by Adrian Levy
Osama bin Laden, dressed in a military jacket, motioned him over. “Have you seen the news?” he asked, patting the cushion beside him. “How did it look?”
Abu Ghaith nervously described the scenes streaming in from New York.
A broad smile spread across Osama’s face. “We did the Planes Operation,” he boasted, eyes blazing, as the courier murmured a congratulatory prayer and Abu Ghaith, overawed to be with this commanding figure at such an auspicious hour, dropped his gaze.
Unseen figures chanted: “Thanks to God.” Abu Ghaith squinted and made out a phalanx of heavily armed Yemenis lurking in the shadows. “By Allah, it is great work,” they muttered.
Osama silenced them and turned to the Kuwaiti. “What do you think America will do?”
He stuttered and frowned, before settling on a turn of phrase. “If it were proven,” he said cautiously, as if he were in the sharia court adjudicating a marriage dispute, “that you were the one that did this …” He found a tone that to him sounded juridical. “America will not settle until it accomplishes two things: to kill you and topple the state of the Taliban.” Should he have sugarcoated the prognosis?
Osama sighed. “You’re being too pessimistic,” he said. “Lie back and rest a little.”40
Abu Ghaith woke at dawn. Adjusting to the soft light, he saw figures sitting around a kerosene lamp. He recognized some of the faces—important, forbidding men of the movement he had only ever seen from a distance, most of them notorious.
Osama was sitting with Abu Hafs the Commander and Dr. al-Zawahiri. Breakfast was being served on a green plastic tablecloth laid out on the ground. This tableau, the figures hunched over food in the mouth of a cave, reminded him of nativity scenes he had seen in books.
Noticing that he was awake, Osama called him over: “Come eat.”
Sitting beside them, he picked nervously at flatbread, cheese, and dates. For once in his life he was not hungry. Awkwardly, he asked a burning question. “Sheikh, what is it you want me to do?”
Osama smiled. “Deliver a message to the world.”
“Me?” Abu Ghaith was aghast. He was an interpreter of scriptures and an emerging adjudicator in religious disputes, not an orator for Al Qaeda. Everyone who knew him thought of him as diligent, harried, and henpecked. He cast around for a way out. “What about the Mauritanian?”
Osama shook his head. “I want you to deliver the message.”
Someone stepped forward and pressed a sheet of paper into Abu Ghaith’s hand.
“Build and deliver a speech around these bullet points,” said Osama. “You’ve got an hour.” He was readying to address the world.
Since returning to Afghanistan in 1996, Osama had come to realize that his ambition to be the leader of global jihad went beyond the battlefield and depended upon building a cogent, powerful image. While the Prophet of old had stood on high to address the people, these days the message was best sold on TV, with his favorite outlet being the Qatar-based Arab network Al Jazeera. Normally he fronted these reports himself, wearing a brilliant, billowing Saudi thobe (robe) of dazzling whiteness. He often sported an outer cape that encased him in what looked like spun gold. Around his head, a freshly starched white headscarf completed his look of ghazi (holy warrior), a wise, just, and brave leader. But today he needed a genuine religious scholar to make the first public response to what was happening thousands of miles away lest it horrify as many people as it delighted. Once the religious justification was out there, and the ummah had chewed over it, he would gauge their response and then he could crow.
Abu Ghaith strained to read the bullet points. What would the Mauritanian have written? he asked himself, chewing the end of his pen. In the background he heard a VHF handset hissing. Had war already started down on the plains?
“Are you ready?”
Abu Ghaith looked up and saw Osama observing him carefully. He scribbled into a notepad, and scribbled some more, and then he stood, following him over to the plastic cloth where two cameramen composed the scene: Osama flanked by Dr. al-Zawahiri and Sulaiman Abu Ghaith.
A bodyguard dressed the set, propping a rifle up against the rock wall behind them and placing a black briefcase stuffed with U.S. dollars beside Osama. A voice called out for Abu Ghaith to enter and put on a military jacket.
