The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  During the 1990s, Abu Ayyub had made bombs at Al Qaeda training camps. After meeting Zarqawi in Afghanistan, he had accompanied him to Iraq, where he was put in charge of recruiting suicide bombers. Abu Ayyub shared Zarqawi’s obsession with “end of days” revelations and Naeed bin Hamed’s Book of Tribulations. Since taking control in Iraq, he had declared that the Mahdi, the Muslim savior, would soon come to alleviate Iraq’s suffering.

  Surrounded by the horror of a war that was costing almost a thousand Iraqi lives a month, hundreds of new supporters were drawn by Abu Ayyub’s arguments that doomsday was approaching, and in October 2006 he formally took over the group and renamed it Islamic State of Iraq.48 Sometimes he referred to it as Islamic State in Iraq, suggesting that it was a caliphate. However, as an Egyptian he knew he would always be regarded as a foreigner and so while he took the role of “minister of war,” he had cast around for an Iraqi front man, settling on Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, who grandly claimed descent from one of the Prophet’s grandsons although he was in reality nothing more than a former police officer who had been dismissed from the force for his ultraconservative views. Now he was proclaimed as the “commander of the faithful,” a title traditionally held by the Taliban’s Mullah Omar.49

  From the letters flowing to Osama it was clear that Al Qaeda supporters around the world were confused. Was the new Islamic State in Iraq part of Al Qaeda or something different? Was it a caliphate or an emirate? Were Osama bin Laden’s and Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s oaths of allegiance to Mullah Omar now redundant, given that Abu Umar was the new commander of the faithful? “How can we pledge allegiance to Abu Umar al-Baghdadi when we have pledged allegiance to Mullah Omar?” asked one. Was it Islamic State of Iraq or in Iraq? Was a former policeman who had made ends meet before the U.S. war by repairing televisions and dishwashers really now more important than Osama bin Laden? “What do we do with the pledge of allegiance to Shaykh Osama?”

  Al-Zawahiri and Osama wrote a complaint to Abu Umar, and Islamic State’s shadow leader Abu Ayyub wrote back, telling them that Abu Umar had pledged an oath to Al Qaeda Central in front of the jihad brothers in Iraq but that they did not want to announce it publicly “due to some political considerations.”50

  Abu Ayyub then addressed the Iraqi people, predicting that the Mahdi would come within the year. A caliphate needed to be in place to help the Mahdi fight the final battle on Iraqi soil, he said.

  Because the incipient Islamic State needed to beef up its membership, many people were allowed to join without proper vetting and the ranks were soon filled with former Saddam Hussein loyalists and intelligence cadres. Rivals were kidnapped, tortured, and killed, as scores were settled that had nothing to do with the outfit. The putative figurehead, Abu Umar was kept out of the loop and “didn’t know what [was] going on around him.”51 If anyone doubted the new group’s virility, insurgent attacks were soon averaging more than ninety a day. But most of the casualties were Muslims.

  Those outside the group could see only chaos. The situation in Iraq was “escalating,” one letter writer warned Osama, talking of “imminent catastrophe” and advising: “This is your last chance to remedy the jihad breakdown that is about to take place in Iraq.”52 Osama should take back control of the Iraq situation “through a speech that you air via the satellite TV stations” or be damned. “You should be aware that on the day of reckoning, you are responsible in front of God for blessing the work done by Al Qaeda in Iraq without disavowing the scandals they are committing in your name.”53 Abu Ayyub and his madness had to be stopped.

  Before Osama had a chance to respond, Abu Umar, the shadow commander of the faithful in Iraq, announced the complete dissolution of Al Qaeda in Iraq. All its fighters would be reassigned to Islamic State of Iraq or punished. “Al Qaeda is but one of the groups in Islamic State,” he declared. His media department followed up: “The brothers previously in the organization of Al-Qaeda in Iraq became part of the ‘army of the State.’ ”54 Soon after, Abu Umar emerged to decry the “lies” circulating about the group’s brutality and to lay down nineteen new laws that Islamic State’s subjects would have to abide by. Those who refused would be crucified, beheaded, stoned, or flogged.55

