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

by Aimen Dean

  We travelled to Sarajevo for the prisoner swap. I was tasked with helping to escort the prisoners and was appalled by the scenes of devastation as our convoy descended from the hills above the airport, speeding past the pockmarked apartment towers of the Dobrinja district where so many civilians had been cut down by mortars and sniper fire. Even though the Serbs had abandoned most of their positions around the city after NATO’s belated intervention from the air, row upon row of headstones in the city’s beautiful public parks spoke of their deadly legacy.

  The exchange took place on a bridge over the River Bosna in the Otoka district. We were well armed just in case the Serb contingent at the other end of the bridge tried their luck. Once the Spanish UN peacekeepers on the bridge gave us the signal, we released the prisoners.

  I will never forget the scene that followed. Scores of women and children, gaunt and pale, began to stream towards us from the other side. They were like ghosts leaving a concentration camp. Their clothes were tattered and many were shivering with cold. Tellingly, there were no boys over the age of ten. By now a growing number of Sarajevo residents, including refugees from other parts of the country, had gathered nearby, desperate to be reunited with relatives. Tears of joy turned to anger and despair as they found out how many of their family and friends had been killed.

  I noticed an elegant, elderly lady anxiously looking on. Finally, she moved towards a beautiful young girl who could not have been more than thirteen years old. Perhaps she was her granddaughter. She looked malnourished. The sadness and weariness in her eyes will always haunt me. What unspeakable crimes had been committed against the girl and her other family members? Where were her parents, her siblings?

  As the two hugged and wept, I couldn’t hold back tears. The pain these people had suffered was beyond endurance.

  What I saw that day on the bridge over the River Bosna provoked a conflict inside me which would resurface time and again in years to come. It made me so angry that I wanted to fight those responsible for such horrors until my dying breath. But at the same time it also made me so distressed that I felt I would never want to fight again.

  There was a sense among the mujahideen late in 1995 – as talk of a truce gained momentum – that Bosnia was the beginning of a larger struggle. It seemed to many of us that the West had come to save the Serbs from further territorial losses. The Americans and the Europeans appeared wary of Muslims asserting themselves in Europe. The odd alliance between Washington and the Afghan mujahideen as part of a bigger struggle against Soviet expansionism was long gone. Now we – the agents of resurgent, fundamentalist Islam – were the enemy.

  Among my fellow jihadis in Bosnia were three Moroccan Canadians. They were ordinary young men; two had worked at a gas station. I asked them what had inspired them to travel all the way from Montreal to this mountainous corner of Europe. Besides defending Bosnian Muslims, came the answer, being in the Balkans put them closer to the inevitable conquest of Rome by Muslim armies near the end-of-days, as had been prophesied in several hadith.25 Over the next two decades I would frequently be struck by just how powerful the prophecies of the Koran and hadith would prove in dictating the behaviour of both men and movements.

  Someone else who believed in the coming showdown between Islam and the Christian West was our Smurf-hating instructor from Khobar, who came to Bosnia after completing his Shariah studies.

  Al-Ayeri revealed to me he had spent time with bin Laden in Afghanistan and Sudan in the early 1990s, and had even travelled on a mission to Somalia to scout out its potential for jihad.*

  ‘There was much I could not tell you at the Islamic Awareness Circle. I was more operational during those years than I led people to believe.’

  Influential jihadis such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who would just a few years later mastermind the 9/11 attacks, were encouraging the belief that a war of civilizations was inevitable.

  ‘KSM’ had arrived in Bosnia after being involved with his nephew Ramzi Yousef (three years his junior) in a conspiracy known as the Bojinka plot to blow up a dozen US airliners over the Pacific. He had slipped out of the Philippines before he could be arrested. He was a freelance terrorist, associated with but not yet belonging to al-Qaeda.*

  I met him at a wedding for one of the Arab fighters in Zenica. He was neatly dressed, with a trimmed beard, the very opposite of the figure who would be captured in Pakistan eight years later, dishevelled and overweight. He immediately warmed to me because he had lived in Bahrain for a time; we soon discovered that one of his mentors was married to a cousin of mine. KSM made no mention of his recently aborted plans in Manila, but had plenty to say about the future.

