Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  But in fact Egypt’s most dangerous exile had set up rather further afield, in Afghanistan. Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the former head of the radical terrorist group Egyptian Islamic Jihad, had become the close confidant of Osama Bin Laden. In fact, that very month they appeared side-by-side in a videotape smuggled out from their Afghan hideout. Many observers believe it was the Egyptian doctor who was responsible for broadening Bin Laden’s horizons and turning Al-Qaeda into a truly global terrorist network.

  Back in Sharm El Sheikh, the interview over, we stood up and shook hands while a state photographer snapped away for the picture that would appear in the next day’s paper. Mubarak retired to his suite, sending down a messenger to enquire what time that evening the interview would be shown on BBC World. Unfortunately the local Egyptian company we had hired to provide the satellite uplink to London developed a technical hitch, and as each hour went by the messages coming down from the president’s suite grew frostier and frostier. ‘Why have you not shown the interview yet? The president watched in vain at eight o’clock and again at nine and he is very upset. Why are you doing this?’ Since I knew nothing about how satellite links work I could only stand there in bovine ignorance, offering empty reassurances while the technicians wrestled with the equipment. Eventually, we got our interview on air, and I think he probably quite enjoyed it as three years later when he passed through London he asked for me again, like a sultan summoning his favourite minstrel.

  As Afghanistan and its Taliban rulers became the likely target for America’s wrath, there was suddenly a flurry of interest in a big British military exercise about to take place in Oman. A total of 23,000 British servicemen and women were taking part in Exercise Saif Sareea; would they simply move on to Afghanistan when it was over? The Royal Navy was sending submarines and an aircraft carrier, and the dust of the Omani desert would soon be kicked up by British Challenger 2 tanks. With all the talk of an Afghan war, the prospect of filming British troops in the desert was too good to be missed. The Omani Ministry of Information, which had been expecting a trickle of defence journalists from London, found itself deluged with visa applications. Whereas it would normally vet foreign journalists carefully, now it just threw up its hands and let everyone in.

  In the capital, Muscat, I joined up with Kate Adie, the veteran BBC war correspondent, and her good-natured cameraman, a young Irishman called Simon Cumbers. He had a ready smile, and whenever you caught his eye it was as if you were both sharing a private joke. Kate had not been on the mainstream news bulletins as much as she used to be, but when we all walked into the bar of the Muscat Intercontinental a cheer went up from the squaddies. ‘Bloody ’ell, it’s Kate Adie!’ said someone. ‘Things must be getting serious!’

  In fact Oman in October 2001 was a bit of a holiday camp. We all moved down to Salalah in the southwest where most of the troops were concentrated, basing ourselves in a newly built five-star hotel, then making occasional forays up on to the desert plateau to see what the troops were up to and braving the ugly but harmless camel spiders to sleep under canvas. Exercise Saif Sareea got plenty of high-profile visitors that autumn. Tony Blair swung through on his mission to forge an international coalition against terrorism. The British band Steps arrived at Salalah airport, where I recorded the one and only interview I have ever done for Radio 1 and sent it by satellite to London two minutes later, such are the wonders of modern journalism. And former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell flew in to ‘raise morale’, according to her PR people. In preparation for her concert the Royal Engineers constructed an artificial sand mound known as ‘Halliwell Hill’. Down in the bar at the Salalah Hilton the troops were mimicking her songs, clamping two beer glasses to their eyes like binoculars and singing, ‘Come on look at me!’

  In London the Ministry of Defence kept reminding journalists until it was blue in the face that Saif Sareea was not an ‘operation’ but an ‘exercise’, and that any idea that troops would fly on to Afghanistan was pure speculation. But speculate the media did, with the result that the poor squaddies had to use up most of their precious phone time to the UK reassuring worried spouses and families that they were not about to go into a war zone. But quietly, behind the scenes, preparations for action were under way, and British Special Forces had already been warned to expect deployment to Afghanistan. Although Oman’s ruler, Sultan Qaboos, had placated the Muslim world by saying he would not allow any attack to be launched from Omani soil, this did not apply to the Royal Navy submarines, which simply steamed further offshore into the international waters of the Arabian Sea when the time came to launch their cruise missiles at the Taliban.

