From London, I watched these developments, outraged at the murder of my Muslim brothers and sisters. By July 1978, Taraki’s requests for Soviet advisers had turned to requests for regiments including rifle divisions and an airborne unit. Slowly, a Soviet presence built in Afghanistan.
But Taraki was behind, history later revealed: the Americans had already authorized CIA paramilitary forces to aid the tribal rebels. As events unfolded, I had no idea I would meet some of these American operatives.
In October 1978, the Nuristani tribes fought back violently against Taraki’s reforms. In March 1979, Afghan rebels in Herat killed ten Afghan soldiers. Taraki’s Air Force struck back, killing twenty-four thousand people in the city of Herat in a massive airstrike. Soon, villages around the major cities—Kabul, Kandahar, and elsewhere—began emptying themselves of young men who joined several insurgent factions, eventually forming an uneasily allied mujahadeen. Four months later, the Americans began arming and training the mujahadeen.
That December, I watched the news as Soviet ground forces invaded Afghanistan. Within a month, they had an established force of one hundred thousand, including eighteen hundred tanks, eighty thousand soldiers, and squadrons of bombers and helicopters. The Afghan government, now led by Hafizullah Amin (who, it is rumored, had Taraki suffocated in his bed with a pillow), hoped the Soviet presence would quell rebellion. Instead, the Afghan tribes rose up in defense of their traditions and in defense of Islam. But even with aid from the Americans, then ultimately the Chinese, Soviet firepower outmatched the mujahadeen and thousands of Afghan rebels died in the withering fire of Russian choppers and bombers.
By then, I was a familiar face at Sheikh Fahim’s villa, and the guards smiled as they waved me through the front gates in early 1980. The sheikh came to meet me in the same den where we had our first encounter, having swallowed the lie that I had not been sleeping with his daughter. I bent to kiss his ring, and he embraced me like a son.
When we had settled into his fancy sofas, Sheikh Fahim leaned forward to pluck a slice of apricot from a silver platter of dried fruits that sat on the table between us. I was surprised when he brought up Afghanistan before I did.
“If we don’t do something swiftly, Muslims will lose Afghanistan because the Americans will defeat the Soviets there,” he said, popping the orange circle into his mouth. “Then we will spend years trying to deliver Afghanistan from the hands of the Americans.”
I gazed out the window at the sheikh’s garden paradise, thinking. How could we help the Afghans? The mujahadeen were already fierce fighters: from the Soviets they had captured caches of RPGs and AK–47s to replace the World War II bolt-action rifles they had been using. Still, the weapons were not enough to battle bombers and tanks; they needed more. The Russians had always been our biggest supplier, but now they were the enemy.
I turned to Sheikh Fahim and shared these thoughts.
“What about the Chinese?” he said.
“Perhaps, but it would be expensive.”
“Kamal, as you know by now, money is not a problem.”
By this time, the sheikh was making direct deposits into a numbered account maintained by the PLO. I left that day with the promise he would pour in seven hundred thousand dollars and boarded a flight for Lebanon. Although I had not seen him in nearly two years, I knew I needed to speak with Abu Yousef.
It would have been the perfect time to stop in and see my mother, whom I missed very much. But I had not seen my father since leaving for Saudi Arabia, and I did not want to see him now. As my status with the PLO grew during the war, he had basked in reflected glory, bragging about me to anyone in the neighborhood who would listen. And the more he did that, the more I grew to resent him. My father loved me not for who I was, not because I was his son, but only because I made him look good. So I stayed away.
I met Abu Yousef in his office at Sabra, the same one where he had dressed me up in a scarf and beret so many years before. He grabbed me in a bear hug. “Yah ibny!” he cried.
To my eyes, Abu Yousef had not changed, except perhaps for a sprinkling of gray in his moustache. Quickly, we caught up on our personal lives—he had a new grandson, he said—then got to the business at hand.
“I have separate intelligence both from the PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood that the Syrians have a cache of SA–7 rockets stored in a weapons depot in the northern city of Aleppo, or Halab,” Abu Yousef said.
“How many rockets?” I said.
“About three hundred.”
