by Adrian Levy
To test the Iranian’s resolve, Saif suggested that one of them should attempt to leave the country. The only person able to travel freely, as he did not face an international arrest warrant (although he was sanctioned), was the Mauritanian.15 He could justifiably claim that as a religious adviser he had never been involved in actual terrorist operations. After witnessing an attempt to assassinate Osama in Khartoum in 1994, he had carried a gun; but he had never used it. Dozens of eyewitnesses (many of whom were now in Guantánamo) could attest to how he had publicly disagreed with Osama over the 9/11 attacks. It was his get-out and he would milk it for all it was worth. But although he could see the logic, he was still daunted about leaving ahead of the others.
Urged on by Saif, he tried the simplest way first, asking the authorities if he could fly home to see his father, who was sick. General Suleimani’s security officials refused. For the past nine years, the Mauritanian had been their main intermediary with the rest of the troublesome Al Qaeda group. To persuade him to stay, they offered new privileges, moving him and his family out of the compound into a two-story villa located in District 9, a smart residential suburb close to Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport. They remained under guard—with the escorts living beneath them on the ground floor—but it was their first taste of freedom in almost a decade.
“We could see the street and people walking about,” said Mahfouz, who began receiving a steady stream of important visitors: politicians, security officials, and religious scholars who all lectured him on staying put. If Al Qaeda wanted to retain Tehran’s backing, he had to play his part, they said.
Concerned about maintaining contact with those still inside the Tourist Complex, he turned to devious means.16 All detainees were allowed to write e-mails, which were saved on USB sticks so they could be vetted by Iranian officials before being sent. Since the officials used the same sticks to save the Mauritanian’s correspondence and those inside the compound, he found he could read their messages. He also used the trusted old method of logging into shared e-mail accounts and writing mails in draft. He sneaked letters into the Al Qaeda box at Tehran’s central post office, where he was taken, weekly, to pick up his own.17
“When are you leaving?” Saif wrote repeatedly.
In October 2011, the Mauritanian was informed that his home government had agreed to take him back if he submitted to being tried under local laws. Over there he was famous and he hoped that unlike Slahi, he would be able to cut a deal. Once more he approached his Iranian hosts. He wanted a private charter plane to take him home, as he was too frightened of CIA spies to take a commercial flight. He still had nightmares about his lucky escape from a Khartoum hotel in 1998, when the CIA had sent a team to render him as a result of the Africa embassy bombings, missing him by minutes through the kitchen door. It could have all ended so differently.
The Quds Force refused. To travel by air necessitated the Iranian government issuing temporary identity documents, and that would leave an untidy paper trail. When he insisted, they came back with another suggestion. He could travel overland via Turkey, guided by people smugglers.18
The Mauritanian, a cautious man, dithered. The only ID papers he had were his old student cards from Nouakchott and Khartoum, and his children, who had all been born in Afghanistan or Iran, had no passports at all. He dared not entrust their lives to a criminal network.
In November 2011, the Iranian government allowed the Mauritanian’s family to fly home on the condition that he stay behind. In an agonizing farewell, he saw his wife and six children off, left alone for the first time since 2002. “I wandered around looking at all their toys and pens and schoolbooks, [and] each time I saw them a wave of frustration came over me.”
When he heard they had safely reached Nouakchott, he put all their things into one room of the apartment and locked the door, so as not to be distracted by memories. With limited Internet and phone access, he began contacting old friends outside of Iran, cross-checking with Saif and other shura members via secret notes, and discovering that Al Qaeda’s Pakistan operation had been pummeled yet again. Younis al-Mauritani, who was responsible for launching new terror plots in Europe via Iran and recruiting for a new Al Qaeda youth wing, had been captured by the ISI in Quetta and handed to the CIA, their first collaboration since Abbottabad.19
The spring 2011 edition of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s propaganda magazine Inspire had carried an article declaring that the Arab Spring “has proved that Al Qaeda’s rage is shared by the millions of Muslims across the world.”20 But by the fall of 2011, the outfit was reeling.21
To encourage Tehran to tackle its ongoing Al Qaeda connections, the U.S. Rewards for Justice program offered a $10 million bounty for Yasin al-Suri, who was picked up in Tehran in December 2011. The news jolted the Mauritanian into a realization that leaving Iran was now essential, and his escorts sensed his agitation, one of them telling him, “If you are going to flee, don’t do it on my watch!”