  ‘Bosnia is a sideshow,’ he said with more than a whiff of condescension. ‘America is the true enemy. The Arabs here should move to Afghanistan. There’s a camp called Khalden in Khost province, where a new force is being built.’*

  ‘So why did you come here?’ I asked somewhat impertinently.

  ‘To find the brightest and the best among jihadis. You know the end is in sight here, but what will happen after the war?’ he asked me as the wedding party got into full swing. ‘The question is: are we going to roam the globe from one hopeless battle to another trying to save Muslims, and then see someone else come in and reap the reward?’ Soon he had a table of six hanging on his every shrewd word, including Khalid al-Hajj and Yusuf al-Ayeri.** ‘How long do we have to go from one front line to the next defending minorities at the edges of the Islamic world, only for secular governments to take over, to allow alcohol, nightclubs? Why do we expend the blood of the best and brightest on fringe conflicts for which we get no credit? Not a single brothel will be closed.’

  To end this cycle, he said, we had to resurrect the spirit of jihad within the Muslim world.

  His little speech was among the earliest signs that jihad was morphing from an instrument to defend Muslims to one aimed at bringing down America and its allies. At the time, I listened respectfully but somewhat sceptically. KSM insisted America would impose its ‘New World Order’29 on Islam, a homogenized offering of Disney, fast food, malls and secular government. We had managed to get visas to come here, he claimed, because the Americans wanted us to come to Bosnia to get killed. There was nothing less than a global war being waged against Islam to suppress our religion. How much the US would come to wish that this operational genius had been among the Arab contingent to find martyrdom in Bosnia.

  Before we parted, he gave me contact details for a man called Abu Zubaydah in Peshawar, Pakistan, an independent operator close to al-Qaeda’s leadership who was the metaphorical gatekeeper of the Khalden camp. KSM’s recruitment drive was not wasted: the first four leaders of the Saudi branch of al-Qaeda would all be Bosnia veterans, as would many other influential figures within the group.*

  The radicalization of those who remained in Bosnia may well have been hardened by the ambush that killed our leader, Anwar Shaaban, one of his deputies, Abu al-Harith al-Libi, and close associates just outside the town of Žepče. They were on the way to a meeting in Zavidovići on the very day the Dayton Accords which had been brokered in Ohio were signed in Paris – 14 December 1995.30

  I was in the Zenica headquarters at the time. Someone ran into the dormitory shouting an order: everyone into full combat gear and to the mosque downstairs. As soon as we were assembled, the military commander of the group, an Algerian called Abu Ayyoub al-Maghrabi, told us the brigade would raze Žepče in revenge for the ambush, which was allegedly carried out by Croatian troops.* We were busy preparing anti-aircraft weapons and other gear when a Bosnian general arrived to tell us that Dayton had finally been signed, and all foreign fighters must disband. The news was met with disbelief.

  ‘The assassination of our leaders and this wretched treaty are no coincidence,’ shouted a fighter next to me. ‘Someone somewhere planned this! We will not allow this betrayal of our martyrs. We will fight the Americans if they land here. And we will start by burning Žepče to the ground.’


  The Bosnian general stood his ground: ‘If you go through there, you will have to go through your Bosnian brothers. We have two divisions in the area.’

  To my relief, our Algerian commander did an immediate volte-face, announcing that this was the last day of the brigade, which would now disband and hand over its weapons. There were howls of protest, acute anger against the United States and other powers that had brokered Dayton. But I had no appetite for witnessing another massacre.**

  I was already thinking of my next step. I felt uneasy about hanging around waiting to be demobilized. We had too many enemies. With a few friends from Saudi, including Khalid al-Hajj, I left Zenica. Our reflex was correct; most of the remainder were evacuated to the Croatian capital Zagreb, where they were photographed and fingerprinted, marked as jihadis. Only twenty or so slipped away unrecorded.

  I called my brother Omar from Split. His delight at hearing my voice and knowing I was still alive was tempered by anxiety.

