Authors: Jason Burke
No one travelled to Afghanistan immediately. For the first six months of 1999, Hijazi worked at accumulating the material he needed for several huge bombs. The group rented a house in a poor suburb of Amman, enlarged a basement to act as a makeshift laboratory and began experimenting with different explosives. They followed instructions contained in the ‘Encyclopedia of Jihad’, the eleven-volume document compiled in Peshawar with bin Laden’s financial assistance in the early 1990s. It had subsequently been carefully transferred to a computer disk (by a Jordanian–American activist based in Pakistan called Khalil Deek) and by 1999 was circulating widely in radical Islamic circles. In June 1999, Abu Hoshar called Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan to tell him that he was sending Hijazi and three other men for training. Hijazi, who was coming to Afghanistan for a specific purpose and had no time to waste bolstering the Taliban, skipped the basic infantry training in Khaldan and went straight to al-Farooq camp where he was taught advanced explosive techniques. On his way out of Afghanistan, after several weeks of tuition, he met Abu Zubaydah again and took a bayat of loyalty to bin Laden, which he was told authorized him to act ‘anywhere in jihad territories’ in the name of his ‘emir’.
As Raeed Hijazi was undergoing his specialist bomb-making training in Afghanistan, Ahmed Ressam was trying to sort out the details of the
scheme which bin Laden, in very general terms, had authorized six months previously. Buying the electrical components for a bomb was easy enough, but he needed manpower. Of the five-man team who had been in Darunta with him only he had made it back to Canada. The rest had either been arrested and detained or were missing; even Fateh Kamel had been arrested, in Jordan in April. In their place, he recruited three of his friends who had expressed an interest in going to Afghanistan or fighting in Chechnya.
34
Then he called Pakistan and spoke to a senior figure he knew had access to bin Laden.
35
Ressam wanted him to get bin Laden’s blessing for the attack he was planning. He wanted to credit it to ‘the sheikh’. That Ressam made this call is interesting because it shows exactly who was most proactive: the LAX bombing was clearly Ressam’s project. Bin Laden’s ‘brand’ – in every sense of the word – was merely being sought by someone who was already deeply involved in violent Islamic terrorism. On 8 November, Ressam called Abu Doha in London, asking for arrangements to be made to fly him out to Algeria after the bombing.
36
On 19 November, he hired a motel bungalow on the southern outskirts of Vancouver and began mixing explosives. Just over three weeks later, he loaded the timers, the urea and the nitroglycerine into the back of a hire car and headed towards the ferry to America.
In Jordan, events were moving fast too. There, bin Laden, through his aides, had established a closer grip on the volunteers’ own scheme. On 30 November, Abu Zubaydah called Abu Hoshar in Amman and told him that ‘the time for waiting was over’. Acting on a tip-off, the Jordanian security services intercepted the call. Within hours, the Jordanians had raided a series of addresses in the capital and on its outskirts and had sixteen people in custody. They found the explosives on 5 December.
37
Hijazi had been arrested by Syrian authorities a month earlier. He was later sentenced to death but cleared of ‘membership of al-Qaeda’.
On the day of Ahmed Ressam’s arrest at the Coho ferry, Michael Sheehan, the US State Department Coordinator for Counter-terrorism, called Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Taliban foreign minister, in Kandahar. Through an Arabic translator, Sheehan told
Muttawakil that America would hold the Taliban responsible for the acts of bin Laden. ‘If there’s a criminal in your basement and you are aware that he has been conducting criminal activities from your house, even if you are not involved in the crimes you are responsible for them,’ Sheehan said. ‘In fact, your willingness to give him refuge makes you complicit in his actions, past and present.’
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The Holy War Foundation
They had gathered in the shade of the plane trees to celebrate a wedding. Beyond were the fields of wheat and opium, dusty hills and then the dry wastes of the desert stretching away to the horizon. The bride, a girl of 14, sat demurely with the women. The bridegroom sat with the men. He was Mohammed bin Laden, 19 years old and Osama bin Laden’s second son. He was marrying the daughter of Mohammed Atef, Osama bin Laden’s military chief and second in command.
The service was short and afterwards the smiling father of the groom said a few words. Then he read out a poem he had composed for the occasion:
1
A destroyer, even the brave fear its might,
It inspires horror in the harbour and in the open sea,
She sails into the waves
Flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and false power,
To her doom she moves slowly,
A dinghy awaits her, riding the waves.
The reference was obvious to all who were listening. Only three months earlier, on 12 October 2000, a small powerboat loaded with explosives had rammed the USS
Cole
, an American destroyer, as it waited to refuel off the harbour at Aden in Yemen. Seventeen American sailors, and the two bombers, who stood upright and saluted as their boat ploughed into the side of the warship, were killed. Within hours, American FBI teams had arrived in Yemen to conduct an investigation.
There were a number of suspects. Even in 2000, after six years of unified government and a presidential election, much of the Yemen,
particularly the areas on the Saudi border, remained a violent, anarchic place where authority lay with tribal sheikhs and arms were plentiful. Attempts by the government to force out the Islamic extremists, both the militants training in the camps in the north of the country and the ideologues who ran the Wahhabi schools such as that which had attracted John Walker Lindh, had met with fierce resistance. In 1999, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, the Algerian GIA, the Libyan Fighting Group and Hamas, all had a presence in the country
2
and hundreds of Yemenis were making their way each year to Afghanistan to fight with bin Laden, the HUM, the Taliban or other groups.
