The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  After his release, Ibrahim joined forces with Jordian hardman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who appointed him emir of Rawa, a town near the Syrian border.36 When Zarqawi was killed in June 2006, Ibrahim quickly transferred his allegiance to Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, a move that was rewarded with a promotion to being his religious adviser. After Ibrahim began writing some of Abu Umar’s letters to Osama, he advanced rapidly, until he became chief justice of Islamic State of Iraq.

  When Abu Umar and Abu Ayyub were both killed, Ibrahim suddenly found himself with surprising proximity to the throne; but as a relative unknown, he would need a powerful backer to champion his case.

  Assuming the kunya Abu Bakr, after the first caliph in Islam, Ibrahim sought out a veteran battlefield commander, Hajji Bakr. A former colonel in Saddam Hussein’s army and sometime adherent of the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, Hajji Bakr was more widely known by his nom de guerre: “the Prince of Shadows.” Successful jihadists needed a powerful “avatar” behind which to rally, wrote Hajji Bakr: someone who had won battles and lost friends fighting them and was seen as heroic and evenhanded.

  The white-bearded Hajji Bakr drew up a strategy paper that championed Abu Bakr, distanced him from his predecessors, and blamed the United States for Islamic State’s previous failings, such as its propensity to massacre civilians. “When it was at the pinnacle of its power and influence, [the Americans] bombed markets, public places and mosques.” They “killed the opponent of the State so that the mujahideen were blamed.” He recommended that the time to strike back would be when the Americans began their withdrawal from Iraq.37 Many aspects of his war plan seemed to have been lifted from The Management of Savagery, an Al Qaeda–linked prophetic book that suggested that what was needed was “naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism, frightening others, and massacres.” Even women and children could be targeted.38

  With the Prince of Shadows at his side and determined to get his CV into shape to assume leadership of the movement, Abu Bakr also appointed a youthful religious adviser who came from a wealthy family close to the Bahraini royals and had been taught by the famous Palestinian cleric Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. After being arrested in Dubai in 2005 for “expressing extremist ideals,” Turki al-Bin’ali had fled to Iraq, where he had come to Abu Bakr’s attention after whipping up a large following in refugee camps. Turki al-Bin’ali was, according to some of those who knew him, malleable, ambitious, and keen to attach his name to a viable cause.

  Summer 2010, Bilal Town, Abbottabad

  Osama bin Laden was determined not to be drowned out by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and he instructed Atiyah to highlight Al Qaeda’s impact “on all fronts and in all territories” by launching a new campaign that focused on “bleeding the American enemy.”39 Funds were flowing in from supporters and other enterprises. The Afghan politician held hostage by Al Qaeda for eighteen months had recently been released, netting an incredible $5 million.40

  Buoyed by this huge windfall, Osama instructed Atiyah to revisit Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s concept of deploying passenger-filled aircraft as flying bombs. The outfit needed to launch another “large operation in the US,” Osama wrote, instructing his new Number Three to identify young volunteers who could be sent to their home to “study aviation”—preferably at their own country’s expense. Meanwhile, one brother with “good manners, integrity, courage, and secretiveness” should settle in the United States to act as coordinator.41

  Atiyah was also told to prepare for commando-style terror attacks in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, where undetectable sleepers should select multiple targets. He would be assisted by Younis al-Mauritani, a protégé of his former spiritual adviser, Mahfouz the Mauritanian. Younis was a founding member of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and since 2005 had been shuttling between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, acting as a courier and conduit for Al Qaeda’s financial pipeline through Iran. His new job was to become “external operations chief,” a post that had once been held by Khalid Shaikh Mohammad. Younis was ordered to encourage lone wolves to migrate to Europe to plot attacks and spread Al Qaeda’s message.

  Next, Osama turned his attention to the other unwieldy Al Qaeda franchises, some of which were trying to follow Zarqawi’s lead, declaring caliphates in their regions, adopting too the black flag of Islamic State and imposing severe hudud punishments of execution, stoning, crucifixion, and amputation without prior approval from Al Qaeda Central. Al Shabaab in Somalia tried to establish a caliphate in 2009. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen, and AQIM were threatening to follow suit.

