by Adrian Levy
To bring him out of his funk, Zaina suggested they launch a high-fashion clothing line called B41. When his second business went the same way as the first, Bakr banned him from working. “He is deluded and thinks he will succeed and be the best at everything without making any effort,” said one family member. Even Zaina, who loved him, described him as “a liability.”
Stuck at home and obsessing about his father, Omar often became maudlin, telling friends that if he had stayed with Osama, he might have become as famous as Alexander the Great. “I would have wanted to rule the world,” he said. “I would have wanted to be the highest.” Instead he had a “very small life.” People should be thankful he had chosen peace, he said. “If I chose war, I would be unbelievable at it. A lot of people should pray to their god to thank him that I did not do that.”18
By 2015 Hamzah was as ready as he would ever be. Now aged twenty-seven, he had matured from the young boy in camouflage who had swung through the monkey bars for the cameras at Kandahar into a dour young man.19 His primary focus was revenge against the “Crusader Americans” who had killed his beloved father.20
When his first statement emerged, issued by Al Qaeda’s media wing As Sahab in August 2015, Hamzah called for a renewal of holy war against the West and suggested that Al Qaeda lone-wolf supporters should prepare for new attacks, specifically on Washington, London, Tel Aviv, and Paris.
He thanked Al Qaeda’s regional emirs for their loyalty, sounding like the dauphin of terror, singling out Abu Mohammad al-Julani of the Nusra Front, asking him to continue to keep his distance from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. “We were pained and saddened … due to the sedition that pervaded your field, and there is no power or strength but with Allah. We advise you to stay away as far as possible from this sedition.”
May 20, 2015, Washington, D.C.
While the Obama administration did its best to downplay Al Qaeda’s ongoing relevance, the group’s subtle maneuverings in Syria, Iran, and Qatar were observed by senior military officers with a growing sense of concern and frustration. A huge cache of primary source material was sitting in a vault in McLean, Virginia, and yet military intelligence analysts, whose job was to provide critical assistance to U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, had been prevented from seeing it by the CIA.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had begun lobbying for access to the Abbottabad document trove as soon as it was brought back to the United States in 2011. But the CIA had stalled them, saying it was being subjected to what CIA documentation exploitation experts described as “a triage,” meaning an initial keyword search that swept for suspect phone numbers, names, and addresses to gain immediately actionable intelligence from the documents.21
Osama’s correspondence files had then been locked away as a bureaucratic battle ensued, the White House and CIA resisting demands for wider access on the grounds that the CIA had “executive authority,” while the U.S. military insisted it needed to see what Al Qaeda was planning for operational security.22 Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, the DIA director who would go on to serve briefly in President Donald Trump’s administration in 2017, acting as National Security Advisor, particularly wanted to corroborate indications that Al Qaeda was actively plotting new attacks. Also of interest was any material that illuminated the growing relationship with Al Qaeda and Iran. “We were trying to gain historical knowledge of the organization, to see how it functioned,” said Michael Pregent, a former DIA analyst.
Eventually and only after sustained lobbying by the CIA director David Petraeus, who had previously been the U.S. CENTCOM commander and supported the military’s position, did his boss, James Clapper, the president’s director of national intelligence, give permission for a combined DIA/CENTCOM team visit. But the access was time-limited and read-only.
Pregent, who was on the team, worked fast. “We started seeing stuff nobody was talking about, like Iranian facilitation of Al Qaeda travel into Pakistan, for example,” he recalled.23 The DIA produced analyses reflecting that Al Qaeda had been strengthening and expanding in several different foreign theaters at the time of Osama’s death. The movement was very much alive and, the DIA concluded, it would thrive under a new leadership.
However, even while the DIA/CENTCOM experts were still inside the vault collating data, a very different message was presented to the public on the first anniversary of the Abbottabad raid, when the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point published its analysis of seventeen declassified letters. The handpicked documents gave a clear message that Osama and Al Qaeda were on the decline, a theme reinforced by the president when he said: “The goal that I set—to defeat Al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild—is now within our reach.” Soon after, the DIA’s access was suspended by the president’s National Security Council, a decision ratified by John Brennan when he became CIA director in March 2013.
