by Mark Bowden
2. The Path of Jihad
Summer 2010
In hiding, his hair and beard had grown white. The Sheik, as he liked to be called, was just fifty-three years old, but the long white whiskers made him look like an old man. In a sense, he had been playing an elder his entire adult life, having been severe and serenely self-important since he was old enough to sprout a beard. Wealthy, well connected, and male in a culture that excessively prized those things, he had known deference and esteem from those closest to him all his life.
Despite the hammering his movement had taken in recent years, bin Laden kept an upbeat tone in his letters. His faith did not allow for doubt, or even questions. His perambulations around the Middle and Near East aside, bin Laden’s world was exceedingly narrow. If the man in the White House, Barack Obama, the man charged with defending the United States of America, was a surprising confluence of race and nationality, a man of international upbringing and broad liberal education, bin Laden was his opposite. The Sheik had walked a relatively narrow path in life. He had found the truth at a young age and ever since had labored to resist any challenge or contradiction. Even before he became the world’s most wanted fugitive, his daily habits and those he imposed on his family were calculated to reduce traffic with those outside his small circle of belief. The rituals he observed—the fasting, the avoidance of women other than his wives, the extra sessions of daily prayer—all of it was designed to stave off outside influence. It was designed to strengthen his devotion to the cause and his faith in ultimate victory.
He saw hopeful signs everywhere.
“Anyone who looks at the enemies in NATO, especially America, will know that they are in big trouble,” he wrote. “This year has been the worst for them in Afghanistan since they invaded it. The number of their dead has never been this high, according to their own reports. Their financial crisis continues. Britain has lowered its defense budget and America is reducing the budget at the Pentagon. Anyone who knows the world and who understands politics realizes that it is impossible for them to continue with the war. There is no difference between them and the Soviet Union before it withdrew from Afghanistan.”
At heart, the Sheik was a fantasist, and here was the nub of his fantasy. He had left home at age twenty-two to join a seemingly hopeless cause, a pan-Muslim jihad to drive the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. The mujahidin who took up this fight were little more than an untrained, poorly armed rabble going up against one of the richest, best-trained and -equipped, and most powerful military forces in the world. In later years bin Laden would be described as a murderous nihilist, someone who believed in nothing. He was murderous all right, but the opposite of a nihilist. He was a true believer. He had a complete vision of the world as he wanted it to be—indeed, as he was convinced it would be, as he was convinced God Almighty intended it to be. He believed in miracles and signs. He collected them throughout his life as proof of God’s favor. His determination to join the jihad in Afghanistan was an act of faith, and the defeat of the Soviets vindicated his commitment. It was the first great miracle on this path, the one that convinced him more than anything else that he was right.
As a boy, growing up one of fifty-four children of a Saudi billionaire construction magnate, bin Laden had gone mostly to Islamist schools, and in religion he found an antidote to the worldliness of his family. He was one of the few bin Laden children who received all of his education in Saudi Arabia. The schools he had attended as a boy included religious studies, but also taught mathematics, science, history, geography, and English. He learned as a boy to speak passable English. Growing up in the 1960s he was among the best educated of his Saudi generation. He had also worked for his father, first as a simple laborer. The bin Laden company was renowned for building roads and parts of the mosques in Mecca and Medina. Young Osama worked his way up to foreman of a labor gang, and finally headed up construction projects himself. One of his specialties was tunneling. This kind of work put him shoulder to shoulder with Muslim workers from all over the region and the world: Egyptians, Yemenis, Moroccans, and even Malaysians. So his ideas about the Muslim world expanded well beyond those of most sheltered young Saudis, who viewed their own Wahhabi brand of the faith as superior to all others. At the same time, bin Laden became exceedingly devout, shunning all contact with women other than his wives (the first of whom, Najwa, he had married at age seventeen). He renounced the affluent lifestyles of his vast family and discovered the work of Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb, a small, mean, sickly man with a Hitler mustache who had been hanged by authorities in Egypt in 1966. In death, Qutb’s angry words gained fiery eloquence for those who thought as he did.
