Al-Qaeda (17 page)

In their place was a radical and violent utopianism. Azzam’s writings are not political tracts, or even arguments, but exhortations to violence. Anything but jihad as armed struggle is rejected. The war had reinforced the radical’s sense of cosmic struggle. The battles with the Russians had shown that it was not merely the failure of Muslims to adhere to the true path that had brought suffering upon the umma but also the machinations of the non-believers as well. The Russian assault on Muslim Afghanistan had convinced them that the forces of kufr, led by the Christians and the Zionists, were plotting continually against Muslims as they had done ever since the Jewish tribes of Medina betrayed the Prophet’s pact. As there had never been a pure and just Islamic state since the time of the Prophet and his four successors, the last 1,300 years, far from the being the ameliorative evolution seen in the West, were, to the ‘Arab Afghan’ veterans, a dark age of suffering and perdition. The culture and sophistication of the Ummayads and the Abbasids, the architecture and poetry, the philosophy and the lore of the Muslim world were rejected as tainted by weakness and corrupted by failure. More than a thousand years of history was relegated to little more than a collection of paradigms and anecdotes.
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Some of the veterans went home. The role of many of them in the emergence of violent radical movements in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere is explored further in chapters to come. In the short term, the radical effect of the new ideology was disguised by the seeming
strength of the more moderate political Islamism. The later 1980s are seen by many scholars as the highpoint of the political Islamist project. In Palestine, the secular Palestine Liberation Organization’s dominance of the intifada was being threatened by the Islamic Hamas group, founded in 1988 by Shaikh Ahmed Yasin, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1990, in Algeria, the Front Islamique du Salut, relatively moderate activists who had engaged with the democratic process, made huge gains in the first free elections since independence. In Sudan, a military
coup d’état
allowed one of the key ideologues of contemporary political Islam, Hassan al-Turabi, to come to power. Nor did the Iranian Revolution appear to have run out of energy. A fatwa pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini on the British author Salman Rushdie ambitiously extended the authority of the Iranian Islamist state and, by implication, ‘true’ Islamic practice throughout the West.
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The Communist system was collapsing. Political Islam everywhere appeared in the ascendant.

One critical element of this burgeoning and radical movement is often forgotten: the recruits had not stopped flowing into Pakistan and Afghanistan, even after the Soviets were defeated. In 1989 and 1990 more were arriving in Pakistan than ever before. One was Jamal al-Fadl, then a 26-year-old from the Sudan who had been working at a mosque in Brooklyn, New York, that was a branch of Azzam’s Maktab al-Khidamat, before travelling to join the jihad himself. After a short time in a guesthouse in Peshawar, al-Fadl had transferred to Khalid bin Waleed camp near Khost, where he had received basic training on Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. He then moved up to another guesthouse, probably the ‘lion’s den’ complex close to the Jaji front. There, after being lectured on his duty to fight the jihad by bin Laden himself, he went into combat.
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Al-Fadl told his story, after receiving a substantial amount of American taxpayers’ money, in New York during the trial in 2001 of the men who bombed the east African embassies three years earlier. He told the court he had spent most of 1989 fighting, in Peshawar or at a number of different training camps. At al-Farooq camp, another camp near Khost, he was lectured on Islamic jurisprudence and the principle of jihad for two weeks. At the Abu Bakr al-Sadeek camp he was trained
in administration. At the Jihad Wal camp, also near Khost, an Egyptian instructor taught him about explosives and bomb-making. Though al-Fadl did not say so in court, al-Farooq was run at the time by Sayyaf and staffed by Egyptian instructors. Nor did al-Fadl mention that Jihad Wal was run by Hizb-e-Islami. Though the instructors and administrators of these camps were Arab, largely because their Gulf patrons did not trust Afghans with substantial sums of money, local mujahideen trained there alongside foreigners. These were not ‘bin Laden’ camps as is commonly alleged.
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Towards the end of 1989, al-Fadl said he was back at al-Farooq camp when an Iraqi volunteer, Abu Ayoub, approached him and asked him if he would be interested in joining a group which, al-Fadl said, was calling itself ‘al-Qaeda’. It aimed to train people to continue the jihad outside Afghanistan. The group, which al-Fadl said he joined by signing an oath of allegiance, a bayat, to its leader in triplicate, comprised only around a dozen people, mainly Egyptians such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Atef.
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The leader or ‘emir’ was to be bin Laden. As the war in Afghanistan waned, bin Laden hoped to start fresh campaigns to bring an Islamic revolution to the countries of the umma. The main target of his activities was not yet America or ‘the West’ (in fact it was Hekmatyar who was the most virulently anti-American activist at the time), but the ‘corrupt and hypocritical’ regimes in the Muslim world. All around him the volunteers who had fought one enemy during the Afghan war were squabbling. Most of them saw their primary objective as returning to their homelands to struggle against their own governments. Bin Laden’s aims have to be seen against their background. He wanted to prevent the fragile international alliance created during the war against the Soviets falling apart. By uniting the various militant movements, split on national lines at the time, bin Laden hoped to concentrate their power.

