Authors: Peter L. Bergen
Bin Laden came of age as a deep religious current was sweeping through the Muslim world. The
Sahwa,
or Awakening, began swirling after the devastating and unexpected defeat of Egypt by Israel in the 1967 war, which called into question the then reigning orthodoxies of Arab nationalism and socialism. And this current was given an intellectual architecture by the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, who claimed that much of the Middle East was living in a state of pagan ignorance, and that the way forward for Muslims besieged by the Western ideologies of socialism, capitalism, and secularism was an Islam that informed every aspect of life. Jamal Khalifa says Qutb made a profound impact on his generation of fundamentalists because he explained that true Islam was
more than just observing
the traditional tenets of the religion; it should penetrate all facets of the believer’s life.
This Islamic awakening peaked in 1979—the first year of a new century on the Muslim calendar—with a series of seismic events that would profoundly influence bin Laden and other future members of al-Qaeda: the overthrow of the Shah of Iran by the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, which demonstrated that an American-backed dictator could actually
be eliminated by a group of religious revolutionaries; the armed takeover of Islam’s holy of holies, the mosque in Mecca, by Saudi militants protesting the supposed impiety of the Saudi regime, later a central theme of bin Laden’s; Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic cease-fire agreement with Israel, which Islamist militants saw as a sacrilegious stab in the back; and finally the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
It was a thrilling time to be a deeply committed Muslim, as the 22-year-old bin Laden then was. At the time there wasn’t much remarkable about him; a priggish young man working in his family business, studying economics at university,
married, with a couple of toddlers
running around the house. He was admired by friends and family alike for his piety, although a good number of them
found his religiosity a bit much
, even by the conservative standards of 1970s Saudi Arabia.
But this would all change with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979. It was the first time since World War II that a non-Muslim power had invaded and occupied a Muslim nation. For bin Laden it was the most transformative event of his life, uncoupling him from his tranquil domestic life of work and family in Saudi Arabia, and launching him into what would become a full-time job helping the Afghan resistance. His experiences in Afghanistan during the 1980s turned the pious, shy rich kid into a leader of men who fought the Soviets himself, and, at least in his own mind and those of his followers, he came to believe that he had helped to defeat the communist superpower.
A key to this transformation was bin Laden’s relationship with the charismatic Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam. Azzam was the critical force both ideologically and organizationally for the recruitment of thousands of Muslims from around the world to engage in some way in the Afghan struggle against the Soviets. And Azzam would become bin Laden’s mentor, the first and most important of a series of father figures that he would find to replace his own father, Mohammed bin Laden, who had
died in a plane crash
in Saudi Arabia when the future al-Qaeda leader was only ten.
The influence of bin Laden’s revered father—a busy man who sired an impressive
fifty-four children
and also managed a business empire, and whom Osama rarely saw when he was alive—may have also helped to shape his desire to become a
mujahid
, or holy warrior. Bin Laden told Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, “My father was very keen that one of his sons should fight against the enemies of Islam. So
I am the one son
who is acting according
to the wishes of his father.” Whether or not his father really wanted one of his sons to be a holy warrior is beside the larger point, which is that bin Laden increasingly fused together his own religious zealotry with the reverence and admiration that he felt for his father, and grafted it on to his self-conception as a heroic warrior defending Islam. Bin Laden was well aware that as one of the most junior of his father’s
twenty-five sons
, he was unlikely to follow in his father’s footsteps at the helm of the family business. But he could do something else of which his father would have approved: fight the enemies of Islam.
Together with his mentor Azzam, bin Laden
founded the Services Office
in 1984, an organization based in the western Pakistani city of Peshawar that was dedicated to placing Arab volunteers either with relief organizations serving the Afghan refugees who had flooded into Pakistan after the Soviet invasion of their country, or with the Afghan factions fighting the communists on the front lines.
