by Aimen Dean
They had every reason to worry. Weeks after the mubtakkar plot was called off, Nasir bin Hamid al-Fahd, chief theologian in al-Qaeda’s Saudi wing, published a twenty-five-page fatwah seeking to legitimize the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States. The fatwah was very probably the one Akhil had told me was being prepared to justify a poison gas attack. Part of it read: ‘If those engaged in jihad establish that the evil of the infidels can be repelled only by attacking them with weapons of mass destruction in a surprise manner, they may be used even if they annihilate all the infidels.’40
Above all, it was about an eye for an eye. Al-Fahd argued the United States was responsible for the deaths of millions of Muslims and so ‘it is permissible [to strike them with WMD] merely on the rule of being treated as one has been treated.’ He made explicitly clear that women and children were potentially legitimate targets.* For those intent on carrying out WMD attacks, al-Fahd’s fatwah was valuable theological cover.**
Bokhowa spent just a few months in prison. It seemed like sympathy for Sunni militants in Bahraini security circles had only increased as a result of anger over the US invasion of Iraq. When he got out he had the temerity to spread the word that he was the inventor of the mubtakkar technology. The electronic blueprints he had created – a step-by-step guide for building a chemical weapon – were eventually posted online by the cell and found their way like a virus from one al-Qaeda online forum to the next.** There was no chance of bottling them once jihadi webmasters had their hands on them.
I spent many hours agonizing over my role in developing the mubtakkar. On good days, I would tell myself that I had had no choice but to help Abu Khabab’s team perfect the means to develop and deliver it, and that, had I not been there, others would have readily solved the technical challenges that arose. On bad days, I asked myself whether there was anything I could and should have done to delay its progress.
The life of a double agent is rarely simple and never pure; it’s one of often unpalatable compromises.
Yusuf al-Ayeri and Osama bin Laden were right about one thing: the US invasion of Iraq would galvanize the global jihadi cause across the Middle East and beyond. It would draw in my family in countless ways, inflict doubt and depression on me and even land me in jail. And for the next three years, a squat, streetwise Jordanian who had sat on the hillside at Darunta and marvelled at my interpretation of his dream would be at the heart of it all.
In the early hours of 18 March 2003, hours before US air raids on Baghdad began, there was an unusual visitor to Iraq’s Central Bank, an austere cube-shaped building rising several storeys above al-Rasheed Street. His name was Qusay Saddam Hussein.
Qusay was carrying a letter from the Iraqi dictator which instructed the bank to hand over a cool $900 million in cash. In an operation that lasted several hours the money was carried from the vaults. It was presumably intended to finance resistance to US forces.44 Intelligence reports suggested the trucks travelled north towards the Syrian border. But somewhere along the way, one was either intercepted by, or handed over to, a resistance group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.*
Zarqawi later boasted he had witnessed the heist of the heist and that his men had removed more than $340 million from Qusay’s convoy.** That was probably an exaggeration, but with even a fraction of that money, Zarqawi was able to merge dozens of embryonic insurgent groups in Iraq. In the world of Terror Inc., he was the CEO when it came to mergers and acquisitions.
Zarqawi used his millions to buy businesses and farms in Sunni areas of Iraq, part of a plan for a long-term insurgency.46 He also received invaluable and inadvertent help from the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority. Its dismissal of Baathist civil servants and disbanding of the Iraqi military provided a pool of recruits for Zarqawi’s group – now rebranded as al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad, or Monotheism and Jihad.
