Authors: Jason Burke
4
. Documents found in Bosnia-Herzegovina in March 2002 included minutes of several meetings in August 1988 where bin Laden, Abu Ubaidah and Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, a.k.a. Mamduh Salim, and others, discussed the formation of a group (US District Court Illinois, USA
v.
Enaam Arnaout, indictment, April 2002).
5
. ‘The Encyclopedia of Jihad’, vol. 1, author collection. The dedication reads: ‘To our much loved brother Abu Abdullah Osama bin Laden who shared in the jihad of Sheikh Abdallah Azzam and in the creation of the Office of Services. Who has committed himself every day to jihad. I pray to God to give him still more will and courage to serve Islam, Muslims, jihad and the mujahideen.’
6
. Gunaratna,
Inside al-Qaeda
, p. 36.
7
. Simon Reeve,
The New Jackals
, Andre Deutsch, 1999, p. 48.
8
. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon,
The Age of Sacred Terror
, Random House, 2002.
9
.
1995 Patterns of Global Terrorism
, US Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, April 1996.
10
. ‘Usama bin Laden: Islamic Extremist Financier’, CIA memo released after 1998 bombings of East African US embassies, p. 1 (author collection).
11
. Unclassified memo, from sec state Washington, released by National Security Archive, USA, under Freedom of Information Act, in 2001 (author collection).
1997 Patterns of Global Terrorism
, US Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, 1998.
12
. Address by President Clinton on military actions against terrorist sites in Afghanistan and Sudan, 20 August 1998 (author collection).
13
. USA
v.
Usama bin Laden, New York Southern District Court, direct examination of Agent Perkins, 19 March 2001.
14
. Transcript of ABC interview, 19 April 2001, kindly provided by Chris Isham of ABC.
15
. Published in
Al-Sharq al-Awsat
, London, 16 December 2002.
16
. Author interview, Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, August 2002.
17
. Interview with Algerian security officials, London, October 2002.
18
.
1997 Patterns of Global Terrorism
, US Department of State, 1998.
19
.
The Herald
, Karachi, May 2002.
20
. See Andrew Tan, ‘The Indigenous Roots of Conflict in Southeast Asia: The Case of Mindanao’, in Kumar Ramakrishna and Andrew Tan (eds.),
After Bali
, Singapore, 2003, pp. 97–116. The US government’s indictment of Janjalani does not mention al-Qaeda or bin Laden.
21
. Michael Smith, ‘Bin Laden Hunted by SAS in Kashmir’,
Daily Telegraph
, 23 February 2002.
22
. Interview with senior Indian intelligence official, Srinagar, October 2003.
23
. In 1998 I was the victim of a classic intelligence operation when I was fed, and then published, false information about bin Laden and the heroin trade.
24
. When the British government issued its long-awaited dossier of evidence aimed at convincing the British public of the need for war in Iraq it did not mention al-Qaeda at all. By March 2004 it was widely understood that intelligence assessments of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction were hopelessly inaccurate. An Israeli parliamentary investigation of their intelligence services accused Mossad of recycling second-hand, unreliable, unverified information. Stephen Farrell,
The Times
, ‘Mossad relied on WMD conjecture’, 29 March 2004. Similar allegations were levelled against the American government and the CIA. In Britain, MI6’s catastrophic failure to provide a realistic picture of Saddam’s capabilities was largely glossed over in the debate over whether information was manipulated by the Blair administration. Journalists and spies shared many sources, a considerable number of which were so palpably unreliable it was almost comic. In Iraq in August 2002, I had an amusing encounter with an Iranian Kurdish drug smuggler who claimed to have met bin Laden in Kandahar while involved in an operation to smuggle chemical weapons hidden in fridge motors to al-Qaeda. When I asked him to describe the city he said it was composed entirely of mud houses. In fact it is full of large, ugly concrete buildings. Jason Burke, Diary,
London Review of Books
, 19 September 2002.
25
. Adam Dickinson,
Behind the Mask of the Terrorist
, Mainstream Publishing, 2001.
