The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  ‘Does your wife know you are taking a second wife?’ was Rabiah’s first question when they met. She had no objection to assuming the second wife position, as long as it was done openly. In her view, second marriages kept secret are ‘always a disaster’. (She says another key to a successful polygamous marriage is: ‘You can only live with it if you don’t think about the time he’s with the other wife. You can’t open that door or you’ll go mad.’)

  ‘She doesn’t know yet, but she will’, Abu Walid assured her.

  And so Rabiah accepted his proposal. Like her previous marriages it was principally a pragmatic union in a society in which it was simply not feasible for a woman to remain alone. ‘I got married because I had big plans and I wanted to do things, and being a woman alone in that society, you are so limited in your movement and your status in society because you don’t have the protection of a husband. It’s not because you’re nobody if you’re not married. It’s a form of protection. If you are married, your status is very clear, there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind, no room for anyone to doubt your intentions or your motives or your goals.’

  Their marriage contract was signed with minimal formality in Kabul, and celebrated with separate small gatherings of a few male and female guests. Abu Walid did not like to socialise and spurned fancy gatherings. And having not yet informed Wafa, who was well known in the women’s circle, he was nervous of become a target of the incessant gossip among the al Qaeda women. While he was in Kabul, Abu Walid lived with one of his daughters and her husband in a commandeered diplomatic house in a leafy street of high-walled compounds in Wazir Akhbar Khan, opposite what is now the Danish embassy. However, his own home was at the al Jazeera office in Kandahar, to which he was eager to return. As Rabiah’s children were at school in Kabul and there was still no school in Kandahar, they agreed that she would continue to spend most of her time in the capital and they would commute between the two cities.

  A few weeks after their marriage, in July or August 2001, Rabiah left the children in the care of a friend and travelled to Kandahar to spend time with Abu Walid. It was a journey of some 400 kilometres through parched mountain desert, which took more than sixteen hours on a road relentlessly pummelled by two decades of war and neglect. Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar had once been the grandly laid out bastion of the Durrani dynasty, which ruled the country for 300 years. It was an important political and religious hub, home to the mausoleum of the eighteenth-century king Ahmad Shah Durrani and the shrine holding the Cloak of the Prophet Mohammed, while its numerous bazaars made it a thriving centre of commerce at the intersection of ancient trade routes between Persia and the Mughal Empire. Its irrigated fields and orchards once produced figs, peaches, mulberries and pomegranates, which were served at the table of the British Governor General of India in Delhi. But by 2001, Kandahar was a wasteland, its orchards abandoned, its fields among the most heavily land-mined terrain in the world.

  The al Jazeera house where Abu Walid lived was in the centre of Kandahar, not far from the compound built for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar by his grateful guest Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden himself lived on a former agricultural cooperative called Tarnak Farm, in an isolated stretch of desert 5 kilo metres from the Kandahar airport. Donated by the Taliban, his 40-hectare complex encircled by a mudbrick wall included dormitories, storage facilities, a mosque, a medical clinic and a crumbling office block. (Unbeknown to bin Laden, the CIA had detailed satellite maps of Tarnak Farm and in 1998 devised a plan to attack the facility and capture him in the middle of the night. The raid never won final approval in Washington.)

  Abu Walid’s modest setup at the al Jazeera house caused Rabiah to laugh at his title. ‘The “bureau chief of Kandahar”! The chief of himself—that’s all he was. It was just him—the bureau consisted of a satellite telephone.’ His living quarters were spacious but mostly empty except for a large library of books and a mass of paperwork. Abu Walid was a voracious reader and avid student of military history, well versed in the theories of Machiavelli, Genghis Khan and the legendary Chinese military sage Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War. When Rabiah met him, Abu Walid was immersed in a project he said he had been working on for three years, a study with the working title ‘The Third Opium War’, which would document the role of the poppy trade in fuelling the Afghan wars. Notwithstanding his talents as an author and unofficial historian, it seems likely that the purpose for which al Jazeera employed him was to facilitate the network’s unique access to the al Qaeda leadership.

  By Rabiah’s account, she and Abu Walid settled into a companionable routine, based more on their shared intellectual interests than mundane domestic needs.

