by Robert Fisk
And how did these perverse men—and perhaps “perverse” was the very opposite of their persona—fly these aircraft with such painless accuracy into three of their four targets? Within days, we would learn of their flight-training programmes, their desire to learn only how to fly an airliner once it had taken off. I was travelling from Beirut to Paris in late September and sought the reflections of my friends on the flight deck, by chance the same crew with whom I’d flown into Dhahran in 1990 when the United States sent its soldiers to Saudi Arabia. “Eighteen months? You think it takes eighteen months to learn how to fly a Boeing 757 once it’s in the air?” the pilot asked. Far below us, the clouds of central Europe passed like a white screen, faint ripples of emerging cumulus climbing from the plateau of mist in the afternoon sun. “I can teach you how to fly this in two minutes. At least, I can teach you all you need to know in order to become a hijacker.” As evening drew in, the instruments began to shine green in front of us. The co-pilot had laid his maps across his lap. His colleagues tut-tutted. “A hijacker doesn’t need these maps,” he said. “All he needed to do was code in the exact location of the World Trade Center Twin Towers. On automatic pilot, the plane will follow these instructions. He switches off the transponder [identifying aircraft for ground control]—this knob—and the plane will head for his chosen destination.”
The pilot leaned forward. The code word for the setting was punched in as “FISK” along with a series of numbers, in this case 123456789, so that the plane would fly itself to its “target.” “The hijacker probably couldn’t put an airliner through a take-off—but he doesn’t have to,” the pilot said. “The hijackers in America let the flight-deck crew do that. They wait until the 757 is at its cruising altitude, say 35,000 feet, then they burst into the cabin, murder the pilot and take over. Most of their work has already been done for them.” It dawned on me then that faith, however perverted, had now connected with modern technology—in just the same way as the volumes in those Algerian bookshops, works on Islam and works on science, had been placed next to one another.
A pattern of towns emerged like white and yellow blood vessels in the body of darkness below us. “Your hijacker has now reached the area west of New York, and he lets the plane take him to within sight of the city,” the pilot says. “Then he just presses this button to cut the automatic pilot and flies the plane himself. He can see the Twin Towers. In broad daylight, it’s easy—every pilot into New York would see the Trade Center. Then he pushes the wheel forward and starts his dive.” Middle East pilots had already discussed the last moments of the two aircraft to hit the Twin Towers. They had studied the photographs in the news magazines, watched and listened to the videotapes. On our flight deck, the crew had a set of press photographs of the last moments of the American Airlines and United Airlines jets.
“On the videotape that was made of the first plane to hit, you can clearly hear the twin engines,” the pilot says. “They are so loud that someone in the street looks up. The engines are over-powered, they were never meant to be flying the plane that fast, they are under immense pressure.” And he makes a noise like a jet through his teeth. “The way the plane is plunging—he’s pushing it down with the wheel [control stick], remember, it’s now flying way forward of its permitted speed. I reckon that first aircraft hit the tower at maybe nine hundred—even one thousand—kilometres an hour.”
We all digest this thought as a bubble of air gently rocks the wings of our own jet, aware of just how easily this secure cocoon of warmth, our air coming pressured into the cabin from the engines, our flight-path directed and watched from central and northern Europe, can turn into a tomb. “You know why those people jumped from the windows of the building?” the co-pilot suddenly asks. “That wasn’t gasoline that had burned into the buildings, the kind you use in a car. That jet was carrying”—and here he glances at a fuel manual—“around twenty thousand gallons of aviation fuel, which is the same as kerosene. Ordinary gasoline will burn you, but kerosene burns ferociously, it’s much hotter. The people burning in that tower were, in effect, being tortured to death. They jumped because of the pain.”