  Oman was delightful, but it was time to move on. President Bush’s newly declared War on Terror was about to grind into action and as Middle East Correspondent I had an awful lot of ground to cover in the region, not to mention trying to get some time back home with my family in Cairo – always a difficult balance to strike for a foreign correspondent. On the evening of 12 October, I set out for Muscat airport to head for home when my mobile buzzed into life. ‘It’s started,’ said the duty news editor in London. ‘They’re attacking the Taliban.’ Operation Enduring Freedom had begun. This meant doing an abrupt U-turn and going straight back to the hotel, where Simon Cumbers was only too happy to help me get rigged up to broadcast live. Of course I had absolutely nothing to report, being two countries and a small ocean away from Afghanistan, but BBC World were commendably interested in knowing what the Arab reaction was likely to be.

  I had spent the previous few days canvassing opinion on just this subject in the decorative souk of Mattrah, strolling around its labyrinth of covered stalls, where shafts of sunlight illuminated great skeins of Indian brocade or steeply piled cones of pungent spices. I had also checked out what young Arabs were saying to each other in internet chatrooms. The answer was, broadly, that although nobody liked the Taliban, nobody thought an attack on Afghanistan, another Muslim country, was justified. ‘What about the Al-Qaeda camps and the attacks on New York and Washington?’ I would ask Omanis in the souk. ‘They didn’t do it,’ was the usual response. Some said the Taliban should be allowed more time to give up Bin Laden, but the mullahs of Afghanistan had already ruled out handing him over for trial in the West. If he was guilty of any crime, they said, then he should be judged by a shari’ah court in Afghanistan. The Americans were not convinced, and by the end of the year, the Taliban were out of a job and Osama Bin Laden was on the run.

  6

  Arabia post 9/11

  THE ATTACKS OF 9/11 were a body blow not just to America, but to the entire Arab and Muslim world. As it became increasingly apparent that the attackers had carried out their ‘blessed raids’ (as Al-Qaeda later called them) in the name of Islam, I watched the Middle East move on to the defensive. A chasm of mutual suspicion opened up between the Arab and Western worlds, just as Bin Laden and his followers had hoped. Every Arab leader condemned the attacks, except for Saddam Hussein, but some were still in denial that Muslims could have been behind them. One country that found itself in a particularly uncomfortable spotlight was Saudi Arabia.

  Even after it transpired that fifteen out of the nineteen suicide hijackers were Saudi nationals, certain Saudi princes found this hard to accept, insisting for months that there must have been some sort of ‘third force’ involved, i.e. Israel. The US press turned its full wrath on Saudi Arabia, accusing it of nurturing and supporting the monster that Al-Qaeda had become. The Saudi state-controlled press responded by accusing the US and Western media of being controlled by Zionists. A country that had long been prone to xenophobia now regarded Western journalists with even greater suspicion. It was amid this atmosphere that I flew into Riyadh in October 2001.

  I travelled out from London with the Westminster press pack on ‘Blairforce One’, the plane chartered for the prime minister’s whirlwind Middle East tour. President George W. Bush had given a defiant speech from the White House, and the military campaign to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan was
two weeks under way. But when it came to international diplomacy, the US president seemed happy to leave the legwork to Tony Blair, who quickly grasped the need to bring other countries on board in a broad-based coalition against terrorism.

  At first the trip went badly. In Damascus we all cringed at that awkward press conference where Mr Blair shared a podium with Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad. The idea had been for them to present a united front against terrorism, but the host refused to play ball, defending instead the radical Palestinian groups based in his country. ‘What you call terrorists,’ declared the Syrian leader, ‘we call freedom fighters. What about your French resistance against the Nazis? Do you call them terrorists?’ Tony Blair shifted uneasily and looked as if he would much rather be somewhere else.

  In Riyadh he had an altogether smoother reception. In the warm glow of an autumn afternoon our plane drew up alongside a red carpet and a band played the national anthem. Crown Prince Abdullah, the effective ruler, was there to greet him, and various flunkies with colourful bandoliers and curved daggers looked on, beaming, before he was whisked off to a palace for an audience with the ailing King Fahd.

