Al-Qaeda (15 page)

There is no better indication of the influence the Saudis had than Sayyaf’s name change from Ghulam Rasul (servant or slave of the Prophet), as he was born, to Abd al-Rab al-Rasul (servant of God and the Prophet), the former, with its implication of the worship of a human, not Allah, being unacceptable to strict Wahhabis. Sayyaf attracted commanders who had no previous claim to authority. Haji Zargoun, a koochi nomad of no distinction at all, started the war with Hizb-e-Islami but then left even Hekmatyar’s well-funded group to join Sayyaf. Said Mohammed Pahlwan, a shepherd before the war, left the moderate traditionalist NIPA party for Ittehad-e-Islami in 1984.
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Gulf funds allowed the creation of ‘Sayyafabad’, a well-provided refugee camp and complex of warehouses, military bases, mosques and
medressas at Pabbi, east of Peshawar, that was to become a crucial location for Islamic militants after the Soviet war.
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Ittehad-e-Islami was the favourite among the foreign volunteers, many of whom shared Sayyaf’s Wahhabi-influenced beliefs. Others were merely drawn by his group’s sophisticated overseas publicity machine. When bin Laden first ventured into battle, he did it with Sayyaf.

5
Heroes

For the first five years of the war against the Soviets, few Arabs actually did any fighting; most worked in humanitarian organizations, in political or media offices or as medics. Ayman al-Zawahiri made several trips to Peshawar in 1980 and 1981 with the Red Crescent organization to look after wounded mujahideen.
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On the whole, the hundreds of Arabs living and working in Peshawar saw their role as supporting the Afghans. Only later did they start to appropriate the Afghans’ jihad for radical Islam.

One of those most instrumental in effecting that change was Abdallah Azzam, the charismatic, erudite, polished preacher whose sermons had made such an impression on bin Laden when he had been at university. Within weeks of his arrival in Pakistan, bin Laden had been introduced to Azzam. The pair got on well. The energy, administrative talent and contacts of the young Saudi complemented the profound Islamic knowledge, confidence, charisma and commitment of the older man.

Azzam, who was a huge influence on bin Laden, became the chief ideologue of the ‘Arab Afghans’. Azzam was not an original thinker like Qutb, Maududi or al-Banna, but he was a powerful orator who fused the historic and the contemporary to create something of unprecedented power. Azzam quoted ibn Taimiya, the Qur’an and the hadith, but spoke about Palestine and the Russians. Moreover, unlike even Qutb, Azzam was preaching to an army that was waiting and ready to fight in a battle that was already underway.

Azzam was born in a village in Palestine in 1941 and joined the Muslim Brotherhood at 18. He studied Islamic jurisprudence at
Damascus University and fought the Israelis in the 1967 war. While studying for his doctorate at al-Azhar in 1973, he befriended the family of Qutb and also spent time with Sheikh Abdel Omar Rahman, the blind Egyptian preacher who was to become the spiritual leader of the violent Egyptian al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya. In 1978, Azzam travelled to Saudi Arabia to teach in Jeddah. He was there in 1980 when, after meeting mujahideen leaders soliciting support from the Gulf for the Afghan jihad, he decided to devote himself to their cause. Well liked by the Saudi establishment, Azzam settled in Islamabad and took a job lecturing at the International Islamic University, built with Saudi funds as part of their global proselytization drive and opened by General Zia only a year previously. In 1984, Azzam moved to Peshawar, where he set up the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) to receive, supervise and organize the increasing numbers of volunteers and the growing flow of funds from the Middle East.
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For Azzam, the jihad in Afghanistan was a moral obligation for all Muslims, the sixth pillar of faith. It was an individual decision to enter the jihad not, as traditionally held, the decision of the senior alim or caliph. ‘Right now fighting is compulsory on each and every Muslim on earth,’ he said in his ‘Last will’, written in 1986.
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His best-known book was entitled
Defending the land of the Muslims is each man’s most important duty
. Azzam made clear that the jihad in Afghanistan was just a beginning:

This duty will not end with victory in Afghanistan; jihad will remain an individual obligation until all other lands that were Muslim are returned to us so that Islam will reign again: before us lie Palestine, Bokhara, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, southern Yemen, Tashkent and Andalusia.
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Bin Laden would specifically refer to Andalusia in his first broadcast after the US air-strikes on Afghanistan commenced in October 2001.