  ‘As a husband he was very easygoing, just in every way’, she says. ‘He’s the type that, if he came home and you said, “I got engrossed in this book and I haven’t cooked anything”, he’d be more interested in knowing what the book was than where his lunch was. He needed a lot of intellectual stimulation. And his interests were very broad.’

  She helped with his research, and they engaged in long discussions in English about politics, Islamic history and the state of the jihad. They argued about the skills of historical figures such as Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler, both of whom Abu Walid regarded as ‘great’ military strategists, while Rabiah considered the former a crazy psychopath and the latter ‘the devil in human form’.

  Abu Walid was a man of sharp intellect and expansive knowledge. But Rabiah was startled to discover after their marriage that he had little interest in the intricacies of Islamic law and practice. ‘Abu Walid studied mechanical engineering; he didn’t study Islam. He didn’t know anything about the deen. I was shocked that someone who was as famous a mujahid as he was, Islamically he had no knowledge. He was the first mujahid I had ever known who knew virtually nothing about Islam. He believed in Islam and the superiority of Islam, but more from an historical and political point of view.’

  He could iterate the dates and details of any number of military engagements, but could barely recite an ayat of the Quran. He often chided Rabiah for being engrossed in the ‘nitty gritty’ of Islam, using the English phrase for what he saw as a pointless fixation with minutiae. He once rebuked her for reading a book by the fourteenth-century jurist Ibn Taymiyya, a leading exponent of military jihad.

  ‘Why are you wasting your time reading that?’ he asked her.

  ‘It’s a book on aqida’, she replied. (Aqida means the Islamic creed or articles of faith.)

  ‘Aqida! Aqida! That’s the cause of all this fitna (strife) we’re going through.’

  Abu Walid believed with a passion that preoccupation with the technicalities of Islam, and the resulting doctrinal disputes and schisms, had become the major hindrance to progress in the Islamic world. ‘He used to blame the scholars of Islam for making Islam complicated’, says Rabiah. ‘He believed Islam had suffered from dogmatism, and that the Quran was a very general guide for human beings and it was not necessary for a layman to be involved in study of the hadith or tafsir (interpreting the Quran). He said we had destroyed Islam by focusing on the nitty gritty.’

  Abu Walid paid little heed to the distinctions between Sunni, Shia and Sufi, ‘hated fanatics’, according to Rabiah, and had no time for the Salafist obsession with detail. ‘Telling him “Your pants are too long” or “Your beard is too short”—he wasn’t interested at all. At all.’

  ‘Allah gave human beings a brain to think with’, Abu Walid used to say. ‘If an Islamic practice holds you back, then you change it.’ In Rabiah’s view this bordered on apostasy, although she didn’t say so at the time.

  Despite his intimate involvement with bin Laden’s organisation, Abu Walid was a free thinker and long-time internal critic of al Qaeda’s management, leadership and strategy, which frequently saw him directly at odds with bin Laden and his cohorts. His extensive writings were later analysed in a study published by the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at Wes
t Point in New York, entitled Cracks in the Foundation: Leadership Schisms in Al-Qa’ida from 1989–2006. This report noted that Abu Walid’s single most important characteristic is his pragmatism. While he shared the broad outlines of the Salafi jihadi ideology, Abu Walid ‘approached jihad as, above all else, a military struggle’. For him, ‘the foremost requirement of a jihadi strategy is that it be effective, not that it be ideologically pure or symbolically potent’.

  His unswerving pragmatism was the spark for recurring conflict with bin Laden and others among al Qaeda’s leaders who took a more doctrinaire line. Abu Walid had infuriated bin Laden during the jihad against the Soviets in 1989, by castigating the al Qaeda leadership over an ill-fated attempt to attack and seize the city of Jalalabad, which failed with extensive loss of life among the mujahidin. Abu Walid knew the operation was backed by the Pakistani ISI and the CIA, and warned that the mujahidin were being manipulated by ‘international powers’. He called the operation foolhardy and ill prepared and likened it to a horde of children being led to their doom by the Pied Piper. He wrote later that had he been in charge, he would have court-martialled bin Laden and his commanders ‘and sentenced them to death’. Bin Laden was furious at Abu Walid’s assessment and ordered it ‘torn to pieces and scattered to the wind’. This only confirmed Abu Walid’s view of the al Qaeda leadership: that ‘their limited mentality will always be disastrous to their operations’.