A microphone was thrust into his hands as he saw Osama lowering his head as if in prayer, or contemplation. The Sheikh was feigning modesty, the position of the listener, hearing news from the battlefront delivered by a renowned priest. Abu Ghaith had never felt more uncomfortable in his life.41
He did not know these people, and had no deep affiliation, and yet he was being asked to front an extraordinary act of terror that had eclipsed in visceral scope all previous bombings of American citizens abroad. Scanning the roof of the cavern, he recalled a recent conversation about how a U.S. Tomahawk missile took only twenty minutes to reach its target.42
When he heard instructions for the cameras to roll he began reading, his voice buffeted by the wind whipping up from Khost. “There are thousands of Muslim youths who are willing to die.”
The cameraman interrupted. Could the respected brother please speak more forcefully?
“The hijacking of planes is not going to stop.” Abu Ghaith’s black turban flapped, but he managed to stop it. “[Colin] Powell and others in the American government know that if Al Qaeda promises or threatens to do something they will do it by the will of Allah.”
“Cut.” Osama held up his hand.
He wanted Abu Ghaith to put on an Arab keffiyah (headscarf) so as to look more the part.
Dressed up, Abu Ghaith rattled off some more words.
“Cut.”
Osama was still unhappy. He wanted a new location. Everyone followed him along a path to a meadow flanked by rugged hills before another costume change. This time Abu Ghaith was given an Afghan pakul (felt cap) to wear.
“Finally,” he was directed to say, “we advise … the Muslims in the United States and Britain … not to travel by plane and we advise them not to live in tower blocks.”
Osama beamed and took the microphone. Now it was his turn. “God Almighty hit the United States at its most vulnerable spot.” The Lord had decreed it. “Here is the United States … filled with terror from its north to its south and from its east to its west. Praise be to God.” Osama looked directly into the camera. “What the United States tastes today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years.”
The attacks in New York had divided the world into “one of faith where there is no hypocrisy and another of infidelity, from which we hope God will protect us.”
Cut.
Osama’s courier set off down the mountain with the tape.
September 10, 2001, Wives’ Compound Six, Kandahar
Just twenty-four hours earlier, Osama’s remaining three wives, Khairiah, Seham, and Amal, had been ordered to pack one suitcase each. No one would say why, only that the Sheikh wanted to move them and the youngest children to a safer location. But not his older sons, Saad, Khalid, and Hamzah, who were to join their father and other brothers.
Osama’s sons, most of whom were barely old enough to grow a mustache, were dwarfed by him physically and emotionally. Almost all those he had fathered with Najwa had been born with developmental problems—possibly caused by the fact that their parents were first cousins. The two oldest had been born with hydrocephalus, and the younger ones suffered from varying degrees of autism, especially Saad.43
The exceptions were Khalid, aged thirteen, born to Seham, and Hamzah, also thirteen, his only child with Khairiah. Since early childhood Hamzah had had a natural bond with his father, and he was happy to dress up in camouflage uniforms, bandoliers, and mirrored sunglasses, looking every bit the mini-dictator. When Osama once asked if any of them were willing to become suicide bombers, only Hamzah had volunteered.44 For Osama, all of his children, despite their disabilities, were actors in the pageant of jihad, and he never missed
an opportunity to use them to promote his mission. Rather than celebrating birthdays or going on vacations, the boys were filmed on front lines holding firearms, while daughters were married off at the onset of puberty to mujahideen twice their age.
Khairiah and Seham had gone along with Osama’s wishes gladly, but Najwa had hated the fact that he beat his vulnerable sons in front of his commanders for ludicrous lapses like telling a joke or “showing their teeth.”45 He forced them to dig pits in the desert with their bare hands and sleep outside in the freezing cold. Most of the boys did their best to avoid him, instead seeking out the Mauritanian or Osama’s cheerful Yemeni driver, Salim Hamdan, who taught them to drive in the desert. Until she left, Najwa had struggled to soften this world, and the children had gathered around her gratefully, eager for the treats she procured—a homemade toy, a hand-stitched dress, a tin of tomato puree, a packet of Maggi noodles. Such acts had always infuriated Khairiah and Seham, who were almost as ideological as their husband.46
Now, the only boy left out of the role-playing was Najwa’s nine-year-old son, Ladin. A timid child who flinched at the sound of gunfire, he and his sister Iman remained panic-stricken at being separated from their mother, who was on the way back to her parents in Latakia, Syria.
