Nine Lives: My time as the West's top spy inside al-Qaeda

by Aimen Dean

  Qutb had been rearrested in Egypt after writing Milestones. One phrase of his particularly resonated – that our words remained unlit candles during our lifetime, but at the moment we die for our beliefs they are lit. It spoke of the ultimate sacrifice.

  A few weeks before he was executed in Egypt in 1966, Qutb had written from prison to a friend: ‘I have been able to discover God in a wonderful new way. I understand His path and way more clearly and perfectly than before.’5 He was looking forward to martyrdom.

  By ordering him to be hanged, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser sealed Qutb’s legend. His writings would have a huge influence on men like Osama bin Laden who were drawn towards jihad because, like Qutb, they believed Muslims had abandoned the basic principles of Islam and had become consumed with their existence in this world and not the next. They had been seduced by Western materialism and secularism.*

  I was gravitating towards this viewpoint, mindful of a hadith attributed to the Prophet:

  ‘Whenever you start dealing in usury and you are content merely with your livestock and agriculture and you abandon jihad then God will subject you to humiliation at the hands of other nations until you return back to the principles of your faith.’7

  In 1994 I was still some way from being a revolutionary. Restless and rebellious perhaps and certainly sympathetic to the militant cause against secular dictatorships in Egypt and Algeria, but the idea of settling religious scores nearer to home in Saudi Arabia or Bahrain by shedding blood was unthinkable. Indeed, the notion of global jihad had yet to surface, but even as a fifteen-year-old I felt humiliation as a Muslim. I despaired that civil war in Afghanistan had ruined an opportunity to build an Islamic State (though the Taliban would soon change that). At the time I was also reading accounts of the serial defeats of the Arabs in their twentieth-century wars against the Jews in 1948, 1956 and 1967.

  Qutb’s works had even greater resonance after the first Gulf War, which had seen a Western-led coalition descend upon Arab lands. Two radical clerics in Saudi Arabia were railing against the presence of the infidel and warning they would only leave after ‘reorganizing’ the region to serve their interests.8 The sermons of Safar al-Hawali and Salman al-Ouda hinted at the end-of-days: an apocalyptic battle was on the horizon. I began to wonder if they were right: at the end of 1992, the US began its ill-fated intervention in Somalia and the following summer there was another cruise missile attack on Baghdad.

  Both clerics were arrested by the Saudi authorities in September 1994 and imprisoned, a move that angered me and thousands of other Salafis, including bin Laden. But their defiance reminded us of the Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyyah,* who had said seven centuries earlier: ‘What are my enemies going to do to me? If they imprison me, my prison will become my retreat. If they kill me, I become a martyr. If they deport me, my exile will be my tourism. What are they going to do to me? My happiness is in my heart. My heart is in God’s hands.’9

  Within days of the clerics’ arrest, and fulminating against the status quo, I decided I was one of Qutb’s unlit candles.*

  While I worked at the Islamic bookshop I would often have dinner with Khalid al-Hajj’s older brother, Mohammed, who worked nearby. One evening soon after the Sheikhs’ arrest, Mohammed told me that Khalid was going to Bosnia and I should say goodbye to him. Only the family knew, Mohammed said, ‘but you are his friend and I thought you should too.’

  I was stunned. I thought I knew Khalid well, but he had never mentioned his plans to me. At the time, the Saudi newspapers were full of stories about the Arab ‘foreign legion’ that had gone to fight alongside the Muslims in Bosnia against the bloodthirsty Serbs. The martyrdom of two Saudis in Sarajevo the previous year had been big news.

  At that moment, sitting at dinner with Mohammed, I was struck by a lightning bolt of purpose – an epiphany. This was the path I needed to take, the answer that had been eluding me for months. Could I really stay at home and train to be an imam – toeing the government line and abetting injustice instead of answering Qutb’s call to defiance?

  I was not hungry anymore.

  ‘I need to talk to Khalid,’ I said. ‘Immediately.’

  I had an impulsive streak (and still do) but this was no rash euphoria. In a way the Gulf War, the Americans hanging around in Khobar, my readings of Qutb, the Islamic Awareness Circle, had all brought me to this moment. Certainly I was imbued with an ideology, but I was also a powder keg yearning for a spark. I did not want history passing me by.

