The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  Abu Ghaith faltered only when he was asked about those still being held in Tehran. Did they want to return to the jihad? asked the FBI special agent. Abu Ghaith trod carefully. Saif, Abu Mohammed, and Abu al-Khayr were “beaten men,” he said, and were primarily concerned with the welfare of their families. As for Al Qaeda’s volatile relations with Iran, he was unsure if there had been any official relationship. He told the FBI: “Iran doesn’t want any Sunni Muslim group to gain power.” Shown a photograph of facilitator Yasin al-Suri, he said that he did not know him.

  After fourteen hours of questions, in which he hoped he had proffered enough answers, the plane began to descend into New York and Abu Ghaith’s interrogation was concluded at noon on March 1, 2013.

  But America was not as Abu Ghaith imagined. “There is no corner of the world where you can escape from justice,” the U.S. attorney general Eric Holder told him as he was remanded at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, which was located just a few blocks from Ground Zero. Former inmates included World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, the Egyptian hate preacher Abu Hamza, mob boss John Gotti, and failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. “Lord of War” arms trader Viktor Bout, who spent fourteen months there in solitary, described it as a harsh place, like the jail depicted in the Alexandre Dumas novel The Count of Monte Cristo.

  Nouakchott

  When he saw Abu Ghaith’s face on the news, the Mauritanian’s heart flipped. The trap was the same that had been sprung for him, but he had had the sense to decline it.

  He thought back to a conversation he had had with an Iranian security adviser during the time of the compound protests. “I told him, ‘You have to give me assurance that you will never hand my brothers or sisters to the Americans.’ ” The Iranian had eyed him: “I can’t give that guarantee,” he had said, “in the same way that the human body must sometimes cut out an organ to keep the remaining organs alive.”

  The Mauritanian was in no doubt that the Iranians had tipped off the U.S. government about Abu Ghaith’s departure and that the rest had been contrived play-acting. General Qassem Suleimani wanted to hang on to the shura, the only ones in the Tourist Complex who really mattered.

  Two months later, in May 2013, Younis al-Mauritani, Al Qaeda’s former chief of foreign operations, who had been seized by the ISI in Quetta and then subjected to months of interrogation at Bagram air base, was extradited to Nouakchott. Unlike the Mauritanian, he was not offered a deal. Instead, he endured a long and tortuous period of interrogation at the hands of the security services.62

  In October 2013, another of the Mauritanian’s old friends from the Quds Force compound was also run to ground. Abu Anas al-Libi, who had caused the Iranians so much trouble that they had let him out in 2010, had returned to Libya intent on helping Al Qaeda. Still talking too much on his phone, he was captured by U.S. commandos in Tripoli on October 5, 2013, and interrogated aboard the USS San Antonio in the Mediterranean. He stopped eating and drinking, his health deteriorated, and he was flown to New York, where he was locked up in a cell in the same “terrorist wing” where Abu Ghaith was being held.

  When al-Libi appeared in court at the end of October 2013, accused of being a mastermind of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, a former U.S. intelligence officer described him as one of the “top finds” since the death of Osama bin Laden.

  Abu Ghaith, who appeared later in the same court, was described as “the most senior adviser to Osama bin Laden to be tried in a civilian court in the United States since the 9/11 attacks.” So few had actually gone on trial that Abu Ghaith was by default a catch. Having taken such care to fashion Zero Dark Thirty, Washington required a guilty verdict.

  Abu Ghaith’s legal team knew they faced an uphill struggle and they tried to take statements from anyone who personally knew the defendant, including the Mauritanian. But U.S. officials based in Nouakchott blocked the lawyers’ visit.63

  The defense team turned to Yemen, where Salim Hamdan and Abu Jandal, “the Father of Death”—Osama’s security officer who had been sent to Yemen in 2000 to broker the Sheikh’s marriage with Amal—agreed to meet, only for the meetings to also be annulled “at the request of U.S. officials.”64

  As a last resort, Abu Ghaith’s lawyers tried to depose the actual mastermind of 9/11—Khalid Shaikh Mohammad. Housed in Camp 7 at Guantánamo Bay since September 2006 and in the early stages of being tried by a military commission along with his four codefendants, Khalid had effected his most dramatic transformation to date. He entered Guantánamo’s $12 million Expeditionary Legal Complex flanked by military personnel and sporting a great fanned beard, a stunning white robe, military waistcoat, and a red-and-white-checked headdress, which made him look like the caliph of Cuba. Often seen at loggerheads with his Pentagon-appointed legal team, he tried to frustrate proceedings at every opportunity, complaining on several occasions that his sons Yusuf and Abed had never been returned to their mother.