Zarqawi turbocharged the insurgency. A suicide bombing against the Jordanian embassy in Iraq was followed by a devastating attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad and the beheading of American citizen Nick Berg. The surge in suicide bombings owed much to the influence of Sheikh Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir, whom I had challenged about the embassy bombings.* In his sermons in Herat, al-Muhajir, Zarqawi’s Rasputin, had provided the Jordanian with the religious justification for an unlimited suicide bombing campaign.48
Al-Muhajir’s ‘thesis’ would take the form of a treatise ominously entitled The Jurisprudence of Blood, which asserted that all forms of suicide in the name of jihad brought martyrdom. It also called for the killing of Shia, arguing they were a greater threat to Islam than all other enemies, and maintained Islam did not differentiate between the military and civilians in warfare. He wrote that ‘the brutality of beheading is intended, even delightful to God and His Prophet,’ just one of the many aspects of his teaching that would be embraced by ISIS. After the declaration of the Caliphate, the group made the The Jurisprudence of Blood a key part of the curriculum at training camps.**
Zarqawi took sectarian loathing to new depths in Iraq just as the Shia majority reasserted themselves. His group assassinated Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim in a car-bomb attack on 29 August 2003. Al-Hakim was the leader of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq and one of the most influential Shia figures in Iraq; the driver of the truck bomb was Zarqawi’s own father-in-law.50
Zarqawi monstrously expanded the definition of Muslims who were apostates, or murtad. His followers regarded Shia customs such as worshipping at the graves of imams and public self-flagellation as contrary to the Koran. They also saw the insurgency as validating the prophecy about an army of jihad arising in Iraq.
In targeting the Shia – seen by many Gulf Sunnis as the agents of Iran – Zarqawi appealed to many donors who had abandoned al-Qaeda. Many of them were wealthy Kuwaitis who took advantage of exceptionally lax financial regulation. Clerics and businessmen in Saudi Arabia also sent donations.
Bin Laden was horrified that al-Qaeda in Iraq should expend so much effort on killing other Muslims. But Zarqawi’s fighters were battle-hardened – taking on coalition forces in urban combat, designing ever more powerful IEDs, carrying out assassinations and kidnappings. They were the poster boys of jihad, just two years after 9/11.
Al-Qaeda central – by contrast – was hemmed into a corner of Pakistan and running out of money. Friends who had stayed with the group after 9/11 told me stories about selling weapons for food and fuel. Soon the tail was wagging the dog; the smell of money began wafting from Iraq.
Thanks to an unusual family connection, I was able to follow that money as it travelled from Iraq through Iran to the tribal territories of Pakistan and al-Qaeda central’s treasury. One of the main couriers was named Abu Hafs al-Baluchi.
Al-Baluchi was an extraordinary character. As the name suggests, his family was from Baluchistan, a wild border region straddling the Iran–Pakistan border. The Iranian part was largely Sunni, dirt-poor and sparsely populated, producing alfalfa and little else.
Al-Baluchi came from the mountainous area of Qasr-e-Qand in the far south-east of Iran. Its hundreds of caves were perfect hiding places for opponents of the security forces. The most promising enterprise for any ambitious teenager in Qasr was smuggling across the Pakistani border, with petrol the product of choice and drugs a close second.
As a young man, al-Baluchi had crossed the Gulf in pursuit of a better life. In a region where the concept of the nation-state is young and often unconvincing, Bahrainis, Baluchis, Saudis and Omanis have mixed and moved for generations. He was given a Bahraini passport and became a police officer before getting into trouble for possession of drugs. He’d also become a devotee of Bob Marley and Rastafarianism and knew the lyrics of all the Jamaican star’s songs (surely the only Baluchi who could recite the lyrics of ‘One Love’).
He’d then mixed with the wrong crowd in Saudi Arabia and in the panic-stricken response post-9/11 ended up in one of the Kingdom’s crowded cells. It was there that he met my brother Moh
eddin.
Jails around the world were (and still are) breeding grounds for militancy; networks were built and relationships formed. Saudi Arabia was no different. In the months before I moved to Bahrain, Moheddin and al-Baluchi were able to call me from prison occasionally, thanks to sympathetic or negligent prison warders, and sometimes asked to have their dreams interpreted. In the few months they were inside together, they became fast friends.
As soon as he was out of jail, al-Baluchi decided he would be better off back in Qasr. He was also aware that a number of senior al-Qaeda figures had been smuggled from Afghanistan into his home province. He began to help with the smuggling operation, but not just to make a profit. By now al-Baluchi was committed to the cause of jihad. Moheddin also got to know some of al-Baluchi’s relatives in Bahrain, a connection that only made him even more of a ‘person of interest’ to the Bahraini authorities.*
Al-Baluchi was always on the move. He knew many of the smugglers who operated between Iran and Pakistan. He also had contacts with Iranian Kurds, another group at odds with the Shia-dominated state. There was essentially a tried and tested rat run between the mountains of Waziristan and Zarqawi’s heartland in northern Iraq. Al-Baluchi was the traffic cop – lapping up information that he would share with my brother, which my brother would share with me, which I would share with British intelligence.