26
. Hala Jaber, ‘Ryanair Gunman: I was not Going to Crash Plane’,
Sunday Times
, 13 October 2002.
27
. On one occasion he spent several hours briefing an Arab journalist in secret, ‘off the record’, in Kabul. Nothing was to be printed, he told the frustrated correspondent, because he did not want to get into trouble. Interview with Arab journalist based in Islamabad, June 2002.
28
.
1995 Patterns of Global Terrorism
, US Department of State, 1996.
2: 11 September, Terror and Islam
1
. Letter published around September 2002, author collection. There is some doubt over whether the letter is actually the work of bin Laden himself. There are several Qur’anic references in it that are erroneous, mistakes bin Laden would be unlikely to make. However, even the fact that sympathizers or associates might be concerned by global warming is significant.
2
. Excerpts from
Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet
were translated and published by
Al-Sharq al-Awsat
, the Arabic-language newspaper, 20 December 2001. The author obtained a copy in Peshawar in June 2002, believed to have been published in early 2002.
3
. Fandy,
The Politics of Dissent
, p. 191.
4
. Ferguson, ‘Clashing Civilizations’, in Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda (eds.),
The Age of Terror
, p. 120.
5
. Juergensmeyer,
Terror in the Mind of God
, p. 147.
6
. Amir Taheri, ‘Al-Qaeda’s Agenda for Iraq’,
New York Post
, 4 September 2003. In January 2004 bin Laden spoke of the occupation of Iraq as ‘the latest episode in Zionist–Crusader series’.
7
. Juergensmeyer,
Terror in the Mind of God
, p. 155.
8
. Roy,
The Failure of Political Islam
, p. 13.
9
. Akbar,
Islam Today
, p. 45.
10
. Gibreel, ‘The Ulema: Middle Eastern Power Brokers’,
Middle East Quarterly
, Fall 2001, vol. VIII, no. 4.
11
. Ruthven,
Islam in the World
, p. 280.
12
. Sura 3:193 (excerpt): ‘Lord, forgive us our sins and remove from us our evil deeds and make us die with the righteous… Those that fled their homes or were expelled from them, and those that suffered persecution for My sake and fought and were slain: I shall forgive them their sins and admit them to gardens watered by running streams, as a recompense from God; God dispenses the richest recompense’ (Dawood translation).
13
. It was in fact 220 miles from Mecca to Medina.
14
. ‘The last will of Abdallah Yusuf Azzam’, Khorasan publications, date unknown, author collection.
15
. ‘The real meaning of Jihad’, e-mail circular, November 2002. Author collection.
16
. Esposito,
Unholy War
, p. 64.
17
. Qutb,
Milestones
.
18
. Ibid., pp. 46, 48.
19
. Ibid., p. 49.
20
. Ibid., p. 131.
21
. Global Islamic Media, January 2002:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/abubanan
.
22
. Roy,
The Failure of Political Islam
, p. 156.
23
. The others are prayer, fasting, the donation of a certain amount of money each year to charity and the pilgrimage to Mecca, known as
haj
. Many of the more militant thinkers have said that jihad is the ‘sixth pillar’.
24
. Translation of letter left by the hijackers,
Los Angeles Times
, accessed
www.ict.org.il/documentes/documentdet.cfm?docid=57
.
25
.
http://www.waaqiah.com/zawahariinterview.htm
.
26
. Transcript of al-Jazeera documentary aired 10 June 1999, featuring interview recorded earlier that year in Afghanistan.
27
. Al-Zawahiri,
Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet
.
28
. Kepel,
Jihad
, p. 282.
29
. Quoted in Ruthven,
Fury
, p. 204.
30
. ‘Bin Laden’s warning’: full text, BBC online, 7 October 2001.
31
. Baudrillard,
The Spirit of Terrorism
, p. 10.
32
. Bernard Lewis, ‘The Revolt of Islam’,
New Yorker
, 19 November 2001.
3: Radicals
1
. Though the idea of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden working with his hands to build up enough capital for his first venture is often repeated, Osama himself hints that he was considerably better off and started contracting immediately in his interview with al-Jazeera correspondent Jamal Isma’il, aired June 1999.