• Ali-Amin al-Rashidi (aka Abu Ubaydah al-Banshiri): An Egyptian, al-Rashidi was a senior member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and supervised bin Laden’s Afghan camps. He was a renowned combat commander and fought alongside bin Laden in the 1989 Jalalabad battles. Earlier, Rashidi served as a combat commander for Afghan Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Masood’s forces in their battles against the Soviet Army in the Panjshir Valley, hence Rashidi’s sobriquet “al-Banshiri.” He later led bin Laden’s fighters against U.S. forces in Somalia. Rashidi was bin Laden’s point man in trying to unite the major Egyptian Islamist groups and was working to create a worldwide Islamic army when he drowned in Lake Victoria in Uganda in May 1996.30
• Mohammed Atef (aka Subhi Abu Sita; Shaykh Taseer Abdallah; Abu Hafs al-Masri): Atef was an agricultural engineer who served in Egypt’s air defense forces and is a senior EIJ member. He went to Peshawar in 1983 to fight in the jihad, and, like al-Rashidi, became an excellent combat commander. Atef also is said to have been a close associate of Shaykh Azzam. Later, Atef was given responsibility for all matters pertaining to bin Laden’s security. Atef accompanied bin Laden to Sudan and helped to plan al Qaeda operations against U.S. forces in Somalia. On al-Rashidi’s death, Atef became bin Laden’s top military commander and right-hand man, almost always appearing with him at public occasions. In January 2001, Atef’s daughter married one of bin Laden’s sons. Atef apparently was killed in the U.S. bombing of Kabul in November 2001.31
• Tariq al-Fahdli: Al-Fahdli is a senior member a powerful south Yemen tribe. He fought with bin Laden at Jalalabad in 1989 and was wounded. He led the failed late-1992 bin Laden-sponsored attack on U.S. troops transiting Aden for Somalia. Al-Fahdli lives in Sana, receives a government stipend, and is on President Salih’s presidential council.32
• Mustafa Hamza: Hamza is an agricultural engineer, a former Egyptian military officer, and was jailed in Egypt from 1981 to 1988 for his part in the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat. He arrived in Afghanistan in 1989 and was Gama’at operations chief until he was removed after the failed June 1995 assassination attempt on President Mubarak in Ethiopia. Hamza has been tied to bin Laden since the Afghan jihad and publicly said he planned the attack on Mubarak while he was managing a Bin Laden Group company in Sudan. Hamza is now the IG’s senior outside-Egypt leader and most lately was based in Afghanistan.33
Construction Programs in Pakistan and Afghanistan
Until 1982, bin Laden made regular but relatively brief trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan to assess the fighters’ material needs, donate personal funds to Afghan guerrilla chiefs, and carry money to them from wealthy Saudis and Gulf Arabs. He also presumably oversaw the dozen health centers in Peshawar sponsored by his family’s business. In the first of a series of shifts in the focus of his efforts in Afghanistan—really a series of expansions—bin Laden in 1982 decided to enhance the aid he was providing by bringing to bear his own and his family’s engineering and construction skills. According to ABC correspondent John Miller, bin Laden brought “his own bulldozers and dump trucks” to Afghanistan “to assist the mujahedin by building shelters, roads, trenches, tunnels, and underground bunkers.” In May 1997, bin Laden told CNN’s Peter Arnett that “When we saw the brutality of the Russians bombing mujahedin positions … we transported heavy equipment from the country of the two Holy Places estimated at hundreds of tons altogether that included bulldozers, loaders, dump trucks, and equipment for digging trenches…. We dug a good number of huge tunnels and built in them some storage places and in some others we built a hospital.”34
Issam Darraz reported more fully on the decision that made bin Laden “contractor to the jihad,” saying that bin Laden had been thinking “of how to develop his support for the Afghan jihad. Instead of [just] paying money and aid to the jihad, he decided to carry out projects helpful to the mujahedin by building mountain roads and building immense tunnels and shelters to protect Afghan mujahedin from air raids. These projects were carried out in coordination with his brothers in the mammoth Bin Laden Establishment who helped him effectively by sending him building equipment, gigantic bulldozers and power generators to Afghanistan.” Tunneling is a specialty of the Saudi Bin Laden Group, and the tunnels built by the firm’s youngest partner were formidable. Robert Fisk, for example, said he waited to interview bin Laden in one such tunnel and that it was “a 20 foot high air raid shelter—cut for hundreds of meters through the rock of the mountainside.”35
