In early 1996 bin Laden negotiated a deal between the NIF and several Yemeni Islamist groups to create a “naval bridge” between Aden and Port Sudan; this pact formalized an ad hoc arrangement made during the Afghan jihad that was operating, according to Al-Watan Al-Arabi, when bin Laden’s fighters tried to attack U.S. soldiers in Aden in December 1992. Bin Laden wanted to use the route to move al Qaeda fighters from Yemen to Sudan to support the NIF and “ship the large supplies of weapons looted by [Islamic] religious extremists during the summer of 1994 war in Yemen.” Several shiploads of weapons were moved to Port Sudan, but the bridge’s status has been unclear since bin Laden left Sudan.33 Financially, as previously noted, bin Laden contributed $50 million to the capitalization of the NIF-dominated al-Shimal bank, and, according to Al-Watan Al-Arabi, in late 1998 he had “$500 million … deposited in the Sudanese Central Bank to cover the Sudanese pound and Sudan’s import ability.” It is unclear if the latter amount came from bin Laden, his supporters, or both.34
To expand al Qaeda’s strength and geographical reach, bin Laden brought with him to Sudan the most senior members of his organization, almost all of whom had fought at his side in the Afghan war. As noted, Abu Hajir appears to have run bin Laden’s weapons procurement activities—conventional and unconventional—while managing Taba Investment Company and acting as financial chief for the al-Themar al-Mubaraka Fruit Company.35 In addition, Wadih el-Hage returned from the United States to become bin Laden’s private secretary.36
It appears that the overall financial administrator of bin Laden’s Sudan-based endeavors, as well as the approving officer for the organization’s expenditures overseas, was a Saudi national named Siddi Maddani al-Tayyib, aka Abu Fadl. Bin Laden, according to Abu Hajir, made Tayyib responsible for approving all expenditures over $1,000. Tayyib was married to bin Laden’s niece and worked as director of the Taba Investment Company in Khartoum. Tayyib would later become a source of trouble for bin Laden when he surrendered, or was captured by, the Saudis in the late 1990s.37 Although it is unclear when they arrived, bin Laden also brought his top military commanders, the Egyptians Abu Hafs al-Masri and Abu Ubaydah al-Banshiri, to Sudan. Both quickly became involved in resettling Arab Afghans, expanding al Qaeda’s presence and military capabilities in East Africa, and, eventually, participating in or facilitating combat operations.38 Also joining bin Laden in Sudan was the Gama’at’s operations chief, Mustafa Hamza, who had known bin Laden in Afghanistan and who had earlier worked for him in an unknown capacity in Cairo.39
Expansion in East Africa
While running training camps and concentrating fighters in Sudan, bin Laden assigned Abu Ubaydah and Abu Hafs the job of building al Qaeda’s East Africa infrastructure.40 As early as 1992, Abu Ubaydah sent veteran Arab Afghans to Africa from Afghanistan, including, the Egyptian police say, alleged Dar es Salaam embassy bomber Mustafa Mahmud Said Ahmed.41 Abu Ubaydah’s work was responsible for “the strength of [bin Laden’s] African network and the multiplicity of its cells,” which was apparent after al Qaeda’s August 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.42 Abu Hafs, however, also appears to have had experience and contacts in Africa. He is reported to have had strong personal connections in Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya; in Uganda, he had strong connections with Kampala mosques and visited several “camps” in the country. Abu Hafs’ African savvy stood him in good stead when he became “the commander of [al Qaeda military] operations and planning in the Horn of Africa area” after Abu Ubaydah drowned in Lake Victoria in May 1996.43
Al Qaeda’s modus operandi for expanding in Africa was simple and direct. Bin Laden and Abu Ubaydah first sent trusted men to establish a presence in a particular country; in East Africa, they chose Kenya as the regional hub and sent al Qaeda members there. They based most financial and business elements in Nairobi and placed the military component, at Abu Ubaydah’s insistence, in the port of Mombassa.44 Between 1991 and 1994, al Qaeda brought Saudi national Khalid al-Fawwaz—later bin Laden’s spokesman in the United Kingdom—from the kingdom to Sudan and sent him to Nairobi, where he set up an import-export business named Asma, Inc.45 It is not clear what goods al-Fawwaz handled, but Al-Watan Al-Arabi reported that “Bin Laden runs commercial firms in Kenya that deal in electrical appliances and make a great deal of profit.”46 Al-Fawwaz also used his existing ties to the Islamic nongovernmental organization (NGO) Mercy International to befriend Nairobi’s Mercy office.47