U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell laid out the ground rules for the first war against “evil” within three days of September 11th. His message to the Taliban was simple: they had to take responsibility for sheltering bin Laden. “You cannot separate your activities from the activity of these perpetrators,” he warned.183 But the Americans absolutely refused to associate their own response to their predicament with their activities in the Middle East. And we were supposed to go on holding our tongues even when Ariel Sharon—a man whose name will always be associated with the massacre at Sabra and Chatila—announced that Israel also wished to join the battle against “world terror.” No wonder the Palestinians were fearful. In the four days following September 11th, twenty-three Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and Gaza, an astonishing figure that would have been front-page news had America not been blitzed. But if Israel was allowed to join the new conflict, then the Palestinians—by fighting the Israelis—would, by extension, become part of the “world terror” against which Bush was supposedly going to war. Not for nothing did Sharon now claim that Yassir Arafat had connections with Osama bin Laden—a statement as empty of truth as Bush’s later attempt to persuade the world that Saddam Hussein had links with bin Laden.
It took a while to grasp what was now going on, the extraordinary, almost unbelievable preparations under way for the most powerful nation ever to have existed on God’s earth to bomb the most devastated, ravaged, starvation-haunted and tragic country in the world. Afghanistan, raped and eviscerated by the Russian army for ten years, abandoned by its friends—us, of course—once the Russians had retreated, was about to be attacked by the surviving superpower. President Bush was now threatening the obscurantist, ignorant, super-conservative Taliban with the same punishment he intended to mete out to bin Laden. Bush had originally talked about “justice and punishment” and about “bringing to justice” the perpetrators of the atrocities of September 11th. But he was not sending policemen to the Middle East; he was sending B-52s. And F-18s and AWACS planes and Apache helicopters. We were not going to arrest bin Laden. We were going to destroy him. And B-52s don’t discriminate between men wearing turbans, or between men and women or women and children.
None deserved this fate, but after twenty-one years of continuous conflict, the Afghans merited it least of all. The Saudis and the Pakistanis had, on America’s behalf, helped to arm the militias of Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, and then—disgusted by the victors’ feuding—supported Mullah Omar’s Wahhabi army of self-righteous peasant clerics, the Taliban. Saudi Arabia had poured millions of dollars into the madrassas—religious colleges—in Pakistan throughout the Afghan–Soviet conflict and the Taliban was an authentic product of Wahhabism, the strict, pseudo-reformist Islamist state faith of Saudi Arabia founded by the eighteenth-century cleric Mohamed Ibn Abdul-Wahab. Western scholars like to refer to Abdul-Wahab’s beliefs—such as they were—as extremist, but to Muslims they had a quite different connotation. For waging war on fellow Muslims who had “erred” was an obligatory part of his philosophy, whether they be the “deviant” Shias of Basra—whom he vainly attempted to convert to Sunni Islam— or Arabians who did not follow his own exclusive interpretation of Muslim “unity.” He also proscribed rebellion against rulers. His orthodoxy therefore both threatened the modern-day House of Saud because of its corruption, yet secured its future by forbidding any revolution. The Saudi ruling family thus embraced the one faith that could both protect and destroy it.
SAUDI ARABIA’S ROLE in the September 11th, 2001 attacks has still not been fully explored. While senior members of the royal family expressed the shock and horror that was expected of them, no attempt was made to examine the nature of Wahhabism and its inherent contempt for all representation of human activity or death. Abdul-Wahab ordered all tombs and mosques built over tombs to be destroyed, including
the tomb of Zayd bin al-Khattab, a companion of the Prophet. The destruction of the two giant Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2000— along with the vandalism in the Kabul museum—fitted perfectly into this theocratic wisdom. So, too, it might be argued, did the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
Saudi Muslim legal iconoclasm led directly to the detonation of the Buddhas. In 1820, the much-worshipped statues of Dhu Khalasa, dating from the twelfth century, were destroyed by Wahhabis. Only weeks after Lebanese professor Kamal Salibi suggested in the late 1990s that once-Jewish villages in what is now Saudi Arabia may have been locations in the Bible, the Saudi authorities sent bulldozers to destroy the ancient buildings there. Saudi organisations have destroyed hundreds of historic structures in the name of religion in Mecca and Medina, and former UN officials have condemned the destruction of Ottoman buildings in Bosnia by a Saudi aid agency which decided they were “idolatrous.” When the Saudis built the massive Faisal mosque in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad— originally destined for Kabul—its construction was followed almost at once by the smashing of a large number of early Islamic figure shrines in the city. Graffiti appeared beside graveyard shrines saying they must be destroyed because “there can be no sainthood in Islam.” Of the many Islamic countries to have condemned the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, one Muslim nation was noticeable by its silence: Saudi Arabia, where even private Christian worship at Christmas is forbidden and where kings and emirs are buried without gravestones.
