Routine waterboarding deep in the interior of the Guantanamo Bay complex did not have the same effect. It scared both Ibrahim and Yousaf, but not to death. They both understood that even the dreaded splashing of water on the back of their hooded heads was a whole lot better than having their necks severed in the time-honored traditions of al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
Neither man ever revealed his full name or identity, nor indeed his nationality and certainly not his link to Osama bin Laden. Inside the camp, with its rigid security and dozens of very defiant men, Ibrahim and Yousaf were standouts—revered hard men, of whom even the guards were extremely wary. The cage-like cells of both men were searched every few hours. No visitors were ever allowed.
There was no communication whatsoever with the outside world. And there was little doubt in any of the guards’ minds that, were the opportunity to present itself, either one of these two former al-Qaeda hitmen would have coldly murdered their captors.
No one had ever seen either of them smile. They were just there, two glowering permanent residents, brimming with hatred, waiting for their chance to get out and resume their timeless battle with the Western world, prepared with each passing hour to carry the fight to the Infidel, to murder and maim citizens of the West, whenever and wherever the winds of revenge took them.
They were both twenty-nine now and had taken enormous care of their physical strength, exercising in the soccer area, using the makeshift gym, and trying to retain their mountain-men fitness. They made few friends and spoke to the guards only in Arabic, with sentences so clipped and threatening they were rarely released from their ankle manacles. They were readily identifiable, by anyone, as two of the most dangerous men in the whole of Cuba, never mind Guantanamo Bay. And their chances of release hovered somewhere between zero and minus six.
It was plainly beyond the comprehension of either Ibrahim or Yousaf that their lives would have improved if anyone in authority had the slightest idea who they were. But they had been extricated from that almost inaccessible Afghani village with absolutely nothing in their possession. Not one single document. Thus, devoid of passports, cell phones, credit cards, driving licences, or even a letter from a loved one, they were utterly bereft of identity or nationality.
And in the great scheme of things, this made them ineligible to face a U.S. military tribunal, where experienced officers could decide what to do with them. The mind-blowing five-year silence of Ibrahim and Yousaf had rendered them outcasts even in one of the strangest communities on earth—making them no-hope prisoners too defiant to take advantage of the normal course of justice.
There was nothing to do with them, save to lock them up indefinitely, in the certain knowledge that if either of them received even half a chance, they would probably commit some diabolical crime against humanity. No one was prepared to take that kind of chance.
The years had rolled by. In the swamp-green, hard-wired corridors of the camp, hundreds of prisoners lived out some kind of twilight existence. In each cell, copies of the Koran were slung from the wire in surgical masks, mostly to prevent the Christian guards from touching the holy book.
Every few weeks, Ibrahim and Yousaf were subjected to interrogation of the most rigorous type. They were deprived of sleep, kept out in eighty-degree heat, marched in and out of cells specifically designed for questioning, always wearing both leg and hand shackles. They were zipped into orange jumpsuits, seated in chairs, and robbed of any form of sensory sensation, blindfolded and masked, with ear-muffs and mittens—the classic methods of the U.S. and UK military, designed to break down totally any man’s resistance.
There were hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in Guantanamo, and the U.S. interrogation techniques mostly worked—in the end, detainees would answer truthfully the questions fired at them by seasoned military personnel.
This did not, however, apply to men like Yousaf and Ibrahim, who seemed to accept their fate that they would live and die in this hell-hole, unloved, unknown, except unto Allah and to their surviving relatives and colleagues in the faraway Hindu Kush. For them there was no calendar, no time frame, sometimes there was no night and no day. There had long ceased to be any normal frame of reference whatsoever.
The best life offered them was a living space eight feet by six feet eight inches, and eight feet high. There were twenty-four of these cells to each “detention block”—and there were several blocks in each of Guantanamo’s six camps. Yousaf and Ibrahim both lived in solitary confinement in Camp Five, a place most often described as “utterly inhuman” by various world human rights agencies.
