by Adrian Levy
As more significant figures arrived, Saif, who assumed a leadership role, suggested that the shura coalesce in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city and one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. If not there, Zabol—an Iranian border town located several hundred miles to the south, midway between the dried-out Lake Hamun and the Hirwan River—which was mainly inhabited by Arab nationals and where Arabic was the lingua franca.78 Whatever their choice, they had to keep the Quds Force at arm’s length while they consolidated in communities they could trust, gathered their strength, and prepared for new attacks on Western targets.
“We began to converge on Iran one after the other,” Saif recalled.79 “We set up a central leadership and working groups. We began to rent apartments for the brothers and some of their families.” They also began to prepare for the arrival of the most precious and sensitive group of all: Osama bin Laden’s family.
They were presently lurching in a bus across the emptiness of Afghanistan’s Desert of Death, Dasht-e-Margo, the driver craning to see through a dust-covered windshield as the man sitting next to him studied a map searching for coordinates that had been transmitted in a letter disguised as a religious edict.
Starting in Karachi, the bus had picked up more passengers in Quetta before skimming around the bottom of Afghanistan and had taken more than a week to reach the border. Death in the desert came on like a haboob, the sandstorms that regularly darkened the skies to the northeast. In the faceless, roadless terrain, several times when the sand covered everything, they got lost and had to double back. The children, who slept fitfully in abandoned buildings or shepherd’s huts, were ragged.
Only the man in the passenger seat seemed alert. He was Saudi fighter Abu Abdallah al-Hallabi—better known by his kunya Daood and for the fact he was married to Osama’s daughter Khadija. He clutched a pocket Koran, hoping it would ward off every kind of accident that however minor in this environment could prove fatal. Bandits preyed on travelers forced to cross this unforgiving area of western Nimruz Province, and the food the women in the group had brought from Pakistan was long eaten. Empty water bottles rattled about on the floor as the bus plunged through potholes and groaned over dry riverbeds.
Eventually, they reached a scruffy border outpost. The women stepped down, clinging to their robes as they were whipped by a violent storm. They watched nervously as Daood handed over a bundle of dollars and the family’s well-worn Sudanese passports.80 They had left their real Saudi documents behind in Karachi with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, who had helped them invent cover stories: their husbands and fathers had been martyred fighting the Americans. They were to invoke Iranian generosity to get home. The border guards, who, over the past six months had seen plenty of families like these, waved them through.
The women and children bade farewell to Daood, who got back on the bus to begin a long return journey to Quetta.
Waiting on the Iranian side were Sunni families loyal to Hekmatyar’s network. As instructed by General Suleimani, the Quds Force had smuggled the veteran warlord back into Afghanistan, where he immediately galvanized forces to attack America, before traveling to Kunar to meet Osama and further secure his hideout.
Hekmatyar’s Iranian network would transport the bin Laden caravan in two old trucks to a remote farm he owned east of Zabol.
As the oldest son present, Saad was nominally head of the bin Laden family party; but given his mental issues his aunt, Osama’s wife Khairiah, took charge, trailed by her hotheaded teenage son, Hamzah. Accompanying them were Saad’s wife and son and Najwa’s married daughter, Fatima, whose husband had vanished at the border when the family party had been ambushed on its way into Pakistan. With Fatima were her younger siblings, Iman and Ladin. There were also the young families of Othman and Mohammed bin Laden. The sons themselves continued to hide, Othman shadowing Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mohammed with his father.
Those in the family who had elected to stay behind in Pakistan with what was now being described in Washington as “Al Qaeda Central” were Osama’s third wife, Seham, and three of her children, Khalid, Miriam, and Sumaiya. Her married eldest daughter, Khadija, had also insisted on remaining in Pakistan and was now waiting anxiously in Quetta for the return of her husband, Daood, the Saudi fighter who had escorted the women and children to Iran.