  Through Atiyah, Osama issued a stern message to the leader of AQAP, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, a loyalist who had once been his personal secretary but who had recently come under the influence of an upstart Yemeni-American scholar called Anwar al-Awlaki.

  “Establishing the [caliphate] before the elements necessary for success are put in place most often will lead to aborting the effort,” Osama lectured Wuhayshi. “Weighing people down with something that exceeds their expectations is fraught with negative results.”42 While Yemen could one day become the ideal place for the caliphate to flourish, the time was not yet right; and when it was, Osama would declare it—not Wuhayshi or Awlaki.43

  Next, he turned to internal housekeeping. He wanted to send a complaint to Abu Walid al-Masri, the former Al Jazeera journalist and father-in-law of Saif al-Adel, who officially remained under detention in Iran but had somehow been able to publish a book online called A Cross in the Sky of Qandahar.44 Those who had read it had been “shaken” by the “hate-mongering and treachery” it contained as well as the “random attacks” on Osama’s character and authority. While everyone in Al Qaeda was familiar with Abu Walid’s propensity for straight talking, this book had “no connection with reality or any semblance of truth,” according to Osama loyalists.

  Key among the complainants was Al Qaeda’s foreign relations chief Abu al-Khayr, who lived in the Tourist Complex with Saif and had already written to the author, castigating him for “slaughtering truth and fabricating history” and making a “sweeping attack on one of the most important groups of mujahideen.” How could someone they had lived with, and whose daughter had married into the leadership, betray them and still claim to be a “personal friend of Shaykh Osama”?45 The only logical explanation, given that Abu Walid lived in a government villa in the smartest part of Tehran, was that he had been persuaded to “adopt the view of the Iranian intelligence agencies.”46

  Closer to home, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leader Hakimullah Mehsud, supposedly an Al Qaeda loyalist and therefore subject to the outfit’s discipline, was also chafing against the outfit’s disciplinary code. Having slaughtered hundreds of Muslims from minority communities in brutal assaults across Pakistan, Mehsud was fast becoming a Pashtun version of Zarqawi.

  There were so many incidents, but Osama was most incensed by an attack on a mosque of the Ahmadi sect, which Hakimullah regarded as heretical, that had killed eighty-two worshippers. The slaughter, in Lahore, was followed by a botched attempt to detonate a bomb in New York’s Times Square—an operation so poorly planned and executed, and without Osama’s say-so, that it enabled U.S. officials to portray Al Qaeda as clowns.

  Atiyah was asked to remind Hakimullah that the TTP did not have authorization to conduct operations in Al Qaeda’s name and that Al Qaeda had a right to veto its operations.47 It should return to its core domestic business of targeting Pakistani security forces and politicians, as set out in its foundation charter, edited and shaped by Al Qaeda.

  Osama turned to the most sensitive issue. Since the release of the Iranian diplomat in March 2010, there had been no updates about the promised release of his family. Why had they not been freed? he asked Atiyah. If the treacherous Iranians were reneging on the deal, Al Qaeda Central would have to consider more kidnappings. Whatever the cost, he wanted his family back.

  July 2010, North Waziristan, Pakistan

  Constantly on the
move, often in the dead of night, with a laptop in his pack and a generator in the pickup, Atiyah shuttled between mud-brick compounds. His world was rapidly shrinking. The frequent trips he had once made to Quetta to consult with the Taliban shura, send e-mails, and take some respite from the drones, which did not operate over Balochistan, were now too dangerous. Al Qaeda’s local support was also hemorrhaging. The villages inhabited by “supporters” were almost all ghostly ruins, and on the roads twitchy young TTP militants shot anyone muttering the wrong password.48 Spies and the threat from the skies had worn everyone down. Pashtun codes of honor and protection had been eroded by aerial intimidation.