  Unsurprisingly, the attempt to produce Khalid Shaikh Mohammad in New York was struck down, although the lawyers did manage to acquire a fourteen-page statement from him in which he was explicit: “[Abu Ghaith] did not play any military role … I do not recall that I ever met him or saw him at a training camp. He did not know me by any name other than the one I was using in Afghanistan [Mokhtar] so he never knew my real name.” He “was not part of that fabric and did not participate in jihad at that time.”

  Nevertheless, Abu Ghaith was found guilty and received a life sentence.65 Before being taken away, incredulous, he spoke from the dock. “At the same moment where you are shackling my hands and intend to bury me alive,” he said, “you are unleashing the hands of hundreds of Muslim youth. And you are removing the dust of their minds.”

  March 2013, Syria

  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had a serious problem. Spies working for the Prince of Shadows, his military commander Hajji Bakr, had returned from Syria with the worrying news that Julani’s Nusra Front was now the preeminent rebel movement in Syria, eclipsing Islamic State.

  As Julani had intended, Syrians dominated his group of five thousand fighters, and he had spies inside government institutions, including the security apparatus. By contrast, Abu Bakr’s forces had mostly won ground by wielding rape, torture, and execution and were widely criticized for forcing their extreme Islamism on civilians. The residents of Raqqa, Aleppo, and Homs happily hung Julani’s Al Qaeda–style banners from their balconies, but they rejected Abu Bakr and his Islamic State.

  Worried that Julani was intending to elevate himself as leader of a new and independent Al Qaeda branch, bypassing Islamic State altogether, Abu Bakr demanded a statement of loyalty.66 Julani refused. On April 9, Abu Bakr tried to get around his disobedience by announcing the formal merger of both groups into the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Syria): ISIL.

  Instead of accepting his fate, Julani sought guidance from Dr. al-Zawahiri, calling him the “sheikh of jihad.” He issued a declaration on jihadi websites: “We are not murderers; we are not criminals. We are fighting those who fight us. We are standing against tyranny.”

  Dr. al-Zawahiri issued a private message asking both commanders to be quiet. Abu Bakr kept at it, warning that Julani was a “traitor.” If al-Zawahiri backed him, there would be “no cure except the spilling of more blood.”

  On May 23, al-Zawahiri declared that ISIL should be abolished, as it had been created without prior approval, and that Abu Bakr should confine his group’s activities to Iraq. Leave Syria to Julani and the Nusra Front, he commanded.

  Furious, Abu Bakr hit back. “I have to choose between the rule of God and the rule of al-Zawahiri, and I choose the rule of God,” he declared before setting his forces against the Nusra Front.67

  As the two groups began fighting each other in Syria, Al Qaeda commanders, including Muhsin al-Fadhli, who had fought with Zarqawi in Iraq and had helped manage the Iran pipeline, were sent to shore up Julani.68 He raised a unit of battle-hardened veterans from the Soviet war in
Afghanistan that called itself the Khorasan Group—after an ancient name for the Afghan region. Dr. al-Zawahiri also sent one of his oldest deputies, Ahmad Salama Mabruk, whose kunya was Abu Faraj al-Masri. The two men had known each other since the killing of Anwar Sadat in 1981 and Abu Faraj now became a top Nusra Front commander.

  Keen for a resolution, al-Zawahiri also dispatched Abu Khalid al-Suri to meet with ISIL.69 He faced a tirade of abuse. “Al Qaeda is gone, it’s burned out,” Abu Bakr snarled. ISIL was here to stay “as long as we have a pulse or an eye that blinks.”70 Men loyal to Abu Bakr set out to seize control of the five-hundred-mile-long border between Turkey and Syria, in an attempt to cut off the Nusra Front’s supply lines.

