by Robert Lacey
Among those friends was Osama Bin Laden, who had recently opened a guesthouse in Peshawar, Bayt Al-Ansar, the “House of the Helpers.” In Islamic history the ansar were the helpers who welcomed Mohammed to Yathrib and gave him shelter when he left Mecca. Osama welcomed Arab volunteers who had come to Pakistan to do relief work among the Afghanis. At this stage there were only a few Arabs who had actually come to fight.
“When Osama talked about jihad in those days,” remembers Bahaziq, “it was more about building than fighting. He was gentle and rather quiet, with this deep, slow voice that came up from his chest. You could not see him going to the battlefield. I thought he was very soft and unwarlike. At this stage he was just starting to bring in his company’s construction equipment, sending machines over the border to build roads for the mujahideen. It was good to see him again after Jeddah. We had long conversations about the jihad and the importance of implementing Islamic values. I found it very, very comforting to feel part of the jihad, and he felt the same.
“Don’t forget that in those days Osama was not a villain, and he was not in any way anti-Saudi. Quite the opposite. He was a hero of the community, using his wealth to help a noble cause that was supported by the Saudi government—and by the American government as well. The Muslims saw the fight as strengthening Islam. The West saw it as a battle to bring down Communism. In those days everyone was fixated on kicking out the Russians. I don’t remember anyone who looked ahead and saw a clash.
“Osama and I would pray together. We were friends and more than friends—our families both came up from Yemen in the early days. When we were kids we would go horseback riding together, doing jumps on a spare piece of land that we owned. Osama was always very athletic. He was the first person I remember—Muslim or non-Muslim—who insisted on eating and drinking things that were pure and natural. After our riding I would offer him fruit juice from the fridge at my house and he’d refuse. ‘This has got preservative,’ he’d say.”
In Peshawar Bin Laden had teamed up with Abdullah Azzam, the inspirational Palestinian jihadi from the Jeddah and Mecca university campuses. Azzam had set up his own Afghan relief network, the Maktab Al-Khadamat (Office of Services), to welcome Saudi volunteers and money. He would accommodate volunteers in the frontier town, then channel them off to the training camps in Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass, which opened just nine miles to the west.
“Azzam was another man of principle,” remembers Bahaziq. “He was very handsome, with his bushy, gray beard. I really loved the moments I had with him. He was always smiling—very calm, not stern. I’d met him when he came lecturing in America in the 1970s. Now he was putting his ideas into practice. He was helping jihad on the ground.”
Azzam’s Office of Services produced pamphlets and newspaper articles, drumming up international support for the Afghan war effort, and Khaled Bahaziq was one of those who responded. In the course of the 1980s he made no less than ten trips from Jeddah to Peshawar—like many Saudis, a vacationing jihadi.
“I’d buy my weapon when I got to the border. There was a huge weapons souk outside Peshawar—the guns were hanging there in rows, hundreds of them. You could buy any weapon you fancied, and go on your way. I would always get a Kalashnikov. It cost a thousand riyals [about three hundred dollars]. I would use it while I was there, then, when I left, I’d give it as a present to one of the Afghan brothers. Across the border there were lots of stalls selling hashish and opium flowers—very beautiful looking. But that was not for true jihadis, not in any way. I’d rent a car, or sometimes I’d buy one that I’d sell when I went home. If I was going up to the northeast where the roads were not paved, I would get a four-wheel drive, a Toyota or a jeep.”
Bahaziq had a job as a university lecturer in Jeddah, as well as a share in a medical supplies business with his brother-in-law. His brother was a full-time mujahid, one of the small group of “Arab Afghans” who were fighting their own battle against the Russians.