Pressure to free up the documents continued to mount, much of it coming from Congress, where in 2014 a new Intelligence Authorization Act was passed that required Clapper’s directorate to conduct a review of bin Laden’s letters with a view to releasing them. The act was backed by Bruce Riedel, one of the few civilians to have seen the documents with his own eyes, and Derek Harvey, a former senior DIA analyst.
Eventually, in May 2015, Clapper’s office published 103 documents under the banner headline “Bin Laden’s Bookshelf.” The declassified material consisted of family correspondence and letters between Osama and Atiyah, some of which referred to Al Qaeda’s ongoing relations with Iran. But this selection, too, portrayed Al Qaeda as spent and Osama as a man at the end of his useful life. Among the approved documents was an Islamic treatise on suicide prevention entitled “Is It the Heart You Are Asking?”24
Also included was a letter in which Osama corresponded with Atiyah about his son Hamzah’s potential. “I see in him wisdom,” Atiyah had written.25 “I reminded him to thank God that he is in a safe place and that with patience all will happen and be fine.” Above all else in life, Hamzah “wants to train and learn.”
By the time this letter became public, Hamzah’s transformation was semi-complete.26
Summer 2015, Tehran
General Qassem Suleimani had become one of the most influential figures in the Syrian war, taking advantage of the unrest to plot Iranian expansion and extend Shia influence.27 The Quds Force and other secret cells from the Revolutionary Guard had stepped forward to assist Bashar al-Assad’s forces, while the Iranian government extended a $7 billion loan to shore up the Syrian economy.
The United States had responded by sanctioning Suleimani, but Washington’s maneuvering did nothing to curtail his activities, as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promoted him.28
Suleimani was prepared to team up with any movement that could help expand Iran’s axis of resistance, even if they were ideologically opposed to Tehran. He convinced Iraqi Shia militiamen to support Assad’s government forces, and Hezbollah fighters, too. Iran’s own Basij militia, which was still required for domestic duties, crushing unrest, was kept in reserve. “Give me one brigade of the Basij and I could conquer the whole country,” he bragged to an Iraqi politician.29
Just as the Quds Force had propped up Shia-baiting Zarqawi in 2002, releasing him from prison in Tehran and transporting him and his followers to Iraq so he could turn up the heat on U.S. forces there, Al Qaeda Central could be utilized for a military escalation against U.S.-backed forces fighting Assad in Syria.
By the summer of 2015, four of the five Al Qaeda military council leaders released from detention in the spring were on their way to Damascus via Turkey, where several comrades who had been freed from Iran earlier were waiting to assist them, including Othman bin Laden’s father in-law Mohammed al-Islambouli.30 Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, Abu Mohammed al-Masri, and the two Jordanians, Khalid al-Aruri and Sari Shihab, were going back to war.
Abu Mohammed, father-in-law to Hamzah, was considered by the United States as the “m
ost experienced and capable operational planner not in U.S. or allied custody.”31 Squaring the circle, he was also married to the daughter of Julani’s top commander, Abu Faraj al-Masri, who had known al-Zawahiri since the early days and was currently active in Turkey and on the battlefront in Syria.
Between them, the four released Al Qaeda members also commanded the respect of Zarqawi’s veterans in Syria. Aruri, as well as being related to Zarqawi through marriage, had been Zarqawi’s most important deputy. Their appearance on the Syrian battlefield could hopefully transform the war from an internecine struggle between the Nusra Front and IS into a united assault on the U.S.-backed coalition.
Only Saif al-Adel, who U.S. officials had previously described as the most likely to step up as Al Qaeda leader should anything happen to Dr. al-Zawahiri, remained in Iran, held for another year on the orders of Qassem Suleimani as insurance that Al Qaeda’s military council played ball.32
Because of the recent U.S.-brokered nuclear deal with Iran, news about the release of the four Al Qaeda detainees was dripped out slowly. However, in August 2015, around the same time Hamzah’s first public statement appeared, Saif al-Adel, still in Tehran, published an online eulogy for al-Zawahiri’s slain Syrian emissary, Abu Khalid al-Suri, who had been killed by five Islamic State suicide bombers in Aleppo in February 2014.
