Afterwards no one would admit giving the order. Did anyone have to? CNN cameras in drones of their own embedded within the American aerial umbrella showed tens of thousands of Caliphate soldiers, the fortunate within or clinging to what vehicles remained, most afoot, as singularly, then in groups, in units, and finally in utter disorganized terror, the entire Caliphate army, the warriors of Islam, broke and ran before the implacably advancing soulless war machine of the Great Satan.
One by one, I turned off the television sets. No one said a word. No one sought to stay my hand. No one could bear to witness more.
* * * *
As it turned out, there was no more. Having sent what was left of the forces of Islam reeling back across the desert sands, the Americans then chose to show a mercy that yet was somehow chilling and perhaps meant to be so.
Their robots did not not pursue the Caliphate forces nor harry them from the air. The manned bombers returned to their bases, the fighter-bombers to their aircraft carriers, the Falcons, Vultures, and Wasps to the Whales. Their artillery and rail-cannon ceased fire. Their robot ground forces withdrew behind the Kuwaiti border that their human troops had never crossed. They then proceeded to redeploy everything to exactly the same position it had occupied before the battle began, as if making the arrogant point, like a single warrior folding his arms across his chest as he stood smiling indifferently and dishonorably over the corpse of a fallen foe, that the exercise had perturbed them not at all.
Elsewhere it was another matter.
There were huge demonstrations in the Caliphate demanding a nuclear response or at least a counterattack, shown on Al Jazeera but ignored by Caliphate Television. When there was not so much as as public statement from the Caliph or the Caliphate Council, they began to turn into ugly riots calling for a declaration of Jihad against all Americans everywhere in the world.
Still the government of the Caliphate maintained a stony silence, and then the Ulema took matters into its own hands. Mullahs, imams, then the Ulema as a body, issued fatwas calling for millions of Muslims from all over the world to flock to the sacred heartland of Islam and join in an all-out Jihad against the Great Satan.
Finally the Caliph was forced to join in that call for Holy War with a fatwa of his own, or lose all legitimate authority, as the worldly ruler of the Caliphate and as the spokesman of Allah to the world.
All the news networks carried the broadcast live, beginning with coverage of thousands of the Faithful gathered before giant television screens set up in the courtyards of mosques, in public squares, even outside the Al-Haram Mosque itself, praying, chanting, as they waited for the Caliph to appear. Television coverage of a huge crowd gathered before the Pillars of Satan in Mina had even been permitted as they threw pebbles and cried “Death to the Great Satan!” as they waited for the Caliph to appear.
And when he did, his appearance alone, before he even spoke, was enough to raise my spirit from the brink of the pit of disbelief on which it had precariously teetered, for his eyes flashed holy defiance, and there was something in his visage, the set of his lips, the calm the rest of his face exuded, that told me that whatever words he now spoke would be inspired by Allah, the Allah who most certainly did exist.
“In the name of Allah, the All-Powerful, in the name of the Caliphate He has entrusted to my hands, in the name of the Ulema, in the name of the Umma, in the name of Islam itself, I declare the Jihad against the forces of the Great Satan that is America occupying the province of Kuwait,” he proclaimed.
“Allahu Akbar!” I shouted, as much an enormous sigh of relief as a war cry, such as no doubt must have likewise been heard throughout all Dar al-Islam.
“But this will be like no jihad ever imagined by the mind of man, for Allah has granted me the vision of a jihad for this perilous moment that will surely prevail,” the Caliph went on in quite another voice; confident, even self-satisfied.
“No worldly military power can prevail against the might of America, as we have seen to our sorrow, and should we resort to our nuclear arsenal as fools have demanded, we would destroy that which we sought to liberate, and our cities and our lands would be destroyed by the Americans, nor could we even know that Mecca and the Ka’aba itself would escape their terrible wrath.”
And then this dour man actually smiled, and his eyes seemed to gaze into the distance, as if the vision that Allah had granted him was once more before him.