  Abu Walid’s unstinting critique of al Qaeda’s failings continued through the years, and the fact that bin Laden put up with it is testament to the esteem in which Abu Walid was held. He criticised bin Laden’s autocratic leadership as ‘unhealthy’ and lamented the group’s incompetent administration and poor strategic planning. In 2000 he complained that al Qaeda’s mode of organisation appeared to be ‘random chaos’. ‘Waging jihad like a rhinoceros is stupid and futile’, he railed in one memorable aside. He despaired over what he called al Qaeda’s ‘Salafi predilections’, and said its habit of choosing allies merely because they shared its ideology was ‘a great calamity’. Rabiah recalls hearing much the same. ‘While we were in Kandahar he would complain about them being tunnel-visioned and having closed minds.’

  Abu Walid’s attitude to bin Laden was clearly ambivalent, by Rabiah’s account. ‘Abu Walid respected Osama for his manners. He said he was very humble. He said he was so charismatic. But he hated Wahhabis. He never saw Osama as a leader. Osama was someone who could facilitate, but he never gave him the title of emir.’ Abu Walid’s personal ties of loyalty were less to bin Laden than to his fellow Egyptians, the al Qaeda military chief, Abu Hafs al Misri, and bin Laden’s head of security, Saif el Adel, who was married to Abu Walid’s eldest daughter. He was also devoted to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, to whom he had sworn the bai’at.

  Abu Walid was conspicuous among the dissidents in al Qaeda’s ranks who opposed bin Laden’s declared war on the United States. Rabiah recalls his anger over events such as the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. ‘He thought it was absolute lunacy for anybody in Afghanistan to entertain the thought of taking on America. He thought it was waving a red flag in front of a humongous enraged bull. It used to make him angry.’ These views were echoed in Abu Walid’s writings, some of which were found by the Americans in Afghanistan, others published in Islamist websites and magazines.

  Despite his idiosyncratic position, Abu Walid remained at the centre of al Qaeda’s leadership and planning. The British-born Australian JI member Jack Roche, who was convicted in 2004 of planning to bomb the Israeli embassy in Canberra, has described meeting Abu Walid in Afghanistan in 2000. Roche testified at his trial that ‘Sheikh Abu Walid’ was present with bin Laden’s lieutenants Abu Hafs and Saif el Adel, at a meeting held at Camp Faruq to discuss possible Jewish targets in Australia. Roche says that Abu Walid opened the meeting by asking him, ‘How are things in Indonesia and the Philippines?’ presumably referring to the state of JI’s operations in those countries. After that, Roche says Abu Walid let Abu Hafs do the talking while he ‘just sat there’, and ‘didn’t say much at all’. ‘I saw him as obviously some kind of adviser’, says Roche.

  While Rabiah knew of Abu Walid’s role as an adviser to al Qaeda, she says she was not aware—and professes surprise to learn—that he was a member of the organisation’s governing shura council. That she could have been unaware of this is quite plausible, given the ‘need to know’ rule that was applied to women in the jihadist movement.

  By the time Rabiah met him in mid 2001, she says Abu Walid was ‘very disillusioned’ with bin Laden’s group: ‘He disagreed with them on everything, their methodology, their goals, everything’.

  Perhaps because of his own reservations—perhaps also because he had still not told his first wife Wafa about their marriage—Rabiah says Abu Walid would not allow her to make contact with the al Qaeda women in Kandahar.

  ‘When I first came to Kandahar the women wanted to put on a party out at the mujama—the “place of gathering” where Osama lived. But Abu Walid said, “I don’t want you to go”. He didn’t believe it was sincere.’ Abu Walid apparently suspected that the women’s motivation was not to welcome their new ‘sister’ but to check out his second wife. Seemingly for the same reason he would not allow Rabiah to set up a clinic in their home, or visit bin Laden’s compound to treat the al Qaeda women. ‘Abu Walid didn’t want me to be involved. He didn’t want me visiting the women and the women visiting me, because he didn’t want problems.’

