God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  Yet Bin Laden’s efforts would have counted for little had it not been for his mentor and patron Abdullah Azzam, whose rudimentary set-up for the recruitment, training and support of foreign fighters grew, with Saudi funding, into a highly sophisticated organisation. It became the Maktab al-Khidamat an-Mujahedeen, the Office of Services to the Mujahedeen, with an international network of overseas branches linked by mobile telephones, personal computers and lap-tops. It also became, in effect, a parallel bureau to that established earlier in Peshawar by Pakistan’s ISI. Abdullah Azzam’s control of the Office of Services to the Mujahedeen allowed him to channel financial support to those mujahedeen groups whose agendas came closest to his own: principally, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami (Hekmatyar) and Ittihad-i-Islami (Unity of Islam). Both these mujahedeen fighting forces came increasingly to be seen as Wahhabi lashkars (war parties) with Saudi-led agendas.

  In excess of twenty-five thousand foreign jihadis are said to have passed through the portals of the Office of Services to the Mujahedeen, set in a leafy, middle-class extension of Peshawar’s Civil Lines, north-west of the old city. Many of them came from the most militant organisations in the Islamic world, including Islamic Jihad and Hamas. To the local population these volunteer fighters were known collectively as ‘the Arabs’, and they were welcomed and honoured for their courage and sacrifices.

  It is no exaggeration to say that from this office the seed of international jihad was planted in the now fertile and receptive soil of the North-West Frontier, to be fertilised by all the resentments real and perceived of fundamentalist, revivalist Islam, watered by Osama bin Laden’s pipeline to Saudi Arabia – and, finally, to take root as Al-Qaeda, the [Military] Base.

  Among those who came knocking on the doors of the Maktab al-Khidamat an-Mujahedeen was the bespectacled Egyptian physician and revolutionary Ayman AL-ZAWAHRI, known familiarly as ‘The Doctor’. He was from one of the most respectable middle-class families in Cairo, Arabic in origin, many of whose male members had distinguished themselves as diplomats, academics, doctors and theologians. One of his grandfathers had served as Egypt’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and had founded King al-Saud University in Riyadh in the 1950s. One of his great-uncles had fought against the British in Egypt and after many years’ service as a diplomat had helped found the Arab League, being credited as the man who persuaded Ibn Saud to join that organisation in 1945. Yet another great-uncle had served as the Grand Imam of Cairo’s Al-Aqsa mosque from 1929 to 1933 – and was the man whom Sheikh Hafiz Wahba, in his lecture to the Central Asian Society in 1929, had identified as being linked, together with the then Grand Mufti of Egypt, as a disciple of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

  A close connection had thus existed between Al-Zawahri’s family and the Sauds for two generations – until Ayman al-Zawahri broke with family tradition by joining the Egyptian Islamic Jihad revolutionary party. He was among the several hundred suspects rounded up and jailed following President Sadat’s assassination in 1981, and emerged three years later an embittered man. He moved to Saudi Arabia and then on to Pakistan and Afghanistan, which he twice visited in the early 1980s as a volunteer doctor working for the Kuwait Red Crescent Society.

  In 1986 Bin Laden flew his several wives and children from Jedda to Peshawar and set up home in a rented house outside the city. That same summer he established a training camp for a group of his Arab volunteers at Khost, on the lower slopes of the Spin Ghar mountain range close to the Pakistan border. Copying Abdullah Azzam, he named this camp Bait al-Ansar, the House of Ansar, and used his family construction equipment to turn long-abandoned Buddhist caves above his camp into fortified bunkers. His plans suffered a setback when Russian Special Forces attacked the camp in the following year, forcing its Arab defenders to retreat across the border. However, the Khost complex survived to became the Afghan equivalent of the Fanatic Camp of the Hindustanis at Sittana, where thousands of international jihadis received the military training and political indoctrination they later applied in domains of war as far afield as Algeria, Chechnya and Xinjiang.