In 1998, a Saudi student at Harvard produced a remarkable thesis—based upon first-hand research in his country—which argued convincingly that U.S. forces had suffered casualties in bombing attacks in Saudi Arabia because American intelligence did not understand Wahhabism and had underestimated the extent of the dissatisfaction among senior ulema towards the U.S. presence in the kingdom. Nawaf Obaid, who drew up his report at the request of a senior State Department official, named the two most vocal clerics opposed to King Fahd as Sheikh Sulieman al-Owda and Sheikh Safar al-Hawali. Al-Awdah had distributed tapes of sermons that compared members of the royal family to the last sultans of the Ottoman empire and the Americans to an occupying force. He drew his support, Obaid pointed out, from a town called Buraiydah, where his followers attempted to prevent his arrest in 1994.
Obaid quoted a senior officer in the Saudi army as telling him that “I was amazed at the ‘secret’ agreement that the king and the minister of defence had made with the Bush administration agreeing to U.S. troop retention after the war. I knew then and there that the society . . . would never understand or accept this situation.” More ominously, a Saudi National Guard officer told Obaid that “the more visible the Americans became, the darker I saw the future of the country.”
Wahhabi puritanism meant that Saudi Arabia was always likely to throw up men who believed they had been chosen to “cleanse” their society from corruption—the royal family usually being fingered as the centre of this Satanic cancer— and it was a former National Guard officer, Juhayman Ibn Mohamed al-Utaybi, who led the siege of the Great Mosque at Mecca in November 1979, along with his friend Mohamed Ibn Abdullah al-Qahtani. Al-Utaybi proclaimed al-Qahtani the mahdi, the divinely inspired figure foretold by the Prophet who would restore justice to a corrupt world. The Saudis deployed 10,000 troops to take back the mosque from the two hundred gunmen who had seized the building. But the Great Mosque was a veritable Afghanistan of underground caves and hiding places. Only after French riot police were brought to Mecca two weeks later—undergoing a brief but formal conversion to Islam to legitimise their presence in a city that only Muslims may visit—was the siege brought to a bloody end. The French flooded the basements of the mosque and inserted cables into the water, electrocuting Saddam-style many of the rebels “like kippers.” On 9 January 1980, in towns across Saudi Arabia, sixty-three men were beheaded in public.
Yet still the Saudis could not confront the duality of protection-and-threat that Wahhabism represented for them. Both Saudis and their Western allies have tried to bury this in obfuscations and metaphors that prevent any serious inquiry into this “puritanism.” Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s long-time ambassador to the United States, once characterised his country’s religion as part of a “timeless culture” whose people lived according to Islam “and our other basic ways.” A former British ambassador advised Westerners to “adapt” in Saudi Arabia and “to act with the grain of Saudi traditions and culture.” This “grain” is all too evident in the libraries of Amnesty International appeals for the hundreds of men—and occasionally women—who are beheaded each year in the kingdom, often after torture and grossly unfair trials.