  By the end of December 2013, Abu Bakr’s black-clad hordes had absorbed or killed more than 80 percent of Julani’s foreign fighters, and they rode into towns previously dominated by their rivals with their black ISIL pennant rippling in the wind. NO GOD BUT GOD screamed the rough lettering of their logo. Underneath, the words MUHAMMAD IS THE MESSENGER OF GOD were arranged inside a circle designed to represent the Prophet’s seal ring that was housed in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.

  In Abu Bakr’s eyes, ISIL was living out predictions laid down in the Book of Tribulations, a collection of hadiths written down by ninth-century Islamic scholar Naeem bin Hammad that described the civil wars preceding the apocalyptic “Last Days” of humanity: “The black banners will come from the east, led by men like mighty camels, with long hair and long beards; their surnames are taken from the names of their hometowns and their first names are from kunyas.”71 The Antichrist would “appear in the empty area between Sham and Iraq” and one of the crucial final battles would take place in Dabiq, a small village north of Aleppo.

  Adopting these ancient words, Abu Bakr declared that Syria and Iraq were ground zero for the apocalypse. His fighters went on a rampage, hunting down and executing high-level Nusra Front commanders, along with civilians loyal to them. Bodies were burned, crucified in the street, dragged behind cars until they fell apart, or returned to their families with legs broken or missing, ears severed, the tops of their heads blown off, their bodies eviscerated.

  They zeroed in on Dabiq itself, in a ferocious battle that was fought mainly for its symbolic value and the demoralizing effect it would have on Julani’s forces.

  Sickened, Julani publicly pledged allegiance to al-Zawahiri while Abu Faraj al-Masri ensured that extra funding was coming from Al Qaeda Central via Qatar and the Iran network.72

  In January 2014, Julani published an online editorial about ISIL, alleging Abu Bakr’s movement was corrupting the jihad in Syria, just as it had done in Iraq. Two weeks later, al-Zawahiri formally expelled ISIL from Al Qaeda.73

  Abu Bakr’s response came on February 21, when al-Zawahiri’s emissary, Abu Khalid, whose mission had been to stop the internecine fighting, reached Aleppo, his birthplace, and was killed by five ISIL suicide bombers.74 Photographs of his bulky, bloodied corpse went viral, intensifying the bitter war between ISIL and Al Qaeda. Someone had to bring the two factions back from the brink.

  Stepping into the fray was a notorious cleric who so far said nothing publicly at all—feeling that to do so would give succor to the enemies of jihad in the West, and to Assad in Syria. This don of Salafist jihad scholarship was Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, the intellectual godfather of Al Qaeda and former mentor of Islamic State’s founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.75

  Maqdisi, who had been in and out of prison on terrorism charges for years, had privately tried to intercede several times over the past year, sending discreet messages on WhatsApp to Abu Bakr’s inner circle via his chief religious adviser, Bin’ali the Bahraini. The scholar had once been a devoted student of Maqdisi’s. But Bin’ali was disrespectful and arrogant in his replies sent in the summer of 2013 and then stopped answering Maqdisi’s messages altogether.76

  In May 2014, Maqdisi issued a fatwa against ISIL from his jail cell in Amman, where he faced charges of inciting terrorism. Abu Bakr and his followers were “deviants” who had no “Islamic pretext,” he said. ISIL’s commanders should defect to the Nusra Front or face condemnation before God. These were heady words from a scholar whose own brother Salahuddin was a top ISIL commander.

  Abu Bakr, who had recently lost his primary backer and adviser, the Prince of Shadows Hajji Bakr—killed by Syrian rebels back in January—responded by declaring a caliphate with himself as “Caliph Ibrahim.” The prophecy was fulfilled, he said, and Judgment Day approached. The name ISIL was shortened to Islamic State (IS) and Muslims worldwide were called to join forces with a movement that had ambitions to “conquer Rome and own the world.”77 Calling for fighters, judges, medics, and teachers to come to God’s kingdom on earth, Abu Bakr declared: “Rush O Muslims to your state. It is your state. Syria is not for Syrians and Iraq is not for Iraqis. The land is for the Muslims, all Muslims.”