3
Following the USS
Cole
attack, Yemeni police arrested six men, all veterans of the Afghan war. The suspected leader of the cell reportedly told Yemeni investigators that he was trained in bin Laden’s ‘Jihad Camp no 1’ in Afghanistan (possibly Jihad Wal camp in al-Badr or one of the new camps that were built to cater for the influx of recruits after the 1998 embassy bombings and the missile strikes) and had also fought in Bosnia in 1994. He said he was acting on telephone instructions from a man called Mohammed Omar al-Harazi, a Saudi-born Yemeni based in Dubai, whom he hadn’t seen for ten years.
4
Al-Harazi, whose real name is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, met bin Laden during the war against the Soviets and is suspected of having recruited ‘Azzam’, the man who died when he detonated the truck bomb outside the Nairobi embassy and who is thought to have been his nephew. Yemeni investigators believe al-Harazi spent time in Aden between the attempt on the USS
The Sullivans
and the USS
Cole
and then left shortly before the bombing.
5
The departure before the attack by the senior commander, the use of a small cell, the careful surveillance and preparation, are all hallmarks of attacks orchestrated by those experienced militants connected to the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’, at least according to the
modus operandi
taught in the Afghan camps.
There is other evidence linking bin Laden to the attack, though much of it is circumstantial. Bin Laden has long had connections with Yemeni militants and a family tie to the country. Phone records from bin Laden’s personal satellite phone show hundreds of calls to the Yemen made between 1996 and 1998,
6
and local Yemeni telephone records
from 1998 to 2000 show calls between telephones used by suspects in the
Cole
attack and telephones belonging to people operating for bin Laden’s organization in Africa.
7
In addition, at about the time of the attempted attack on the USS
The Sullivans
, bin Laden appeared in specially filmed recruitment videos with a
jambiya
, the traditional Yemeni dagger, at his waist. And, according to some reports, when the Sana’a government tried to close down the training camps run by the Islamic Army of Aden-Abyan a representative of bin Laden attempted to mediate.
8
In 1997, bin Laden sent an envoy to the Yemen to find out if it would be a suitable base should the Taliban expel him from Afghanistan.
9
The air in Yemen, he told an interviewer, was ‘free of humiliation’.
10
And while in Kandahar in 2000, bin Laden, having divorced an earlier wife who remained in Saudi Arabia rather than come to Afghanistan with him in 1996, had married a Yemeni.
11
The presence of men in the Yemen who were, at least theoretically, under the control of bin Laden and his associates is revealed by another of the letters found by the
Wall Street Journal
on the computer picked up in Kabul. Several files show leaders in Kabul trying, with varying degrees of success, to maintain control of militant groups abroad. One lengthy report referred to a cell in the Yemen which was showing too much independence: ‘The general management shall be consulted on issues related to joining and firing from the company, the general strategy and the company name,’ it said, again using the language of commerce as a makeshift code. A member of the cell, the report complained, had been overheard talking ‘in an unsuitable way’ with a woman on the telephone and had then tried to avoid questions about the relationship by ‘pretending to be busy reading the Qur’an’.
12
Yet despite all of this evidence, the exact mechanics of bin Laden’s relation with the USS
Cole
bombers remain unclear.
In fact, the exact mechanics of bin Laden’s involvement, whether with individual terrorist acts or with other groups, between 1998 and 2001 are often unclear. Partly that is the consequence of the extreme difficulty of investigating terrorist attacks and the problems of gathering solid intelligence on an amorphous and opaque group of activists. Unfortunately, this means that, rather than try to comprehend the multiplicity of different ways in which bin Laden and other Islamic
radicals interact, it is far easier to reduce them to a simple boss–worker, commander–foot soldier relationship. Such an over-simplification is wrong.
Instead it is useful to think of a scale with, at one extreme, an attack like the Nairobi bombing, involving a tight, well-organized cell based on an idea originating within the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’, run closely by them and comprising a large number of personnel flown in especially for the purpose who have no previous local links, and, at the other extreme, local groups or even individuals who merely share broadly sympathetic aims with bin Laden but whose links to him or his associates are extremely tenuous. Somewhere in the middle of the scale, there are men like Ahmed Ressam, who conceived and planned an attack himself, selected his own targets and whose dealings with ‘al-Qaeda’ were limited to contact with Abu Zubaydah, training and a development grant for his idea. The attack on the USS
Cole
, which appears to have been the work of a group of local militants drawn together and organized by a more senior bin Laden associate, would slot in between Ressam and Nairobi.
Between 1996 and 2001, bin Laden was linked to other groups and individuals in a bewildering variety of ways. Every relationship was different. An examination of his dealings with Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and the Taliban has already shown how, in the late 1990s, groups with very different agendas began to converge in terms of ideology, methodology and targets. Bin Laden’s relations with the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC) in Algeria and in Europe, Islamic groups in Kurdistan and a particular cell in Malaysia, linked to the Jamaat Islamiyya organization of Indonesia, are also revealing.
In Hosh el Hadair, a small village about 75 miles to the southwest of Algiers, life is very different from the crowded, cosmopolitan capital. There is no running water, limited electricity and the nearest metalled road is miles away.
Late in July 2001, twelve armed men came silently through the vine fields that surround the village. They shot nine men and cut the throat of a tenth, Djilal Bouaissaoui. Bouaissaoui had spent most of his 62 years working the dusty patch of land that soaked up his blood. The
thick dark stain on the sandy soil was still visible two days later. He was the 105th person to die that month. After his funeral, I sat with his son and ate grapes and couscous. My heavily armed government security detachment waited nearby. The massacre barely made the local newspapers.
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