  Tensions between bin Laden and his Taliban hosts had also been simmering for years. Bin Laden’s escalating rhetorical and physical attacks on the United States and its allies had placed the Taliban regime under intense international pressure. Taliban leader Mullah Omar had repeatedly asked bin Laden to refrain from ‘media encounters’ such as his celebrated interviews with CNN and ABC America, which drew attention to his Afghan sanctuary. When bin Laden ignored this, it was the Taliban who shifted him to Kandahar, both for his own protection and to keep him under control. They confiscated his satellite telephones and appointed a ten-man guard to keep watch over him. In June 2001, Taliban leader Mullah Omar declared that any fatwah by bin Laden was ‘null and void’ because he didn’t have the religious authority to issue them. However, the Taliban resisted taking any real action to curb bin Laden’s activities and refused to surrender him.

  Abu Walid described to Rabiah how he had been present at a meeting between Mullah Omar and the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki al Faisal, who visited Kandahar twice to try to persuade Omar to hand bin Laden over. After a previous session, at which Omar had reportedly agreed to this in principle, Prince Turki had ordered the shipment of 400 brand-new pickup trucks from Dubai to Afghanistan as a downpayment on bin Laden. Prince Turki thought it was a done deal. But Mullah Omar’s position had hardened. ‘Just think of the benefits for your people. There is so much we can provide’, Prince Turki cajoled the Taliban leader.

  ‘It’s not allowed. It’s haram (forbidden)’, Mullah Omar kept replying.

  Several times throughout an increasingly tense conversation, Mullah Omar got up and left the room. The third time he came back he was dripping with water. When Prince Turki resumed his efforts at persuasion, Mullah Omar held a hand up to silence him and announced, ‘Bas, bas (Enough, enough)’.

  ‘You have come and you have spoken’, Omar declared. ‘I felt my temper rising so I went out and I did wudu (ritual washing), just as the Prophet said. And I did that three times, because the Prophet said when you lose your temper one of the best ways to control it is to go and do wudu. But there must be something wrong with me. Because I’ve done wudu three times, and the last time I tipped the whole bucket of water over my head. But I can no longer bear to hear what you are saying.’

  Mullah Omar refused to withdraw his protection of bin Laden, and Prince Turki left, empty-handed and furious. Abu Walid’s description of this meeting to R
abiah is corroborated by other published accounts. Another version has Prince Turki leaving with a parting warning: ‘You must remember, Mullah Omar, what you are doing now is going to bring a lot of harm to the Afghan people’.

  Rabiah remained largely oblivious of Afghanistan’s impending doom. Impatient as always to make herself useful, she devised a number of new projects to occupy her time in Kandahar. She planned to write articles for the Taliban magazine and hoped to broadcast a women’s program in English on Radio Shariat. Abu Walid seemed to share her enthusiasm.

  ‘It would have been just a radio program for women—in English because that was seen as educated and progressive’, she says. ‘We wanted them to be aware that suppression of women has no place in Islam. It would have been the same as the program to teach English in the hospital—teaching women through the English medium, but within the bounds of Islam.’ Abu Walid undertook to raise these ideas with the Taliban leadership, whose support for them was far less certain. ‘We were trying to figure out how to do it, because it would have been unacceptable to the Arabs—a woman being on the radio. But we were working on it’, Rabiah says. There was also discussion about whether Rabiah should be sent to interview six female aid workers who had been arrested by the Taliban in Kabul in August 2001, and accused of illegally preaching Christianity. She says her task, had it eventuated, would have been ‘to find out what they were doing and what they had to say’. Like the other proposals, this never came to fruition because of the world-changing events that were about to occur.

  By the beginning of September 2001 there was a growing sense of peril in Kandahar, though very few knew exactly what was about to transpire. ‘We did have a sense that something big was going to happen—but we thought we were going to be attacked’, says Rabiah.

  It has since been revealed that the United States was devising a secret contingency plan to oust the Taliban regime by force if Mullah Omar continued to refuse to hand over bin Laden. While this was not known publicly at the time, it was clear to those in Afghanistan that the United States was running out of patience. Concerns about the possibility of a pre-emptive US strike were raised by al Qaeda trainees at a ‘political course’ presided over by Abu Walid in 2001, and detailed in documents later found by the Americans. A number of trainees asked about the likelihood of a US invasion in questions that were passed on to bin Laden in a submission by Abu Walid at the conclusion of the course.