  Saudi Arabia was still hard to get into as a broadcast journalist and none of us had visas to stay on after Blair’s plane departed the next day. But at this point I saw my opportunity and pounced. As the welcome ceremony wound down I spotted a prince I knew vaguely and greeted him. ‘Your Royal Highness, I wonder if we could do an interview tomorrow. I’ll still be in Riyadh.’

  ‘Of course, with pleasure. Just call my office manager to fix a time,’ replied the prince, who, like many well-travelled Saudis, had a reputation for shifting effortlessly between his own culture and that of the West. This was perfect: now I had both an official reason for staying on in the country and the prospect of a useful interview. To the amazement of the Westminster press pack I produced a miniature digital camera and telescopic tripod from my bag, my tools for going solo here for the next few weeks. I also had the latest radio broadcasting pack, known as an M4. Andrew Marr, the BBC’s recently appointed political correspondent, was not impressed. ‘The M4’s a motorway to Bristol, isn’t it?’

  Twenty-four hours later, as Blairforce One took off for Tel Aviv and the next leg of the prime minister’s Middle East tour, I embarked on a journey into what some were calling ‘the spiritual heartland of Al-Qaeda’. The town of Buraida lies about two hundred miles north of Riyadh and is not a place used to seeing Westerners. With 9/11 still fresh in everyone’s minds and Osama Bin Laden’s latest anti-Western diatribes pouring into Arab living rooms via the Al-Jazeera TV channel, I wanted to assess how much support his movement really enjoyed in this most conservative corner of the country. I had the pseudonym and phone number of a local Saudi who was willing to show me around, whom I had arranged to meet beside a certain mosque at a prearranged time.

  To avoid any awkward official questions as to why I was going to Buraida I decided to travel at night, in the back of a taxi, dressed as a Saudi to get through the police checkpoints. I wore a red-and-white chequered headcloth neatly creased in the middle above the forehead, capped by an aqaal, the woven black rope that keeps it in place. I also wore the full-length white thaub shirt dress, like all Saudis, above a pair of plain sandals. I am not normally a fan of local disguise – this is the one and only time I have employed it – believing that in broad daylight a Westerner still stands out a mile just from the way he walks, compared with the graceful, loose-limbed gait of a Saudi. But that night it worked fine and we sailed through the checkpoints on the lonely desert road.

  In the darkened streets of Buraida, a flash of headlights beside the mosque told me we were in the right place and I swiftly changed cars. ‘Abdullah’, who never did tell me his real name, was immediately welcoming. Young and intelligent, with dark, thoughtful eyes, he seemed surprised and pleased that a British journalist should want to come all this way to visit his town. Was I hungry? he asked. I was, so we drove to a late-night fast-food joint, one of thousands that have sprung up all over the country since the nineties.

  While Abdullah went up to order a snack I sat at the Formica table and looked around. The clientele here looked very different from those in Riyadh. They were all men, which is not unusual since men and women are not allowed to eat together in public unless they are from the same family, in which case they must sit in a screened-off section. But all of these men sported lavish, unkempt beards and their white thaub robes were cut short above the ankle, in accordance with the style at the time of the Prophet Muhammad 1,400 years ago. There are two other distinguishing features that identify a deeply religious or fundamentalist Muslim, and many of these men had them. They wore their headcloths without the black rope coil, showing that they spent so much time bent over in prayer that it was impractical as it might fall off. They also had what Egyptians irreverently call the zabeeb, the ‘raisin’, meaning a dark, worn spot on the forehead where they had touched the ground so often in prayer. There was no question about it, this was the fundamentalist heartland of Saudi Arabia. I would have to tread carefully to avoid upsetting any sensibilities.

  Abdullah had taken a risk in letting me stay in his family’s house. Foreigners are supposed to stay in hotels, where the authorities can keep track of them. I soon learned that he had had some trouble persuading his family to let a Western journalist stay under their roof. It turned out that Abdullah’s brother had recently left for Afghanistan to ‘wage jihad’ against the infidel Americans and others. But nobody was up when we arrived at his house, a typical dust-coloured, high-walled villa tucked away down a leafy backstreet. I slept on a mattress on the floor, then awoke to Abdullah performing his dawn prayers.