  Khalid was surprised to see me, and more surprised that I knew of his plans.

  ‘How many of you are going?’ I asked.

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Now it’s four.’

  ‘But you’re fifteen. You can’t just take off anywhere. War is not a poetry competition.’

  ‘Correction: I just turned sixteen,’ I interrupted.

  Khalid was becoming desperate. He did not want to offend me, but nor did he want what he expected to be the burden of looking after me.

  ‘Do you really think jihad needs you there?’ he asked, almost pleading.

  Without knowing where the words came from, I answered: ‘I know jihad doesn’t need me, but I need jihad.’

  It might sound like a glib response, but I felt a moral and religious duty to take up arms.

  Years later Khalid told me my reply had persuaded him that I should join the expedition. It had meant that I wanted to travel not as an adventurer in search of thrills and heroism but to better myself, to be part of a project that would make a difference.

  I told my brothers that I was going on a camping trip with Khalid and some others for two days.

  ‘Off with the Circle again, little brother?’ asked Moheddin with a smirk.

  He embraced me as I left – for longer than a camping trip warranted. He had a sense that I was off to do more than camping. He had known Khalid’s group was leaving for Bosnia and expected me to join them, but he didn’t want our brothers to know. He knew that Omar in particular would try to dissuade me. Moheddin told me many years later that he had felt exceptionally proud that his little brother had taken it upon himself to wage jihad in defence of our faith.

  I collected winter clothing, a radio, flashlights and a Swiss army knife, as well as about $3,000, the earnings from the bookshop that I had carefully saved for a higher education that would be on indefinite hold. I also bought a return ticket – as did the others – so as not to arouse suspicion among European immigration officials. I felt it unlikely I would ever make that return journey. I was going to be a Holy Warrior and seek martyrdom – and that outweighed the sadness that I would probably never see my family again.

  The quartet comprised Khalid, myself, a young businessman from Khobar and a student from Riyadh. The businessman was the scion of a Saudi construction dynasty and was carrying the equivalent of $800,000 to donate to the cause. We split up the cash between us, in case one of us was stopped and searched. It was my first encounter with the way cash for jihad was moved.

  We flew out of Dhahran for Vienna in early October 1994 and were asked just one question by the Saudi border security official as we were leaving: ‘How are you boys going to manage in Vienna if you can’t speak German?’

  When we arrived at Vienna airport, our problem was not so much our inadequate German as the overwhelming abundance of young women. There were dozens of them in every direction. The miniskirts and jeans, lipstick and cleavage affronted my Saudi sense of modesty. At home, girls typically donned the veil from the age of eleven; here they seemed to wear less the older they grew.

  Like a demented robot I kept moving my head in different directions so as to avoid setting eyes on this onslaught of the female form. I felt my virtue and dignity threatened and remembered the warning of the Prophet Mohammed: ‘The first glance is for you but the second glance will be against you.’10

  Before leaving the airport, the four of us went to a coffee shop. I could not help glancing at a girl who was about my age, sitting w
ith her parents at the next table. I remember her exactly, such was the impact on my delicate sensibilities. She had deep blue eyes and auburn hair that cascaded onto her slim, pale shoulders. A sleeveless lilac dress hung delicately on an already alluring figure. She smiled and I blushed scarlet, quickly averting my gaze.

  ‘Khalid, can you switch places with me?’ I asked my friend.

  ‘Why?’ he replied.

  ‘I feel a bit uncomfortable.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said, making the swap.

  ‘You rascal. Why didn’t you tell me?’ he hissed a few seconds later.

  ‘Because you’re older than me and more pious,’ I replied. Temptation was the work of the devil.

  The passage to Croatia and into Bosnia had been well trodden by the first wave of the mujahideen. Obtain a visa for Croatia in Vienna, touch base with worshippers at the al-Sahaba mosque, drop into the adjacent McDonald’s for a fish burger. It was there that we began to discuss martyrdom, four young men from the desert in the city of Mozart and Strauss.

  ‘How do you want to die?’ Khalid asked, as he reached for the French fries.

