explains his absence at Khaldan camp: ‘I promised to return in three days but came across some guys I know from al-Farooq camp who were in Kabul and through their contacts I managed to get onto this training session.’
Towards the end of his time in al-Farooq, al-Owhali met bin Laden
several times and asked him for a mission. Al-Owhali said he was asked, as Jamal al-Fadl said he had been back in 1989, to take an oath of allegiance to bin Laden and to al-Qaeda. Al-Owhali refused, on the basis that he wanted the liberty to be able to refuse any non-military mission that bin Laden or his aides might assign him. This is evidence of the strong personal authority bin Laden could exert over those who swore an oath to him but also shows that he and his associates were quite happy to use people who had not sworn allegiance to them. As ever, the exact meaning of ‘al-Qaeda’ remains elusive. The FBI asked al-Owhali to explain, through an interpreter, what ‘al-Qaeda’ was. According to the FBI, he said: ‘[It] is not a particular place but it’s a group and it stands for the base of God’s support, and that bin Laden is in overall charge of al-Qaeda.’
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With no military mission forthcoming, despite his repeated requests, al-Owhali decided to look elsewhere for his jihad.
In the summer of 1997, the Taliban met with their first serious reverse. In confused battles in and around the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, somewhere between 700 and 2,000 of their fighters had been killed in ultimately fruitless combat. After three years of war, the original Afghan recruits to the movement were either dead or had grown tired of the constant campaigning. There was also a limit to the number of fighters who could be produced by the medressas in Pakistan. Early batches had included youths from a range of school years and many who had long left. That resource had been exhausted.
Shortly after the Taliban had seized Jalalabad in September 1997, two of bin Laden’s main protectors, Engineer Machmud and Maulvi Saznoor, had been killed in an ambush almost certainly organized by the Taliban. Bin Laden swiftly set about building a relationship with the movement. This was not as straightforward as many have made it seem and will be dealt with in greater detail in later chapters. However, it is important to stress again that, though superficially there appear to be many similarities between the hardline Islamic ideology of the Taliban and that of bin Laden and his associates, in fact in 1996 there was little beyond a literalist interpretation of Islam’s core texts, an extreme orthopractic tendency and a paranoiac worldview to unite them.
In the summer of 1997, after persistent requests, bin Laden gave permission for al-Owhali to go and fight for the Taliban. After a bout of tuberculosis, during which he was cared for by a fellow Saudi called Azzam, he was posted, as most of the non-Afghan fighters were, to the frontlines north of Kabul. Al-Owhali, despite his relative lack of experience, found himself caught up in fierce combat. In one firefight, which became known as the ‘C-Formation’ battle, he and five other men held off much larger forces. The battle established his reputation as a soldier and shortly afterwards al-Owhali and Azzam were taken to a camp outside Kabul and, with four others, underwent a month of intensive instruction in how to run a covert terrorist cell. Their trainer was an Egyptian who had been trained by another Egyptian, probably Ali Mohammed, the former US special forces sergeant. The camp they were at is impossible to identify but appears to be one of the newer bases that bin Laden and his associates were establishing around Kabul by early 1998 to cope with an influx of volunteers. Shortly after completing his training, al-Owhali was given a false Iraqi passport in the name of Abdul Ali Latif and told to travel to the Yemen. He arrived in April 1998 and stayed in Sana’a with Ahmed al-Hazza, one of the men who fought with him in the C-Formation battle. Al-Owhali must have already known what his ‘mission’ was likely to entail because, for the first time in two years, he called his parents in Saudi Arabia. On 18 May, he flew back to Pakistan. In Peshawar a man called Khalid, possibly Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, briefed him on his mission. Al-Owhali was told he was to die driving a truck full of explosives into an American target in east Africa. He recorded a video claiming the strike in the name of the ‘First Squad of the El Bara bin Malik division of the Army of Liberating the Islamic Holy Lands’.
On 28 May, bin Laden held a press conference at one of the Khost camps. It was the culmination of a series of press statements and interviews. Over the previous 18 months, bin Laden had seen several prominent British and American journalists, ensuring coverage on US networks and local media worldwide. Since the days of the war against the Soviets, bin Laden had always been acutely aware of the importance of the media. In 1994, he had been involved in the creation of the Advice and Reformation Committee, based in London, which appears
to have been, at least in part, one of a long series of attempts to improve his image overseas. Bin Laden sent audiotapes of his lectures to be played at meetings of radicals in Pakistan. In early 1998, he sent a signed letter to an associate in Pakistan telling them to increase payments to selected journalists. He wanted to see an increase in coverage of his statements and activities, he told his correspondent.
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Bin Laden has always been careful to tailor his statements carefully for the intended audience. Only a few days before the May 1998 press conference, he issued a signed communiqué aimed at the Pakistanis. India had just tested a nuclear device in the Rajasthani desert and the Pakistani government of Nawaz Sharif was under enormous international pressure not to respond. This, bin Laden said, should be rejected. The Muslim nations should strive to build a nuclear weapon to counter the unbelievers. Bin Laden exploited every local sensitivity with some precision, mentioning the ‘hundreds of millions’ of Indian Muslims threatened by the Hindu nationalist government as well as the alleged long-term hostility of New Delhi to Islamabad. He also made a rare reference to ‘occupied Kashmir’.
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Sometimes bin Laden seemed to show an incredible instinctive grasp of modern marketing techniques. Shortly after the security scare in Jalalabad forced him to move to Tora Bora, bin Laden organized the circulation of hundreds of genuine 100 Pakistani rupee notes stamped with his face and a parody of a Saudi or American request for information about him.