The women and children filed onto a corroding Soviet-era bus smeared with mud, setting off on a dirt track parallel to the Silk Road.
“When the engine stops, you get off,” Osama told them.
Three uncomfortable days later they lurched to a halt at another qila on the outskirts of Jalalabad, a city in the northeast of Afghanistan. The dun-colored fort was surrounded by four-meter-high mud walls and crowned with guard towers.
Khairiah and Seham recognized it immediately. They had stayed here once before, in 1996, having fled Sudan on a military transporter.47 Younis Khalis, an Afghan warlord sometimes allied to Al Qaeda, had lent them this compound while Osama furnished Tora Bora, his base in the White Mountains, a jagged line of peaks to the south of Jalalabad that merged with the Sulaiman range and was the location of a cave complex to which he had been introduced in 1986.
Osama had grandiosely named this borrowed Jalalabad fort Najm al-Jihad, the Star of the Holy War, but as it was surrounded by adobe huts set into a lunar landscape, Saad bin Laden, his third son and the most profoundly autistic, had dubbed it “Star Wars.”48
In more recent times the camp had become a barracks for the Al Qaeda training camp located at the nearby village of Daruntah. Discarded ammunition boxes, food packaging, and empty bottles of chemicals lay everywhere. Wife number two, Khairiah, the most ideological, organized a cleanup.
They made it homelike by pinning up woolen rugs to absorb some of the winter chill and plumping up thin foam mattresses with old clothes, inspecting the bedding for scorpions and snakes. Najwa’s daughter Iman shared with Seham’s younger daughters, Miriam, eleven, and Sumaiya, nine, while Ladin was taken in by Khairiah, who was lost without her beloved Hamzah. Only wife number four, the silent Yemeni teenager, Amal al-Sadeh, sat it out, exhausted and feeding her baby.
Narrow alleys connected the apartments to a tin toilet outhouse that was swilled out, and in the rudimentary kitchen area someone fixed the water pump and got an old generator running. They would cook on a traditional Afghan bukhar (open stove), and the three nursing mothers were to have the best pickings.
Seham’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Khadija, had recently given birth. She had been married off at the age of thirteen in a double wedding with her twelve-year-old half sister, Fatima (Najwa’s daughter). Their husbands, two Saudi brothers in their thirties, both had wives and children already. Saad’s wife, Wafa, the daughter of a Yemeni mujahid based in Sudan, also had a baby. They had named him Osama.
While the women worked, one of Khalis’s deputies had his men excavate a bomb shelter, filling it with dried food and water.49 He held drills, all the women racing into it when he banged together some cooking pans. Even Ladin had a role. He was told to lie on his back, staring up into the sky, scouting for enemy jets.
Khairiah and Seham, whose religious conservatism meant they could not speak to the male guards, dissected every scrap of news they overheard.
They wondered what would befall those left behind in the cities. Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s wife and five children remained in Kabul, along with Abu Hafs the Commander, whose teenage daughter Khadija was here with them and fretted constantly.
Suffering from a herniated disk, Abu Hafs would go down from the mountains the day after 9/11 and seek treatment in the city, where he would try to keep up his routine, going daily to the Al Qaeda office with his laptop in a briefcase. The rest of the shura and their families were scattered about the country.
Until a few days back, Osama’s four wives had lived in adjoining concrete huts at Tarnak Qila, sharing a cordoned-off yard that they tilled to make a small allotment and where they reared rabbits and chickens. Sometimes, when the compound emptied of men, they gathered here to uncover their faces, while the children fought over a battered Nintendo or scanned their father’s transistor for snatches of Madonna.50
But lately there had been dissonance.
When wife one, Najwa, married Osama in 1974, she had just turned sixteen and he was still forging a reputation as a demon soccer player at his university and for driving fast cars recklessly. Her father and Osama’s mother, Allia, were brother and sister, and she had been charmed by the doe-eyed shyness of her cousin, who was the seventeenth son of Saudi Arabia’s richest man, although he had grown up as a single child after his father divorced his mother when he was still small.
Eventually finding herself in Kandahar, Najwa had clung to the vestiges of her old life, filling her shelves with foreign cosmetics, curling and coloring her long black hair, and donning a jogging suit after dark to run around the inner courtyard, singing to herself.