Saif described al-Suri as the “lion of Jihad Wahl,” a reference to the Afghani training camp in which he worked in pre-9/11 Afghanistan, and wondered who, other than the “twisted” and “perverted,” could possibly dare “to kill a sheikh among the sheikhs of the mujahideen.”33
Official confirmation that four members of Al Qaeda’s military council had been released by Tehran did not come until September 2015, when the Iranian government said it had “expelled” them. Soon after, influential jihadists began exchanging news on Twitter that the group was in Syria and working alongside Suleimani.34
Their arrival in the war zone would act like “a shot of energy,” predicted Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, who had retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency after losing his battle with the CIA over the Abbottabad trove.35 But while old faces were being resurrected, another was buried. Following months of speculation and stories spun by Afghanistan’s intelligence establishment, the Taliban confirmed that their leader, Mullah Omar, who had not been seen in public for more than a decade, was dead. Even worse, the Taliban was forced to admit that he had actually been dead for two years already, spending his last days in a Karachi hospital. His deputy, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, had issued pronouncements in his name in much the same way Dr. al-Zawahiri had intended to keep Osama bin Laden’s image alive—even beyond his natural life span—had it not been for the Americans killing him so publicly.
In addition to courting Al Qaeda, General Qassem Suleimani continued to make other deals, perhaps his most significant luring Russia into the war on Assad’s side. In a one-on-one meeting with President Vladimir Putin, Suleimani had laid a map of Syria out on the table, pointing to the IS advances but assuring him that “we haven’t lost all the cards.”36
By the summer of 2015, Suleimani was spending more time in Damascus than he did at home, working out of a heavily fortified nondescript building with the heads of the Syrian military, a Hezbollah commander, a coordinator of Iraqi Shia militias, and the former deputy commander of the Basij militia.37 He met Assad regularly and was photographed on the battlefield wearing a beige sweatshirt, a canvas cap, and no flak jacket, further enhancing his image as fearless. Many Quds Force members had already died in the fighting, including Suleimani’s close friend Hassan Shateri, a senior commander. “When I see the children of martyrs, I want to smell their scent, and I lose myself,” Suleimani told the Iranian media shortly after attending Shateri’s funeral.38 In a speech before the Assembly of Experts—the clerics who choose the supreme leader—he declared: “We will support Syria to the end.”
Prominent Al Qaeda supporters revealed on social media that Al Qaeda was planning to launch a new branch inside Iraq. Evidence emerged that al-Zawahiri had shifted his permanent base to Iran with Suleimani’s blessing. The idea of Al Qaeda fighting in two theaters simultaneously was being actively promoted by Saif al-Adel and al-Zawahiri and had the secret backing of Iran.39
In May 2016, al-Zawahiri issued a new proclamation that suggested a thawing of relations between IS and Al Qaeda. “Either you unite to live as Muslims with dignity, or you bicker and separate and so are eaten one by one,” the Al Qaeda leader railed.
The following day, Hamzah bin Laden announced his support for the “blessed Syrian revolution.” He said: “The Islamic ummah should focus on jihad in al-Sham [Syria] … and unite the ranks of mujahideen. There is no longer an excuse for those who insist on division and disputes now that the whole world has mobilized against Muslims.”
His statement coincided with the release of a second batch of letters from the Abbottabad archive, documents no longer conforming to the trope that Al Qaeda was down and out, and that instead confirmed the outfit as one still managing a cohesive global network with subordinates everywhere from West Africa to South Asia, and with Hamzah likely to emerge as its figurehead.