Then, in 1994, bin Laden moved al-Fawwaz to London and sent his private secretary, Wadih el-Hage, to Nairobi to “set up a base for al Qaeda operations in the country. El-Hage established himself as a dealer in gem-stones and also founded an NGO called ‘Help Africa People.’”48 The Washington Post has said El-Hage falsely registered the NGO as part of a German charity and that “the purpose of El-Hage’s charity was always a little vague.”49 The vagueness may not be surprising, because El-Hage and his deputy at Help Africa People, a Comoran named Abdullah Muhammad Fazul, were indicted by the United States on terrorism charges. El-Hage was convicted in May 2001, but Fazul fled Nairobi after the August 1998 attacks.50 Also in 1994, as noted, al Qaeda sent Mustafa Mahmud Said Ahmed, allegedly a bomber of the U.S. embassy in Tanzania, to open a Nairobi branch of bin Laden’s Taba Investment Company.51
While El-Hage was al Qaeda’s chief in Kenya, the group’s fighters lived and worked in Mombassa. As noted, Abu Ubaydah picked Mombassa and probably did so because of its large Muslim community and the fact that the Kenyan government’s writ and security forces are not as strong there as in Nairobi. While not a perfect analogy, Mombassa provided a more secure operating environment for al Qaeda, much as does Peshawar in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, which is barely within Islamabad’s writ. Al Qaeda, according to the Washington Post, sent convicted Nairobi embassy bomber Mohammad Sadiq Odeh to Mombassa with funds to set up a fishing business, and the Sunday Times has said Odeh used the money to buy “a fleet of fishing boats to move [al Qaeda] members around.” The Post also reported that three of the alleged Nairobi embassy bombers “lived modest, nondescript lives” in Mombassa, one as a fisherman, another as a charity administrator, and the other—like El-Hage—as a gemstone dealer.52
Beyond helping the NIF and building al Qaeda, bin Laden courted friends and allies and tried to heal rifts among the courted, in a sort of Islamist “outreach” program. In the area of mending relations, Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operatives Ibrahim al-Najjar and Sayyid Salamah told an Egyptian military court that bin Laden and Turabi in 1992 began working to reconcile the EIJ and the Gama’at.53 For bin Laden, this was a carryover from the Afghan jihad, when he pursued the same goal.54 In Sudan, bin Laden broadened efforts to include two more Egyptian groups, Ahmed Hussain Agizah’s Vanguards of Conquest and Colonel Mohammad Makkawi’s EIJ faction, both of which had left Zawahiri.55 Although bin Laden’s Turabi-assisted reconciliation efforts did not yield a united Egyptian organization, they did further ingratiate bin Laden with a long list of senior Egyptian Islamists, including Zawahiri, Makkawi, Agizah, Mohammad Shawqi Islambuli, Mustafa Hamza, Shaykh Rahman, Tharwat Salah Shihata, Talat Fuad Qassem, Yasir Tawfiq Ali al-Sirri, Adil Abd al-Qaddus, and others.56
International Travels
In the outside-Sudan dimension of the outreach program, bin Laden’s activities were many and varied. An array of press and wire service stories claim he was a fairly active traveler in the Islamic world between his arrival in Sudan and his departure for Afghanistan in mid-1996. Bin Laden visited Mindanao Island in the Philippines several times in the early 1990s; Sana, Yemen, in February 1993; Brunei in 1993; Tirana, Albania, in April 1994; Doha, Qatar, in 1994 and another unknown date before May 1996; and Somalia in early 1996.57 Of the visits, the Qatar trip in 1994 appears the most important; the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram has reported that Shaykh Abdullah Khalid, then Qatar’s minister for religious endowments, held a “coordination meeting” with Zawahiri, bin Laden, Islambouli, and Mustafa Hamza.58 Another intriguing b
in Laden trip was his reported visit to Brunei. Needless to say, a working relationship between bin Laden and the endlessly wealthy sultan of Brunei or his family would have been formidable. In this period, there also are unconfirmed, often bizarre reports of bin Laden visiting or owning homes in Geneva, London, and Paris. Bin Laden denied the stories and said, “I prefer death to living in any European country.”59