The Zabol farmhouse was a fortress in the desert. The younger women tried to settle the children, while Khairiah sent word of their arrival to Saif al-Adel. He was shuttling between Al Qaeda cells hiding in Mashhad, Zahidan, Shiraz, Tehran, and small towns on the Caspian Sea.81 It took him several days to reach the families, taking with him whatever he could find en route—dried dates and small gifts including books on jurisprudence and hadiths supplied by the Mauritanian.
Saif had news for everyone. His own wife, Asma, and children had reached Tehran and had been reunited with Asma’s father, the former Al Jazeera bureau chief.82 The widow and children of the martyred Abu Hafs the Commander were also there, but Dr. al-Zawahiri’s wife and two children were dead. Khairiah, who knew the woman well, was horrified.
Anxious, Saad, a creature of habit who found every small change in his routine alarming, nervously asked about their safety. Would they be spending the rest of their lives like this? He wanted to go home to his grandmother, Osama’s mother, Allia, who lived in the exclusive bin Laden family compound in Jeddah.
Saif gently reminded Saad that their Saudi citizenship had been rescinded long ago, and that Riyadh’s proximity to the Bush administration ruled out any rapprochement. There was another problem. The Sudanese passports had now lapsed, meaning they had no travel documents with which to fly.83
When someone suggested traveling overland to Turkey and then crossing into Syria, where they could reach out to Saad’s estranged mother, Najwa, and their brother Omar, Saad became enthusiastic.
Again, Saif tempered his expectations. According to news reports in the Arab press, President Bashar al-Assad’s intelligence agencies had been cooperating with the United States in its 9/11 investigation, providing information about lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, who had worked in Aleppo in the mid-1990s. Saif advised everyone to stay here for now and keep their heads down, which meant no phone calls.
The advice was of no comfort to Hamzah, who still carried the string of prayer beads his father had given him in the olive groves of Melawa, a moment so painful that he had written about it, saying he “remembered every smile that my father smiled at me, every word that he spoke to me, and every look that he gave me.”84
When Saif made it clear to the family that he was directly in touch with the Sheikh, Hamzah brightened up. Khairiah suggested that he write a letter.
He began immediately.
“Oh father!” he wrote. “Where is the escape and when will we have a home? Oh father! I see spheres of danger everywhere I look.” Born into jihad, Hamzah had never known peace. Now that he was in Iran, he could see no future. “Tell me father something useful about what I see,” he pleaded. “What has happened to us?”85
A few weeks later, Osama, incredibly, replied: “Oh son! Suffice it to say that I am full of grief and sighs. Pardon me my son but I can only see a very steep path ahead.”86 There was a message for all the family in these words. Even though they had reached Iran, they were still not safe. “Security has gone, but danger remains,” Osama warned.
Even in hiding, he saw himself as a vengeful savior. “For how long will real men be in short supply? I have sworn by God Almighty to fight the infidel.”
Khairiah comforted her son and told him to heed his father’s message. Hamzah’s time in the Iranian wilderness should not be wasted. Instead, he should study and prepare for the day he could “march with the mujahideen legions.”
April 2002, Iran
Alarming news arrived at the Zabol fort. Furious at being labeled as part of Bush’s Axis of Evil, the reformers in the Iranian government had ordered the intelligence ministry to round up all Al Qaeda families and expel them. President Khatami,
who had come to power promising to take on the unelected Iranian state and reduce the power of the military, was determined to show Washington he was in charge.
General Qassem Suleimani, who was known for his unwavering loyalty to Iran, loved a fight and had the support of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who described him as “a living martyr of the revolution.” But at this juncture Qassem could do nothing but watch as Al Qaeda wives and daughters were detained and sent to an abandoned Iraqi refugee camp in the desert outside Arak, a city in the parched center of the country. Former fighters that Khatami’s agents arrested were transported to Rajai Shahr, a prison for political detainees in Karaj, where they were photographed and fingerprinted, being made ready to be bartered.87
Khatami had a plan. Arabs fleeing Afghanistan and Pakistan would be handed over to their respective governments or offered to the United States. To show that he was serious, and in a sideswipe at General Suleimani, Khatami had sixteen Saudi fighters deported to Riyadh and handed another low-level Al Qaeda group to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who turned them over to America, after which they were transported en masse to Guantánamo Bay. Several Al Qaeda foot soldiers were issued with Iraqi refugee passports and put on flights to Southeast Asia, the authorities at the other end having been tipped off about their arrival. The net was being gathered in.