But after many years together, some of them had become sloppy. During the daily changeover the new man on duty in the District 9 apartment would always come up for a cup of tea, bringing the front door key with him. “I thought about locking him in a room and breaking out,” Mahfouz recalled.22
In January 2012, he had a better idea. Every afternoon, he and the duty escort visited the nearby Zeytoon-e-Artesh sports center, where they swam and relaxed in a hammam. Most escorts took his locker key to ensure that his clothes remained out of reach. However, his favorite guard was more lax.
On January 30, Mahfouz stayed up late, destroying digital files and burning documents. “I recorded all my most precious things onto an orange USB stick.” He hid it in his shoe.23 On the morning of February 1, he took a piece of frozen meat from the fridge and left it on a plate to thaw, “so if I got caught I could say they misunderstood the situation as I’d got my dinner waiting to cook in the evening.” To shore up his cover story, he packed a broken radio in with his sports kit. “If they find me in the street,” he told himself, “I can say I was heading to get it fixed.” He knew in his heart that he would fold if captured and suspected that a life of facing interrogators around the clock in Evin prison would be just as bad as doing time in Guantánamo.
When they set off for the sports center that afternoon, he had a pang of guilt. The escort beside him would be severely punished if he bolted. He asked to go into a store and bought a bottle of expensive aftershave. “I have to give him something precious,” the Mauritanian told himself.
“This is for you,” he said, handing it to the escort.
“Why?” the man said, surprised at the gift.
“Take it please,” the Mauritanian urged.
“It’s not my birthday,” the escort replied, laughing.
“Take it please,” he insisted. “This is to mark your everyday kindness that does not go unnoticed.”
The escort smiled. “Okay,” he said, taking the package.
As they passed a smart restaurant, the escort stopped again. “Because you bought me this gift,” he said, “I will host you at dinner tonight.” The Mauritanian felt sick. He was planning to be at the Mauritanian embassy before nightfall.
At the sports center, the two men entered the changing rooms. “I told him I hadn’t prayed yet and would go to the mosque inside the complex,” he recalled. While the escort went off to the hammam and “disappeared into a cloud of steam,” the Mauritanian slipped his locker key into the pocket of his trunks and headed the other way.
Moments later he was back in the locker room, dressing as quickly as he could. Walking out through the turnstile with his head lowered, he felt his whole body shaking. He hailed a cab and doubted his chances of success. “Downtown!” he told the driver, thinking of the small matter of the November 2001 interview he had given to Al Jazeera in which he had claimed that the war against America had only just begun: “We are lying in wait for them, inshallah.”24
Who, the Mauritanian wondered, would be
lying in wait for him?
Fall 2011, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Pakistan
Shortly after taking over as Al Qaeda’s emir in June 2011, Dr. al-Zawahiri had given a video address warning that Osama would continue to “terrify” the United States from beyond the grave. But with the losses of Atiyah, Younis al-Mauritani, and Yasin al-Suri in Iran, nothing seemed further from the truth at that moment. The franchises in Yemen and North Africa that had announced their intention of declaring their own Islamic states were also suffering setbacks.