But, as one U.S. Army general succinctly phrased it, “Well, where the hell do you want us to put guys who for two cents would blow up the Empire State Building with everyone in it? The fucking Waldorf Astoria?”
There were no windows in these cells. The front wall on the block corridor was built on a solid, reinforced steel frame with heavy wire mesh through which prisoners could stare at the empty throughway. They slept on mattresses and were issued a blue blanket, pillow, and prayer mat. Yousaf and Ibrahim usually fell asleep dreaming of the verdant green slopes and fast-flowing rivers of their mountainous homes, half a world away from this baking hot United States internment center at the rough eastern tip of Castro’s Cuba.
The U.S. Navy Base at Guantanamo Bay is the oldest overseas base ever occupied by U.S. forces. Its position on this rugged deep-water coastline creates a perfect set-up for a supply-line directly into the only U.S. base in the world located on Communist soil. The camp is peppered with stark and sinister-looking watchtowers, equipped with laser-strength searchlights and staffed by heavily armed guards.
Anyone trying to make a break for freedom would be lucky to survive for thirty seconds. This place is high-security to a degree worthy of Stalin’s archipelago, with perhaps an even more ruthless edge. The U.S. military considers the inmates of Guantanamo to be a potential menace to the health and well-being of all its citizens. For years, the accepted creed wa : No one gets out of here. No one.
And it was a creed that pervaded the quiet, lonely corridors of the camp down all the years since first the prison was constructed back in the winter of 2002. Since then, they closed down the most primitive sections of the original facility, the dreaded and feared Camp X-ray, where the most disturbing images of Guantanamo had been photographed.
The lines of hooded, blindfolded prisoners pictured kneeling in their shackles under a pitiless sun shocked most of the agencies for the humanities who tried, without much success, to demand an instant relaxing of this apparently brutal U.S. regime of capture and interrogation.
It looked, of course, rather different to military personnel, men who’d had friends, colleagues, and sometimes relatives, blown to smithereens by terrorist bombs and booby traps while on active duty on behalf of the United States—men from whom the sorrow would never pass, but who were now faced on a daily basis with these killers, these jihadists, with their sneering hatred and loathing of the western world.
Today the old camp is an overgrown jungle. In its place has emerged a smoothly efficient modern prison—no longer a throwback to the Dark Ages, but the very epitome of an iron-clad, high-security jail. The hatreds are still there, and the determination, by some, to stand tall against their American captors, remains undiminished. But no one has ever escaped.
Yousaf and Ibrahim both understood their predicament, particularly the no-escape clause. So far as they could tell there was not a chance of release. Of course they both knew they had committed heinous crimes against the U.S. military, but the light of battle had not entirely dimmed in their minds. Theirs was a Holy War, and they had fought it with similar heroism to that of the mighty Kurdish warrior, Saladin.
And deep in their most private dreams they each heard again the words of the immortal Sheikh Osama Bin-Mohammed bin Laden—the words that were spoken only to the glory of Allah—and the Prophet Mohammed-stated: “I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that
no one but God is worshipped. God who put my livelihood under the shadow of the spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.”
Yousaf and Ibraham understood those orders. Because they were not temporary orders. They were lifelong commands to wage war against the Infidel. Prison could shackle them, but it could never wash away the commands of Allah through his Servant Osama. “We will avenge the American wars on the Muslim world. We will attack them, strike at them at random in Europe and then America. We have bled, and now they will bleed. Never say that those slain in battle in the cause of God are dead. Because they will never die. They are alive, but you are not aware of them. Again I beseech you, in the name of God, you will fight the Infidel!”
And not all the influence of the University of London nor Harvard could remove these truths from the minds of Yousaf and Ibrahim. They did not need it to be set down on parchment. It was branded into their hearts. But even so, each man had written down the resounding words in Arabic, on the first blank page at the front of his American-supplied copy of the Koran.