Calculating that the sheikh’s money would be enough to buy them all, I told Abu Yousef of Sheikh Fahim’s gigantic deposit.
He chuckled, shaking his head in a slight reproach. “Kamal, these are Syrians. I would not give a Syrian a kroosh for his hummus when I can steal his food from his mouth and pay nothing. The Muslim Brotherhood intelligence was able to provide us the depot hours of operation, the guard shifts, and details on all security procedures. We will save Sheikh Fahim’s money for something else.”
I laughed along with Abu Yousef at my lapse into thinking ethically about Syrians. It was very good to see him.
2
Stealing SA–7s (we called them SAMs) from Hafez al-Assad would be like stealing rats from the mouth of a cobra. The PLO could have done it alone. But when stealing from a cobra, it is sometimes wise to enlist the help of a crocodile.
I had long known a man named Abu Tawfiq, the bodyguard of the ambassador from Iraq. Abu Tawfiq was famous for saving his boss from at least two assassination attempts, one during the Lebanese civil war. Now his country had a new president, Saddam Hussein, a man who had long supported the Palestinian cause. I arranged a meeting between Abu Tawfiq, Abu Yousef, and myself. That led to a meeting at the Iraqi embassy with the ambassador where we shared the intelligence on the Syrian rockets and posed a question: would Saddam like to help the PLO embarrass al-Assad, his hated rival?
The answer returned to us swiftly: yes.
Saddam, who had since the early 1960s consolidated his power in Iraq, had SAM missiles of his own he could have given to help the Afghans. But he agreed to involve his intelligence forces for the sheer joy of mocking al-Assad.
A week later, posing as tourists, a unit of fedayeen rumbled into Syria, through the port city of Tartuse to Halab, in two buses with storage compartments concealed under false floors. Two kinds of conspirators met us in Halab: Saddam’s intelligence agents and Syrian soldiers who, as secret members of the Muslim Brotherhood, had agreed to betray al-Assad and admit us to the weapons depot.
When we rolled up to the depot, the Iraqi agents subdued the Syrian guards who were loyal to al-Assad, while pretending to force the Brotherhood Syrians to give the fedayeen access to the SA–7s. As we loaded the rockets onto the buses, the Iraqi agents shot and injured the Brotherhood Syrians so that it would appear to al-Assad that they had put up a fight. Then we headed for the Iraqi border with three hundred rockets for the Afghans.
The PLO had not used SAMs before, but the Iraqis had. Once in Iraq, we trained for two days at an air base deep in the scorching desert. On the second day I watched a convoy of military vehicles roar onto a ramp area near a warehouse about one hundred meters away from the range area where we were training. A man wearing a khaki uniform, black beret, and sunglasses alighted from the rear of a Jeep and walked to the edge of the tarmac, an entourage trailing out behind him like ladies-in-waiting. The man in the beret held out his right hand. An aide put a pair of binoculars in it, and the man aimed his eyes at us.
“It is Saddam! He is looking at you!” the Iraqi trainers told us reverently. “Wave at him! Show him you are grateful!”
I had heard stories about Saddam Hussein. That he would toss a man into a torture chamber simply for not smiling correctly. I was not afraid to die, but I did not want to die in Iraq, the prisoner of a sadist. So when Saddam Hussein aimed his binoculars my way, I grinned and waved wildly, jumping up and down like a trained monkey.
Among Muslim warriors
, the saying goes, “Me and my brother against my enemy.” Saddam was a staunch Sunni brother who hated the Syrians and the Shia as much as we did. Still, on this mission, we knew we were in bed with real evil. Every one of us was glad when we loaded the SAMs on a Saudi cargo ship bound for Pakistan and left the crocodile behind.
3
Five of us went into Afghanistan. One was a Palestinian named Aassun. He was older than I, in his mid-twenties, and very good with explosives. Tall and slim with curly hair bleached gold by the sun, Aassun could also make anything out of anything. He was like an ancestor to the American television character MacGyver. Zeid, a light-skinned Lebanese with blue eyes, was an intellectual who devoured books the way other men eat meals. He understood Islam inside and out and fully embraced jihad as the ultimate aim of the teaching of the Koran and the hadith. Zeid was from an upper-middle-class family who used some of their money to finance his zealot adventures. His specialty was an ironic sort of factional diplomacy. He knew enough about the quirks of each rebel group to persuade them to lay down their differences—and their guns—long enough to come to the bargaining table. Two other young Lebanese fighters, Samir and Hassan, also went with us.