  The discussion energized rather than depressed us. That’s why we had made the journey: to offer our lives for the cause. My friends decided they preferred being vaporized in an explosion so no remains would be left on earth. I, too, was gripped by the sense that this foreign battlefield would be my bridge to paradise. As the Prophet had said, with the first drop of blood all the sins of a martyr are forgiven. With the second they see their place in heaven. There would be no purgatory and no anxiety on the Day of Judgment. Not only would seventy-two virgins await, but as a martyr I could ask the Lord to grant eternal life to seventy of my relatives and friends.11 I would be reunited with the mother I so missed and the father I had never got to know.

  That evening Khalid and I made a pledge to each other: ‘Brothers in God. Brothers in Faith. Brothers in Arms!’

  The Croatian embassy in Vienna was not as helpful as we had hoped,* so we flew to recently independent Slovenia, the first of the Yugoslav republics to break away. Arriving on a balmy autumn afternoon at Ljubljana airport, we were lucky enough to find a Lebanese taxi driver to translate for us and the following day had freshly stamped Croatian visas at a cost of 100 Deutschmarks each.

  We were asked few questions when we flew into Split. To avoid looking like a group we joined different queues at the immigration check. We had come up with the rather feeble ruse that we were on vacation and planned to go swimming. I made swimming motions with my hands to the border agent, just as out of the corner of my eye I caught one of my friends doing exactly the same. So much for subterfuge.

  The Arab fighters gathered at the Pension Tommy, a villa overlooking the Adriatic just outside Split on the coastal road to Dubrovnik. By the time we reached the pension (one of the few hotels in war-torn Croatia doing a roaring trade) there was already a group preparing to cross into Bosnia, including two fresh-faced Palestinians from Milan called Marwan and Hazam.

  Over dinner that night as the moonlight shimmered on the Adriatic, an Egyptian jihadi veteran told us about the war in Bosnia. The Muslims had been unprepared both militarily and psychologically and had anticipated neither the ferocity nor the brutality of Serb tactics. Only now were they coming to terms with the reality that the Serbs were hell-bent on a war of annihilation. Massacres had sent shock waves throughout the Bosnian civilian population; more than a million people had been displaced. The capital of Sarajevo was besieged and bombarded from all sides by heavy weaponry. The hillsides around the city were occupied by Serb snipers who showed no mercy to civilians, killing anyone who moved, regardless of age or gender.

  The Egyptian explained why Bosnia was attracting a growing foreign legion of jihadis. The Bosnian civil war had erupted just as the Afghan jihad was winding down. The mujahideen had finally entered Kabul after twelve long years of struggle for the city, only to start fighting among themselves. Despairing of the internecine warfare, many Arabs had left and some had gravitated to Bosnia. So would eventually a few hundred Muslims of North African descent who lived in Europe.

  Many of the ‘Afghan Arabs’ had received training in camps run by Pakistani intelligence: they were accomplished fighters but also well versed in everything from forging passports to laundering cash. Impressed with their prowess on the battlefield, the beleaguered Bosnian government had allowed them to set up a unit within the 3rd Corps of the Bosnian Army called the Mujahideen Brigade, and a growing number of Bosnian Muslims were now choosing to fight with the group. Their headquarters in Zenica, forty miles north-west of Sarajevo, was our destination.

  Despite the danger, a daily bus service still shuttled between Split and Zenica. On a cool October morning we set out from the coast. The mountains of the interior loomed and the landscape of the barren coastline gave way to thickly forested hillsides. As our bus lumbered through small towns, churches were less in evidence and the minarets of mosques more frequent. Many were badly damaged. In one picturesque mountain village carpeted by red and orange leaves we saw a mosque whose dome had been split in half when its minaret had come crashing down. I had seen such images on videos back in Saudi Arabia, but seeing the destruction in person profoundly shocked me. For as long as I could remember my life had revolved around the mosque. Sadness, anger and indignation swirled within me.

  Hazam, one of the Milanese Palestinians, said softly: ‘Remember, this is exactly why we came.’

  Zenica was a grim steel town in a broad valley. A Moroccan was waiting for us at the bus depot. He came every day in a minivan to pick up new volunteers. We were taken to our new lodgings: a dreary tenement on the edge of town that had once served as a dormitory for metal workers.