Yousaf had added the phrase, again in Arabic: “What can you possibly know about our pain?” He could not recall why, and indeed when, he had written it, because the years of deprivation had left him mentally numb in any number of ways. He did not even know which year it was, forget days and times. But his phrase stood out in the holy pages of the Koran, and he stared at it often, linking his own personal pain with that of his people. And in these quiet times he swore vengeance upon the Great Satan, even in the certain knowledge that he could never get out of this place.
And his dreams were sometimes illuminated by the vision of the Great Osama, sword drawn and mounted on a battle camel thundering across this hot, dusty coastal wilderness at the head of a marauding jihadist army, which would blast away all of the Americans and spirit him, Yousaf, back to the place where he belonged, in the unending service of Allah.
Inside the camp, there were only a few like Yousaf, men for whom the Dream would never die, men whom those in the west could neither recognize nor understand. So many in the United States believed that everyone was sick to death of the War on Terrorism; that the American people just wanted it over, and that their enemy was as tired of it as they were. He’s not. His perception of time is different. Beyond the razor wire of Guantanamo there were thousands who believed what Yousaf believed. Men who seethed against poverty, and burned with frustration, anger, and passion.
In Guantanamo their thoughts were sometimes expressed in murmured defiance, in the strange mutterings of the permanently incarcerated, spoken softly as if to another self, the person they once were, and which now gave the impression of encroaching madness.
It was these slender indications of continued rebelliousness that kept an ever-watchful force of guards on the very edge of vigilance. Occasionally personnel fluent in Arabic were inserted into the exercise areas to listen and try to comprehend the current mindset of the prisoners. And they would hear the suppressed jihadist phrases of the camp’s toughest inmates. “We will not negotiate, neither will we rest, nor put down the sword until every infidel across the face of the earth is either converted to the true faith, or lies dead at our feet. Allah is great.”
These swarthy captives had been taken prisoner on the battlefield. They were illegal combatants, guilty as all hell, and ought rightfully to have been executed by military firing squad. But right now U.S. law did not permit that, and here they must stay, in Guantanamo, until, if necessary, the end of time.
Which left Ibrahim and Yousaf somehow stranded with their dreams and beliefs. Of the two, the dark, powerfully built Ibrahim was more the warrior. For him, much like the SEAL team that had captured him, there were very few of the world’s major problems that could not be solved with high explosive, a science upon which he was an expert. Yousaf was the more thoughtful, the planner, the strategist, always ready to assist Ibrahim in the manufacture of an Improvised Explosive Device to attack the enemy. But he was more at home at the feet of bin Laden, or Ayman al-Zawahiri, sipping coffee, studying data, and scheming.
Now, however, he did not know whether The Sheikh was even alive. And his innermost thoughts remained rooted in the mountains, in the high caves and hollows, where al-Qaeda and the Taliban came together, in secret, unseen councils of war.
Yousaf never allowed himself to consider that all might be lost, and that The Sheikh had been killed by the Americans. He was forbidden to tune in to any form of news program on the radio, and he was not allowed to read newspapers or to watch television. He was a man in a vacuum, out of the loop, alone with his memories, with the minimum of human contact.
For him this terrible place was a daily nightmare. Cuba has rock-steady temperatures of above 80 degrees F, give or take a half-dozen degrees to distinguish summer from winter. Guantanamo lies just a fraction north of the twentieth parallel, while Yousaf’s home village above the Chitral Valley on the Pakistan side of the frontier high in the mountains, was almost sixteen degrees further north, and subject to very different seasonal changes.
The mountains there, spectacular among the awesome peaks of the Hindu Kush, lie well beyond the clutches of the monsoon, and the lower valleys are just deserts. High up however, the villages are irrigated by wide mountain streams that come rushing out of the heart of the range, fed by melting snows.
