Al-Qaeda (30 page)

Preparations for major operations take a certain amount of time, unlike minor operations. If we wanted small actions, the matter would have easily been carried out immediately after the [August 1996] statement. [But] the nature of the battle calls for operations of a specific type that will make an impact on the enemy and this calls for excellent preparations.
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The initial attacks needed people and a secure base. Bin Laden had neither. The Taliban, who viewed bin Laden with a significant degree of suspicion, had seized Jalalabad three weeks after the Declaration was issued.

But though bin Laden lacked manpower and security, there were several groups in Afghanistan which did not. In Chapters Five, Six and Seven, I examined the training camps and the militant organizations, some backed by governments in the Gulf, some by the Pakistanis, others by private donors throughout the Islamic world, which had been able to thrive in Afghanistan and Pakistan after the end of the war against the Soviets. It was on bin Laden’s arrival in the region in
1996 that the true consequences of this became apparent. Bin Laden arrived back in Afghanistan with an ideology but no way of prosecuting it. In the camps he found his weapon. Within five years, he, al-Zawahiri, Mohammed Atef and others would together be able to build an astonishingly sophisticated infrastructure for terrorist training.

Bin Laden was not entirely devoid of resources on his return. Though his bank accounts were depleted, they still existed and funds from wealthy private backers in the Gulf were still flowing in. He had the core group of militants who had returned with him from the Sudan. He also had his own contacts in Peshawar and the tribal belt. Abu Zubaydah, the young Palestinian who had helped funnel recruits for the jihad into training camps in the late 1980s, had been able to hang on in Peshawar where he had been looking after an office-cum-guesthouse funded by bin Laden in the western suburb of Hayatabad. There were others too. Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, the Egyptian group, had an estimated 200 fighters training or billeted in and around Jalalabad. Islamic Jihad, their rivals, also had volunteers undergoing training. Sayyaf was still running camps for militants from all over the Islamic world in Kunar. His Khaldan camp on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan was also still functioning. Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami had facilities at Darunta, outside Jalalabad, and in what had become a huge complex of different camps on the road between Khost and the border with Pakistan. High on a ridge, in six camps known collectively as the al-Badr complex, Hekmatyar, assisted by instructors from the Pakistani ISI, continued to train Pakistani militants from a variety of groups including Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Sipa-e-Sahaba Pakistan.
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Hizb-ul-Mujahideen ran ‘Salman al-Farsi’ camp alone, though most camps tended to be divided into Pakistani, Afghan and ‘Arab’ sections. The latter category included Saudis, Yemenis, Filipinos, Uighurs, Kurds, Jordanians, Tajiks and Uzbeks among many other nationalities. Khalid bin Waleed camp, where Omar Saeed Sheikh had trained before heading off to New Delhi on his first kidnapping mission, was still pumping out militants. There were so many Pakistanis that the camps were known locally as the ‘Punjabi ghund [camp]’.
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Relations between Hekmatyar’s men and the Taliban were poor.
The two groups were ideologically opposed and had fought for control of several provinces. So when the Taliban seized the provinces around Khost in the summer of 1996 they immediately shut down two of six al-Badr camps and handed the rest over to the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), who were fellow Deobandis. The HUM had their own political links within Pakistan and were very close to the Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islami (JUI), the Pakistani Deobandi political party which had been inducted into government by Benazir Bhutto three years previously and whose medressas in the North West Frontier Province, Baluchistan and elsewhere had supplied much of the manpower for the Taliban. The JUI in turn were close to Jalaluddin Haqqani, the Deobandi cleric and veteran mujahideen commander who had originally built and run the Zhawar Khili base. Haqqani, the main powerbroker in the Khost area, had joined the Taliban in August 1996 and was very happy to expel Hekmatyar’s cadres and bring in his allies. Haqqani also had strong connections to the Pakistani military and to the Gulf, allowing him access to financial and political resources, publicly and privately from Islamabad, Dubai and Riyadh.

This shift in the administration of the camps, from the political Islamists linked to Jamaat Islami, the party founded by Maududi, to the neo-traditionalist Deobandi Taliban, is more than just a local detail. It is representative of what was happening more broadly in Afghanistan, in Pakistan and across much of the Islamic world as well. Political Islamism, riven by particularism and ideological weakness, had simply failed to achieve many of its declared aims by the mid 1990s. Alternatives, such as the harsh brand of Islam practised by the Taliban or the Salafi radicalism of bin Laden and his associates, were emerging as the dominant discourse for articulating radical dissidence in its place.

Bin Laden never took over the administration of these camps. He did not need to. None of the other groups training in Afghanistan at the time were focused on attacking America. By advertising his intention to launch strikes against US interests, bin Laden was able to cream off the most talented and the most motivated volunteers. If they wanted to fight in Kashmir, against Shias in Pakistan or for the Taliban then there were organizations able to help them. If they wanted a ‘martyrdom’
operation against the forces of kufr, then there was only one group to go to. This was where bin Laden’s close relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad was critical. Egyptians had historically filled many of the more senior or specialized positions in the camps and comprised a significant proportion of the trainers and administrators. Two camps in particular, al-Farooq and Abu Jindal, had been run by Egyptians with Gulf funds (some channelled through Sayyaf) for nearly a decade. With al-Zawahiri and others back in Afghanistan it was a relatively easy process to appropriate them for the exclusive use of bin Laden and his associates. They became the specialist camps for those selected to receive the intensive training necessary to take part in terrorist operations against the ‘Zionist–Crusader alliance’. Camps like Khaldan acted as clearing camps where volunteers received basic military training, as they had been doing for the best part of a decade. Most went on to fight for the Taliban, or returned to their own countries. Only the best went on to al-Farooq or Abu Jindal. Mohammed Rashid Daoud al-Owhali was one.

