by Aimen Dean
Worried about spies sent by Arab regimes, Abu Zubaydah made it his business to know about every would-be jihadi arriving in town. He was intrigued by the arrival of a seventeen-year-old ‘veteran’ of the Bosnian war. Over the course of an uncomfortable hour he grilled me about my upbringing in Saudi Arabia, fighting in Bosnia and my intentions in Afghanistan.
‘I want to give myself to jihad,’ I told him. It was the unvarnished truth. On the threshold of adulthood, I was demanding to be taken seriously. ‘I know mortars, I’ve been in battle. I’ve carried the bodies of martyrs. I am ready,’ I said.
‘But why Darunta? Why not Khalden?’ he replied.
‘I was told it was the best.’
For a few moments, Abu Zubaydah’s default severity slipped from his face. There was a hint of empathy, even.
‘Then I can hardly stop you,’ he said with a grimace.
My escort into Afghanistan was Mohammed Hanif, an Afghan doctor working with Hezb-e-Islami. He was amiable enough, though the swaying of the bus sent him to sleep. Even when the bus lurched through the hairpin bends of the Khyber Pass like some demented fair ride, Hanif was undisturbed.
At the border we had to get off and walk into Afghanistan through the Torkham Gate crossing. There was nothing resembling passport control; I was told identity papers were seldom checked on either side. The colonial ‘Durand Line’ that had in 1893 arbitrarily divided Afghanistan from the part of British India that became Pakistan had little relevance to the Pashtuns on either side of the border.
It was an almost medieval scene. The potholed road was crowded with vehicles piled with basic goods heading into Afghanistan and porters buckled by years of back-breaking work. In a few hundred yards, I felt I had stepped back a few hundred years. No more the teeming bazaars on the Pakistani side, the pickup trucks and intricately painted lorries kicking up trails of dust as they ferried goods along the crowded roads. Instead, a vista of donkeys and carts, and people whose dress was made of the same dull, rough fabric as that of their ancestors. On the side of the road, an old bus sat abandoned, falling apart. I was told to wait next to it. Hours later, I was surprised to see the bus splutter into life, expelling thick grey-blue smoke. Dozens of people clambered on board; Dr Hanif and I squeezed among them.
I was shocked by the absence of vehicles on the road or almost any form of life beyond it as we made our way to Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province and the largest city in eastern Afghanistan. Jalalabad clung to a few vestiges of a better past – such as the grounds of a once-royal residence. But its chief characteristics were grinding poverty and the damage caused by a decade of war – sprinkled with a few villas built on the proceeds of heroin trafficking. Compared to Mostar and Sarajevo, it was a dun-coloured medieval heap. Dr Hanif proved to be a handy companion because I came down with a bout of diarrhoea after my very first meal in Jalalabad. The locals, I discovered too late, included an obscene amount of animal fat in all their cooking, though the dirty water may also have been the culprit.
It was a relief to leave Jalalabad and head to the clean breezes of Darunta. No more than a collection of mud-brick dwellings perched on the hillside, it did enjoy a breathtaking setting – with the majestic White Mountains straddling the border with Pakistan in the distance. Beneath, a man-made lake stretched northwestwards, looking like a well-fed silver serpent. Darunta was the site of one of Afghanistan’s most important hydro-electric dams, built by the Soviets in the 1960s.
Darunta was drawing a growing stream of jihadis from across the world. Its remoteness made it seem beyond the reach of most adversaries. There were already four camps there. Two of them were by the placid lake, run by Algerians loyal to Hekmatyar. Another camp belonged to Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist Pakistani political movement.
An Egyptian who went by the name Abu Khabab al-Masri was just setting up another camp.* It would soon become one of al-Qaeda’s most important resources – a place for training in making explosives and for experiments with chemicals and toxins. At that time, Western intelligence knew nothing of its existence or purpose beyond satellite images that showed ‘someone’ had decided to occupy a hillside a few hundred metres from a former Soviet compound.
My initial destination was a Hekmatyar-affiliated camp. When I arrived I was taken aback to see a familiar face.