  Breakfast was hard-boiled eggs, black olives and flat, round loaves of bread. I was then introduced to Abdullah’s parents. Arab custom demands that the elders of the household be treated with great respect and dignity, even if you disagree with their views. So that morning I nodded politely and kept my views to myself.

  ‘What happened on September the eleventh was the work of the Jews,’ said the old man, an opinion I have heard countless times since all over the Arab world. ‘It was the Israelis who did it and then blamed it on the Arabs. Why? To make President Bush wage war on the Muslims, and now look, he is attacking defenceless women and children in Afghanistan, bombing them in their homes. Bush is a war criminal!’

  I asked if they had heard from their other son.

  ‘No, but God give him strength,’ chipped in the mother. ‘May he achieve his wish and die a martyr fighting for Islam.’

  It struck me then how extraordinary such words would sound coming from a Western, non-Muslim mother – and there, I realized, was one of the advantages Al-Qaeda had over its enemies. Most of its followers were not afraid to die; in fact they relished the prospect, convinced that if they died in the cause of their religion they would be guaranteed a place in paradise. ‘We love death just as you love life,’ boasted Osama Bin Laden in one of his many audio broadcasts.

  It was Friday and most of Buraida was preparing to head for the mosque for the midday prayers. Abdullah offered to show me round town, so together we set off in his car. There appeared to be only two colours here: desert brown, as all the buildings took on the colour of the desert that surrounded them, and dusty green, from the date palms that fringed the city. In contrast to the ornate architecture of mosques in Egypt, Morocco or Syria, Buraida’s houses of worship were especially austere. The minarets were modern, with square outlines and no hint of decoration. This was the Wahhabi style, the prevailing brand of Islam in Saudi Arabia. Derived from the teachings of an eighteenth-century cleric, Muhammad Bin Abdul Wahhab, it allows for few earthly pleasures. It urges its followers to reject many of the trappings of the modern world and emulate instead the simple lifestyles of the Prophet Muhammad and his early followers.

  Within thirty minutes we encountered three police checkpoints. These were more than just a couple of squad cars with flashing blue ligh
ts. Saudi checkpoints often involve a soldier in a flak jacket sitting on top of a pickup truck and manning a heavy machine gun. The police have lists and photographs of wanted suspects, but Abdullah showed me how easy it was to evade them, taking shortcuts through groves of young palm trees to emerge on the other side.

  ‘This town has become a security nightmare for everyone,’ said Abdullah, as he swerved to avoid a dozing camel beside a bush. ‘Always they are searching people, looking for weapons, but this way they are making many enemies. Even the mosques are full of informers, they are listening to see if anyone supports Al-Qaeda then they report them to the Mabahith.’ These are the ‘Investigators’, the secret police, a rather more feared version of Britain’s Special Branch. Some Saudis claimed that their methods of interrogation were brutal but the government denied any use of torture. I certainly had no wish to come across them, but I had a film to make for BBC2’s Newsnight so Abdullah took a considerable risk in letting me film the checkpoints discreetly through the window of his car. He wanted the outside world to see how nervous the Saudi authorities had become. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘it would not be like this if we had democracy.’

  After prayers I went down to the market on my own. It was a colourful place, but as a Westerner I was not welcome. ‘What’s that bloody American doing here? Get him out of here,’ screamed an old woman from behind a spice stall. Giving them what I hoped was a disarming smile and announcing I was British, not American, made no difference. In their eyes my country’s government was the enemy. Like others in the Arab world, many Saudis had been watching the war in Afghanistan unfold on Al-Jazeera. What they saw was not so much a campaign to dislodge a brutal, repressive regime that nurtured terrorist training camps, but an unjustified aerial bombardment of defenceless Afghan civilians. Al-Jazeera had a good working relationship with the Taliban, so they were able to get access quickly to some of the places that had been bombed, showing close up the horrific results when bombs hit civilian instead of military targets. (This later became a feature of many Arab TV networks during the Iraq conflict of 2003.) For a while Al-Jazeera played a short promotional video montage between its news bulletins, showing first an American B-52 bomber flying overhead and then an Afghan child in tears beside a ruined house. The message was clear: ‘US warplanes bomb innocent Muslims.’ Images like this undoubtedly helped galvanize Arab opinion against the war in Afghanistan. The net result for me was that Buraida spice market was not a sensible place to get out the camera.