Azzam saw the veterans of the Afghan war as a mobile strike force operating throughout the Islamic world. He stressed again and again the humiliation that the umma had suffered when it had been dismembered into nation-states by the West. Azzam’s internationalism
was a critical new development and reflected the diversity in the backgrounds of the volunteers answering his call.

As well as rallying recruits, Azzam worked hard to inculcate volunteers with a desire for martyrdom, repeatedly stressing its rewards and quoting the single hadith in which the Prophet assures the shahid absolution from all sins, seventy-two beautiful virgins and permission to bring seventy members of their household into Paradise with them. Such ideas were to become a key part of the radical Islamist discourse. Azzam’s most popular books included a compilation of ‘a hundred eyewitness accounts of miracles experienced by the Mujahideen in the Soviet–Afghan Jihad, from perfumed bodies of martyrs to accounts of angels helping the Mujahideen’ and ‘Lovers of the Paradise Maidens’, which ‘contains the biographies and stories of over 150 martyred mujahideen’.
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Both works are widely available, and widely read, today.

One text in particular bears closer examination (and comparison with documents written by the 11 September hijackers and the bulk of modern contemporary radical Islamic literature). In September 1985, the first Saudi Arab, a 20-year-old called Yahya Senyor from Jeddah, was killed in combat in Afghanistan. Azzam wrote an address to the dead man:

Everything in your soul used to speak that you were the next to be a martyr. There were your brothers who shared with you the pains of the path of sacrifice, the sweat and blood, under the shower of bullets and the thunder of cannons, to awaken an umma whose depths was filled by weakness. I sensed in my depths that you would be a shahid.

O Yahya! Your fragrant blood began to flow and not a single person that touched your body or perfumed themselves with drops of your blood remained without the smell of musk filling their noses.

You refused to let the Muslims’ honour be violated, their support reduced or their victory be trampled on. You did not sit by patiently while the Muslims were being humiliated… rather you advanced to Allah, steadfast.

Azzam quoted what he said was Senyor’s last letter to his family:

‘Despite the airplanes, the tanks, and the shelling day and night, and the intense cold and the hunger, I am happy and peaceful, because I feel that I
am doing the most beloved of acts to Allah, and Allah rewards those who act. This Jihad is the only way that man can present to Allah acts which please Him and to return to this Umma its full honour.’

It was Azzam’s epic, mythic, fantastical language that was to become the standard mode of expression for ‘jihadi’ radicals over the next decade.

By the time of Senyor’s death, Arab volunteers were arriving in significant numbers. The years between 1985 and 1987 marked a turning point in the Afghan war. Existing trends – the growing numbers and radicalism of the Arab volunteers, the increasing dominance of the Afghan political Islamists, the burgeoning warlordism, factionalism and corruption of the mujahideen commanders – all began to accelerate. In 1986, American and Saudi funding reached record levels and American Stinger shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles were distributed by the ISI to favoured commanders. The mujahideen, though they still found it difficult to counter Soviet airpower, now had the weapons and munitions necessary to inflict significant damage on their enemies.