‘Farouq,’ I shouted.
He ran towards me and we embraced.
Farouq al-Kuwaiti was from a Bedouin tribe that inhabited barren scrub and salt marshes between the Iraqi port of Basra and Kuwait, an area that had seen more than its fair share of combat and oppression in recent decades. He had dark features and his muscular frame was accentuated by his modest height. He had joined the Mujahideen Brigade in Bosnia months after me, and although he was eight years my elder he had taken a mischievous pleasure in obeying ‘orders’ from his teenage companion. He was a good listener; I was the incessant talker.
Within a few weeks Abu Said al-Kurdi also turned up, bringing a dozen Arab fighters with him from the Khalden camp. While he was suspicious of Hekmatyar, he acknowledged al-Qaeda needed his firepower. We got on well, the Kurd, the Bedouin and the Bahraini. It was an adventure, a time of camaraderie and shared purpose. But my connections to them would have deep and utterly unexpected consequences.
It was in Darunta that I became imbued with the routines and rhythms of being a jihadi, routines that stressed religious preparation and knowledge as much as physical fitness and expertise with a weapon. If Bosnia had been the school of jihad, Afghanistan was its university. As part of my matriculation, I decided to take on a new kunya (jihadi alias), Abu al-Abbas al-Bahraini. Changing names was common practice in order to confuse security services.
Every day would begin with the call to the Fajr when what seemed like millions of stars pricked the sky’s impenetrable blackness. The mountain air was astonishingly clear and invariably bitter. As we prayed the darkness gave way first to indigo and then orange, and we welcomed the gradual warming of the sun as it finally climbed clear of the mountain peaks.
There was a feeling of unity at the camp; we were brought together by a potent combination of devotion and purpose, an immutable belief in the duty of jihad. But the Afghan camps were not just about contemplation. We were preparing for action. And that frequently meant that Fajr would be followed by a long mountain run. To some of the fit young men in the camp, like Farouq, this was a pleasure. To me, never the athletic type, it was torture – especially before breakfast. I would arrive back at the camp gasping for breath and bent double, slumping down at our long communal table, much to Farouq’s amusement. It was hardly a meal to anticipate: cracked wheat and sugar, and if we were lucky an egg and some mashed potato, accompanied by hot, sweet green tea.
Then came the part of the day I most enjoyed: the classes, often led by Egyptian veterans, on handling and maintaining weapons and battlefield tactics. The Zuhr prayers were followed by a basic lunch, of which lentils were invariably the main ingredient, and then religious studies were led by one of the more educated camp members. Many were illiterate and had only a basic – if tenacious – grasp of Islamic history and the Koran.
The average day had little in the way of recreation. We usually had just one hour in which to relax, and would play board games like Snakes and Ladders or draughts, innocent pastimes in those pre-ISIS days. Occasionally, a Mars bar bought in nearby Jalalabad would be divided among four or five of us, every last morsel savoured. To my delight there was one tradesman who always seemed to have Coca-Cola in stock. I’d bring bottles back to the camp and cool them in the lake. I needed my sugar fix.* As I walked around the camp I was invariably followed by a stray cat I had named ‘Hindh’. Much to the mirth of the other jihadis, I had adopted her (or perhaps it was the other way round) soon after arriving at Darunta. I had always had a soft spot for cats. At night it often curled up next to me.
The late afternoon might involve shooting practice if there was enough ammunition available. A tin can would be pla
ced on a hillside some 200 yards away and there were serious bragging rights for whoever was the first to send it dancing off the rock.
Between the classes and physical training were the afternoon Asr prayers, and at sunset the Maghreb. And, finally, the last act of the day was the Isha night prayer.
There was little variety to the routine but its rhythm was reward in itself. There was never any danger of being bored and sleep came quickly every night – even on a thin mattress in the draughty dormitory.
There were many moments of levity. Once when it was my turn to organize the guard roster I found I was short of names because those training on mountain warfare claimed to be too tired. Farouq al-Kuwaiti suggested I enlist one of our Snakes and Ladders regulars, a young Saudi with an infectious sense of humour called Abu Abdullah al-Maki, who had just come down from the hills.