Soon after, former acting CIA director Michael Morell published a book in which he claimed that the archive showed that “bin Laden himself had not only been managing the organization from Abbottabad, he had been micromanaging it.”40 Even James Clapper, the president’s director of national intelligence, who had tried to keep the documents from U.S. CENTCOM and the DIA, appeared to have changed his mind, saying that Al Qaeda “nodes in Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkey” were “dedicating resources to planning attacks.”41
Only the Taliban continued to struggle. Two weeks after Hamzah’s statement, new emir Mullah Mansour emerged from Iran, where he had spent several weeks, seeing his family in Zahidan and meeting officials. Crossing back into Pakistan at Taftan, using a fake Pakistani passport, he was spotted by a U.S drone halfway up the N40 to Quetta, the same road the Mauritanian had taken all those years ago to cement the Iran–Al Qaeda relationship. Mansour was taken out by two Hellfire missiles that smashed into his white Toyota Corolla, killing him and his driver. Dr. al-Zawahiri’s move to Iran could not have been better timed.42
In July 2016, Al Qaeda’s media arm, As Sahab, issued a third audio message from Hamzah, once again threatening revenge for the death of his father. “If you think that your sinful crime that you committed in Abbottabad has passed without punishment, then you thought wrong,” he said. “What is correct is coming to you and its punishment is severe.” The video accompanying Hamzah’s words featured a photograph of his dead half brother Khalid and another of former Guantánamo detainee Faiz al-Kandari, who after fourteen years had been freed in January 2016 to his native Kuwait and had gone back into the arms of Al Qaeda in Syria. The production was entitled “We Are All Osama.”
Soon after, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the leader of the Nusra Front, also made his on-screen debut, dressed like Osama in a white turban and camouflage jacket. He announced that his group was formally splitting away from Al Qaeda, reinventing itself as a popular revolutionary movement bent on fighting the forces of President Assad of Syria, and renaming itself Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, or the Army of Conquest. It was a strategic move that Julani hoped would disassociate him from the previous rows with al-Baghdadi. To make sure that everyone knew the new organization was still loyal to Al Qaeda, al-Zawahiri’s old friend Abu Faraj al-Masri sat at Julani’s elbow throughout the recording.43 A few days later, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, one of the Tehran four, who was now identified as al-Zawahiri’s deputy, released an accompanying audio message blessing the move, saying, “We direct the leadership of al-Nusra to go ahead with what preserves the good of Islam and the Muslims, and protects the jihad of the Syrian people.”
Although Abu al-Khayr was killed in a missile strike in northern Syria in February 2017, Western observers were impressed by Al Qaeda’s subtle shifting.44 Not only was Dr. al-Zawa
hiri using the chaos of the Syrian war to revive Al Qaeda’s fortunes and spread its geographical footprint across the Middle East, but Al Qaeda also appeared to have learned from past mistakes.45 “They are much less brutal in Syria than they were in Iraq,” observed Robert Ford, who had been U.S. ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014. “They are much more subtle in their tactics and have a lot more local support … This will make them much harder to contain.”46
Hamzah made yet another appearance in August 2016, this time to criticize Saudi Arabia’s ongoing war in Yemen. The Saudi royals were “great criminal thieves” and “agents of America,” he said, echoing his father’s words. The kingdom was “in dire need of change,” Hamzah continued, before he issued a call to arms for all “youth and those capable of fighting” to join the mujahideen in Yemen.47 In January 2017, the U.S. State Department designated Hamzah as a global terrorist.48
August 23, 2016, Camp 7, United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
Dressed in a white tunic and with his beard neatly trimmed, and flanked by two camouflage-clad Pentagon-appointed “personal representatives,” Detainee 10016 sat in the $12 million Expeditionary Legal Complex at Guantánamo Bay, waiting to make his case to a military board that he should be considered for release.
One thousand three hundred miles away in Washington, D.C., more than a dozen reporters and human rights lawyers crowded into a conference room at the Pentagon to watch a live video feed.
Officially, they were here to observe a legal process introduced by the Obama administration in 2011 to review all detainee cases with a view to emptying the detention facility, an essential break, as the president saw it, from the Bush-Cheney era. But the real reason most had come was to catch the first glimpse of Abu Zubaydah: a detainee who the CIA had decided in April 2002 “should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.”49 As such, he had not been seen for almost fifteen years.