The Soviets were murdering our brothers and sisters by the thousands. We went to help the mujahadeen repel the Communist invaders. But as they say, war makes strange bedfellows. We loved the idea that the hated Americans were on our side in this war, though for different reasons, and that the Saudis, whom we also hated, were financing our operation.
We were not the only Muslim group to lend assistance to the Afghan mujahadeen. Hezb-e-Islamie-i-Gulbuddin, a radical Islamist party that recruited from Muslim religious schools, helped the Afghans, bolstered by aid from the United States and Pakistan. Another Islamist group, Jamiat-i-Islami, infiltrated northern Afghanistan from Pakistan. The Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan, which promoted jihad among Arab youth, was funded by Saudi Wahhabists. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a radical university professor who had been in Saudi at the same time as I, even issued a fatwa, or religious decree: “Defense of the Muslim Lands, the First Obligation after Faith.” In this document, Azzam declared that, like the Palestinian struggle I had known all my life, the Afghan rebellion was a jihad that required all Muslims to rise up and kill foreign occupiers. Saudi’s grand mufti, Abd al-Aziz Bin Bazz, agreed with the edict. Now, my friend Sheikh Fahim had no need to keep his contributions secret.
For us, the PLO, Saddam Hussein, and the Muslim Brotherhood provided logistical aid. The Syrians (against their will, of course) provided our main weapons. And Sheikh Fahim had lined the purse of a rogue Pakistani general named Hafiz, who agreed to provide us with safe passage from the Turbat region of his country through the mountains of Afghanistan.
When our ship pulled in from Iraq, the Pakistani convoy was waiting near the wharf. Using a small forklift, the ship’s crew loaded the drab olive crates into a pair of Russian-made trucks—ironic, since we meant to go blow up some Russians. Our convoy of trucks and Jeeps rumbled through the ancient wasteland of Turbat, across the Afghanistan border and up into the arid mountains that would lead us to Kandahar. The climb up the mountain roads was treacherous. The trucks were wide and the trails narrow. Our tires bounced dangerously close to the rim of plunging gorges. Many times, the driver came to a complete stop on a steep grade, shifted into the lowest gear, and still could barely get the truck moving again.
Finally, the skinny roads narrowed to what could be called no more than goat paths. At that point, the Pakistanis handed us off to a band of Pashtuns, the dominant Sunni tribe in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis helped us move the rockets from the trucks to mules the Pashtuns had brought. The Pashtuns were mostly farmers and goatherds, but the Soviets had forced many of them to become guerrillas as well. Still, with their wild beards, flowing pants, and tunics, they looked fierce and had a reputation for being experts with knives.
The Pashtuns had brought with them nearly twenty mules and donkeys, the pack animals they still used to transport fruits, grains, and produce to market. But since the beginning of the war, the tribes had begun using them to carry a different kind of cargo—weapons. Aassun and Zeid climbed into the back of a truck and began cracking open the green crates. Inside were smaller boxes, each containing four rockets. With expert speed, the Pashtuns wrapped each rocket box in thick canvas and secured the bundle with rope. They then placed each box in an empty canvas sack, lashing two sacks to each animal so that they hung down, one on each side, secured across the creature’s back by canvas straps. To conceal the swaddled rockets, the tribesmen placed in some of the canvas bags large cloth sacks labeled roz—rice. Other bags they stuffed with blankets and hay, feed for the donkeys and mules. All this was designed to fool the Soviets, who often buzzed legitimate mule trains in search of mujahadeen.
We were only able to transfer one hundred of the rockets to the pack animals and were forced to leave the rest with the convoy. I went and found the Pakistani captain in charge. “Please remind General Hafiz that Sheikh Fahim will be very keen to see us return with a second load of rockets. Tell him to take good care of the sheikh’s property.”