Qutb had railed against the rapid Westernization of traditional Arab societies. He championed divine revelation in a fallen modern world, penning biting critiques of both capitalist democracy and communism. A fervent Jew hater, he saw secret Zionist plots behind most of what he disliked, embracing every cockeyed forgery and myth in the canon of anti-Semitism. The Koran, he argued, was the one true path. All the wisdom mankind needed was in that book, which he spent a lifetime interpreting and explaining to suit his own vision. Muslims held the truth, the only truth, and had a duty to confront unbelievers, violently if necessary. Regimes and states that stood in the way of religious rule were jahiliyya—ignorant pre-Islamic societies—and as such were legitimate targets for violence. The forces of God must combat the forces of Satan, beginning with the secular regimes of modern Arab states. Qutb urged the faithful to carve out one country in which to base a pure society founded on shariah, Islamist law, a foothold for the faithful in a fallen world, and from that base radiate righteousness outward, by the sword if necessary. The new caliphate thus created would bend all of civilization to God’s will. At a time when well-to-do Arabs were becoming increasingly secular and Western, sending their children to Europe and the United States for advanced degrees and adopting lifestyles antithetical to Arab tradition, Qutb urged them to go in the opposite direction.
He had lived for a time in the United States—briefly in Colorado and in California—and seemingly everything he saw clarified his hatred not just for America, but also for the humanism that formed the intellectual undergirding of the Western world. A fastidious man who never married and seemed repelled by sex, Qutb denounced the licentiousness, materialism, and personal freedom of capitalist democracy. He saw clearly that for all its so-called respect for religion, Western society had become primarily secular, that faith, which for him was the dynamic principle of life, had been reduced in capitalist societies to something more akin to a commodity, as though there were different flavors of divine truth arrayed like items on a supermarket shelf for shoppers to pick through. What could it possibly matter to God what sort of truth a man preferred? There was only one truth, and man’s job was to accept it reverently and try to live in accordance with it. The very idea of tolerance, of respect for a variety of beliefs, was anathema. One either embraced the truth or was lost. As for Marxism, the Western world’s great rival notion, he saw it as simple idolatry, elevating human reason—“Rational Idealism”—above revelation. Lurking behind both Marxism and capitalism, he argued, was world Jewry.
“Islam is a system given by God and it aims to establish a fundamental principle of God’s sovereignty and people’s servitude to Him alone,” Qutb wrote. “As such, Islam has the right to remove all obstacles from its way and address people freely without any impediments such as a political system or social customs and traditions… it is the right of Islam to take the initiative. It is not the creed of a particular people or the system of a particular country. It is a system given by God for the entire world. As such, it has the right to take action to remove all obstacles that fetter man’s freedom of choice. It is a faith that does not force itself on any individual, it only attacks situations and regimes in order to free individuals from deviant influences that corrupt human nature and restrict man’s freedom.”
Young Osama bin Laden was not the first yo
uth to be swept up by a pure, simple ideology that promised to create freedom of choice by abolishing everything that disagreed with it. The Koran stood like a rock in the shifting waters of human history. Progress for human beings meant one thing: living more closely to the teachings of the book.
“The Islamic concept of Divinity is utterly distinct from man’s… and therefore it does not need to develop or change,” Qutb wrote. “The One who established this concept can envision without limits of time or space. His knowledge is immune to the obstacles of ignorance and deficiency; and He chooses without being influenced by passion or emotion. Therefore, He has established for the entirety of humanity, in all places and at all times, a firm principle within the framework of which human life freely advances and develops.”
Accused of participating in a Muslim Brotherhood plot to assassinate Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser, Qutb went to the gallows with his beliefs unshaken. “The Muslim Brotherhood is not a party of preachers and missionaries but rather of divine enforcers,” he wrote. “Its mission is to blot out, by force if necessary, oppression, moral anarchy, social disorder, and exploitation so as to finish the so-called divine role of self-styled gods and replace evil with good. ‘Fight them,’ the Koran says, ‘until there is no more oppression, and all submission is made to God alone.’”