Wife number two, Khairiah, Osama’s favorite, had married him in 1985 when he was already well along the path to jihad, a vision she shared. Seven years older than Osama and a child psychologist by profession, she had been introduced by Najwa, who had met her after seeking out help for her disabled sons at a medical clinic in Jeddah. Plain, dour, and humorless, Khairiah had presumed she would spend her life as a spinster until Najwa suggested she join the family. Osama had already taken a second wife, Khadija, who Najwa did not get along with and who he would later divorce. He now wanted another, telling Najwa he needed to have as many children as possible “for Islam.” Determined to have a say in who shared her house and husband, Najwa suggested that ironclad Khairiah could help with their sons’ education. Osama judged that she was doubly perfect as the Prophet had decreed that men should wed “unmarriable” women to enable them to share the joy of motherhood.
Although it took her many years to conceive, Khairiah eventually bore him one child, Hamzah, who inherited his parents’ fervor. Although Khairiah’s physical relationship with her husband had long since ceased, a clean shalwar kameez still hung for him on the back of her bedroom door and a bottle of his favorite aoud oil perfume sat in the bathroom. A force of nature who Najwa had come to rely on to care for her disabled sons and otherwise deal with their husband, Khairiah had evolved into the extended family’s emira (matriarch)—and it was in her room in Kandahar that everyone had gathered to resolve disputes and discuss impending changes, or to lobby for an extra sack of rice, basic medicine, or schoolbooks.
Khairiah was unflappable when it came to births or childhood illnesses, giving way occasionally to Dr. Aisha Siam, the only female doctor in Kandahar, or to Dr. al-Zawahiri, who was a trained doctor and liked to dispense advice from behind a thick curtain. Osama’s attitude toward his family’s medical needs was more negligent. He advanced a spoonful of honey as a desert wonder cure for everything, but honey had not worked for Najwa’s oldest two sons. Her oldest, Abdullah, born in 1977, had become ill and dehydrated after Osama banned his wife from using a baby bottle. The next baby, Abdul Rahman, had suffered serious developme
ntal problems when his hydrocephaly went untreated on his father’s orders. The wives of Osama’s brothers had tried to intervene to no avail.51
Wife number three had arrived two years after Khairiah, in 1987. Another uber-religious Saudi woman, Seham claimed to be directly descended from the Prophet Mohammed and her brother was one of Osama’s Saudi fighters in Afghanistan. She held a Ph.D. from Medina University and had worked as a teacher before marriage, at which point she dedicated herself to Islam and Osama, in equal measures, setting herself the task of having as many children for the jihad as she could. After a daughter, Khadija, was born in 1987 she had a son, Khalid. The boy was quiet and withdrawn, unlike his older sister or his younger siblings, feisty Miriam and Sumaiya.
After four children, Seham had shut the bedroom door and gone back to her role as a teacher, turning her hut in Kandahar into a classroom, complete with slates, chalk, and a few secondhand matriculation papers purchased at the bazaar. Osama sometimes interrupted, conducting impromptu math and English tests, with his children lined up in order of size as his own father had done with him. The only other time they spent together was on infrequent day trips into the desert, when he and his bodyguard would drive ahead in a pickup, and they would trail in his dusty wake in a rickety bus. For a few hours they would sit together in the hot sand to listen to his stories about great battles against the Soviets, before he took off in the Hilux and they made the lurching journey home.
But the arrival of wife number four, eighteen-year-old Amal, had upended this unconventional but otherwise calm domestic scene.
June 2000, Ibb, Yemen
Osama bin Laden’s decision to marry a Yemeni teenager was as much an attempt to deal with an existential question as it was about his libido. By 1999, when he had first come up with the idea of taking another wife, Taliban leader Mullah Omar had made it clear that he was running out of patience. Yemen, the land of Osama’s forefathers, a skeletal state and the poorest country in the Arab world, was an obvious choice as a potential sanctuary, should he ever need to escape. Unstable, sparsely populated, and bordering his native Saudi Arabia, it was the kind of holed tapestry where Al Qaeda could prosper in the moth-light.