“When I went to the front, it was a very good feeling. I had a sensation of calmness and peace. Jihad was doing God’s work, and I felt very close to God. I always felt—and my brother used to say this—that we were defenders. We were not there to kill, but to defend. There was great fellowship, we were all brothers, with a lot of joking. I used to make this life-size human dummy: it had a headdress that made it look like an Afghan, so I would stick it up over the trench and the Russians would fire at it. We laughed and teased each other—we felt very easy with the bullets flying around. If one of them caught us, we knew it would take us to heaven. I remember one expedition in the mountains where we had no jeeps. We had our weapons on donkeys, and it got dark and cold. One of the young guys decided to give his donkey a name—Nadia. ‘Please, Nadia,’ he said, ‘come into the cave with me, just for warmness. I’m not married, and I want the feeling that I have a woman to keep me warm.’ ”
Bahaziq brought his wife to vacation with him on several occasions, taking her into the firing zone.
“So my wife, you could say, is also a terrorist. One day I was teaching her how to throw hand grenades. I had one in my hand with the pin out, holding it tight so it would not explode. ‘Am I your king?’ I asked her. ‘Am I your master on the earth? If I release this, what happens after three seconds will be horrible—worse than death.’ ‘Please, Khaled,’ she said, pleading with me, ‘please, yes indeed, you are my master.’ So I threw the grenade far away and it exploded. ‘Right,’ she said, taking a grenade for herself and pulling out the pin. ‘Now let me tell you who you are.’ ”
Coming and going, often during his Ramadan holidays, and sometimes bringing his children, whom he would leave in one of the Peshawar guesthouses, the vacationing jihadi had no illusions as to who were the serious warriors in the battle against the Russians.
“The Afghans were like their goats, scaling the mountains so nimbly. Somehow they always got themselves up above the Russians, firing down on them in their tanks. They had such toughness. They did not show pain. I remember one had had his finger cut off, and I was dressing that wounded hand with a bandage. Meanwhile, he had his walkie-talkie in the other hand and was giving out orders. Another time I was with an Arab and an Afghan when both of them got shot. At once the Arab started rolling on the ground screaming. The Afghan just looked at him.”
For several years Osama Bin Laden was an armchair warrior, traveling to Peshawar to bring money and supplies, helping the mujahideen with his road-making work, but not actually joining the Afghans on the field of battle. Later he confessed his shame that he had not been braver—“I asked forgiveness from God Almighty,” he wrote in one account that he prepared for Abdullah Azzam, “feeling that I had sinned.”
But in 1986 he started work building a military base, a camp to house several dozen Arab fighters, near the Afghan village of Jaji, about ten miles from the Pakistani border. It was a turning point in his career—it brought him into contact with real fighting. The following summer Soviet jets made a series of attacks on the camp, diving down on Jaji, their engines screaming. The lanky young Saudi, now thirty years old, dived for cover as the shells rained down.
“The mountains were shaking from the bombardment,” as he later described it. “The missiles that landed outside the camp were making a huge noise that covered the sound of the mujahideen cannon as if they did not exist. Bear in mind that if you heard those sounds alone, you might say there could not be anything louder! As to the missiles that landed inside the camp, thanks to God, they did not explode. They landed as iron lumps. I felt closer to God than ever.”
By Bin Laden’s melodramatic account, the mujahideen cannon managed to bring down four Soviet planes.
“I saw with my own eyes the remains of [one of] the pilots—three fingers, a part of a nerve, the skin of one cheek, an ear, the neck, and the skin of the back. Some Afghan brothers came and took a photograph of him as if he were a slaughtered sheep! We cheered.”
Osama described the battles of Jaji to the young journalist
Jamal Khashoggi, who had come out to write about the Arab Afghans for Al-Majallah magazine.
“He was very proud,” remembers Khashoggi. “He showed me how he’d figured out that he could defend the whole valley from a certain vantage point. The Afghans, he said, did not think tactically like that.”
Like Khaled Bahaziq, Bin Laden was full of admiration for the bravery of the Afghan fighters. Unlike the Arabs—and Bin Laden himself—they had not dived for the trenches. They had stood their ground, firing up at the infidels, serene in their faith, accepting life or death as it was dealt to them.
“Reliance upon God is the main source of our strength,” Bin Laden told Khashoggi. “These trenches and tunnels are merely the military facilities God asked us to make. We depend completely on God in all matters.”