‘You know perfectly well I don’t negotiate with terrorists,’ I replied, trying to keep a straight face.
Living like family, our friendships deepened. We felt privileged despite our spartan surroundings. We were chosen, the Vanguard of jihad. We were preparing for the march on Jerusalem, metaphorically if not literally. It might take generations, but of its inevitability we had no doubt.
In those early weeks we received courses on a variety of weapons and explosives. We learned counter-surveillance and counter-interrogation techniques and how to deceive Pakistani border guards. One ploy was to pretend to be attending a madrassa, one of the religious seminaries that had sprung up in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. We were taught how to detect spies, to watch out for people who asked a lot of questions or seemed insufficiently committed to prayer. We were also taught how to interrogate prisoners. One technique involved forcing prisoners to drink copious amounts of water, tying their hands behind their back and then placing adhesive tape around their urethra to prevent them from urinating.
‘It doesn’t leave a mark and it certainly makes them talk!’ an Algerian instructor told us.
Another course focused on hostage-taking and was led by an American of Moroccan descent from the Boston area, who went by the name Salahadin.* One of his fingers had been reattached after an explosion, but not very expertly. He ran through the various ways to take control of hostages, recommending that women and children should be separated from the men to create tension.
Immediately, images of the Muslim women and children freed from Serb captivity on the bridge over the River Bosna flashed before me.
‘I’m sorry; this is not for me,’ I said abruptly, getting up and leaving the room.
‘What do you expect from someone who adopts cats?’ a Kuwaiti jihadi quipped.
Later Salahadin came up to me.
‘You’ll obviously not be assigned to take hostages because you’ll end up releasing them immediately and giving them taxi money,’ he said with a smirk. He spoke Arabic with an American twang, which made me smile. ‘Don’t worry; there will be some other role for you.’
And there would be.
One afternoon there was a buzz at the camp that Abu Khabab, the Egyptian bomb-maker, had wandered over to pay a visit.
A distinguished looking man of upright bearing with chiselled features and a thick greying beard dyed with flecks of henna was standing in the exercise yard, talking to a fellow Egyptian, Abdullah al-Muhajir, our camp’s religious teacher. Al-Muhajir had left his PhD studies in Pakistan after being implicated in planning a suicide bombing against the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, and would later become the head of al-Qaeda’s Shariah college, its ideological motor.
Never wracked by shyness, I approached them.
‘Forgive me,’ I said to Abu Khabab. ‘Are you the one they describe as the master bomb-maker?’
His eyes creased with a grin and he threw his head back as he chuckled.
‘All I do is mix salads, young man,’ he exclaimed.
He noticed the crestfallen look on my face.
‘That’s because we’re still equipping the camp,’ he added with a wink.
Born in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria, Abu Khabab had studied chemistry at university before becoming a lieutenant in the Egyptian army’s bomb-disposal. He was one of the early wave of Arab fighters to come to Afghanistan in 1986.11 He had walked with a limp since more than a hundred shrapnel fragments lodged in his leg from a mortar round in the 1989 battle of Jalalabad.*
Now, in his mid-forties, he was emerging as the dean of bomb-makers in the Afghan camps.
Abu Khabab had not formally pledged loyalty to bin Laden, insisting on his independence, but he worked closely with al-Qaeda. He was kept financially afloat by a small group of fundraisers, including two jihadis who lived in the United Kingdom and who had spent time in his camp.** One of his earliest students (though in Pakistan, not at Darunta) had been a young Pakistani called Ramzi Yousef. Yousef had tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York in February 1993, later telling the FBI he had wanted to build a device capable of toppling one tower onto the other.12 The blast created a 100-foot crater in the underground parking garage and killed six people, but the building stayed upright. (Eight years later, his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, would accomplish what Yousef could not.)
Abu Khabab had a first-hand account of the plot because Yousef had, incredibly, managed to escape New York within hours of the explosion and fly to Pakistan. It would be months before he was caught and extradited back to the US.