“But Allah has shown me the way to victory,” he declared. “I call for the sons of Islam from all over the world to make a pilgrimage to the Caliphate, in their thousands, in their millions, like unto the Hadj, to gather not in Mecca, but in the desert beyond the border of Kuwait. This will be both a Hadji and a marshalling of Holy Warriors. Bring weapons if Allah so commands your heart, come unarmed if you are willing to die for Islam but not to kill. Do not wear the white ihram, if you would show a color to proclaim your intent, let it be the green of the battle flag of Islam, and if you would wear an emblem, let it be one that the Infidels have come to know and fear, that of the Jihadi you are there to become, the mask of Osama the Gun.”
I reeled with shock as I heard those words. Tears welled up in my eyes. I was filled with a joy I could not contain. It was the gift of Allah. And never before had I so felt the warmth of His Infinite Love. All praise to Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful indeed!
“For make no mistake, America,” the Caliph went on, glaring directly into the eye of the television camera, “this is the Jihad, and it will be an army of Holy Warriors that you confront. An army such as no military power, no nation, the soul of no people, has ever faced before. Millions of the Faithful from all the world will march across the desert sands to redeem the lands you have stolen from Islam. A great sea of humanity will roll up to the border into the steel teeth of your army of djins and robots and across it. And the choice will be yours. If you do not fire upon them, it will be a peaceful march through Kuwait to the sea. If you fight, they will fight back, millions of those who would follow the path of peace will fight until you are defeated or the last Muslim is slain. You would probably prevail in such a battle, but never in the Holy War you would thereby ignite. A billion Muslims would rise against you. Even the Infidels would shun forever a people who would commit such an unthinkable crime. Even the Zionists, even the Devil himself, would turn his back and spit at the sound of your name.”
He paused, his visage softened, became almost that of a kindly and imploring father. “I speak to you now, America,” he said softly. “I ask you to listen to your own hearts. I speak to your souls, yes, I even pray for them to Allah, that He might speak to them and redeem you from your thralldom to Satan. Islam has made its choice. Now you must make yours. Allahu Akbar!
* * * *
I wept as I left the darkness of the television world and emerged into the light of a brilliant sun in the cloudless African sky such as shone down on me when I was an innocent boy in Arabia, and as the Christians would have it, I felt that that boy had been born again.
Not as an innocent child, but as a man who had served Mohammed’s government on Earth, had killed in its service, been betrayed by it, duped into serving in a futile war, had hovered on the brink of disbelief, but who now had been redeemed.
I would join those millions, to march among them as I had on the Hadji, to feel once more that joyous submergence in the sea of the Umma, to become Al Hadj Osama again and forever.
I did not pray to Allah that it would be a march of peace that would melt the steel heart of America as did the Caliph. My only prayer was one of thanks, for my most desperate prayer had already been answered. Allah had taken me in his arms and restored my soul and I had already surrendered to His Will once more and would joyfully accept whatever fate I might meet in its service.
I was a Muslim. I was a Holy Warrior of Islam. I was Osama the Gun.
But I would not lead Ski Mask Jihadis again. That was
over. This was no place for commando units in this war. No place for colonels or generals or sergeants or any leaders at all. This was the Jihad in its purest form. Each man of all those millions would fight his own jihad alone, yet none of us would be alone. We would be the Umma united. We would be Islam. The many made one.
CHAPTER 35
I went to Abuja to secure a flight to Riyadh, but what direct flights there were had been filled by Hausas, no few of them veterans of the war, Muslims flocking to the greater cause. I was able to find a flight to Nairobi, and from there a plane to Karachi on the coast of Pakistan, but by then all flights to Arabia were likewise filled, as were all ships save a rag-tag fleet of dhows, and I was able to secure passage on one of them, crowded with Pakistani jihadis, to Ad Dammam, beyond the Straits of Hormuz, some two hundred miles south of Kuwait City and the American fleet.