With considerable prescience, the Saudi scholar Obaid concluded in 1998 that “in the Taliban, the U.S. will have a chance to witness a Wahhabi government without the moderating presence of the al-Saud, and perhaps a glimpse into what Saudi Arabia could become if the traditional balance of power is disrupted in favour of the religious establishment.” It was to prove a fearful experience. The Taliban made no secret of their intolerance, their merciless punishments, the hanging of thieves—along with videotapes and television sets—their amputations and beheading and beating and execution of women.184 But when faced with Shia Muslim opponents, they were capable of applying Abdul-Wahab’s concept of waging war on “deviant” Muslims with a ferocity that quite matched their Afghan militia opponents. In August 1998, they succeeded in breaking into the last stronghold of Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance, the city of Mazar-e-Sharif. The first eyewitness accounts of the ferocious massacre—kept secret for two months in a series of confidential United Nations files—provided horrific evidence of rape, throat-slitting and mass suffocation of Shia Muslim men and women by the Saudi-funded army. The reports, compiled by officials of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights in Pakistan, were sent to New York but kept secret because the UN was still trying to negotiate with the Taliban. Outraged by what he read in the documents, however, a Swedish diplomat passed on their contents to me.
An Afghan man, a Tajik father of three, described to UN officials how he had “never before witnessed such scenes of bestial violence” until the day the Taliban entered Mazar to find the unsuspecting men and women of the city going about their daily shopping. “They were shooting without warning at everybody who happened to be on the street, without discriminating between men, women and children,” he said. “Soon the streets were covered with dead bodies and with blood. No one was allowed to bury the corpses for . . . six days. Dogs were eating human flesh and going mad and soon the smell became intolerable.” The same witness said that on the second day of their victory, the Taliban began house-to-house searches in a hunt for Shia Muslim families who were identified by their facial features. “Almost all who were found were either shot three times on the spot (one bullet in the head, one in the chest and one in the testicles), slaughtered in the Halal way (with a knife to the throat) or stuffed into containers after being badly beaten.”
Up to twelve of these containers were parked all day long in the sun with sealed doors, and the witness “saw a container that had its doors opened after all the males inside had died of suffocation. Some of the containers were filled with children (boys and girls) who were taken to an unknown destination after their parents were killed.” Women, the UN report said, “were usually abused and many rape cases were reported . . .” One witness fleeing through Mazar heard the calls of the muezzins in the mosques “asking all Shias to convert to Sunni [Islam] and attend the daily prayers for their own sake.” A woman whose husband and two brothers were executed—shot twice and then their throats cut—described how the Taliban, as they left the house, shouted “that they had more serious executions to carry out, but that they would be coming back.”
Ten Iranian diplomats and an Iranian journalist were killed when Taliban men entered their consulate. Their bodies were left lying in the building for two days until they were buried in a mass grave in the compound of the Sultan Razia
Girls’ High School. The murder of the Iranians almost provoked Tehran to stage a military incursion into Afghanistan in September 1998. Of the thousands of Shia Muslims taken from Mazar, not one returned.
In the early spring of 2000, I visited a Taliban production line, a school of committed, earnest young men whose Koranic learning was aided by the modern science that captivates so many Islamists. Its pupils— talib means “student”—were of many nationalities, all seeking the divine revolution which they believed would occur in their lifetime. Arriving at the college at Akora Khattak in Pakistan’s North West Frontier province with film-makers Nelofer Pazira and Siddiq Barmak, I found Tajikistan’s Islamic “liberators” more than willing to talk to us. Down a narrow passageway, the young men were gathered, bearded, smiling, crying Allahu akbar, posing before posters that showed the Russian bear skewered with a green Muslim flag. Abdul-Raouf—there were no student family names for us as at the great mosque and its religious school opposite the railway track from Peshawar—grasped my arm. “We would like to make an Islamic revolution in Tajikistan and we believe in the rebirth of Islam in Tajikistan,” he shouted in Russian, which Siddiq—who trained in the Soviet Union—could translate. “The great light of Islam will shine upon our country. It is the promise of God for us.” His face was thin, his beard pointed, his eyes alight with conviction. Abdul-Raouf and his fellow students in the madrassa founded by Mullanah Abdul al-Haq had only recently taken leave of their Chechen colleagues, young men who—after a year of Koranic teaching at Akora Khattak—had returned to their country to fight the Russians.