‘The trouble with Ramzi,’ Abu Khabab would later tell me, ‘was that he made two basic errors in preparing the device.’13 He walked me through how the blunders had reduced the force of the blast. Abu Khabab never tired of teaching. Those two mistakes may have changed the course of history.
My arrival in Afghanistan coincided with that of someone rather better known: Osama bin Laden. He flew into Jalalabad on a chartered jet from Sudan, where he’d become persona non grata thanks to Saudi* (and probably Egyptian and American) pressure.15
There was excitement in the camps when news spread that bin Laden had arrived. The Saudi millionaire was a revered figure; he had placed his fortune in the service of jihad. He had founded al-Qaeda in 1988 as an autonomous Arab brigade to attack Soviet forces in Afghanistan and had invested in safe houses and camps to train arriving volunteers. After Soviet forces withdrew in 1989, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia and sought to internationalize his efforts, continuing to support training camps in Afghanistan but turning much of his attention to overthrowing Communist rule in southern Yemen.16
By some accounts, the arrival of US troops in Saudi Arabia after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a pivotal moment for him. He had offered (rather implausibly) to protect the Saudi royal family from Saddam Hussein by deploying al-Qaeda fighters but was rebuffed. He had then spent a year back in Pakistan and Afghanistan but had grown increasingly frustrated by the infighting among Afghan warlords. With the Pakistani government making life increasingly difficult for Arab fighters, he had relocated the core of al-Qaeda to Sudan, which at the time was controlled by an Islamist-leaning government at loggerheads with Egypt.17
Bin Laden’s hostility towards the United States had only grown in Khartoum. He had railed against the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia and viewed the arrival of US peacekeepers in Somalia as a plot to dominate the region. Reluctant to spill Muslim blood in the Arab world, he had begun to see the merits of attacking the United States, not only as a unifying cause for jihadis, but also as way to delegitimize the House of Saud which he assumed would have to rally to America’s defence. He had sent men such as Yusuf al-Ayeri to foment a jihad against US forces in Somalia* and dispatched operatives to Nairobi to case the US embassy.19
Bin Laden had been joined in Khartoum by Ayman al-Zawahiri before his ill-fated trips to the Caucasus. Zawahiri’s experienced Egyptian fighters strengthened the Saudis’ hand, while bin Laden’s money helped the EIJ organize attacks against the Mubarak government.**
When he arrived in Jalalabad, bin Laden was housed in a compound belonging t
o Younes Khalis, a warlord in his late seventies and a veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad who was now seen as above the fray. Bin Laden knew little about the Taliban at that stage; negotiating al-Qaeda’s place within the complex rivalries of different Afghan factions would occupy his early days in Jalalabad.
Soon after he arrived, we received word that the Sheikh would like to meet with fighters from the Gulf States. After getting permission from our camp’s leadership, a dozen of us crammed into a Toyota pickup truck and made our way into the valley. All the talk was about the recent bombing in my hometown of Khobar which had killed nineteen US airmen.* There were rumours bin Laden was responsible.
Bin Laden had taken over a very basic dwelling of mud brick. I was immediately struck by his height (he was about 6 feet 4 inches), which probably contributed to his air of calm authority. The al-Qaeda members we met clearly revered him. There were several Egyptians in the room with him, including the group’s chief operating officer, Abu Hafs al-Masri.**
After embracing every one of us, he bade us sit in a semicircle around him on the carpeted floor. He asked each of us in turn to tell him about ourselves. Speaking sotto voce, his tone somehow added to his understated authority.
‘Please forgive us for the chaos. We had to leave Sudan in a hurry and we are still trying to work out where we will be staying,’ he said. Bin Laden had lost a sizeable part of his fortune in Sudan, where he had invested heavily in agriculture projects.
I asked him if he intended to choose between the Taliban and the Afghan warlords.
‘By staying here with Younes Khalis I’ve made it clear that I have no intention of picking a side,’ he replied.
Farouq al-Kuwaiti was sitting next to me.
‘Sheikh, are you going to open up camps again here?’ he asked.