  When Atiyah finally replied to the Sheikh’s long missive, it was with a surprise announcement of his own: his resignation. “I ask God to relieve me and quickly,” he wrote to Osama, his mental state revealed in his description of himself as “the weakest servant.”49 He was not going to leave Osama in the lurch, as he had already thought of a replacement, Abu Yahya al-Libi, the hero escapee from Bagram, who had served as a deputy to the deceased financier Sheikh Saeed. “I think he is the most prepared of the brothers,” Atiyah wrote.50

  Atiyah was exhausted, stressed, scared, and frustrated, and his biggest bugbear was having to continually lean on the Pakistan Taliban for security, given that Hakimullah’s attitude to internal discipline was at best slipshod.

  “They do as they wish and roam around in the markets,” he complained, drawing a pen portrait of mercenaries and thugs who robbed and kidnapped in the name of religion. “They have no obedience.” The most violent and unpredictable among them exacted summary punishments. The beheading in February 2009 of a Polish engineer, kidnapped on his way to work—the first execution of a Western hostage in Pakistan since Daniel Pearl—had enraged Atiyah.51

  The Pakistan Taliban—largely responsible for the cascading, random suicide attacks that had claimed 3,500 lives in Pakistan over the past three years—was making Atiyah’s job of enabling Osama’s vision of an Islamic emirate practically impossible.52 The TTP’s martyrdom operations took place without letup in “marketplaces, mosques, roads, assembly places,” he complained. It would also be impossible to dispatch these wild brothers abroad to carry out complex operations in sophisticated Western settings, as Osama was demanding.53

  The Sheikh would do best to let his foreign franchises get on with that job and keep the Al Qaeda brand alive, Atiyah suggested, taking a significant risk in criticizing his leader. He disagreed with the way Osama was choking the foreign franchises. Why oppose a call by AQAP in Yemen to declare a caliphate? Al Qaeda should seize the opportunity to back its most loyal affiliate, rather than muzzle it. “War [in Yemen] has become a reality,” he argued presciently, acutely aware of the Islamic etiquette of only praising one’s teacher even when he is wrong. The brothers from Al Shabaab also craved the Sheikh’s approval to deepen the insurgency in Somalia. “It would be nice if you could do something, especially for them—that would convey we are happy,” Atiyah wrote.54

  Turning to family matters, there was more bad news: Atiyah had nothing to report from Iran. “Shaykh, perhaps the matter is more difficult than you imagine,” he advised. Even if he was released, Hamzah could not simply fly to the Gulf, as Osama had suggested. “The Americans will definitely take him! The matter requires that we study it in detail and be careful and take precautions.”

  Only one person had reached them from Iran, Abu Anas al-Libi, the Al Qaeda veteran who had once lived in Manchester and who arrived just a few days before Sheikh Saeed was killed. He had negotiated his way out of the Tehran compound, possibly as he was identified by the Iranian authorities as a troublemaker who had sparked many of the riots. Atiyah reported that Anas was “in bad psychological shape.” He was “very agitated, showing signs of anxiety and depression.” Atiyah had found him secretly phoning his family in Libya, oblivious to those who would be listening in and in contravention of direct orders that warned that use of phones exposed Al Qaeda to drones. “Even though it was known that he is a dangerous man and wanted by the Americans, he contacted them by telephone repeatedly!” Atiyah protested.55

  The prognosis was not good. He estimated that it would take months for Anas to be rehabilitated, and if that was his fate, what, he wondered, had become of legends like Saif al-Adel and others on the army council, whose return he had hoped would revive the outfit.

  Atiyah was also horrified by the security crackdown that the Pakistan Taliban had provoked. Roadblocks were being thrown up sporadically and surveillance had become more pervasive. There was even talk of war in North Waziristan. Al Qaeda needed quiet and discipline to consolidate, but Atiyah was faced with the prospect of a leader who refused to keep quiet. Osama’s output remained prolific. In these volatile days, ferrying video and audio recordings from Abbottabad placed everyone in harm’s way. “I consulted with the brothers and we think that at this time and for the indefinite future we should not be present in the media, owing to our remaining hidden and … to avoid the monitoring by spies,” Atiyah suggested, wondering if they would not be better to correspond by e-mail, using “Mujahideen Secrets,” a software encryption program developed by Al Qaeda supporters in the West.56 “Our circumstances are difficult, Shaykh, and we are trying, but this war of espionage has really worn us down. Take excessive caution and care, especially this year.”

  Would he listen?