As the convoy rumbled away, Aziz, the Pashtun leader, gave us each a set of Afghan clothing: Flowing pants, tied at the waist and gathered at the ankles, that had once been white but had yellowed to ivory and were covered with stains; a same-colored tunic to the knees; a brown woolen vest and a wool cap. They also handed us each a long beige scarf; I noticed some of the Pashtun wore a similar cloth wrapped completely around their face and neck, revealing only their eyes. I wrapped mine in the same fashion and put on my sunglasses to knock out the glare.
The Pashtuns didn’t talk much, except to each other in their native Beluchi tongue from which I could catch a sprinkling of Arabic. One of the tribesmen, Rafuq, did speak a little more Arabic than the others so I talked with him about the journey ahead, a four-day trek to our rendezvous with an Afghan warlord named Abu Haifem. As we advanced, I kept a wary eye on the narrow path; if you wavered to the right or the left, you would likely fall into a gorge. Looking below, I could see the thread of a small river or stream snaking through the floor of the abyss. Down there, green trees and shrubs flanked the water’s edge. Where we were, only a bland, endless palette of dirt and stone jutted up into a hard blue sky.
The journey was much worse than I expected and grew worse as we went along. Along the lower trails, the desert sun scorched our skin. As we climbed higher, harsh range winds beat us constantly, carrying so much grit that I felt like I was eating breakfast right from the air, even through the scarf that covered my face. As we tramped along with the pack animals, we dodged steaming piles of dung about every twenty feet.
As we gained elevation, the air turned brutally cold. Near the end of the first day, I began to notice Russian helicopters below our altitude patrolling for mujahadeen. On the second day, as we ascended narrow rugged trails, I watched the eastern sky turn a smoky red as a Soviet bomber pummeled an Afghan village.
“Sikhoi,” said Aziz, naming the bomber, which appeared as a long silver tube in the distance. “They are like flying death. When the villagers see them coming, there is nothing they can do but hide and pray.”
I had heard stories of hundreds of mud-walled huts smashed into jagged ruins, thousands of Muslims killed. I stared out at the fiery horizon. “We are here to change that.”
Our rockets represented a chance to liberate the valley villages, temporarily at least, from Soviet air attacks. The villagers were mostly farmers and herders, tied to the land by their crops, their animals, their water supply. Most of the mujahadeen were part-time fighters with responsibilities at home. For too long they had had to leave their villages and livelihoods in the care of women, children, and old men in order to escape the Soviets’ systematic attempts to purge the villages of rebel fighters. Now, if the mujahadeen could control access to the valley with the rockets, they might have time to regroup.
By mid-afternoon, we a
rrived at a cave system called al-qa’idah, or “the base,” a mujahadeen stronghold secreted deep inside a labyrinth of jagged gorges. Abu Haifem met us at the main entrance and introduced himself.
“Welcome, welcome,” he said, greeting us with firm handshakes and a clasping of our wrists that signaled our warrior brotherhood. “Before we go in, I want to tell you that there are rules here. I am the liaison for all things. Anything you want to do, you must go through me.”
I nodded my understanding.
Abu Haifem stepped aside so that I could see deeper in the cave. I had expected a primitive setting with a few mujahadeen. Instead, I saw a fully operational military base thrumming with the low conversation of at least two hundred warriors.
In one area, I saw stacks of supplies—bags of rice and crates of what appeared to be military food rations. In another corner, two mujahadeen guarded an arsenal of AK–47s, RPGs, and an assortment of ammo boxes. I saw a sleeping area and to the left several mujahadeen were gathered, each holding a Koran, in a circle with a man who appeared to be an imam.
The biggest surprise: an entire corner devoted to what appeared to be a communications and surveillance station. Radar and radio equipment, and at least six men in Afghan dress and keffiyeh who were clearly not Afghans. It was instantly clear that the mujahadeen gave that area a wide berth, as if it were surrounded by some kind of force field. Or it might have been the huge, grim-looking man standing at the edge of the equipment holding a grenade-tipped weapon. His forearms were as big as my neck.
Abu Haifem saw me staring. “They are Americans. Don’t cross to that side.”
The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption Page 22