  One of these ‘Arabs’ was the man who currently (September 2005) masterminds the bombing campaign in Iraq, as well as presiding over some of the worst terrorist beheadings and atrocities: the Jordanian Abu Musab AL-ZARQAWI. Al-Zarqawi arrived in Peshawar as a twenty-year-old in the summer of 1989, bringing with him an unenviable reputation as a street thug and bully. He had missed the boat as far as taking up arms against the Russians was concerned, so he began working for a radical Islamist newsletter, where he came under the influence of a fundamentalist cleric named Sheikh Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a fellow Jordanian whose Salafi beliefs made him a natural ally of the Deobandis. These beliefs appear to have caused Al-Maqdisi and his new student to hold back from joining either Abdullah Azzam or Bin Laden. Instead, they formed their own group, naming it Bait al-Imam, the House of the Imam, before returning to Jordan with the intention of overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy. Both men were arrested for plotting against the state and given long prison sentences.

  In the meantime, the Egyptian doctor Al-Zawahri had followed Bin Laden’s example by also moving his family from Arabia to Peshawar, where he and other Egyptian revolutionaries set up a local faction of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Inevitably, a rivalry developed between the Egyptians led by Al-Zawahri and the Arabs led by Abdullah Azzam from the Office of Services to the Mujahedeen. These differences became acute when in 1988 Soviet Russia decided to cut its losses in Afghanistan and began to pull out its troops. A decade of warfare against the Russian infidels had created a battle-hardened and highly politicised international brigade. Abdullah Azzam wished these foreign jihadis to remain in Afghanistan and secure it for the Islamist cause, after which they would join forces with the Deobandi politico-religious parties and other Islamist groups to liberate Pakistan and Kashmir. Al-Zawahri, however, argued that the pan-Islamist armed movement created in the course of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan should now be employed in liberating the entire umma, beginning with Egypt.

  In the late summer of 1989 a plot by persons unknown to assassinate Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was foiled when a large cache of primed explosive was found under the pulpit of a mosque where he was about to preach. A face-to-face confrontation followed at which Al-Zawahri accused Abdullah Azzam of indulging in ‘cat’s-piss politics’. It ended with the Doctor winning over to his camp the idealistic and impressionable man whom he was then treating for a kidney complaint: Osama bin Laden, aged thirty-one to Al-Zawahri’s thirty-eight. On Friday 24 November of that same year Abdullah Azzam, now increasingly isolated, was targeted once again as he and his teenage sons made the journey from their home to the local mosque for evening prayers. In a narrow lane just short of the mosque they got out of their vehicle to walk the rest of the way – at which point three mines were detonated. ‘A great thundering was heard over the city,’ relates a website dedicated to Abdullah Azzam:

  People emerged from the mosque and beheld a terrible sight. The younger son Ibrahim flew 100 metres into the air; the other two youths were thrown a similar distance away, and their remains were scattered among the trees and power lines. As for Sheikh Abdullah Azzam himself, his body was found resting against a wall, totally intact and not at all disfigured, except that some blood was seen issuing from his mouth. That fateful blast indeed ended the worldly journey of Sheikh Abdullah, which had been spent well in struggling, striving and fighting in the Path of Allah.

  Although the CIA was blamed, the most obvious beneficiary of the Sheikh’s death was the man who spoke the eulogy at his funeral: Dr Ayman al-Zawahri, who now became world jihad’s leading ideologue.

  Although the withdrawal of Soviet troops was completed in February 1989 it was not until 1992 that a coalition of mujahedeen forces finally overthrew the Soviet-backed Afghan Government. To the dismay of their foreign patrons, the seven mujahedeen armies then turned their guns on each other, leading to a catastrophic breakdown of law and order. Ever s
ince 1980 Afghan refugees had been crossing into the border areas of Pakistan and Iran to escape the fighting, but as conditions worsened in the early 1990s their numbers swelled to a point where the Government of Pakistan found itself having to absorb and shelter well over three million refugees, mostly Pathans.