It was a long, water-rationed and therefore odorously unwashed voyage, but praise be to Allah, at least the seas were calm and I experienced no seasickness, though many others were not so lucky, making the stench all the worse. In a certain manner the whole process reminded me of the journey of my hadj, but in another, it could not have been more different. For while that had been a lone flight from the French authorities and possible Caliphate assassins without at all knowing what would greet me when I reached Jeddah, this was a pilgrimage among brother jihadis on our way to certain Holy War.
And though death might await me, so too did certain victory in that ultimate Jihad, which would also be a hadj of a new kind, a perfect fusion of military mission and Islamic duty, prayer in action and action as prayer.
By giving up my own identity as the man inside the mask of the leader of the Ski Mask Jihadis, I had at last truly surrendered it to the collectivity of the Umma and so to the Will of Allah and set my soul at peace. Now we were all Osama the Gun, and though there were those on the dhow who regarded Osama the Gun as the Madhi, if there was a Madhi, we were all him.
And when the dhow reached the port of Ad Dammam just north of Qatar and some two hundred miles from the Kuwaiti border, my failure to find a flight to Riyadh was revealed as a gift of Allah, for I would have arrived at the wrong destination.
Riyadh lay two hundred miles inland on the edge of the cruel Najd Desert and even farther from the border, and had the Great Jihad been assembled there, it would have faced an impossible march of three hundred miles across the waterless waste to reach it.
While I was making my way back to the Caliphate, the Caliphate authorities had designated the coast of the Gulf south of Kuwait as the assembly area, for here there was a string of desalinization plants to supply water for such a multitude, the proximity of the Gulf moderated the heat somewhat, and there were ports for the ships and boats and dhows bringing most of the jihadis from beyond the Arabian Peninsula.
The Caliphate had also made good use of its millennial experience as host and protector of the Hadj and the modern means stored to service the annual influx of millions which no other nation possessed; the hundreds of thousands of tents and portable field kitchens, now forming a huge tent city erected not in the vicinity of Mecca and Mina, but here along the coast.
If this was not the millions strong gathering of the Hadj, perhaps half a million men when I arrived, it was certainly the largest gathering of Muslims the world had ever otherwise seen and the most diverse such an assembly.
More of the jihadis than not were from Arabia itself, men from the cities and towns, arriving in limousines, cars, recreation vehicles, buses, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, even on foot and by hitchhiking rides along the way. And there were Bedouins come from the desert on camels, men riding donkeys and horses.
By sea came Pakistanis from the cities and the deep tribal areas of the mountains bordering Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden had found refuge and many Afghanis too, Iranians making the easy passage across the Gulf, Iraqis, Kurds, Chechens, Kazaks, Azeris, Yemeni eschewing the inland route across the desert. From India they came, from Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia. Hausas from Nigeria, Muslims from Somalia, Sudan, the Magreb. Even Turks from Germany and beurs from France.
It was not the Hadj, and yet it was steeped in the spirit of the Hadj, a community of jihadis from all the world gathered together to wage a Holy War that would not be like any Jihad ever envisioned. Perhaps not a clash of arms, though more than not bore arms and would willingly die fighting if that should be the Will of Allah, but a Holy War within the battlefield of the soul.
The soul not of Islam but of America, forced to wage the jihad within between its slavery to the evil of Satan and the humanity that Islam taught slept in the heart of all men. These Muslims who had heeded the call to this battle had already won that jihad within. Nor could Islam lose the jihad without, for if America chose the path of Satan and slew us in our multitude down to the last unarmed man, the whole world would turn against as it had against the German Nazis and never relent until it was defeated.
Only by overcoming the evil within its soul and granting Islam a bloodless victory could America achieve a victory of its own. And that would be the greatest victory possible—for America, for Islam, for Allah. For if the Americans thus freed themselves from their enthrallment to Satan, would they then not become Muslims in their own hearts though they might know it not? And would that not eventually lead even them into the Light of Islam and thus bring about an Islamic world?