  There was one more outstanding issue that required the utmost care, and Atiyah could not decide how to tackle it. The “Pakistani enemy”—even at this time when Al Qaeda was on the run—was secretly and incredibly offering peace talks.

  Heavyweight covert mediators had emerged in the form of two of Osama’s old allies: Fazlur Rehman Khalil and Hamid Gul. The former, the emir of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, who had met Osama several times, had been “consulting back and forth” with Islamabad.57 On his most recent visit to the Tribal Areas he had been accompanied by Gul, the former ISI director, who had promised to shield Osama in 2005.

  Recently, Khalil and Gul had delivered a message to Atiyah from the ISI’s director general, Ahmed Shuja Pasha: “We are trying to convince the Americans and pressure them to negotiate with Al Qaeda and to convince them, as well, that negotiating with the Taliban side and without Al-Qaeda is of no use.”

  “Just wait a little bit,” Pasha had apparently said. “If we are able to convince the Americans, then we have no objection to … sitting down with you.”58

  Atiyah did not know what to make of this olive branch. “Are the Pakistanis serious, or are they just playing with us?” he asked Osama.59 “We must be cautious.” The army and the civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari were under constant pressure from their “lords and masters” in the United States to eradicate Al Qaeda. Sensitive to “enemy tricks,” Atiyah wondered if this ISI approach was just another ruse designed to entrap Osama.

  Perhaps Khalil and Gul were being used, he suggested. While the ISI had paid Khalil handsomely to run a proxy force that waged war secretly in Indian-held Kashmir, it also had a history of turning on him when he refused to do the ISI’s bidding. In 2006, he had been abducted and beaten by ISI thugs after refusing to tell one faction within the spy agency what he knew of Osama’s whereabouts. “I was asked to help arrest the key leaders including Osama,” Khalil later recalled.60 “I refused to provide such help, due to which I was badly tortured.”61

  “So I ask you,” Atiyah wrote to Osama, “what is your opinion?”

  August 2010, Bilal Town, Abbottabad

  In earlier times, Osama would have spoken to Khalil and Gul personally. But their phones were tapped and in Khalil’s case a shipping container was permanently parked outside his madrassa in Islamabad with a phalanx of ISI officers sitting inside, listening to his every conversation.62

  Osama’s companion Ibrahim would have to test the water. After driving down to Hassan Abdal, Ibrahim turned on his cell phone and made some calls, before popping into a public phone booth in Mansehra to make some mor
e. He returned with interesting news. Veteran Al Qaeda supporters believed the negotiations offered by General Pasha were in good faith. The Sheikh should advance—but with caution. These were confusing times and opportunists were everywhere.63

  Osama wrote back to Atiyah, giving him permission to proceed with the ISI talks “in a fashion that … is in the interest of the al-mujahidin [sic].”64 But he turned down Atiyah’s suggestion to use encrypted e-mail. “We should be careful not to send big secrets by email,” he wrote. “We should assume that the enemy can see these e-mails.” Encryption was not a guaranteed fail-safe. “Computer science is not our science,” he concluded warily, “as we are not the ones who invented it.” Besides, the Abbottabad compound did not have an Internet connection.

  To demonstrate his point, he referred to some recent correspondence from the brothers in Yemen, in which they had recommended that American-Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki be declared “the top man.” Although Osama had vetoed the proposal, the U.S. government had started referring to Awlaki as Al Qaeda’s “top man” in Yemen, echoing these intercepted words.

  Osama also ignored Atiyah’s request to maintain a lower profile. Instead, he recorded a new video, his first in several years, something he described as a “visual statement to the American people.” For it, he wore his favorite golden robe and a new turban. His beard had been neatly clipped and the gray hairs dyed back to black, but the shadows under his eyes and his sagging cheeks spoke to his bottled-up and stressful existence. When he was finished, he copied the file to a USB drive and sent it off in Ibrahim’s next batch, with instructions that Atiyah should give it to Al Jazeera for a forthcoming film on the anniversary of 9/11. If the channel agreed to use it, he would answer their questions and provide “real information.” He would not interfere with their editorial freedom, but he did want a promise “not to interview anyone in my family.”