Al Shabaab had tried to dominate southern Somalia, but in late 2011 Kenyan forces, backed by U.S drone strikes, isolated the group in a remote corner of the country. Nasir al-Wuhayshi’s Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) had come closer to success, declaring several “emirates” after Osama forbade him to create a caliphate. But in truth, most Yemenis were fearful of Wuhayshi’s fighters, especially after a man was executed for spying and several women were stoned to death for witchcraft, leading southern tribal militias to rebel. By the time AQAP’s Yemeni-American cheerleader Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in September 2011, the nascent state had collapsed.25
Soon after, it was the turn of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), with Wuhayshi writing to his Algerian counterpart, who had seized control of a large chunk of northern Mali, “The places under your control are a model for an Islamic state. The world is waiting to see what you’ll do next.”26 But as hudud laws bit in northern Mali and AQIM razed the shrines of local Muslim saints, women who previously had been happy to cover up removed their veils in protest. No one wanted Afghanistan in Africa. Crowds gathered outside mosques to bar the jihadists from praying. They intervened to prevent stonings and amputations.
Al Qaeda commentators argued that these failures demonstrated that Osama had been right to discourage his affiliates from establishing Islamic states before they had deep popular support. His erstwhile competitors interpreted them as evidence that Al Qaeda had not been sufficiently brutal.
Now that the real axis for jihad was rapidly shifting thousands of miles away to new theaters in Iraq and Syria, Dr. al-Zawahiri would have to take advantage.
Fall 2011, Mosul, Iraq
Just days after the raid on Abbottabad, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State of Iraq, had issued a eulogy for Osama, and his forces appeared to demonstrate their loyalty by launching a wave of suicide bombers and IED blasts that slaughtered hundreds in Mosul and Baghdad. Dr. al-Zawahiri responded by sending Abu Bakr $2 million a month from donors in Qatar.27 Abu Bakr took every penny, which arrived via the Iran network. But in reality he was actively plotting to undermine the Al Qaeda leader.
First, he asked his religious adviser, the thirty-year-old Turki al-Bin’ali, to provide “proofs” that he was descended from the Prophet, going against Al Qaeda’s instructions that no one should declare themselves a caliph. Second, he issued orders that senior commanders in Iraq who were loyal to Dr. al-Zawahiri should be sidelined or allowed to die in battle.28 Most of Abu Bakr’s brutal street fighters, who were drawn from irreligious Ba’athists who had fought for Saddam Hussein and were paid to be loyal, happily complied. Islamic State’s new field commanders had agendas different from al-Zawahiri’s: two of Abu Bakr’s uncles had served in Saddam’s state security apparatus and one of his brothers had been an officer in the Iraqi army. The ground forces were led by Hajji Bakr, the white-bearded former colonel in Saddam’s army who had championed Abu Bakr’s appointment and was referred to as the Prince of Shadows.
At the end of 2011, when the United States declared Abu Bakr was a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and offered $10 million for his capture, Al Qaeda was still paying the Islamic State to represent its interests there, but al-Zawahiri’s influence was shrinking.29
January 2012, Syria
Abu Bakr had unilaterally decided to enter the fray in Syria. Late in 2011, he dispatched Abu Mohammad al-Julani, his top commander in Mosul—a Syrian national and former close associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—to recruit two hundred former Al Qaeda members recently released from Sednaya, the country’s most notorious military prison. The amnesty had been a deliberate move by President Bashar al-Assad to foster violence among the street protesters. But Abu Bakr had spotted an opportunity too.
Julani, who had grown up in Damascus where his family ran a grocery store, met the Al Qaeda prisoners in the countryside outside Damascus at Reef Dimashq and then again in Homs. To inspire them, he took along veterans from Zarqawi’s old Iraq network.30 The new outfit tested the water in December 2011 with a huge suicide attack in Damascus that killed dozens of people. They were ready, and on January 24, 2012, Julani officially launched his force. Although it was tied to Islamic State and Al Qaeda, it would have its own name: Jabhat al-Nusra (the Nusra Front). Within weeks, funds were flowing in directly from Al Qaeda’s Iran-based facilitator Yasin al-Suri (who had somehow talked himself out of Iranian detention).31
Although he was personally answerable to Abu Bakr, the handsome, smiling Julani was spiritually closer to Al Qaeda and greatly influenced by the writings of Osama’s trusted red-haired Syrian theologian Abu Musab al-Suri, a man Dr. al-Zawahiri had once described as the “professor of the mujahideen.”