A number of accounts, some by eyewitnesses, state that bin Laden trained and led the first construction operations of what can be described as a small unit of Arab combat engineers. “We were 11 brothers,” bin Laden later recalled, “and we worked to build roads, tunnels in the belly of mountains, and shelters to protect the Afghan mujahedin.” The initial construction work took place near the city of Khowst, capital of Paktia Province in eastern Afghanistan. The city was then held by a garrison of Afghan government troops, surrounded by the mujahedin, and supplied by air. The area’s major insurgent commander was Jalaluddin Haqqani—from Yunis Khalis’s Hisbi Islami party and a close associate of Shaykh Azzam—and bin Laden cooperated with him; in the early 1980s, Haqqani had built some military infrastructure at Khowst, primarily staging areas and training camps. These sites were picked for bin Laden to fortify because in April 1986 Afghan regime forces, including an elite commando brigade, and Soviet Special Forces (Spetznaz) fought their way into Haqqani’s “complex of guerrilla base camps at Zhawar Khili, [which is] wedged hard against the Pakistan border, southwest of the Afghan town of Khowst. The battle lasted for three weeks and the [mujahedin] suffered hundreds of casualties.” Although the Soviet and Afghan units eventually withdrew, the air support that effectively covered their attack and withdrawal convinced Haqqani and bin Laden to strengthen the insurgents’ positions.36 Bin Laden and his assistant, an Iraqi engineer named Mohammed Sa’d, led the engineers that managed the job. The new construction included a “huge tunnel” that “contained a number of hospitals, depots, and warehouses.”37 It is interesting to note that the Bin Laden company’s Web site stresses the firm’s unique experience in building tunnels. Since its inception, the company claims to have built 8,000 meters of tunnels, a total that presumably does not include the many meters built by its youngest partner in Afghanistan.38
Over time, bin Laden’s engineering activities broadened to include other areas of eastern Afghanistan, particularly in the vicinity of Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar Province. After initial activities at Khowst, however, bin Laden began in August 1986 to train more Arabs on construction equipment so he could focus on matters elsewhere. It also is possible that non-Arab Islamists were trained in construction given the Philippine military’s spring 2000 discovery of extensive tunneling in an area controlled by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, some of whom were trained by bin Laden’s cadre or al Qaeda’s Kashmiri associates.39
Two enduring themes emerge from bin Laden’s formation and leadership of the engineering effort. The first is that the projects were professionally designed and built—per Time magazine and other sources—and gave the mujahedin stronger, better-protected base camps, storage facilities, and fighting positions. In April 1991, for example, Haqqani’s fighters captured Khowst after their construction of successive trench lines brought them close enough to the town’s airfield to shut down aerial resupply, and the Afghan air force was unable to neutralize the bunkers and revetments bin Laden had built for Haqqani’s artillery, rocket launchers, and heavy mortars.40
Some of the same positions also weathered the August 1998 U.S. missile strike without irreparable damage, although it is not known how they stood up under the U.S. Air Force’s drubbing in late 2001. In August 1998, retired Pakistani lieutenant general Hamid Gul summed up the value of bin Laden’s construction work. General Gul has first-hand knowledge of bin Laden’s activities, because he was chief of Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence Directorate (ISID) during the late 1980s and was responsible for manag
ing Pakistan’s support for the Afghan mujahedin. “Although Bin Laden was wounded on at least two occasions,” Gul told the Guardian, “his main contribution to the war against Soviet forces was as an engineer. Osama is a gifted engineer who is an expert in building tunnels.”41
The second theme that emerges is a vivid picture of bin Laden as a physically brave man. Bin Laden has recalled that at Khowst “our route was exposed and visible to the enemy, and so he shelled us. We would get out of the vehicles, spread out, and [then] move anew.”42 Other reports corroborate bin Laden’s matter-of-fact description of his reaction to being shelled. A former Arab Afghan told Time magazine that bin Laden’s style was always simple and unaffected. “He [bin Laden] came down from his palace,” the fighter said, “to live with the Afghan peasants and Arab fighters. He cooked with them, he ate with them, he dug trenches with them. That was bin Laden’s way.” Time also reported that bin Laden was seen “driving a bulldozer and exposing himself to strafing by Soviet helicopter gunships,” and Reader’s Digest said when “Bin Laden could not find fighters willing to face the Soviet gunships, he drove the dozers himself. One time he was attacked by Soviet helicopters and wounded.”43 Even the always-skeptical John Miller wrote that he talked to “grizzled mujahedin fighters [who] recalled the young man who rode the bulldozers himself, digging trenches on the front lines.”44
Funding of Combat Training Camps
Around 1984, bin Laden again expanded the scope of his activities after concluding “the mujahedin position was weak in both terms of numbers and equipment, especially in combat requirements.” To fix these deficiencies, bin Laden began funding training camps in Afghanistan to train Afghans and non-Afghan volunteers. The first camps were built in a mountainous area near the village of Jaji in Paktia Province; British journalist Robert Fisk has reported that bin Laden also built tunnels at these facilities. The camps provided military training and lectures in Islamic theology and history; the latter because bin Laden believed “there wasn’t enough awareness [among the mujahedin] of the importance of supporting this faith and of the need to fight the infidel so all religion will belong to God.” To this end, bin Laden established a “huge library in Peshawar” to help educate “the Arabs arriving in a certain [theological] direction.” Later, when bin Laden created al Qaeda, he expanded this educational effort by establishing “ideological institutes” in Pakistan, staffed by Islamist scholars from the EIJ and Gama’at, and through which new recruits were cycled before military training.45