  The apocalyptic messages undermined Osama’s authority, but he could not distance himself completely as Al Qaeda needed to keep a hand in the Iraq game. However, after reports filtered back to Abbottabad that an Al Qaeda fighter who had flipped to Islamic State had beheaded an eight-year-old girl, he asked al-Zawahiri to address the issue through As Sahab.56 After weeks of to-ing and fro-ing, al-Zawahiri decided to announce his official support, saying, “It is a legitimate emirate established on a legitimate and sound method.”57

  Soon after, a mujahid who until recently had acted as chief justice to Islamic State arrived in Damadola and warned al-Zawahiri he had made a serious mistake. They could not contain the Iraqi storm. It was not an emirate but a rolling war crimes machine. Islamic State was “approaching the abyss.” More than 2,500 civilians were being killed by the month, many of these executions posted online like serial snuff films. Al Qaeda’s brand was bloodied and battered.58

  Frustrated at his inability to influence Islamic State in Iraq, Osama turned his attention to something he could control, his wives and children. The compound had been overhauled as a result of the 2005 earthquake; a third floor had been added with a terrace protected by a huge seven-foot-high privacy wall. The bedroom on the right facing the balcony was Osama’s private domain, shared most nights with Amal, while Seham and her children occupied the bedroom opposite. The younger children slept downstairs in bedrooms opposite the vast “media center,” which now took up three rooms and was filled with neat desks, computers, and tidily filed boxes filled with thumb drives, videotapes, and audiotapes—a situation room waiting for a war.59

  Much of the time Osama complained of feeling ill, describing his symptoms as dehydration and a lack of energy. He spent hours sitting cross-legged on the floor wrapped in a woolen shawl and watching reruns of the 9/11 footage, saved programs about the ongoing search for him, and daily news on Al Jazeera and BBC World.

  During the day, Amal and Seham stayed out of his way and kept the children busy. Seham had set up a classroom, while Amal cooked with Seham and Osama’s daughters Sumaiya and Miriam. Ibrahim, fearful of discovery, had banned the women from throwing anything away, so the common areas were filled up with boxes of broken shoes, old clothes, and disused kitchen and electrical equipment. Because none of the many members of the household ever went out and all meals had to be prepared on two ring burners, the kitchens stank and were filthy.60

  On Osama’s suggestion, a builder had cut off the far end of the main garden and erected a small, box-like, single-story annex inside a tight triangular courtyard. This was where Ibrahim now lived with Maryam, their children sleeping on cots lined up along the walls, the other half of the building taken up by a kitchen. To complete the separation between the two households, a lockable gate was fitted between the two courtyards to which only Ibrahim had the keys. Abrar and Bushra still lived on the ground floor of the main house.

  Bushra and Maryam were the main security problem, Osama warned, as they frequently left the compound and used their cell phones. He worried about them being tracked, their calls being eavesdropped on, or what they might say should they be arrested. Although he tried to keep them inside as much as he could, Ibrahim was unable to stop them from going out to meet other family members, shopping or visiting the pharmacist.

  When it came to managing his own family, the years of exile had not softened Osama. Amal’s children were now old enough to question their confines and frequently asked to go outside to meet their “cousins,” who they watched playing with balls and waterpistols.61 Osama would not budge, forcing his children into long hours of religious study, rapping their knuckles with a cane if they looked out of a window or made too much noise. Only the youngest were allowed outside with him when he made his daily perambulations under the g
azebo Khalid had erected, Osama walking with his wide-brimmed hat shielding his face. Seham, Sumaiya, and Miriam only went out if there was a medical emergency, in which case they were driven in a red Suzuki van, their faces obscured by dupattas.

  Most frustrated was Khalid. Eighteen years old but still a virgin, he was ensconced all day with his father, typing up his speeches and filing papers. The boy had grown up hoping to become a mujahid but now he was a secretary. The only time he got to go outside was to attend to the family cow or work in his vegetable garden, an enclosed and muddy patch of land to the west of the main house.

  Respite came in June 2007 when his sister Khadija wrote. “I want to relay to you good news.”62 The family of the martyred Egyptian had finally agreed to him marrying their pretty daughter Karima. “They do not object,” she said. The reason for the long delay was that Karima had been busy memorizing the Koran. Now that she had finished, she had one question to ask her future husband. Would she be expected to move to Abbottabad or would he go to Waziristan where she was? “If the marriage happens, God willing, come here for jihad?”