  The emergence of the Taliban in the winter of 1994–5, seemingly from nowhere, and its rapid rise to power, culminating in the capture of Kabul in September 1997, has been meticulously chronicled by the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. The rise of Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda over this same period has been no less meticulously researched and graphically told by Malise Ruthven, Bernard Lewis, Giles Keppel, Jason Burke and other respected authorities. It remains only for a few last gaps in the convergence of these two movements to be filled in.

  After the withdrawal of Soviet troops many of the foreign jihadis left Afghanistan and Pakistan to take the struggle to their homelands. But before the final departure of the bulk of the ‘Arabs’ a meeting took place in Bin Laden’s camp at Khost in the spring of 1988. Here Al-Zawahri and perhaps a dozen like-minded individuals representing Islamic Jihad and other organisations agreed to form a loose-knit organisation that would take jihad to wherever Islam was under threat – and to whoever threatened it. The name given to this organisation, Al-Qaeda, with its connotations of a military base, may be seen as an indirect homage to the burra godown, the ‘big storehouse’ in the Mahabun Mountain first established by Syed Ahmad in 1827 and known thereafter to the British as the Hindustani or Fanatic Camp. Directly after this meeting at Khost Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayyaf, leader of the Wahhabi Ittihad-i-Islami group, left Peshawar with a large party of his followers for the Philippines where, as the ‘Abu Sayyaf gang’, they introduced Wahhabi terror to the Western Pacific. Others fanned out to take the Islamist revolution as far north as Chechnya and Kyrgyzstan and as far west as Algeria, Morocco – and the United States.

  Bin Laden himself was not present at the Khost gathering, having gone home with his family to Jedda to establish a welfare organisation for returned Arab fighters. In Jedda he might well have stayed but for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, which prompted him to contact the Saudi Defence Minister, Prince Sultan, with a proposal to defend Saudi Arabia by calling on his global network of ex-Afghanistan jihadis, beginning with the several thousand Wahhabi veterans now back in Arabia. According to one account, he left the meeting believing his offer had been accepted, so that when he learned subsequently that the Saudi Government had turned instead to the United States of America, it seemed a double betrayal. His strong Wahhabi convictions could not countenance the affront of infidel desert boots on the sacred soil of Arabia, which he saw as a direct defiance of the Prophet’s injunction that there should not be two religions in Arabia. Within months Bin Laden was set on the course that was to send him into permanent exile as a bitter enemy of the House of Saud and of the Wahhabi Establishment that had betrayed its founding fathers. Although his assets in Saudi Arabia were frozen he still had sufficient funds and contacts to became the banker of Al-Zawahri’s Islamic Jihad and the Al-Qaeda confederacy.

  In September 1993 New York’s World Trade Center was bombed and six persons killed. This was Al-Qaeda’s first serious act of aggression against the United States of America, and it was followed by further operations in Somalia and Egypt.

  12

  The Unholy Alliance

  A spring at its source can be turned with a twig, But when grown into a river, not even an elephant can cross it.

  Sheikh Muslihu-ud-Din, better known as Saadi,

  thirteenth-century poet of Shiraz

  In early April 2001 a vast encampment of canvas tents and brightly coloured cotton shamianas sprang up on the plains beside the village of Taro Jaba on the eastern limits of the Vale of Peshawar. Over the course of three days what was reported as the largest gathering ever seen in Pakistan celebrated the achievements of the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband madrassah movement. According to its organisers, the JUI, well over one million delegates attended, representing madrassahs in countries as far afield as the United States and South Africa. More than a score of countries sent official delegations, and messages of congratulation were read from such luminaries as Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi. However, the two speeches that received the greatest acclaim were both taped messages. The first was from Mullah Omar, Amir ul-Momineen of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The second, for all that the conference organisers blandly denied it, was from ‘al-Shaykh’: Osama bin Laden.