  A wizened Egyptian stared up at us from a battered desk.

  ‘Welcome to the Mujahideen Brigade. How long do you expect to stay?’ he asked.

  ‘Open-ended,’ I replied without a trace of irony.

  I was assigned number 324; I was the Brigade’s 324th volunteer. Mohammed al-Madani,* a Saudi fighter, then took me to the store room to pick up a uniform. It was the first of our many encounters.

  He certainly knew how to be condescending.

  ‘We’ll need to find you a baby-sized uniform. It may be difficult; Mothercare stopped manufacturing uniforms in your size!’

  ‘I’m almost as tall as you!’ I scowled, pulling myself up to my full height.

  The store room was plentifully supplied: the shelves were packed with AK-47s, machine guns, RPG-7s, grenades and more. Al-Madani handed me boots and a green camouflage uniform issued by the Bosnia-Herzegovina army. It had a patch with crossing swords and the blue and gold Bosnian crest, the insignia of the 3rd Corps.

  ‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

  ‘Like I’ve found my purpose – as if I was born for this.’

  Within days I had met white American converts to Islam, Britons of Pakistani origin and plenty of Egyptians. Many of the Egyptians belonged to Gama al-Islamiya, a jihadi group attempting to overthrow the Mubarak government. They had fought in Afghanistan and were the commanders and trainers of the brigade and frequently paid the price for leading from the front.

  Muslims from forty nations had come together in defence of other Muslims. It was the Islamic version of the International Brigade that had fought in the Spanish Civil War and I was immensely proud to belong to it. The overall commander was Anwar Shaaban, a senior member of Gama al-Islamiya and a veteran of the Afghan jihad. More recently he had gained prominence as the firebrand imam of the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan, and his associations with known terrorists had made him a wanted man in Italy.*

  When I was ushered into his office, I was greeted by an avuncular figure in his fifties with thick glasses and a long beard flecked with grey. He was impressed I had memorized the Koran and had come to fight at such a young age.

  I told Shaaban I had named myself ‘Haydara al-Bahraini’, the lion’s cub of Bahrain, a title whose pretension still
fills me with embarrassment.

  ‘I hope from time to time you can help our Bosnian brothers in the brigade. They have, alas, lived for many decades under atheism and communism, so they don’t always have the correct religious understanding,’ Shaaban said.

  It was true that many Bosnian Muslims wore their religion lightly, smoking and drinking and praying only occasionally. But the conflict had regenerated religious belief in Bosnia and an interest in jihad. While the vast majority of the approximately 100,000 Bosnians under arms in the civil war joined other units in the Bosnian army, some two thousand fought with the Mujahideen Brigade at any one time, outnumbering foreign fighters four to one.

  One young Bosnian fighter who spoke a little Arabic was called Abdin. He told me that while he had been at the University of Sarajevo the Serbs had come to his village and killed almost every member of his family. They had raped one of his sisters before killing her.

  ‘My other sister, we don’t know what happened to her,’ he said with sad resignation. For Abdin, jihad offered consolation and vengeance.

  The conflict would sow bitter fruit. Two decades later, more than 300 Bosnians would travel to Syria and Iraq to support ISIS, one of the highest number per capita from anywhere in Europe.13 Bosnia was a crucible for modern jihad.

  A few weeks after arriving in Bosnia, I was sent for training at al-Siddiq camp north of Zenica. I was reunited with Hazam and Marwan, the two Palestinians who had travelled with me into Bosnia, and we became fast friends. Khalid, as a ‘veteran’ of Afghanistan, had been dispatched straight to the front lines.

  The sloping encampment an hour's drive north of Zenica high up above the hamlet of Orašac consisted of a stone villa housing our sleeping and eating quarters. It was surrounded by outhouses, an exercise yard and firing ranges.14 For a boy from the Arabian Desert, the green mountains and the first snows of winter added to the sense of wonderment. It was a time of blissful fulfilment, even if boot camp and parade drill had to be endured. The prospect that I might not leave Bosnia alive sometimes gave me pause, but I accepted and even embraced the prospect of martyrdom should God so decide.