  Suspecting that her brother would prefer the second option, Khadija continued: “Pray to Allah you join us soon.”

  Karima was to be Khalid’s ticket out of Abbottabad.

  July 2007, Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), Islamabad

  Nothing was going right for Pervez Musharraf. His hoped-for grand policy idea, the Waziristan Accord, had been shot down by America in Chinagai, and the ISI had still not wrested control of the drone program from the CIA. To democrats the president remained a bugbear. For Islamists he was a traitor, and the clerical brothers who ran the Lal Masjid in Islamabad, preachers who had single-handedly demoralized the army by calling for the corpses of soldiers killed in Waziristan to be concealed, now upped the rhetoric. They drummed up a following that looked and acted like the Taliban, and their prayers and catcalls rang out across the capital.

  Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi and his brother Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi began advocating for imposition of sharia law across Pakistan, sending out groups of male and female students who resembled the Taliban’s “Vice and Virtue” brigades. Armed with sticks and knives, they attacked massage parlors, kidnapped Chinese prostitutes, and burned down restaurants accused of serving alcohol. Shops selling CDs were ransacked.

  At the beginning of July, Musharraf snapped. Accusing the mosque authorities of harboring militants connected to the London transport bombings of July 2005—an attack said to have been inspired but not commissioned by Al Qaeda—the police raided the mosque, only to be beaten back on live television by baton-wielding female students. On July 3, a fresh battle erupted, as police tried to lay barbed wire around the mosque’s precinct. In firing that started from inside the mosque, nine people were killed and 150 injured before the students bolted the doors.

  As worried parents gathered by the roadside, the ISI cut off all live TV and brought in Osama’s ally Fazlur Rehman Khalil of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen to negotiate a cease-fire. But Khalil would not, or could not, bring the two sides together, leaving Musharraf to call up his old unit, the Special Services Group (SSG)—in which Ilyas Kashmiri had once served.

  The interior of the mosque had been booby-trapped, and the SSG commander was killed. Charging down into the basement, his men encountered militants armed with machine guns, shoulder-fired rockets, and Molotov cocktails.

  The battle raged on for eight days until July 11, when officials reported that the bullet-ridden Lal Masjid complex had been cleared and that suicide belts, night-vision goggles, and antitank and antipersonnel land mines had been recovered, along with the bodies of dozens of foreign militants allied to Al Qaeda itself. How they or their arms cache had reached the capital unseen was never answered, and how many had actually died was never verified.

  Official figures put the dead at one hundred, including Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi, his mother, and his nephew. The brother, Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi, was caught trying to flee the complex dressed in an oversized burqa, just as other Al Qaeda members had done to escape the post-9/11 bombardment of Afghanistan and prison in Iran.

  Musharraf did not crow, as he knew that the sight of soldiers smashing up a mosque was incendiary news in Pakistan. But Dr. al-Zawahiri capitalized, issuing a video calling for a holy war against Pakistan’s security forces. “Muslims of Pakistan: your salvation is only through Jihad,” he declared, dressed in white like a saint against one of Azzam the American’s green-screen backgrounds. “Rigged elections will not save you, politics will not save you, and bargaining, bootlicking, negotiations with the criminals, and political maneuvers will not save you.” Turning his attention to the president, he accused him of having committed “a dirty, despicable crime” in killing Abdul Rashid Ghazi. “Musharraf and his hunting dogs have rubbed your honor in the dirt in the service of the Crusaders and the Jews.”

  Rumors spread that Dr. al-Zawahiri felt so emboldened he visited Islamabad to see the wrecked mosque for himself.63 His battalions were soon raging across Pakistan. By the end of the month the country had been rocked by seven huge suicide-bomb blasts, most of them directed against military and police targets. More than 150 officers died in attacks at police training centers in Dera Ismail Khan and Hangu. A military convoy was confronted in Miram Shah. Lawyers in Islamabad were bombed and shot at, while a mosque used by soldiers in Kohat collapsed after a colossal blast, as Al Qaeda fought on three fronts: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan.