There are few details about what bin Laden did and said during his international travels. Al-Watan Al-Arabi says when visiting Sana he “chaired a meeting that was attended by the leaders of the religious extremist movements in Yemen.”60 Pretty dry stuff, but probably a fair description of the content of most visits. It is certainly in character for bin Laden to promote unity among Islamist groups and listen more than talk. Bin Laden did, however, take advantage of his status as the world’s best-known Arab Afghan to meet Islamist leaders, contribute to their activities, preach Muslim unity and anti-U.S. actions, and generally lay the groundwork for future cooperation and coordination. On balance, little military planning probably went on during these trips, although bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Muhammad Jamal Khalifah, was active in that sort of activity—with Wali Khan and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef—in the Philippines during this time frame. Khalifah had been active in the Philippines since at least 1993, according to Manila’s intelligence services, and worked with the Abu Sayyaf Group in “sowing terrorism in Zamboanga, Sulu, and other parts of Mindanao.”61 Finally, as will be seen, Abu Ubaydah and Abu Hafs were busy expanding al Qaeda in Africa.
Maintenance of Afghanistan Connections
Before discussing the military operations al Qaeda and its allies conducted during bin Laden’s Sudan interlude, it is worth looking at the connections bin Laden simultaneously maintained in Afghanistan. There is no indication that any of the bin Laden-sponsored camps in Afghanistan were shut down after he left for Khartoum. What seems to have happened, however, was that the camps’ military curriculum was expanded to make the training pertinent to combat situations like those in Afghanistan—that is, for rural insurgencies—as well as for Islamist fighters destined for venues where urban warfare would be on tap or where they would be infrastructure builders, not warriors. Convicted Nairobi embassy bomber Mohammed Sadiq said he was trained at one of bin Laden’s Afghan camps in the 1990s, receiving instruction “as a Stinger missile operator provided by an Arab instructor who had an impressive record of shooting down Soviet aircraft during the Afghan war.” Sadiq added that bin Laden’s camps “are the best in Afghanistan and have produced some of the best guerrillas,”62 while Cairo’s Rose al-Yousef has claimed that after the Soviets left, bin Laden added such topics as “how to make explosives, poisons, [and] secret acids for forgery” to the curriculum of his Afghan camps. As always, al Qaeda camps coupled military training with instruction in such “practical skills” as basic engineering, technical skills, farming, and vehicle driving and maintenance, each of which would benefit an insurgent no matter where in the Islamic world he went to fight or build infrastructure.63 The high quality of training offered in bin Laden’s Afghan camps was reaffirmed by the New York Times after it had examined materials seized in Afghanistan since October 2001. “The [captured] documentary trove punctures two myths,” the Times explained in March 2002. “One was that the camps were turning out tens of thousands of suicide bombers. In fact, they were training soldiers for a war. The second was that the forces were disorganized and ragtag. They were, in reality, quite well disciplined.”64
Perhaps the biggest change in camp curriculum was the addition of training to produce fighters capable of precision attacks in urban settings. Professor Magnus Ranstorp has written that bin Laden commands “battle-hardened Islamic revolutionaries [who] are highly skilled in urban guerrilla warfare tactics.”65 While this evaluation has become true, it was not the case during the Afghan jihad. One reason why the Soviets and Afghan Communists held on for thirteen years was that the insurgents lacked motivation for destructive urban warfare—because most had family in the cities, urban areas were heavily defended, and they wanted to preserve the little modern infrastructure Afghanistan possessed—and made a deliberate decision not to wage all-out war in the cities. Assassinations and kidnappings, however, were staged in Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, and Jalalabad.66 In the 1990s, bin Laden’s camps taught urban warfare skills, although he too told his fighters to avoid “harming the vital utilities and strategic wealth” of the Muslim world. The tactics taught to bin Laden’s cadre will be apparent to those who recall the attacks on President Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia in 1995; on tourists in Luxor in 1997; on sightseeing buses in Cairo, leisure boats plying the Nile; Egyptian police during the 1990s; and—more recently—the insurgent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq and the renewed attacks on tourists in Egypt. Now-imprisoned EIJ fighter Mohammed Attiyah described the training in the bin Laden-associated Badr camp near Khowst as including,