Osama was coming to feel that his life—and death—was totally in God’s hands.
“I became more convinced of the fact,” he later wrote, “that no one could be injured except by God’s will.”
When a Russian mortar shell fell at his feet shortly after this, he waited fatalistically for it to explode and kill him.
“I felt sakina [serenity],” he later told the British journalist Robert Fisk—sakina being the Islamic concept that removes you mentally from the material aspects of the world. Linked with God in another existence, you feel elevated, exhilarated—quite indifferent to whether you live or die. It is the nirvana to which suicide bombers aspire.
“It was quite clear talking to him,” said Fisk, “that this was a very important moment in his life—he had conquered fear and the fear of death. And once you do that, you start discovering that perhaps you love death . . .”
The Soviet attacks on Jaji were Osama’s baptism of fire, launching his career as a holy warrior. The Saudi press took up the story, glorifying “Abu Abdullah” (“Father of Abdullah,” Osama’s jihadi name) and also the role of the young Saudis who fought beside him—as many as ten thousand according to an Interior Ministry survey of exit-stamp destinations in the 1980s. This scarcely compared to the 175,000 to 250,000 native Afghans estimated to have been fighting the Soviets, but the Saudis had given lavishly (with America) to support the war, and some of the payment was in blood. The bodies of the Arab dead were dispatched home in cold storage, embalmed in sweet-smelling fluid whose scent consoled grieving parents, convincing them that their sons had died martyrs.
It was a new and very pleasant sensation for Arabs to feel they had played their part in a military victory. “Progressive” Arab leaders like Nasser and Sadat had flung well-armed Arab armies against Israel, and had delivered humiliation. They had not included religion in their strategy. But now victory was going to those who grounded themselves in Islam. Small and simple groups of holy warriors were humbling one of the world’s two superpowers. God was smiling on the faithful in the mountains—as He was also smiling on the domestic jihad that was restoring godliness to Saudi society.
The Sahwah—the Awakening—was coming good. As the 1980s progressed, the tone of Saudi preachers grew sharper in the Friday pulpits, and their sermons circulated through a jazzy new medium—compact recording cassettes. Once condemned as vehicles for decadent Western music, cassette tapes were now welcomed as a way of spreading the word of God. Popular sermons sold in the thousands through stalls in the souk, along with stories of the Prophet and early Islam. Young devotees collected and swapped these cassettes the way their Western contemporaries collected Michael Jackson tapes. There was an exciting sense of momentum—and some of these preachers were extremely young men.
Mansour Al-Nogaidan, aged eighteen, was an eloquent young preacher from the town of Buraydah in Qaseem, the Wahhabi heartland two hundred miles north of Riyadh. To this day the sheikhs of Qaseem consider themselves the true keepers of the Wahhabi flame, proudly showing visitors the small, conical mosque, an oversize beehive made of mud where, they say, Abdul Wahhab stayed at least once when he came to Qaseem to carry out his mission. In all the Arabian Peninsula, they believe, they remain the most faithful to the monotheistic, reforming truth of the Wahhabi mission.
Not surprisingly, in 1979 Qaseem had contributed a generous number of supporters to the cause of Juhayman. Mansour Al-Nogaidan can remember his classmates bunking off school in the early days of 1980 to watch their execution. Age eleven at the time, he was too nervous to join them.
“The beheading platform was only four hundred yards from our school,” he recalls “But my knees would not allow me to go.”
Juhayman’s movement had been explained to Mansour and his friends in terms of black magic.
“His hands were tied behind his back, according to our teachers, because if he were let loose he could fly. He was the bogeyman. Mothers told their children that Juhayman would come and get them if they did not behave and go to bed.”
From his early teens, Mansour was proud to consider himself a Salafi, memorizing the Koran, attending extra lectures at the mosque, and drifting into the orbit of the local fundamentalist preachers who called for the destruction of television as the machine of the Devil. Inspired, the boy would secretly pour water through the holes in the back of the family television set. The antihierarchical nature of Salafism made the movement deeply appealing to the teenage rebel in search of a cause.