  August 2007, Block 300, Quds Force Training Facility, Tehran, Iran

  The car had been fitted with opaque glass windows and drove them out of Block 100 and on a circuitous tour of Tehran, before pulling back into the training facility and eventually stopping at a new gate marked Block 300. The charade had fooled no one, including the other inmates of Block 100, who soon realized the Mauritanian had left them, having bargained to get himself out.64

  As they entered Block 300, the family was stopped in its tracks by a huge crowd of smiling faces—women and young children on one side, men and teenage boys on the other. “The joy was overwhelming,” the Mauritanian said. “Happiness, excitement, and pleasure beyond description.”

  He caught sight of Osama’s sons Saad, Mohammed, Othman, Hamzah, and Ladin. In the six years since he had last seen them they had all grown up. Saad, now twenty-eight, was the father of three children, a boy named Osama and two little girls, Asma and Duha. He was anxious to inform the Mauritanian that a few months back his wife had had another son who had died because the Iranians had refused a hospital visit. In tears, Saad had held the dead baby up to the security cameras so the administrators could see the consequences of their actions.65

  Mahfouz noted that Othman, twenty-three, most resembled his father in appearance and stature. He wore a thick beard and had a reputation for punching walls. He had taken a second wife, Sofia, one of Saif al-Adel’s daughters, and was standing beside his other father-in-law, Mohammed al-Islambouli, who had remained with Osama’s family throughout their Iranian sojourn. Islambouli told the Mauritanian that his wife had died for want of medical treatment while they had been held in Block 200, cut off from the world.

  Mohammed bin Laden, who the Mauritanian had not seen since his wedding day in January 2001, was now twenty-two and the father of two little boys. He appeared to be the sanest of Najwa’s sons. He was quiet, polite, and well-read. His shy wife, Khadija, stood at the back of the crowd.

  The biggest surprise was Hamzah. The last time they had met in Afghanistan in November 2001 he had been a child. Now he was a strapping eighteen-year-old with a beard, married to a daughter of Abu Mohammed al-Masri, Al Qaeda’s Egyptian head of training and the builder of the bombs that had been used to attack the U.S. embassies in East Africa. Hamzah had already fathered a boy, yet another Osama.

  Ladin, once the baby of the family, stood alone, glaring. Aged fifteen and already six feet tall, he spent most of his time in bed. Had the Mauritanian heard from his mother, Najwa? he asked gruffly. Mahfouz sho
ok his head. As far as she was concerned, he said, they were all dead, killed during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11.

  An older man wearing steel-rimmed glasses and a cotton skullcap stepped forward and took the Mauritanian’s hand. Suddenly Mahfouz was transported back to Tarnak Qila and the day of Mohammed’s wedding, when, deeply troubled over the brewing Planes Operation, he had sought out this man to shoulder the burden: Saif al-Adel. Al Qaeda’s military supremo and number twenty on the FBI’s original Most Wanted Terrorist list was more gaunt and aged, but the Mauritanian could see that he still burned with ambition.

  Al Qaeda’s chief of foreign relations, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, who had known Osama and al-Zawahiri longer than anyone, was also here, as was Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, who had been thrust into the limelight in the days after 9/11. He had never managed to cut free, and as a result had had no contact with his wife and seven children in four years.

  From what the Mauritanian could see, the entirety of Al Qaeda’s military council minus Dr. al-Zawahiri and Sheikh Saeed al-Masri was here in Block 300.66

  On the far side of the courtyard, crying women, their niqabs pulled askew in the rush to kiss each other, surrounded the Mauritanian’s wife and daughters. Matriarch Khairiah bin Laden greeted them stoically. The bad food and unsanitary accommodations had taken their toll on her. She now walked with a cane, assisted by Najwa’s daughter Fatima, who was desperate for news of her siblings. Where was her half sister Khadija? How many children did she have now? Was she still in Waziristan? Had anyone heard from Fatima’s husband, who had vanished at the Pakistan border in 2001?

  Osama’s beautiful daughter Iman, now sixteen, listened in. She was eager for news of her “twin,” Seham’s daughter Miriam. They had been born on the same day in the same hospital in Jeddah. Although they had smuggled out letters, no one in Block 300 had received anything back from Pakistan.