The efforts made by Azzam, bin Laden and others to build a network of recruiting offices throughout the Middle East were also paying off. Branches of the MAK had even been opened in Brooklyn, New York. In many places the organization relied on the existing structure of the Muslim Brotherhood. So many recruits were arriving that in Peshawar the system of guesthouses had to be reorganized. There were now at least a dozen in the city, some in the University Town and some in the western suburb of Hayatabad, one for each nation’s recruits.
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Though the bulk of the volunteers came from Saudi Arabia, the Yemen, Egypt and Algeria, there were Sudanese fighters, a small number of Indonesians, Filipinos, Malaysians, Chechens, Iraqi Kurds and Bosnian Muslims. Almost every Islamic nation was represented, if only by a few individuals.
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However, though the Muslim Brotherhood and other similar organizations played key roles in recruiting and fundraising, an increasing number of the volunteers themselves often had little previous involvement with Islamist politics. Many were very young and few had any
profound understanding of Islamism and its antecedents. They were very different from the Islamist cadres of Hizb or Jamaat Islami. Some were attracted by the handsome subsidies provided by Saudi donors. Others flew in for a few weeks over a summer before returning to wealthy homes in the Gulf. Though the leaders of the Arab Afghans were largely middle-class graduates from technical disciplines and thus still fitted the classic activist’s profile, the rank and file were increasingly filled with far less educated men who were profoundly ignorant both of the cultural, political and intellectual heritage and context of contemporary radical Islam and of the ethnic and political reality on the ground in Afghanistan. The fact that they were still committed to fighting in the war there is good evidence of the conception of jihad as without earthly ends and as a continuing struggle and sacrifice, as outlined in Chapter Two.
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The volunteers’ lack of political sophistication, and in some cases lack of literacy, made them susceptible to the less coherent, more millenarian message of Azzam. Though Azzam was clearly building on the legacy of al-Banna, Maududi, Qutb and Khomeini, his thought was far less polished and ideological than the earlier thinkers. Its ideological weaknesses were obscured by its rousing call to jihad and martyrdom and broad-brushed depictions of a cosmic struggle between the umma and its enemies, between good and evil. This was a significant step towards the hardening of the dominant discourse within Islamic militancy. As the war progressed the trend was to accelerate. So too was the social shift discernible among the Arab Afghans.

The new radicalism was bolstered by the arrival in Pakistan of a small number of hardened activists from all over the Islamic world, though especially from Egypt, who moved swiftly into leadership positions. Many of the Egyptians had been imprisoned following the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981. These included several Egyptian Islamic militants, such as Mohammed Shawky al-Islambouli – the brother of the army lieutenant, Khalid al-Islambouli, who had killed the Egyptian leader – and Mohammed Atef, a 6′ 4′′ former policeman who was to become one of bin Laden’s closest aides. Many already had contacts with Hekmatyar, Sayyaf and other Afghan Islamists.
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In 1985, Abdel Omar Rahman, the ‘blind
sheikh’, accompanied Hekmatyar on a trip ‘inside’ Afghanistan and wept when he heard the sounds of combat that he could not see.
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Al-Zawahiri took up a medical position at a hospital funded by the Kuwaiti government in Peshawar and delivered firebrand sermons each Friday that were popular with the city’s growing Arab community.
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A contingent of Egyptian fighters maintained a strong presence in Nangahar, fighting alongside Hekmatyar’s Hizb groups and building a reputation for tenacity and courage.
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The Egyptians were known as the ‘thinkers and the brains’ among the Arab Afghans. According to Essam Deraz, the Egyptian filmmaker who spent years with both bin Laden and the Egyptian radicals:

bin Laden had followers but they weren’t organized. The people with Zawahiri had extraordinary capabilities – doctors, engineers, soldiers. They had experience in secret work. They knew how to organize themselves and create cells. And they became the leaders.
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Several hundred fought themselves, usually alongside Sayyaf.

However, the vast bulk of the volunteers arriving in Afghanistan were without any military training. At first, most were sent to one of the many mujahideen bases to be taught the rudiments of small arms and heavy weapons use. Each mujahideen group had a main headquarters base with substantial stores and facilities and a varying number of smaller bases out in the field. The latter, which became more numerous in the later stages of the war as local field commanders became increasingly independent of even those local communities that had survived sustained and targeted Soviet bombing, often comprised little more than a dozen or so men in a couple of stone huts or caves. The main bases were sometimes far more elaborate affairs.