Al-Baluchi was one of the conduits through whom a stuttering dialogue was evolving between Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Zarqawi sent a stream of requests – for everything from explosives experts to authorities on Shariah law.* These exchanges were not exactly a meeting of minds. Al-Qaeda’s more cerebral leadership was suspicious of the streetwise Jordanian whose group murdered Muslims with the same ferocity that it attacked occupying forces. But there was a larger goal. Jihad had already erupted in Iraq, and US troops had returned to Saudi Arabia, a launching pad for the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein. The efforts of the Saudi government to distance themselves from the preparations were unconvincing amid almost universal public hostility to the war. Bin Laden perceived an historic opportunity.
Late in the evening of 12 May 2003, teams of al-Qaeda gunmen attacked three Western expatriate compounds in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. They first fired on the compounds’ gates, allowing vehicles each laden with high explosives to penetrate residential areas. In just a few minutes of carnage thirty-five people were killed, including Americans, an Australian and a Briton.52
Yusuf al-Ayeri and Khalid al-Hajj had launched their campaign of terror in earnest. Bin Laden probably imagined it was the first shot in a campaign that would bring down the House of Saud. He would be bitterly disappointed. Al-Ayeri was killed in a shootout with Saudi police just three weeks after the Riyadh attacks, and Khalid took over as leader.53
Under his command al-Qaeda launched attacks on Saudi security forces for the first time.54 As I watched the unfolding insurgency in Saudi Arabia and wondered where Khalid was hiding, I thought continually about our shared childhood. Just over a decade previously, we had celebrated being awarded a poetry trophy by a Saudi prince. Now Khalid was the most wanted man in the Kingdom.
Khalid lasted all of nine months. On 15 March 2004, he was killed in a highway shoot out with Saudi security forces in Riyadh.55 Saudi Arabia had ramped up its counter-terrorism capabilities and was progressively dismantling al-Qaeda’s networks across the country. The wave of violence was not over, but bin Laden had lost his gamble that al-Qaeda could spark an insurgency to topple the monarchy. A new generation of ‘unlit candles’ angered by the Iraq War had mostly flocked to join Zarqawi’s insurgency in Iraq rather than turn their guns on their own people.56
I was shocked to see images of Khalid’s body riddled with bullets in a black SUV. I thought briefly of our many experiences together, but we had taken different paths. If I felt sadness, it was because his life had been worse than wasted.
A few days after his death, there was a meeting of about a dozen al-Qaeda supporters in Bahrain, and I was asked to offer a few thoughts about his life. I spoke fondly about the romanticism of his jihad, his love of poetry. It was an act, but I felt that I owed my old friend a warm tribute.
‘He pursued martyrdom like a lover chasing the object of his desire,’ I told them. ‘I remember him telling me in Afghanistan that there was an elixir about jihad that sometimes made him think of castrating himself to avoid temptations of the flesh.’
As I spoke, the words echoed in my mind. They could have been a eulogy for me years earlier. But I had come to believe that subscribing to al-Qaeda demanded a blinkered dedication, a lack of inquisitiveness. Khalid’s elixir was now a poison to me. I felt I was the true jihadi for turning against al-Qaeda. Once again, Imam Ali’s phrase came back to me: ‘Loyalty to the treacherous is treachery in the eyes of God. The betrayal of the treacherous is loyalty in the eyes of God.’
As we ate together afterwards, I was introduced to a young Bahraini called Turki Binali. Only nineteen years old, he would soon enjoy the distinction of being expelled from university in the United Arab Emirates for his militant views.57 He sneered about the Mujahideen Brigade in Bosnia, which he described as pointless. Somewhat emotional after delivering the eulogy for Khalid, I shot back.
‘Brother,’ I said, ‘I was fighting to defend Muslims at the age of sixteen. You were at school at that age, a pre-pubescent.’