But in Iran every high corresponded to a low, and the guests hiding out at Hekmatyar’s Iranian farmhouse learned from Saif al-Adel that the Quds Force had become emboldened. Senior Al Qaeda figures from bomb makers to former camp commanders, biological weapons specialists, operational planners, and financial chiefs were once more being smuggled into Iran through Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s northerly route. The fight was far from over.
Saif, feeling more confident, started to plan a new campaign for Al Qaeda. “We formed some groups of fighters to return to Afghanistan to carry out well-prepared missions there,” he wrote.88 “We began to examine the situation, looking for new places to hide the fraternal brothers.” For months he had been carefully monitoring the U.S. campaign for a war against Saddam Hussein, with President Bush telling the BBC in April 2002, “I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go.” Surprised that the U.S. had taken such a turn as a result of 9/11, but happy to have been handed such an opportunity, Saif determined that Al Qaeda should begin building up a force on the Iran-Iraq border, ready to take on the Americans whenever they arrived. What he did not realize was that the person he entrusted to scope out this critical new mission—Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—was one of the reasons Bush was citing for taking out Saddam.
In late 2001, Zarqawi had traveled to the Iraqi border town of Khurmal to negotiate an allegiance with a hard-line Kurdish fighting group called Ansar ul-Islam. It was led by a Kurdish veteran of the Afghan jihad who, taking the lead from Saddam Hussein, had used poison gas against the Kurds in 1988 and was developing cyanide gas, toxic poisons, and ricin for potential use against Europe and the United States.89 Zarqawi found himself at home among these harsh ideologues, who strictly observed the ancient hudud punishments of execution, beheading, stoning, and amputation. Local Sufi shrines were desecrated, singing was banned, and the only girls’ school in the area had been destroyed. In his present location, Zarqawi was also safe, since Khurmal was in Kurdish territory and so in a U.S. no-fly zone, established at the end of the first Gulf War. But that did not stop the United States from watching.
That winter, Zarqawi and Ansar ul-Islam’s activities were observed by a CIA forward-deploy team, which reported back to Langley that a group of Islamists who might or might not be linked to Al Qaeda was playing with ricin and bioweapons in a small factory in the Khurmal hills.90 When the team cabled back to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) in Langley recommending an operational strike, the intelligence was fast-tracked over to the White House.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was keen to go ahead, but Secretary of State Colin Powell argued against it. The United States was not yet ready to declare war with Iraq, although plans were advancing. Why take out one small faction now when Zarqawi and his group could be used to justify the war?91 In June 2002, Bush vetoed the Pentagon plan for military action, enabling Zarqawi to slip down into Baghdad with Ansar’s help and to seed more sleeper cells ready to greet the Americans in the Iraqi capital.
As plans for “regime change” in Iraq advanced in Washington, the CTC went into overdrive on Zarqawi, mapping his background in Zarqa, his religious conversion in prison with Maqdisi, and his troubled relationship with Osama.92
Unaware of this mounting attention, Zarqawi sent word to Saif al-Adel in Iran that he needed more cash, more fighters, and Al Qaeda’s official approval. Saif would have to convince the shura to endorse a man it despised. He called a “consultative council” in which he drilled those present on the need to focus on Iraq, describing how Zarqawi was inspired by reading about Nur al-Din Zengi, who in the twelfth century had repelled the European Crusaders from the Levant, and his protégé, Saladin, who had battled Richard the Lionheart. In Saif’s eyes, the Jordanian mujahid was a totally different man from the one he had first met in Kandahar in 1999, someone who back then had been “not really very good with words” and whose “life experience was not very rich.” Now, he was “one of the best lions and heroes,” reading as many books about Zengi and Saladin as could be found in the remote border region.93 Zarqawi had matured, argued Saif. He now understood his place in history. “His hatred and enmity against the Americans shaped his new character,” reasoned Saif, whose own attitude toward America had also significantly hardened. Gone was his fervent opposition to random attacks that caused civilian casualties, a position he had voiced during the final shura meeting with Osama in Kandahar, prior to 9/11. Now Saif talked of how Al Qaeda needed to strike at “the head of the snake” to “smash its arrogance” and to “prompt it to come out of its hole.” They should deal “consecutive blows to undermine it and tear it apart.” Zarqawi’s activities in Iraq—aided by Ansar ul-Islam—would foster Al Qaeda’s “credibility in front of our nation and the beleaguered people of the world.”94
Saif gained the shura’s consensus and issued a stark warning: “Woe unto the Americans, British, and everyone who supports them when our nation wakes up.”