the use of weapons inside cities. I also studied topography, military tactics, how to ambush patrols, and how to shoot with the left hand in case the right hand was hit. I was taught how to shoot while riding a motorcycle or in a speeding car and how to rescue a hostage from [a] kidnapper by blocking roads and pointing guns at the kidnappers. The daily program in the camp started after dawn prayers where we formed a circle to read the Koran, then we did physical exercises before breakfast. Then military training and lessons began, followed by noon prayers. After prayers, the training focused on attacking tourist buses. Barrels were placed in such a way to form the shape of a bus. Other barrels were put within to designate humans. The plan required the use of an open van. One person sat behind the wheel and another sat next to him and two others sat in the back. The vehicle had to get as near as possible to the bus. The two in the back would get off and one of them would throw a hand grenade on the bus. The other took up a position near the second door while his colleague went to the rear door. Both of them would then open fire on the dummies and then withdraw to their vehicle and be driven away. Those in charge of the training told us: Just imagine that the bus passengers are Israeli or Jewish tourists. Practical training was preceded by theoretical training about the target area, the attack, and escape plans which required abandoning the vehicle used in the attack and getting into another one waiting at a predetermined place. We also trained in attacking tourist boats. A house was used for that purpose [as the target]. A van carrying three persons would get as close as possible to the boat. One of them would fire an RPG while the others covered him. There was also training in attacking police stations in a similar way.”67
10
BIN LADEN BEGINS: INCITING AND WAGING JIHAD FROM SUDAN, 1992–1996
Tis true, but little or more are nothing to him that has the truth on his side; Though a host should encamp against me, said one, my heart shall not fear: Though war should rise against me, in this I will be confident. Besides, said he, I have read in some records, that one man has fought an army: And how many did Samson slay with the jaw-bone of an ass?
The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678
In late 1993 journalist Robert Fisk interviewed Osama bin Laden while bin Laden was directing the construction of the Khartoum-to-Port Sudan highway. One question Fisk asked bin Laden was if he was running military training camps in Sudan. Bin Laden indignantly answered Fisk, telling him the idea was “the rubbish of the media and the embassies. I am a construction engineer and an agriculturist. If I had training camps, I couldn’t possibly do this job.” Bin Laden was not candid.1
Between 1992 and bin Laden’s return to Afghanistan, bin Laden, Abu Hafs al-Masri, Abu Ubaydah, and their subordinates were, in essence, continuing to build and expand a self-supporting international insurgent organization with which to attack U.S., Israeli, Christian (almost exclusively Catholic), Egyptian, and other pro-Western Muslim targets. As is known, however, bin Laden did not publicly declare jihad on the United States until his 1996 return to Afghanistan. In evaluating bin Laden’s activities in the 1992–1996 period, a look wil
l first be taken at bin Laden’s premier military operations of the period: al Qaeda’s attacks on U.S. forces attached to the UN’s “Operation Restore Hope” in Yemen and Somalia. The latter al Qaeda operation used the East Africa network bin Laden had put in place in a relatively short time, and which would score more successes against the United States in 1998. The Somalia operations also showed the skill of bin Laden’s fighters in terms of insurgent capabilities and their talent as trainers who are able to teach their skills to novice but eager-to-learn students. After the Somali discussion, the narrative will be broadened to assess bin Laden’s overall “war effort” while he was based in Sudan.
Operations in Somalia and Yemen
Through Our Enemies' Eyes Page 22