  ‘We want to see you as soon as possible but things have changed here.’

  ‘How so?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s a different attitude. Jihadis are looked on with some suspicion. You might be detained if you come back.’

  A month earlier, a suicide bomb attack against a US-operated National Guard Training Center in Riyadh had killed five Americans and injured more.33 The Saudi royal family was beginning to realize that it could neither contain nor direct the fury of jihad, a fury it had encouraged and exported.

  But where should I go next? Even after fourteen months in Bosnia I did not feel the lure of home comforts; indeed, the very notion of ‘home’ seemed alien. The thought of college courses, listening to some ageing, blinkered teacher droning on about how Saudi Arabia had won its independence was beyond depressing. I would be like a falcon being returned to its cage. I knew others felt the same way, unable to contemplate ‘settling down’. Some had families they wanted to return to and jobs to reclaim, but those of us who had spent a year or more in Bosnia had lost our moorings. Many were regarded as stateless outlaws.

  I for one was blasé about the prospect. I was a citizen of the world now – before my eighteenth birthday.

  KSM’s arguments had also made an impact on me. I didn’t regard my time in Bosnia as wasted. I had come to defend Muslims who would otherwise have been slaughtered and I had been inspired by fraternity with hundreds of others who had turned Qutb’s words into action. But because of the betrayal at Dayton I had begun to see that Bosnia was merely an episode in a much larger struggle that pitted the defence of our faith against powerful enemies.

  The Prophet had foretold that the Vanguard of jihad would ‘hurry from one front to another, never harmed by betrayals, until God’s commands descend’.34 There had to be a larger purpose, I felt, than our being the fire brigade of jihadism. KSM had a point in stressing that we had to build a truly Islamic way of life, rather than expend our effort in a place where Muslims slowly drowned amid a tide of corrupting Western influences.

  As Qutb had written: ‘It would be naive to assume that a call [to Islam] is raised to free the whole of humankind throughout the earth, and it is confined to preaching and exposition. [ . . . ] When . . . obstacles and practical difficulties are put in its way, it has no recourse but to remove them by force so that when it is addressed to people’s hearts and minds they are free to accept it or reject it with an open mind.’35

  After the ‘betrayal’ at Dayton I, too, started to believe in a wider plot by powerful forces to stifle Islam and target Muslims around the world. At my core nothing angered me more than the oppression of my religion. I needed to be part of the Vanguard fighting back on behalf of vulnerable Muslims.

  And I was after all just seventeen. Anger and indignation were as much part of me as ideology. I was horrified by the suffering of Muslim populations around the world. As the Bosnian war wound down, we turned our attention to the Caucasus, where Muslims were suffering at the hands of an indiscriminate Russian military campaign aimed at snuffing out the region’s aspirations for independence. Among young jihadis, the videos emerging from Chechnya were a hideous confirmation of the brutality Russia had inflicted on Afghanistan.

  From their mountain camps, in what to me was another clear-cut example of defensive jihad, some Muslims were fighting back.

  If I could only reach Chechnya, surely the martyrdom I had been denied in Bosnia would be close at hand.

  * Jihad is a term that is often used very loosely, but it has distinct meanings in Islam. It originally stems from the root juhd meaning effort or struggle. In a religious context jihad covers two crucial aspects of Islam. One concerns the inner struggle against worldly temptations such as alcohol, theft, extra-marital affairs and so on – the struggle to be a better Muslim. The second aspect covers military struggle. Whenever jihad is mentioned in the Koran outside the spiritual context it usually means participation in conflict.

  ** I think about five of my twenty-five classmates had memorized the Koran by this age. While not an exceptional achievement, it brought respect.

  * Hadith are sayings and deeds attributed to the Prophet Mohammed which began to be written down just over a century after his death, after being passed down orally by his disciples and their successors. There were hundreds of thousands of hadith originally written down but only approximately 40,000 unique hadith have been taken seriously by Muslim scholars over the centuries. Since then Islamic scholars have questioned the authenticity of at least three quarters of these.