Now that he had official backing, Zarqawi plotted to use Iranian president Khatami’s repatriation program to channel hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters from Iran to Iraq so as to expand his own group—Tawhid al-Jihad—and assist Ansar ul-Islam.
The first company of men bound for Iraq converged on the Amir Hotel in Tehran, where the Quds Force, also keen to see the United States bled in Iraq, issued them with fake travel documents and cash. They would travel by air, while a second group made its way overland, through Kurdish-held territory. According to Saif, they “would then spread south to the areas of our fraternal Sunni brothers.”
During the next fourteen months, Zarqawi traveled widely, through Iran, Kurdistan and northern Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, where he visited the Ayn al-Hilwah Palestinian refugee camp in the south, which became another recruiting ground.95 Saif al-Adel saw this growing brigade of Jordanian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Palestinian volunteers as a perfect tool to use against U.S. forces, as their “skin color and tongue enabled them to integrate into the Iraqi society easily.”
Zarqawi’s plan became ever clearer, he explained in couriered messages to Saif. He would focus his energies on the Sunni Triangle—a densely populated region lying to the north and west of Baghdad bounded by Baqubah to the northeast, Tikrit to the north, and Ramadi to the west. He had already begun training fighters and setting up safe houses and military camps there, using funds from Gulf supporters channeled through Iran.
Despite President Khatami’s best efforts, Al Qaeda, working with the Quds Force, had turned Iran into its main supply artery for the coming war in Iraq.96
April 2002, Tehran, Iran
As he sauntered along wide-open boulevards, enjoying the cool evening air, no one noticed
the Mauritanian. What had been a long beard was now closely cropped and the Afghan desert robes he had worn for years had been swapped for a tidy pair of suit trousers and a buttoned-up shirt. These days everyone addressed him as Dr. Abdullah, a scholarly aesthete.
Although a team of Quds Force “hosts” guarded him and his family around the clock, he was able to take a constitutional stroll most days. He claimed it was for health reasons, but he used these free moments to duck into Internet cafés. After the roundups of Arab families had begun in Tehran and elsewhere, he had received dozens of calls from Pakistan from concerned brothers wondering if it was still safe to travel.
Unlike Saif al-Adel, who dealt directly with senior Quds Force officers on a regular basis, some of whom he had known since 1995, the Mauritanian had felt personally “shocked and embarrassed” by the arrests and unsure how to react to them. “I was the one who had concluded the contract on their behalf with the Iranians,” he recalled. Now he felt a duty to keep everyone abreast of the rapidly developing situation. He demanded a meeting with one of General Suleimani’s officers, a conversation that was “unpleasant and angry.”
The Quds Force had been taken by surprise by the reformers and by the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, which wanted to take over the Al Qaeda operation. General Suleimani was not used to losing political ground and his man shifted the blame to Mahfouz: “The root cause of the arrests is mainly due to your people’s phone calls, which are now being tracked in Iran.” Why couldn’t the Arabs learn to shut up?
The Mauritanian bridled.97
Soon after, intelligence officials barged into his home and demanded his cell phone, claiming they were doing it for his own security as they had intelligence that “foreign spy networks” were monitoring his number. From now on he had to resort to Internet cafés, from which he Skyped Quetta. “No one else should come,” he told everyone. “Until Iran decides where it stands.”