Al-Suri was out of action, still languishing in Sednaya prison.32 However, his deputy Abu Khalid, who had been captured with him in Pakistan, had recently been released along with the rest of the Al Qaeda cohort and was Julani’s most valued strategist and commander.33
Abu Khalid and Julani had plenty of shared history, going back to the Al Qaeda training camps of Afghanistan long before 9/11. During the Iraq war, Julani, Khalid, and al-Suri had all acted as logisticians for Zarqawi, managing a network of “guesthouses” in Syria to channel would-be fighters into Iraq, and harvesting finances, too.
Another key figure in the Nusra Front was Zarqawi’s childhood friend Iyad al-Toubasi, the former ladies’ hairdresser from Zarqa. He was by now the outfit’s emir in Damascus and Deraa and led a large cohort of Palestinian-Jordanian fighters, mostly from Zarqa.34
Julani’s allegiances to Abu Bakr and Islamic State were superficial by comparison. The two men had met in Camp Bucca, the sprawling U.S. internment facility in southern Iraq where many next-generation fighters were radicalized during the Iraq war. There, Julani had taught classical Arabic and fired up those who were not already committed to the fight against U.S. forces, while Abu Bakr led them all in prayer. When he seized control of Islamic State of Iraq in 2010, Abu Bakr appointed Julani as a senior field commander.
In his first few months as leader of the Nusra Front, Julani mirrored Zarqawi’s group, with his foot soldiers mercilessly killing hundreds of innocent civilians to make their mark. However, by the summer of 2012 Julani sought a new direction. He beseeched his fighters to read Abu Musab al-Suri’s treatise The Call for Global Islamic Resistance, written in Iran in 2003. He had them watch al-Suri’s old training videos from the Al Qaeda camps in which he stood at a whiteboard and lectured on the six stages that would have to be surpassed before a caliphate was declared. There were talks on military strategy, with al-Suri trying to wean Al Qaeda off set-piece attacks with many moving parts in favor of what he called “individualized terrorism.” Lone-wolf attacks were much more effective as they were harder to stop, he had said. Sleeper cells should be seeded in all major European cities, where they could remain hidden for years before being activated.35
Julani declared that he was against needlessly attacking the West as it alienated the international community and aided Assad.36 His focus was overthrowing the Syrian government.
The Nusra Front would not abuse or exploit its people but provide services, he said. His fighters should maintain strong relationships with their neighborhoods and other fighting groups based there, and they should put the focus on a united struggle against Assad.
Dr. al-Zawahiri was pleased that Al Qaeda seemed to be gaining a new and focused lease on life in Syria. “He was to me and my brothers such
a great adviser,” the doctor would later remark about Julani’s strategist, Abu Khalid al-Suri.37
Spring 2012, Islamabad, Pakistan
The old guard was also changing in Pakistan. After four years as ISI director, overseeing one of Pakistan’s most tumultuous periods and causing the nadir of the ISI’s relations with the CIA, General Pasha was stepping down after he and his boss, army chief General Kayani, failed to squeeze through a third extension to his tenure.
Even though the CIA and ISI had briefly come together to capture Al Qaeda’s Younis al-Mauritani in Quetta, the military’s relations with the United States remained in tatters. A U.S.-led NATO skirmish against the Taliban on the Pakistan border in November 2011 had resulted in the killing of twenty-four Pakistani soldiers. Military chief Kayani had flown to Washington to protest, achieved little, and returned to find Pasha moving furniture about at Aabpara and landscaping in Abbottabad. The outgoing ISI chief ordered demolition crews into Bilal Town on February 27 and leaked a series of bizarre stories, including a claim that during one last sweep of Osama’s compound before razing it to the ground, bibles had been found hidden in walls. They supposedly contained coded clues about future terror attacks in Europe and America, although Pasha refused to give any further details.
Instead, the ISI began briefing foreign reporters, building up its version of the Abbottabad raid, telling a British tabloid newspaper that Amal and Khairiah had been caught fighting in their safe house, where they were still imprisoned.