Bin Laden became a “divine enforcer.” As a young man, he was not a scholar or much of a thinker, and he lacked Qutb’s eloquence. Those who knew him found him tongue-tied and unimpressive. But he was ambitious, and rich. His billionaire father was killed in a plane crash in 1967, leaving behind enough of a fortune to make all of his offspring at least multimillionaires. Bin Laden’s inheritance at age ten was estimated in the tens of millions. He had no interest in using his wealth to build a fine home or adopt a luxurious lifestyle, though, as many of his siblings did. His inclinations ran the opposite way. He had been educated in a private secular school, but by the time he attended King Abdulazzi University, where he studied economics and business management, he was already preaching simplicity and seemed primarily interested in religion and charitable work. He continued to pursue these interests until the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and launched him on the path toward his life’s work.
Huthaifa Azzam was just fourteen years old when he answered a bell on the gate outside his father’s house in Jordan. He found a very tall, very thin, swarthy and bearded young man wearing Arab robes and a simple white turban, not the typical red-and-white-checked headdress, or shemagh, worn by most Saudi men. The visitor asked, shyly, “Is this the house of Dr. Abdullah Azzam?”
Azzam was a prominent Palestinian Islamist and scholar whose fatwa, “Defense of the Muslim Lands: The First Obligation After Faith,” had caused a stir in the Arab world, summoning the faithful to Afghanistan to resist the infidel Soviets. Azzam had done more than preach. He had relocated to Pakistan to take part in the holy war himself. Based in Peshawar, close to the Afghan border, he had established what he called the “Services Office,” to recruit and train young Arab volunteers to join the fight. Magazines, photos, and videos prepared by the office spread news of the heroic religious resistance throughout the Arab world… and had found their way to young bin Laden. Azzam was taking a short holiday break with his family in Jordan when the young Saudi made the four-hour trip to ring his bell. This volunteer was different from most, of course, because of his fortune. Azzam must have been delighted. The two men spoke for hours that day, and by evening bin Laden was a recruit. He pledged himself to the cause. He was still enough of a loyal Saudi subject, however, that he delayed traveling back with Azzam in order to seek permission from King Fahd. He arrived in Peshawar several weeks later.
At that point, bin Laden’s money was more valuable to the cause than his leadership or even his life, and so during those first years with Azzam he stayed safely behind the lines, working at the Services Office and helping to attract other young fighters to the cause. This was not destined to last. Bin Laden was a romantic, and a zealot, and he had not made his jihad to live safely behind the lines. He grew apart from Azzam, increasingly falling in with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the radical Egyptian physician who had left his home country after serving three years in prison. Zawahiri worked at a Red Crescent hospital in Peshawar. Although only six years older than bin Laden, he was a man of wider experience and education, and had been deeply embittered by the torture he had undergone at the hands of Egyptian police. His angry radicalism stirred bin Laden to play a more active role in the holy war—to become a full-fledged mujahid himself.
Bin Laden’s growing extremism began to trouble his Palestinian mentor. Azzam, a college professor, balked at bin Laden’s refusal to send his children to school. The younger man wanted Arab recruits to form separate, religiously pure fighting units, while Azzam believed the Arabs would be better employed if mixed with the savvier, more experienced Afghan militia. He also resisted his protégé’s growing carelessness about human life. Bin Laden had embraced a broad definition of “infidel.” Until that point, the enemy had been understood to be Russian soldiers and Afghans who fought with them. They were at war, after all. Bin Laden had expanded the definition. It now applied to any Russian, even any non-Muslim. He was fighting a bigger war than the one being promoted by Azzam. The older man’s wife, Samira, remembers her husband arguing with bin Laden about the younger man’s plan to place a bomb on a bus full of Russians visiting Pakistan.
“You entered Pakistan on a visa,” Azzam reminded him. “The visa is a contract. You signed when you obtained the visa that you would not be a troublemaker nor break the laws. A Muslim should not break a contract.”
“Pakistan is a Muslim country,” bin Laden told him, by which he meant that non-Muslims had no business coming there.
It was one thing, Azzam argued, to kill Russians who invaded Afghanistan and held it by force, quite another to target innocent civilians on a holiday to a country that welcomed them.
“So what will happen if Russia loses a bus full of people?” bin Laden said dismissively. “It is not going to matter.”