But a close examination shows that the group that hoped to be ‘al-Qaeda’, the base for the new international vanguard, were a fairly mixed bunch. Al-Qaeda comprised a dozen or so people at best, mainly recruited from within al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad faction. Whether the bayat sworn to bin Laden superseded allegiance to local groups was a matter of some discussion. So were the group’s aims.
Their ideology was unsure and their practical capabilities were almost non-existent.

Indeed, bin Laden was far from the most prominent or the most influential of the many militants active in southwest Asia, and elsewhere in the Islamic world, in the late 1980s. In fact it was Abdel Omar Rahman, the Egyptian ‘blind sheikh’, who was considered Abdallah Azzam’s successor as the spiritual leader of the radical Islamic movement. In the years after bin Laden’s departure from southwest Asia, Islamic extremist activism in Pakistan and Afghanistan intensified rather than diminished. As pointed out in Chapter One, in the seven years he was absent from southwest Asia, tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of militants trained for terrorism and combat in the scores of training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan and many of these activists went on to launch an unprecedented wave of terrorist attacks in the Middle East, south Asia, Europe and America. The movements that flourished and grew during that short time, particularly Pakistani militant groups, were to be of critical importance in the late 1990s. Bin Laden’s involvement in their activities, as with the camps, was negligible.

6
Militants

I had left the domes and minarets of the great Mughal mosque well behind me. A short ride in a rickshaw and a long walk through filthy alleys finally brought me to a door behind a carpet weaver’s workshop. The only mark identifying the door as that of the Lahore office of
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen
(HUM), the militant Islamic group, was a small sticker on the doorjamb depicting two crossed Kalashnikovs above an open Qur’an. I was buzzed in and was met by ‘Mohammed’, a young HUM cadre I had met in Kashmir a month or so earlier. The office comprised two large rooms and a small kitchen. At night dozens of young volunteers passing through the city on their way to the training camps or combat in Kashmir slept on thin, stained mats on the floor. When we had met previously, Mohammed had offered to introduce me to six HUM fighters who he said had recently arrived from the UK. The British fighters never showed up but, as we spoke about the group’s recruitment overseas, Mohammed mentioned a young British – Pakistani who was in prison in India on terrorist charges. I was intrigued and over the next few months was able to piece together much of the story of Omar Saeed Sheikh.

Sheikh fits the profile of the classic politically aware Islamic activist. He was young, the son of a relatively wealthy self-made immigrant (from Pakistan to the UK, rather than from the country to the town), intelligent, literate and a graduate in a technical discipline at university. His passage from an interest in Islamic political issues while a student to the HUM, kidnappings in India and on to an eventual death sentence in a Pakistani court for his role in the murder of Daniel Pearl, an American journalist, in January 2002, tracks exactly the shift in the
broader movement of Islamic activism from the political and ideological activism of early Islamic radical thinkers such as al-Banna to the current debased, millenarian and nihilistic strand of Islamic radicalism that has become so dominant today. It also demonstrates the role of states, in this case Pakistan, in the radicalization process, shows how bin Laden’s influence on such developments and involvement with militant activities in the early 1990s was marginal and is evidence of how the training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan thrived in the period. More than anything it shows the diversity of the modern Islamic radical movement.