Abu Mahmud, the war-name of a colleague of bin Laden who served with him on the Arab Afghans’ coordination council in Peshawar, has said that at this time bin Laden’s main goal was for the camps to “graduate the largest possible number of mujahedin who are enthusiastic for jihad.” Abu Mahmud suggests that in this phase of bin Laden’s activities there was a quality-versus-quantity problem, because bin Laden tended to “help any young man, regardless of his ideological orientation” as long as he wanted to fight. Bin Laden seems to concur, telling Al-Quds Al-Arabi in March 1994 that initially “We cooperated with everyone to help Muslims defend themselves and their religion.”46
Also in 1984, bin Laden began a more formal working relationship with Shaykh Azzam, who was a major conduit for money and fighters flowing to the jihad from the Muslim world, and who, as noted, had been one of bin Laden’s university instructors. Together the men opened an Islamic NGO called the Services Office, or Maktab al-Khidimat (MAK). The MAK was divided into training, military, logistics, and humanitarian committees, but was created “fundamentally to receive Arab brothers arriving from abroad and to train them and send them to Afghanistan.” Shaykh Azzam officially was the MAK’s chief, but others managed day-to-day affairs; among the managers was one of bin Laden’s future senior lieutenants, Abu Hajir al-Iraqi.47 The MAK immediately was well funded; Azaam was a magnet for money from the Muslim Brotherhood—he was a longtime, distinguished member—and bin Laden brought in money of his own, as well as from “the funds he received from rich Arabs in the Gulf and Muslims from across the Islamic world.” At the time, journalist Jamal Ismail has said, “Osama bin Laden used to finance the largest part” of the MAK’s budget. According to Issam Darraz, for example, bin Laden provided $25,000 per month to the MAK for “office expenses alone.”48
Bin Laden said he opened the MAK and its guesthouses and camps because he saw “the Afghans loved the Arabs so much, [that] they treated them as guests. They did not assign them to any military or combat tasks.” Bin Laden said, “The Arab youth felt offended by this because they wanted to operate as mujahedin. This is why I thought of establishing a place to receive the Arab brothers and to train them for combat. In 1404 of the Hegira [1984], I asked the leader of the Afghan mujahedin’s Ittihad-e Islami [Abdur Rasul Sayyaf] for permission to set up an office to receive Arab brothers and to utilize their capabilities and to establish a camp in an area close to the border to train the brothers there.” Sayyaf agreed, reflecting ties he established to bin Laden a decade before at bin Laden family Hajj events, and bin Laden’s funding of the mujahedin generally and Sayyaf’s fighters in particular.49
It is worth examining bin Laden’s view that the Afghans “loved” the would-be Arab mujahedin. In his interviews with Darraz, bin Laden said he had “noticed the interest and joy the Afghans felt in the presence of the Arabs among them. The Arabs strengthened the Afghans, made them more faithful and enhanced their morale greatly.”50 While bin Laden was with the Afghans and the author was not, the literature pertinent to Afghan history and the Afghan-Soviet war makes it clear beyond doubt that Afghans never look to others for leadership or role models. Afghans, to put it mildly, are acutely aware and tremendously proud of their history. They see themselves as the heirs of 2,000 years of “glorious history,” take enormous pride in being one of the few Muslim peoples the Europeans failed to colonize, and even regard the Persians as upstart, new kids on the block. The Afghans likewise believe they have nothing to learn about Islam, and there is strong anecdotal reporting about the resentful, angry, and at times violent reactions of Afghan fighters to unsolicited, often condescending theological tutorials from their Arab brethren.51
Beyond what might be called the Afghans “attitude” lies another key reason why Sayyaf and other Afghan commanders were pleased to see the creation of Arab-only camps and combat units—the Arabs wanted to die. For all the stereotypes portraying Afghan fighters as bloodthirsty wild men, the truth is that most Afghan commanders rose to and retained that status because they were pious, intelligent, and cautious men who maintained the loyalty of their fighters by supplying supplies and weapons, caring for their families, and keeping casualties as low as possible. While Afghans are genuinely ready to die for Allah, almost none wanted to reach paradise in any vehicle save a deathbed in extreme old age. There were no advocates of suicide attacks among the most effective Afghan commanders. Haqqani’s forces, for example, besieged the city of Khowst for nearly a decade before reducing its defensive perimeter to the point where aerial resupply was untenable and victory could be had with tolerable casualties. For Afghans—today and historically—the path to victory that follows the slow, steady, and least-costly approach is always preferred to the faster but likely fatal tack.