He had moved beyond the conflict in Afghanistan. His faith empowered him. God had touched him. This gave him the right to decide, to kill.
Bin Laden also felt that jihad demanded that he actually fight as well, not just take part in recruiting, training, and paying others to do so. The older man argued with him for months, no doubt convinced that a multimillionaire Saudi was worth more to the cause alive than dead. But bin Laden had made up his mind. He was going to cross the border and join the battle. In 1987, he split with Azzam. He recruited his own band of about two dozen Arab fighters, creating the kind of fighting unit he preferred—a pure, all-Arab force of men who fought for religious reasons alone, not just for the principle of Afghan nationalism. Equipped with weapons and bulldozers, they drove ten miles or so into Afghanistan, joined up with some like-minded Afghan fighters, and set about building a mountain outpost near the village of Jaji. Bin Laden fortified a series of ridges and began building roads and other structures—he said a school and a hospital—that advertised their presence. It was in easternmost Afghanistan, in rugged country, and was not a strategically important spot, at least not in any conventional sense. Bin Laden called it al-Masada, the Lion’s Den. It was near a much larger Soviet garrison and its primary purpose was to provoke an attack. To a practical man like Azzam (who would be assassinated two years later) this probably appeared foolhardy, but bin Laden lived in a world of romantic fantasy, and in that realm, al-Masada made perfect sense. The battle was not just for Afghanistan, but for the whole world. It was the beginning of a new caliphate, the dawn of a new Muslim age. He was a holy warrior, and warriors did not win battles by writing checks and making videos and leading from the rear. In his view, the idea wasn’t to defeat the Soviets in battle, or even to survive, but to display such heroism and resolve that it would inflame the fighting spirit of the greater Muslim Nation.
“God willing, we want the Lion’s Den to be
the first thing that the enemy faces,” bin Laden told a Syrian journalist. “Its place as the first camp visible to the enemy means that they will focus their bombardments on us in an extreme manner.”
And the Soviets obliged, dropping napalm and so many tons of conventional explosives that the outpost and the area around it were denuded of trees and vegetation. Then they attacked directly, encircling the outpost. The siege lasted for twenty-two days, with a heavy toll on both sides. Some of bin Laden’s men were more skilled fighters than he was. Abu Hafs (Mohammed Atef, an Egyptian policeman who would be killed in 2001) and Abu Ubaidah (Ali Amin al-Rashidi, also a former Egyptian policeman, killed in 1996) led punishing counterattacks. The Soviets eventually gave up and retreated, handing the Arab fighters an inspirational victory. It had unfolded for bin Laden miraculously, a clear sign from heaven.
He would later tell the Syrian journalist, “At seven on the twenty-seventh morning of Ramadan 1407 [April of 1987], most of the people were sleeping in the camp because it was Ramadan. Then I saw things that, by God, I have never seen before. A Soviet airplane, a MIG, I believe, passed by in front of us, when a group of our Afghan mujahidin brothers grouped together [and attacked]. The plane then broke into pieces and fell right in front of our eyes. This battle is what gave me the strong will to continue with this war.”
By all accounts bin Laden fought bravely, exposing himself to danger and the extremes of deprivation and cold like everyone else in the camp. He was injured during the fighting and, at one point, he later told an interviewer, he lay unconscious and bleeding in a trench, surrounded by his dead comrades. He was ultimately rescued, but only after losing a lot of blood, an incident that he would later say had given him chronically low blood pressure. Bin Laden’s willingness to place himself at risk greatly enlarged his reputation. It mattered little in the end that the battle had been meaningless in practical terms. The Battle of Jaji was proclaimed a great victory, and bin Laden, having conceived it, was its hero. Reporters trekked out to al-Masada to meet this Saudi multimillionaire who fought with suicidal conviction. One of them, Ahmad Zaidan, a Pakistani newspaper reporter working for a group of Arab newspapers, found an extraordinarily pious young man in complete command, who had supplanted the role once played by the far more famous Azzam, and who was surrounded by devoted followers. Bin Laden had transformed himself from a rich-kid backer on the sidelines into a frontline mujahidin leader.