In 1968, Sheikh’s father, a wealthy Pakistani businessman, left his village near the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore and, with his wife, travelled to Britain. They settled in Wanstead, a genteel suburb on the eastern outskirts of London, where their first son, Omar, was born in 1973. At the age of nine he was sent to The Forest, a nearby fee-paying school. Schoolfriends and teachers agree that he was a physically and mentally powerful individual. In 1987, his father sold his business in London and decided to move his family back to Pakistan. One reason may have been a wish to raise his children in a more devout environment than could be found in the UK.
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Back in Lahore, Sheikh was sent to the prestigious and elitist Aitchison College, known as Pakistan’s Eton. Omar lasted two years there before being expelled for fighting. He was either a habitual bully or a principled and brave young man unafraid of physical violence. Accounts of the incidents leading to the expulsions differ.
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In 1989, Sheikh’s father’s business in Pakistan failed and the family returned to London. By December 1990, Sheikh was back at The Forest, working for exams which eventually gained him admission to the London School of Economics, where he studied applied mathematics, statistics, economics and social psychology. He also joined the Islamic society and, during ‘Bosnia week’ in late 1992, watched a series of documentary films about the oppression of Muslims following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. In the wars in the Balkans in the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Muslims were brutally put to death in scenes of violence unseen in Europe since the Second World War. Those who killed them, particularly the Christian Serbs, were often
projected in the Islamic world as agents of the West, or kufr. Before his time at the LSE, Sheikh had demonstrated little interest in religion or politics. Six months later, however, when he visited Pakistan with his father, Sheikh distributed films of the war in Bosnia and made contact with Islamic militants in Lahore. Within weeks of his return to the UK, he had joined a relief convoy organized by a London-based charity travelling from the UK to Bosnia. Sheikh fell ill at the Bosnian border and, while convalescing in Split, met a Pakistani veteran of the war against the Soviets who was a member of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. The Pakistani was on his way to join the other Afghan veterans who, reinforced by volunteers from all over the Muslim world, were travelling to fight alongside local Muslims. He encouraged Sheikh to take up arms.
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The younger man was impressed and some time in the late summer arrived at the HUM offices in Lahore from where, after a few days in the city, he was sent on to Miram Shah, the dusty town close to the Afghan–Pakistan border area used as a staging post for recruits heading to the training camps around Khost. After a brief stay there Sheikh joined a group of recruits on their way to a training camp.

Afghanistan and the borders were in political flux. When the Soviet Union collapsed, so too did the flow of funds and material to Dr Najibullah’s administration in Kabul. The regime was left unable to buy crucial support outside the narrow groups who were loyal to it, its authority and military capability swiftly disintegrated and the mujahideen factions were able to take control of the capital. Najibullah made a half-hearted bid to escape to India, was stopped at the airport and effectively imprisoned.

When Sheikh arrived in the region in late 1993, about 18 months after Kabul had fallen, the camps around Khost and Jalalabad were as full as ever. And though many thousands of militants from all over the Islamic world trained in them in this period the majority of terrorist recruits learning how to fire Kalashnikovs and plant explosives were Pakistani.

Pakistani militancy in this period splits into two broad strands: sectarian militants, who were almost exclusively focused on killing within their own country and showed little interest in any globalized jihad, and a ‘Kashmiri’ strain composed, paradoxically but for reasons
that will become clear, largely of non-Kashmiris who fought Indian security forces in the disputed Himalayan state. Both strands were, at times, supported and exploited by agents of the Pakistani state and funded by states and private donors in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere. Both, until late 2001, remained relatively distinct. Both also, again until quite recently, remained apart from the ‘Arab Afghans’ who had remained in Pakistan in numbers after the end of the war against the Soviets. The reasons why Pakistan, a supposedly democratic state that was a nominal ally of America and the West, was actively encouraging the training and deployment of thousands of extremist militants, and thus sustaining and perpetuating an infrastructure that would be enormously useful to bin Laden and his allies later on, lie in the structural flaws of the Pakistani state and the degree to which those weaknesses were exploited both by groups within the country and by external actors.