This cool temperate zone was home to the lean, hook-nosed Yousaf, and the constant high temperatures of the eastern Cuban prison camp almost drove him mad. He longed for a respite from the heat, but the only time he got it was in the rainy season when the occasional hurricane swept in on the veering northeastern trades and almost blasted the place to hell and back. But it was mercifully cooler and Yousaf lay on his back in his cell, listened to the wild wind and contemplated his far-lost homeland.
And always in his mind were the words of the Great Osama, and Yousaf tried his best to remember them, and when eventually he had arranged these innermost thoughts into the order that The Great One had recounted them, he spoke softly in his cell, more a murmur than a mantra.
And he knelt down and clasped his hands together as if seeking comfort from the Prophet. And he said the words solemnly, and he begged Allah to hear his cry, that he was not finished, and within him there still beat the heart of a loyal jihadist warrior:The Arabian Peninsula has never—since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas—been stormed by any forces like the U.S. Crusader Armies now spreading across it like locusts—consuming its riches and destroying its plantations.
The United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors. It has been forming a spearhead with which to fight under the banner of the Crusader-Zionist Alliance. So far they have killed more than a million people in the northern section of the pensinsula—and now they come to annihilate what is left of us.
The United States’ aims are both religious and economic, designed to serve the Jews’ petty State and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and the murder of Muslims there. Their aim is to weaken us all, and, through this weakness and disunion, to guarantee Israel’s survival, at any cost, in Muslim blood.
These sentiments, which probably would not stand up under serious historical scrutiny, were originally part of the Fatwah “Urging Jihad Against Americans,” and published on bin Laden’s orders on February 23, 1998. Since then the Saudi-born terrorist godfather had rewritten them in many forms, and Yousaf Mohammed had read them many times.
And now, in a soft monotone, he repeated them over and over. And despite the religious overtones with which he invested the text, he never once gave a thought to those he had personally blown up and killed.
If he ever got out of Guantanamo, Yousaf was destined for high command in al-Qaeda, whether or not bin Laden still lived. His name was remembered with immense respect in the high caves of the Hindu Kush. Not as a fanatic, but as a highly educated battle commander, of the quali
ty required for the jihad. In the minds of the al-Qaeda elders, Yousaf Mohammed was temporarily hors de combat. But one day he would return.
Ibrahim Sharif, too, was in the thoughts of the senior jihadists who formed the leadership of al-Qaeda. Since the 2003 attacks on Baghdad, there had been a tightening of the alliance between bin Laden’s councils and the leadership of the Taliban, but they had drafted top commanders into Iraq and they had died by the dozen in the face of the U.S. onslaught on the terrorist enclaves.
Men like Ibrahim were still valued, and the memory of them was still vivid, if only because so many had died. At least Ibrahim and Yousaf had lived, although where and how was unclear. According to the intelligence network of al-Qaeda, they were both held captive in Guantanamo, but maybe not forever.
Forces were gathering worldwide to have the place closed. And this was despite the granite resolve of the Pentagon that it could not, must not, ever be shut down, because there was nowhere else to hold the world’s most dangerous illegal forces, without trial.
And the situation in the mountain villages of Afghanistan was becoming more and more complex. The regular Pashtun communities, with their two-thousand-year-old tribal customs, did not approve of the unrelentingly harsh doctrines of the Taliban, nor did they see much point in staging some kind of nutcase war against the most powerful nation in the world—one that had already proven it could smash them to pieces any time it felt so inclined, like in Tora Bora, 2001.
Which left both the Taliban and al-Qaeda in a never-ending quandary. They had little success in recruiting senior men from the villages, and could only find new followers among the very young, impressionable kids, thrilled by the prospect of one day becoming warriors for the jihad.
By that method al-Qaeda had recruited Ibrahim, but in the law-abiding communities it was not approved, and as the years had passed there was much disquiet among the village elders about both al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and the manner in which they located potential freedom fighters.
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