Death to the Great Satan.
But long live an America embracing Islam and thus become its greatest champion.
Could that have been Allah’s plan all along? To create a Great Satan, an ultimate champion of evil more powerful than the forces of good, as a lesson to the infidels of the world that even such a demonic monster could be redeemed by surrender to His Loving Will?
Inshallah, let it be so.
* * * *
Basic food and a daily ration of water were supplied free of charge as was a place in a tent, but as on the Hadj, there were stands set up among the tents where the fare of all the world could be purchased, and at prices so modest it was clear that it was being offered at cost. After securing a place in a tent, I went to buy a weapon, for I was still a jihadi and fresh from battle against the Americans too, and I was not about to confront the Great Satan unarmed.
Arms merchants had set up their kiosks everywhere, for while many chose to march unarmed and those from within Arabia could easily bring their own guns, few had risked bringing them along on the ships and boats, let alone on planes. Weapons were on sale in abundance, but they were mostly used stuff, hunting rifles, shotguns, Kalashnikovs, and Chinese and French automatic rifles which had seen much action and better days, or had been stored far too long. But here, unlike in a normal souk, they were on offer at prices that amounted to donations to the cause, and ammunition was handed out free. I eventually settled for an old but serviceable Kalashnikov for a price that wouldn’t have bought a decent meal in Paris.
While shopping for my gun, I passed any number of stands selling green ski masks of every description and quality; woolen ones which would be torture to wear in the desert, well-perforated synthetics, cotton and linen and even silk ones.
It was unsettling to see these things on sale to be worn by thousands as battle emblems proclaiming their solidarity, masks that revealed for them the identity that I was determined to conceal. Yet if that mask had meaning, it was the one I had given it, so that the thousands who wore it would in a sense be wearing my face though I would not. Seeing the face that I had shed on sale almost as a tourist item or souvenir made me feel as if I were the dead ghost of a living legend.
* * * *
My tent-mates recalled fond memories of the companions of my hadj, and like myself here for a purpose that was both spiritually focused and martial, but contentious, for as several of them insisted, it was political as well.
There was a survivor of the slaughter of the Caliphate army by the Americans
, Ahmed Jabar, a private who had seen hundreds killed before his own eyes and barely escaped with his own life, Hassan Karim, a Kuwaiti army major who had managed to sneak across the border, and the source of much of the political argument, Mohammed Karzai, an Afghani who had a most confused opinion of America, and admitted it even to himself.
“The Americans saved my country from the Russian atheists, there is no denying that—”
“Only because the Russians were their enemy at the time,” Major Karim scoffed.
“But the Russians were our enemies, and is it not said that the enemy of my enemy is my friend?”
“The Americans rescued my country from Saddam Hussein, and now they occupy it, and for the same reason, the oil and nothing more.”
“Afghanistan had no oil.”
“And they occupied Afghanistan too!”
“That was an act of vengeance against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. In Afghanistan we understand that taking vengeance for an act against your tribe is an obligation of honor.”
“You dare to call what they did to us honorable?” snarled the veteran of the slaughter of the Caliphate army.
“You never even saw their faces. In Afghanistan the Americans themselves were among us for years. A strange people. Who could slaughter from the air without a second thought yet treat wounded enemies as if they were their own sons. There was nothing of selfish value for them in Afghanistan, and yet they remained within a destroyed country to rebuild it at the cost of much money and their own soldiers’ lives.”
“So why then are you here?”
Mohammed Karzai shrugged. “As the Caliph himself has asked of them, to learn what is really in their hearts.”
And so it went, on and on, in one form or another.
There was also an Iraqi, Saddam Tikriti, a member of Saddam Hussein’s tribe and proud of it, whose father had been killed in the second American invasion, who declared that there was nothing in the heart of America but evil, and who had simply come to help defeat that evil and kill as many Americans as possible.
Osama the Gun Page 34