  ** Among the books of hadith, the Persian scholar Muhammad al-Bukhari’s collection (circa AD 846) and the Book of Muslim are considered the most authoritative by Sunni Muslims.1

  * His family originally came from the town of Buraydah in the al-Qassim region of Saudi Arabia. The area was a key recruiting ground for al-Qaeda, including during its campaign of attacks after 9/11.

  * This was the Saudi Ibn al-Khattab who knew both my brother and Yusuf al-Ayeri.

  * The Saudi state was financing the Afghan resistance lavishly – to the tune of about $1.8 billion in the period 1987–9.3

  * His name was Osama Mansouri and he came from a distinguished family: his uncle was a government minister.

  ** Salafis believe that the Koran and the hadith as well as the consensus of Muslim scholars are in themselves sufficient guidance for a believer in Islam. They therefore insist on the literal truth of Islamic scripture, and practise a ‘pure’ and ‘unadulterated’ Islam that is as close as possible to that practised by the first three generations of Muslims after the Prophet Mohammed.

  * It is not the same as offensive jihad: ‘Permission to fight is given to those upon whom war is made because they are oppressed, and most surely God is well able to assist them’ (Koran 22:39). ‘Fight for God’s sake against those who fight against you, but begin no hostilities for God loves not the aggressors’ (Koran 2:190).

  * Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later became leader of al-Qaeda, wrote that Qutb’s philosophy was the ‘spark that ignited the Islamic revolution against the enemies of Islam at home and abroad’. Qutb’s brother, Mohammed Qutb, who helped to popularize his ideas, gave university lectures in Saudi Arabia which bin Laden attended.6

  * Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328) was based in Damascus at the time of the Mongol invasions. He argued that Islam had become distorted by different sects and schools over the centuries and needed to return to the Koran and the Sunnah (the customs and practices established by and inherited from the Prophet Mohammed). Long after his death his teachings deeply influenced the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia, other Salafi currents and the jihadi movement.

  * Only in the mid-1990s did the Saudi establishment wake up to the challenge posed by Qutb’s message, with the publication by Salafi scholars of a book that identified Qutbism as a threat.

  * From the autumn of 1992 Croatia began restricting the flow of mujahideen through its territory. The following year there were clashes between Bosnian Croat and Muslim forces inside B
osnia. Tensions were reduced after the Washington Agreement in March 1994 ended hostilities between Croats and Muslims.

  * Not his real name.

  * Under Shaaban, the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan, a former garage turned into a mosque, became a key logistical hub for the Bosnian jihad. My two Palestinian travel companions on the bus had attended the mosque. Shortly after 9/11, the United States Treasury Department labelled it ‘the main al-Qaeda station house in Europe [used] to facilitate the movement of weapons, men and money across the world’. Shaaban had links to Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, who was convicted for a part in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. US intelligence agencies also linked Shaaban to the casing that year of the US embassy in Tirana, Albania, for a potential terrorist attack.12

  * Early Muslim rulers were known as Caliphs and were expected to lead and defend the worldwide Muslim community. Sunni Muslims have a particular reverence for the ‘four rightly guided Caliphs’ after the Prophet Mohammed’s death. In more modern times Ottoman Sultans, despite reigning over many non-Muslims, referred to themselves as Caliphs until Turkish nationalists abolished the title in the early 1920s. The Caliphate al-Qaeda seeks to restore – and ISIS claimed to have restored – is the one that jihadis imagine ruled over early Islam.17

  * Takfiris believe Muslims who do not subscribe to their extreme interpretation of Islam are apostates and potentially worthy of death.

  * Between May and September 1995, the Mujahideen Brigade fought three major battles alongside Bosnian army forces as part of this strategic plan. The operations were codenamed ‘Black Lion’, ‘Dignity’ and ‘Badr’ and involved a mixture of artillery strikes and suicidal uphill offensives to storm Serbian bunkers. I fired mortars in the first two battles. Later accounts described the Mujahideen Brigade directing ‘devastating pinpoint artillery strikes on the heart of Serb defences’.19