The Arabs were a different story. The Afghans did not doubt the Arabs’ courage and truly appreciated their willingness to “help us liberate our country, and many gave their lives for the glory of Islam.”52 The issue was one of too much courage, and that of a reckless variety whose major characteristic was an un-Afghan eagerness for death. On his arrival in Afghanistan, bin Laden seemed infected with this trait. “I felt that we would be failing our Afghan brothers,” he said, “if we did not perform our full duty toward them and that the best atonement was to die fighting the holy war in the cause of God.”53 Most Afghan commanders sought to distance themselves from the Arabs because the latter were “crazy brave” and “racing to die.” “Commander Saznur, from the Islamic Union Party [of Sayy
af], a famous commander,” relates Issam Darraz, “used to refuse to allow the participation of Arab fighters with him. He used to say that the Arabs are disorganized, they only want to die as martyrs.”54
Arab-Only Training and Combat Units
In the 1986–1987 period—by which time he was living full-time in Pakistan—bin Laden again reevaluated his activities and decided to build several Arab-only training camps in Afghanistan, as well as to form Arab-only combat units. Actually, these camps were for non-Afghan Muslims, and beyond Arabs included Sudanese, Kurds, Kashmiris, Turks, Filipinos, and so forth. To an extent, this decision created a parting-of-the ways for bin Laden and Shaykh Azzam. Earlier, at the MAK’s 1984 formation, bin Laden said the MAK was needed because “the Arab presence had to be organized and it should have specific goals so the Arabs would play an effective role in the jihad and in combat training.” At that time, Azzam agreed with bin Laden because bin Laden had not yet stated an intention to form Arab-only combat units. The Khowst battles in 1986, however, appear to have prompted bin Laden’s decision to field such units; these battles were the first where a primarily Arab unit fought. “We must note,” said Abu Mahmud al-Suri, a Syrian associate of bin Laden, “that the first battle the Arabs waged in a single group took place in Khowst in 1986. The Arabs gathered and formed a battalion they called al-Khasa, which Abu Hajer al-Iraqi called the battalion of the graceful. The battalion waged fierce battles in Khowst in which a large number of Arabs were wounded and others were martyred.”55
As noted, bin Laden and his engineers were on hand for the 1986 Khowst battles—Time magazine claims bin Laden may have fought there—and watched the Arabs in action, seeing the large number of casualties they took.56 Another Arab mujahedin, Ali al-Qazan, has said the high number of Arab casualties stemmed from the fact that “most of the Arab brothers were not well-trained…. The reason for poor training was the young men themselves, who came to Afghanistan seeking only a little training so they could go [to] the battle front as quickly as possible.” Bin Laden appears to have shared this assessment and decided the best approach, for the good of the Arabs and the Afghan jihad, was to concentrate Arab and other non-Afghan Muslims in their own training camps and units. It is on this point that bin Laden and Shaykh Azzam disagreed, with the latter continuing to favor the standard practice of dispersing Arab volunteers to Afghan mujahedin units and to Islamic NGOs.57 There is little to show this was an acrimonious disagreement, aside from Al-Hawadith’s claim that bin Laden’s initiative produced a divergence of approach with Azzam, and a report that Azzam was worried that the Egyptian Islamists might gain too much influence with bin Laden. To the contrary, al-Hayat has said, “Shaykh Azzam did not conceal his admiration for the young bin Laden,” and Azzam was quoted just before his murder as saying “there is one person who has always stood by us—Osama bin Laden.”58 Later, Shaykh Azzam and Sayyaf were present as observers with bin Laden when the first Arab-only unit, formed and trained as a result of bin Laden’s initiative, saw its initial combat near Jalalabad in April 1987.59 In turn, bin Laden, who singles out few for praise or admiration, is always outspoken in regard to Shaykh Azzam. “Shaykh Abdallah Azzam, may God have mercy on his soul, is a man worth a nation,” bin Laden told Al-Jazirah in June 1999.60 “After his assassination, Muslim women proved unable to give birth to a man like him. The people of jihad who lived the epoch know the Islamic Jihad in Afghanistan had not benefitted from anyone as it has from Shaykh Abdullah Azzam.”61
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