Salafism also played on the fears of a scared inner child. At the religious summer camps that Mansour attended, adult teachers deliberately cultivated their charges’ fantasies about heaven and hell.
“After listening to the teachings, my mind would dwell on the scorpions and spiders in hell, and the two blue angels who would be coming to my grave to take me to the fire. I would go to bed crying and scared.”
Abdullah Thabit, a young Salafi recruited in Asir in these years, remembers actually being taken to his grave.
“I had this mentor—each new recruit had one. After dark he would drive me to the cemetery and instruct me to lie down in one of the freshly dug graves. I would shiver there in the darkness looking up at the stars, while he terrified me with tales of hellfire and the tortures that awaited me if I did not find the way to God.”
The mentor also, however, offered his young charge a personalized, fatherly protection against these ultimate fears—a crucial element in Islamist recruitment tactics. While ostensibly anti-Western, the recruiters deployed Western parenting techniques, extending to vulnerable youngsters a one-on-one warmth, interest, and support that contrasted sharply with the authoritarian style of traditional Saudi fathers, who doled out whatever personal affection they had to offer among numerous wives and a large brood of children. Mansour Al-Nogaidan found his own way to God revealed when he was coming down the steps of the mosque and felt his shoulders being held warmly by a venerable and kindly old sheikh.
“He had a ‘white face,’ ” Mansour remembers. “That’s an expression we use for someone whose faith is shining out of their features.”
This man, Sheikh Mohammed Al-Saqaabi, was famous in Buraydah for following the ways of the Prophet in the most literal possible fashion, living in a mud hut without electricity and shunning the motorcar to travel by horse and buggy.
“ ‘Look, my son,’ he said to me. ‘I’m sure you’re attending the public education [the local state school], and I am here to tell you that is the worst thing that can happen to you. You must leave, and attend more of these lectures at the mosque. Your family will get angry with you, but you are here on this earth to satisfy God.’ ”
Mansour’s family was, indeed, as angry as the sheikh predicted. His mother wept, and his brothers threatened to beat him and drag him back from the madmen into whose hands he had fallen. Many ordinary Saudis did not sign on to the extremism of the Sahwah. But the “awakening” was smiled upon by the religious establishment, and—like the jihad in Afghanistan—its agencies received easy support from the rich and vicariously pious: there was no shortage of funds to print pamphlets and circulate cassettes. The government gave no sign that it discouraged the development of this mystical
and rather wild strand in national life. On the contrary, King Fahd had denounced the “lost” youth of the West: he could only approve, surely, of young Saudi men becoming more religious—while for the young men themselves, the confident certainties of fundamentalism offered comforting solutions and a clear way ahead through the confusions that afflict any teenager.
“It now seems to me,” says Mansour, “that I struck a sort of deal with God—that He would take away my personal fears and worries if I gave up everything to devote myself to Him, following the Salafi way. That was the bargain: if I lived like the Prophet, I would find peace of mind. And in due course, after several years, I myself could become a ‘sheikh.’ ”
Mansour left home to go and live with the local Salafis, the “Brothers of Buraydah,” a community of fundamentalists who occupied their own particular corner of town—three hundred families or so, with their own school and mosques. In front of the family his father had sternly warned Mansour that he would be on his own if he left. But he clearly sympathized with his son’s religious direction: he secretly bought the boy books and helped him out financially for a year, until he died. For SR 1,500 ($400) a year Mansour was able to rent a semiderelict old house among the Brothers. “It was a mud hut,” he remembers. He grew his beard long and cut his thobe short. As he studied at the feet of the local Salafis, his mentors encouraged him to start teaching and preaching in his own right—and, after a year or so, even to start issuing fatwas.
Mansour’s first fatwa, published when he was eighteen, was that there should be no ceremonies of congratulation for boys who had completed their Koranic memorization or for men who were starting on the religious life. There was no record in the Koran or the Hadith, he argued, of Mohammed conducting such rituals.