  While Maqdisi predicted disaster, Abu Bakr found himself shored up by a huge wave of public support led by young and disenfranchised Muslims who flocked to Syria from the West. Many lacked the religious knowledge to question his credentials, and did not understand the significance of Maqdisi’s opposition. They simply relished the declaration of a caliphate, the illusion of power over Western repression.78

  Buoyed by their arrival, Abu Bakr released a video of himself addressing the Grand Mosque in Mosul, in which he declared himself the “commander of the faithful,” world leader of Muslims. Maqdisi appeared to have made a serious error in judgment.79

  The most fervent descended on IS’s self-declared capital, Raqqa. Abu Bakr had come a long way from being the shortsighted draft dodger who lived a bachelor life in a single room attached to Tobchi mosque on the outskirts of Baghdad. A man released by the U.S. forces from Camp Bucca as a “low-level prisoner” even though he had told his captors, “I’ll see you guys in New York,” was now invoking doomsday imagery, backed by a generation of young Muslims who could barely remember 9/11.80

  However, privately Abu Bakr was still worried. He could get away with challenging the authority of al-Zawahiri, given that the doctor was far away and apparently weakened. But the open opposition of Maqdisi, who remained a real force in the region and was personally linked to the founder of Islamic State in Iraq, Zarqawi, posed a significant threat to his legitimacy. Osama bin Laden had frequently recommended that his followers study all that Maqdisi had to say about the jihad.81 Abu Bakr had to get Maqdisi on his side.

  In the summer of 2014, IS dispatched top secret messages to Maqdisi and his close friend Abu Qatada, another Palestinian cleric now living in Jordan, who a Spanish judge had once described as “bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe.” Qatada, a huge bear of a man who wore a robe spun from raw camel wool, was publicly notorious, but privately he was an influential and highly respected Salafist force.

  The British government had accused Qatada of acting as planner Abu Zubaydah’s European postbox during the 1990s, collecting funds and sending recruits to Peshawar, but he had never been a fighter and he denied these accusations vociferously. Bright-eyed and sharp, he had lived for twenty-three years in London, first preaching and then fighting a grinding deportation case that he conceded before returning to Jordan in 2013.82

  Bin’ali, who was by now being described as “Grand Mufti” of Islamic State, wrote to Maqdisi and Qatada with an enticing offer: $1 million each if they moved to Raqqa.83

  Behind the scenes cash deals were also offered to Al Qaeda affiliates. Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the Yemeni leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was offered $10 million to swear allegiance. A similar deal was offered to Al Qaeda’s Libyan offshoot, albeit for half the money.

  Maqdisi, who was by now out of prison, and Qatada, who was still remanded on terrorism charges, could both have done with the IS cash. But they rejected Abu Bakr’s advances and launched a twenty-one-page online broadside. “The announcement of a caliphate by the Islamic State is void and meaningless,” they said, “because it was not approve
d by jihadists in other parts of the world.” Maqdisi ordered IS to “reform, repent and stop killing Muslims and distorting religion.”

  Qatada twisted the knife. IS was like “a mafia,” he said. Abu Bakr was a “thug” who did not respect anyone. His fighters were “gangsters” without religious credentials. The suggestion that one man could announce a caliphate and declare himself as its leader was akin to a five-year-old child thinking he could buy a house without any adult help. “There has to be agreement between more than one party,” he continued. “I can declare an emirate in my home but the ummah should choose the calipha. There has to be a contract.”84

  In September 2014, shortly after being freed by the Amman security court, Qatada called Maqdisi to discuss how they could intervene to save the countless hostages IS was holding in Raqqa, including more than a dozen Western journalists and aid workers. Two, American reporters James Foley and Steven Sotloff, had already been beheaded. Qatada had done something similar in 2005, when the British security services had asked him to help negotiate the release of Norman Kember, a British peace campaigner who had been seized in Iraq. Kember had eventually been freed and in 2008 he paid back the favor by providing bail to Qatada, then on remand in a British prison.

  Qatada and Maqdisi knew they were better placed to influence the hostage takers than anyone else. They went for picnics in the Jordanian countryside, the slow and lumbering Qatada rapt by the highly sprung Maqdisi. But before they had a chance to intervene, David Haines, a British RAF engineer turned aid worker, was also slain. British taxi driver Alan Henning followed on October 3. Both men were killed by the same masked IS fighter from London, who was dubbed “Jihadi John.”

  Next on the butcher’s list was Peter Kassig, a former U.S. Army Ranger who had set up an aid charity in Syria and had been abducted in October 2013. An American lawyer, the same one who had represented Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, met with Abu Qatada and Maqdisi and asked them to negotiate with IS for his release.85