That same year, Azzam, a true religious scholar (unlike his younger protégé) with a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, issued
an influential fatwa
that was to provide the ideological underpinnings for the recruitment of Muslims from around the globe to the Afghan jihad. The fatwa ruled that to expel foreign aggressors from Islamic lands was a
fard ayn,
or a compulsory duty for all Muslims. In effect Azzam was saying that every individual Muslim had a religious
obligation
to fight in some way in the Afghan war. The radical call to arms would help ignite the first truly global jihadist movement, inspiring men from Algeria to Brooklyn to travel to Pakistan and Afghanistan to wage jihad against the Soviets.
In all this bin Laden played only a financial role, helping to subsidize the operations of the Services Office, which served as the logistical hub for those who answered Azzam’s call to arms. Faraj Ismail covered the Afghan jihad for the Saudi newspaper
Muslimoon
during the mid-1980s. He remembered that the shy Saudi rich kid exhibited no leadership charisma and was instead totally overshadowed by Azzam. “
The relationship between
bin Laden and Azzam was the relationship of a student to a professor,” Ismail recalled.
In 1984 bin Laden for the first time ventured into Afghanistan, an experience that transformed his life. He told a journalist, “
I feel so guilty
for listening to my friends and those that I love to not come here [to Afghanistan] and stay home for reasons of safety, and I feel that this delay of four years requires my own martyrdom in the name of God.” Bin Laden now began spending
most
of his time
on the Afghan front lines, particularly with Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Pashtun commander based in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan.
From 1986 on, bin Laden’s close relationship with his mentor Azzam would gradually fray as the young Saudi militant became preoccupied with personally fighting the Soviets rather than simply supporting the activities of the Afghan mujahideen, which was what Azzam saw as the most pressing task for the Arab volunteers.
Abdullah Anas
, Azzam’s son-in-law and also a close friend of bin Laden, says that the future al-Qaeda leader, fast approaching the age of thirty, was now starting to assert his independence from the charismatic Azzam.
Khaled Batarfi, bin Laden’s childhood friend, continued to see bin Laden when he returned home to Saudi Arabia, but noticed that his old soccer buddy had changed: “
He became more assertive, less shy
.” Jamal Khalifa also noticed that his close friend, who had once enjoyed the give-and-take of a real discussion, would now
no longer tolerate disagreement
with his own views.
The Afghan war changed bin Laden. The humble, young, monosyllabic millionaire with the open checkbook who had first visited Pakistan in the early 1980s would, by the middle of the decade, launch an
ambitious plan
to confront the Soviets directly inside Afghanistan with a group of Arabs under his command. That cadre of Arabs would provide the nucleus of al-Qaeda.
Seeking martyrdom, in 1986 bin Laden established a base for several dozen Arab fighters close to a Soviet garrison inside eastern Afghanistan, located in Jaji, about ten miles from the Pakistani border. With the zeal of a fanatic, bin Laden told a journalist that he hoped his new base would draw heavy Soviet firepower: “God willing, we want [our base] to be
the first thing
that the enemy faces. Its place as the first camp visible to the enemy means that they will focus their bombardments on us in an extreme manner.”
Jamal Khalifa was not impressed by his friend’s plans to set up a military operation right next door to a Soviet military post. Khalifa knew that bin Laden had absolutely no military experience, and he was also concerned that his friend was sending idealistic young Arabs to the Afghan front lines on kamikaze missions. He confronted bin Laden inside his base in 1986. “I told him, ‘
Every drop of blood
bleeds here in this place; God will ask you about it in the hereafter. Everybody is saying this is wrong, so Osama, please leave the place right now.’ Everybody was hearing our argument, our voices become hard.” The two friends rarely spoke again.
From the Jaji base, bin Laden fought near suicidal battles over three weeks
with the Soviets during the spring of 1987. Esam Deraz, an Egyptian film-maker who covered the battles in Jaji, explains that they were
the making of bin Laden
. “I was near him in the battle, many months, and he was really brave…. [bin Laden] fought in this battle like a private.”
Bin Laden’s stand against the Russians at the battle of Jaji was lionized in the mainstream Arab press, turning him into an authentic war hero. A 1988 article published in the Saudi magazine
Al-Majallah
featured bin Laden, who was quoted saying, “We sometimes spent the whole day in the trenches or in the caves until our ears could no longer bear the
sound of the explosions
around us.” Bin Laden told the reporter from
Al-Majallah
, “It was God alone who protected us from the Russians during their offensive last year. … We depend completely on God in all matters.” By the late 1980s, bin Laden already saw himself as an instrument of God’s will in an epic struggle against the enemies of Islam.