‘That doesn’t matter. Facts are ageless. Bosnia was not a jihad to establish God’s sovereignty over Earth.’
‘Of course not,’ I retorted. ‘It was about saving Muslim lives. The Koran tells us to fight for those who are oppressed and exiled from their homes.’58
I thought Binali an arrogant sociopath; later events would validate my perspective. But there was no doubting the anger among militant Salafis on the verge of crossing from word to deed. Thanks to the Iraq War the ‘street’ across the Middle East was boiling.
One of the men who had attended the memorial for Khalid was Yasser Kamal, the Bahraini militant who would plot to kill me at my nephew’s wedding more than a decade later. He had a lithe frame, symmetrical features dominated by large arching eyebrows and a groomed beard which betrayed a certain vanity. His small, dark eyes could flit from friendliness to anger in an instant. For all his charm there was an underlying menace about him. His voice was raspy, as if had smoked forty unfiltered cigarettes in short order.
Kamal was a fishmonger, selling the catch of the day in a van he drove around Manama. But his vocation was jihad, and besides hawking fish he was visiting like-minded members or followers of al-Qaeda.
I had first met him at the al-Nisf mosque in early 2003, weeks before the US invasion of Iraq. He smelled of fish. Within an hour we had established that we had a lot of associates in common, including Abu Zubaydah.
Kamal’s journey was a familiar one. He’d been a small-time drugs dealer and petty criminal before finding redemption in jihad, just like al-Zarqawi. He had fought in Kashmir against the Indians, and then moved on to Afghanistan, where he had joined al-Qaeda. But if Zarqawi was an enforcer, Kamal was a salesman and wheeler-dealer. He liked to persuade. He was a bundle of nervous energy and networked like a politician. When we walked outside after prayers, he popped into all the stores, greeting everybody by name. He was constantly befriending people from all walks of life.
Kamal thought he had found a kindred spirit in me; I thought I had found someone who might well interest my handlers. He invited me to his home several times, where I met his brothers Omar and Hamad. Omar had been deported from Saudi Arabia for militant activities; Hamad had been at Tora Bora for al-Qaeda’s last stand.
A few weeks after Khalid’s death, Kamal arrived at my apartment unannounced.
‘Abu al-Abbas,’ he greeted me effusively. The salesman was pitching. ‘I have thought so much of what you said about Khalid.’
After a few minutes of idle chatter, he surprised me with an invitation.
‘Let’s go for a drive.’
All of twenty kil
ometres long, Bahrain didn’t offer much in the way of road tours, but we drove out of Manama beyond one of the poorer Shia fishing villages. We reached a stretch of deserted road and he pulled over. The Arabian Gulf merged into the offshore mist; ripples lapped onto the soft sand.
‘Leave your phone in the van,’ he said.
‘Abu al-Abbas,’ he said, staring out at the sea, ‘do you know how many Americans celebrate New Year’s Eve in the cafés and nightclubs in Juffair and on Exhibition Road?’
I didn’t need to answer. Maybe hundreds of sailors from the Fifth Fleet would be out on the town. Some hotels had tables set aside for US personnel and expats who worked in Aramco’s oil installations across the causeway. Bahrain was also one of the few places in the Gulf where foreigners could find alcohol easily. There was no shortage of targets.
‘Look what they’re doing in Iraq, massacres in Fallujah.* It’s time to hit back. We need to cleanse our lands of the Crusaders,’ he said, those dark brown eyes flitting excitedly. ‘Brother, I asked you to come here because I have some exciting news. We are in touch with Hamza al-Rabia. He is now head of external operations.’
I was astonished. Neither I nor British intelligence knew that al-Rabia, a veteran Egyptian jihadi, had succeeded 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who’d been seized in Pakistan the previous year.
Kamal enjoyed a moment of self-importance.
‘He’s in Iran and is in touch with Sheikh Osama and Zawahiri. He is considering a big operation here and has authorized me to seek your help. He will be sending an envoy soon to provide us with funds and instructions, the same guy he uses to communicate with our brothers in Saudi Arabia. You were with Abu Khabab. We need your expertise on bombs and chemicals. Are you with us?’