In February 1998, bin Laden had announced the formation of the ‘World Islamic Front’ and had issued a statement promising a ‘Jihad against Jews and Crusaders’. In its call for the defeat of factionalism, its selective Qur’anic references, its description of the ‘nations attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food’, there was little that was new. The focus on the US was, however, stronger. A quotation from the sword verses of the Qur’an, ‘Fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them’, stressed the international dimension of the cosmic struggle between good and evil that bin Laden felt was occurring.
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The statement also included a fatwa that:
to kill Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to
do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa mosque and the Holy Mosque [in Mecca] and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.
The declaration was signed by bin Laden, al-Zawahiri in his capacity of ‘emir’ of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Abu Yasir Rifa’I Ahmad Taha of the Egyptian al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya and Fazlur Rahman, ‘emir’ of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh.
The press conference was theatrical. A party of journalists was brought from Pakistan over the high passes along the border and driven in circles through the hills before reaching the camp. There, local mujahideen fighters, especially recruited and armed for the occasion, put on a noisy display of firing.
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Bin Laden sat flanked by al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Atef and reiterated his fatwa of February. Around the same time, he gave an interview to John Miller of ABC, the American news network. He explained that:
any American who pays taxes to his government is our target because he is helping the American war machine against the Muslim nation… Terrorizing oppressors and criminals and thieves and robbers is necessary for the safety of people and for the protection of their property.
He denied being a ‘terrorist’, saying: ‘[They have] compromised our honour and our dignity and dare we utter a single word of protest against the injustice, we are called terrorists.’ The World Islamic Front had been formed, he said, as ‘a higher council to coordinate rousing the Muslim nation to carry out jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders’. Bin Laden said that ‘Westerners were under the impression that [Muslims] are butchers’. History proved that this was not the case, as the peace and protection offered to Christians living under the Ottomans in ‘eastern Europe, Turkey and Albania’ proved. The misapprehension was because ‘the Western masses have fallen under the effect of the Jewish media’, bin Laden said, emphasizing once again his interest in modern communications, ‘who do not broadcast on Muslims except that we butcher, and without showing that the number of us who were butchered it is the biggest number’. ‘It is our duty to lead people to light,’ bin Laden said and promised news of a major action soon.
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In the early 1990s, a basic structure had been laid down by Islamic Jihad in east Africa. Several veterans of the war against the Soviets or volunteers who had been trained in the camps between 1989 and 1995 had been sent there or returned to homes in the region. They included Mohammed Odeh and Harun Fazil, who had both travelled to Somalia in 1993 and 1994. By 1996, Ubaidah al-Banshiri, the Egyptian military specialist, was at work in Africa, dealing in tanzanite and gold as well as setting up and recruiting cells.
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Though Ubaidah was killed in a boat accident, progress was being made in setting up networks capable of major terrorist attacks. The work was not easy and was made harder by the absence of local groups who could be co-opted. Eventually, most of the bomb team ‘talent’ came in on direct orders of senior, and still unidentified, associates of bin Laden in Afghanistan. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Mohammed Atef are the prime suspects.
Al-Owhali arrived in Nairobi on 2 August. He went by taxi to a small suburban hotel, took a room and rang Pakistan. He was told he would be contacted and within an hour Harun Fazil, whose jeep he would follow less than a week later as he drove with the bomb to the embassy, arrived. Harun paid the hotel bill and the pair then drove to a house on the outskirts of the city. The next day, two men arrived. One was Azzam, the young Saudi alongside whom al-Owhali had fought in Afghanistan and alongside whom he was now supposed to die. The other was an Egyptian known as Saleh. This was Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, the operational commander running both the Nairobi operation and the simultaneous attack planned in Dar es Salaam. He had been associated with bin Laden and Islamic Jihad since the late 1980s. The bomb had been ready for two weeks. On 4 August, al-Owhali, with Mohammed Odeh and at least one other man, drove to the embassy and videoed it. On 5 August, a fax was sent to the Cairo office of the
al-Hayat
newspaper from Egyptian Islamic Jihad, threatening that American interests would soon be attacked.
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On the evening of 6 August, Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian that al-Owhali had met in the al-Qaeda training camps, came to the house and readied the bomb. Then the two men who would deliver it were left alone. There was little need to discuss an escape plan or what they would do after the bombing. Telephone records obtained by the FBI
show a flurry of calls towards the end of the week. At 8.44pm on 6 August, al-Owhali rang 00 967 1 200578, the number of the former comrade in Sana’a, and spoke for a little over seven minutes. At 9.20 on the morning of 7 August, he called the Yemen again, speaking this time for three and a half minutes. Azzam called his family in Saudi Arabia. At 9.45am, the pair drove the truck away from the house and, tailing Harun in his jeep, headed into Nairobi. The bomb went off 54 minutes later. The bomb in Dar es Salaam exploded ten minutes after that. Five days later, al-Owhali was arrested at the cheap hotel he had stayed in when he had first come to Kenya, not quite four weeks previously.
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Global Jihad
We drove into Kandahar around noon, just over 40 hours after leaving Kabul. It had been a long, hard, if very beautiful, journey. I had dust in my nostrils, eyes, hair and throat. I paid off my taxi and checked in to the United Nations guesthouse then, after lunch and a shower, walked the few blocks through the dusty streets, past Mullah Omar’s new residence, to the foreign ministry office. The Taliban leader’s home was set in a high-walled compound with painted gateposts with multicoloured tiles set into them. It was hot and very dry; the sun was directly overhead and the shadows hardly stretched across the melting tarmac of the road, the only metalled surface anywhere south of Kabul, in front of its high gates. It was 20 August 1998, 13 days after the bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.