  Presiding over the conference was Maulana Fazal-ur-Rahman, a burly, genial, white-turbaned and, of course, bearded figure in his early fifties, widely known in Pakistan as the ‘Diesel Maulana’ following allegations – not proven – concerning his part in a fuel permit scandal. He had inherited his position as head of a militant faction of JUI from his Dar ul-Ulum Deoband-educated father Maulana Mufti Mahmood, who had guided the JUI party through the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. He now chaired a coalition of five Deobandi political groups and was spoken of as the ‘mentor’ of the Taliban. In his concluding address he called on Muslims to unite behind their brothers wherever they were in trouble. ‘No one’, he ended, ‘can bar us from supporting the Taliban or other Muslims fighting for their independence and identity in any part of the world.’ This was five months before the coordinated attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of 11 September 2001.

  In September 1994, so the popular version goes, a thirty-five-year-old mullah from the Maiwand region outside Kandahar happened upon the scene of a murder: a family driving from Herat to Kandahar had been held up by a local warlord who had raped and killed all the girls and boys in the family. With the help of some local taliban the mullah washed the bodies and gave them a proper burial. This was Mullah Omar, a landless and barely literate Ghilzai Pathan and veteran jihadi who had lost his right eye fighting the Russians but had afterwards become so disillusioned by the corruption of the mujahedeen warlords that he had exchanged his AK-47 for the Quran. He had then resumed his religious studies at the Sang-i-Hisar madrassah in Singesar, a hamlet to the north-west of Kandahar not far from the scene of a famous Afghan victory over the invading British in 1880. So sickened was Mullah Omar by this latest atrocity that he gathered a group of mujahedeen veterans together and swore with them to rid Afghanistan of the devils who were destroying it – and to restore true sharia. This little group then went from mosque to mosque calling for volunteers, and out of this local reaction there developed – with more than a little military assistance from the Hizb-e-Islami and Pakistan’s ISI – the Taliban.

  The man who almost by accident founded the Taliban was no ideologue, but the men who joined him and who became his closest lieutenants were very much of a type, for nearly every one of them was the product of a madrassah in one form or another. As Ahmed Rashid says in his book Taliban: The Story of the Warlords, ‘the Taliban represented nobody but themselves and they recognised no Islam but their own’. They described themselves as Sunnis who followed the Hanafi form of Islamic jurisprudence and insisted they were neither Deobandis nor Wahhabis nor followers of any other religious party. But they did have an ideological base, which was linked to ‘an extreme form of Deobandism’. As Rashid explains, ‘The links between the Taliban and some of the extreme Deobandi groups are solid because of the common ground they share . . . The Deobandi tradition is opposed to tribal and feudal structures, from which stems the Taliban’s mistrust of the tribal structure and the clan chiefs.’

  In April 1996, nineteen months after Mullah Omar’s intervention, an unprecedented gathering of Pathan leaders took place in Kandahar. This was not the usual loya jirga but a gathering of ulema on the Arab model, a shura or religious council that bypassed the usual tribal leaders. It was at this shura that Mullah Omar was elected Amir-ul-Momineen (Commander of the Faithful) before cloaking himself in the Prophet’s mantle and receiving the oath of allegiance (baiat) from all those present. A Pathan-dominated council of ten was then for
med with Mullah Omar at its head, and a jihad proclaimed against those Muslims who refused to acknowledge its authority. These actions won widespread support among Afghanistan’s Pathan population but were not welcome to the Tajiks, Uzbeks and other groups who together made up the other half of the country. Nevertheless, with the continuing support of Pakistan and a Saudi-backed switch of sides by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hizb-i-Islami (Hekmatyar) armed force, the ever-growing Taliban army was strong enough to lay siege to Kabul throughout the summer of 1996, culminating in an August offensive which saw thousands of armed but raw taliban from the frontier madrassahs hurrying to join its ranks. Kabul fell to the Taliban in September 1996 and within twenty-four hours the strictest form of sharia ever seen outside Saudi Arabia was imposed on the country. Indeed, it took Saudi Arabia as its model and was in conformity with the theology of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab of Nejd, founder of Wahhabism. Only two governments recognised the Taliban Government: Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.