Jaji was bin Laden’s first brush with publicity and over time the shy millionaire would increasingly come to embrace the spotlight. But the battle of Jaji was only a morale booster for the scores of Arabs then fighting in Afghanistan. It was not a battle of any importance in the larger war against the Soviets.
Bin Laden’s decision to found his own military force made no strategic sense and would be part of his pattern of strategic overreach that would culminate in al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11. Informed estimates of the total number of Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets
ranged up to 175,000
. By contrast, the largest number of Arabs fighting the Soviets inside Afghanistan at any given moment amounted to no more than
several hundred
. To assemble those fighters in one force did not make much sense from a military standpoint. Indeed, despite bin Laden’s subsequent hyperventilating rhetoric, his “Afghan Arabs” had no meaningful impact on the conduct of the war, which was won with the blood of the Afghans and the billions of dollars and riyals of the United States and Saudi Arabia.
Abdullah Azzam was opposed to the idea of a separate Arab military force because he envisioned Arabs seeded throughout all of the Afghan militias functioning as morale boosters who could simultaneously teach the Afghans about true Islam, aid them with education and medicine, and bring news of the Afghan jihad to wealthy donors in the Middle East. A single Arab military force would end this effort, and in any event could have
no impact
on the conduct of the war. Bin Laden saw matters differently. He believed that an
Arab military force would stand its ground against Soviet attacks because his recruits were more than willing to martyr themselves.
Bin Laden’s military ambitions and personality evolved in tandem. He became more assertive, to the point that he ignored the advice of many of his old friends about the folly of setting up his own military force. That decision would also precipitate an irrevocable (but carefully concealed) split with his onetime mentor, Abdullah Azzam.
During the mid-1980s, bin Laden had been careful to distance himself from the more radical Arab elements in Pakistan who wanted to overthrow the ruling regimes of the Middle East. In 1987, when King Fahd of Saudi Arabia traveled to Britain on a state visit, he was presented a medal in the form of a cross by Queen Elizabeth II. In the hothouse radical atmosphere of Peshawar, some militants said that by accepting the crosslike decoration, King Fahd was no longer a Muslim. Bin Laden was having none of this, telling the militants, “
For God
’s sake, don’t discuss this subject; concentrate on your mission.” And bin Laden continued to maintain cordial relations with the Saudi government. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the director of Saudi intelligence, met bin Laden on a number of occasions in Pakistan during the anti-Soviet jihad and remembered him as “a
gentle, enthusiastic young man
of few words who didn’t raise his voice while talking.”
It was not an accident that bin Laden’s split from Azzam began around the time of his first meeting with the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 1986. Zawahiri nurtured a far more radical interpretation of jihad than Azzam’s vision of rolling back non-Muslims who had invaded Islamic lands, as the Soviets had in Afghanistan. The Egyptian doctor was a revolutionary who wanted
regime change
across the Middle East, something that Azzam would have no part of, as this was to engage in
fitna:
sowing discord within the Muslim community.
Azzam did not approve
of intra-Muslim violence. But Zawahiri gradually won over bin Laden to his more expansive view of jihad. Faraj Ismail, the Egyptian journalist who covered the war against the Soviets, recalls that it was Zawahiri “who got Osama to focus not only on the Afghan jihad, but regime change in the Arab world.”
Osama Rushdi
, a member of the militant Egyptian Islamic Group who had been jailed with Zawahiri in the early 1980s in Cairo, a few years later was living in Peshawar. There, he says, Zawahiri, a prickly intellectual, increasingly adopted the doctrine of
takfir
(declaring other Muslims to be apostates). Rushdi remembers that Zawahiri even told people not to pray with Azzam,
“and that is a grave thing in Islam, because in Islam it is correct to pray with any Muslim.” The conflict between Azzam and the Islamist militants in Peshawar may have signed his death warrant.
He was assassinated
there by unknown assailants on November 24, 1989.