Al-Owhali had reached Afghanistan shortly after bin Laden. He was coming up to his twentieth birthday. There is no evidence that it was bin Laden’s presence in Afghanistan that attracted the young Saudi. He had grown up in a wealthy, prominent and devout family in Riyadh. During his teenage years he had become drawn to the radical fringe, listening to the tapes produced by Saudi Arabia’s dissident Islamic activists and reading magazines and tracts produced by the Arab mujahideen. Abdallah Azzam’s works, the
al-Jihad
magazine and books such as
The Love and Hour of the Martyrs
were particularly influential. He then spent two years at a religious university. In mid 1996, a friend returned from fighting in Bosnia and inspired al-Owhali and several others. They discussed going to Bosnia themselves, or to Chechnya but, al-Owhali told his FBI interrogators, could not find anyone who could get them there. Instead they decided to go to Afghanistan. Al-Owhali arrived in Khaldan camp, then under the command of a man known as Sayyid al-Kurdi, late in the summer. Five years later, with American bombers in the skies overhead, I was able to reach the city of Khost days after the Arabs had withdrawn.
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In a compound known simply as ‘the Arab camp’ on the northern outskirts
of the city, I found a small packet of letters. They were from volunteers who had been trained in Khaldan camp between 1996 and 1998. Each had written to thank his tutor and to complain or offer suggestions about the instruction they had received.

The letters provided a fantastic insight to life in Khaldan camp at the time that al-Owhali was there. Al-Owhali only briefly sketched out his time in Khaldan, describing it to the FBI as ‘a basic military training camp’ where he was instructed in ‘light weapons, some demolition, some artillery, some communication’. The syllabus had remained unchanged since the days of Pakistani instruction for mujahideen guerrillas in the late 1980s and was identical to that being taught in the HUM camps. Al-Owhali also spoke of religious training. Most extremist religious movements and cults try to create discrete spaces away from the broader social and cultural environment where their normative systems can prevail and any uncertainty on the part of recruits can be progressively eliminated. As we have already noted, Islamic groups in particular have an interest in creating ‘Islamicized spaces’ where they can attempt, on a necessarily small scale, to create their utopian vision of the ‘Islamic society’ based on their reading of the texts and early history of Islam. This is justified by reference to the Qur’anic injunction for true believers to withdraw from the community, physically as well as mentally, so as to be able to better follow the true path of the Shariat. In contemporary terms, this has led to a profound interest in creating physical areas set apart from kufr or unbelief.
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However, it is important not to see the Afghan camps as instruments of ‘brainwashing’. Those who travelled to Afghanistan in this period were highly motivated individuals who had made significant sacrifices and overcome significant obstacles to reach their goal of participating in jihad. Of course, once in Afghanistan there is no doubt that, especially if they were selected for ‘elite’ training, there was an important process, as in any military organization, of building a particular identity based in a certain sense of group solidarity. Al-Owhali told the FBI that, at Khaldan, he had received religious instruction including ‘fatwas which called for violence’. He had explained to his interrogator that ‘if a ruler changed something in contradiction to Islam that particular
ruler had blasphemed and therefore it was your right and duty to kill him’. The statements he had heard from bin Laden, who addressed the recruits on rare occasions, ‘further solidified his religious feelings’, he had said.
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Sayyid al-Kurdi’s letters reinforce this point. ‘I learned so much about how to become strong internally,’ Said Ahmed, a Pakistani volunteer, told his tutor.
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The letters also reveal the sheer internationalism of the camp. Abu Ziad, a Kurd, asks his tutor to send his regards to other tutors, including Faris al-Bosni (Bosnian), Abu Omar al-Yemeni, Zaid al-Najdi (from the Saudi province of Najd). Another letter mentions Abu Omar al-Jazairi (Algerian), Omar al-Tajiki (Tajik) and Jalib al-Afghani. Yet such diversity, as bin Laden was aware and so often spoke out against, was a problem. ‘The Algerians keep to themselves, so do the Turks and everyone keeps to their own groups. They should mix more,’ moaned Abu Zubeir al-Makki. Their chief instructor himself was the cause of various complaints. According to Abu Ziad al-Yemeni, ‘Abu Sayyid never really joked or socialized outside training. He was always very serious with those undergoing training both inside and outside the camp.’
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Interestingly, many of the letters are poorly written and ungrammatical, even by those for whom Arabic is their first language. This hints at a shift in the type of recruit to radical Islam from those drawn from the more educated political Islamist cadre, such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Omar Saeed Sheikh, al-Zawahiri or bin Laden himself, to those drawn from poorer, less educated social groups.

One important feature to note is how the structure of the camps mirrors the tripartite division of the phenomenon of ‘al-Qaeda’ and modern Islamic militancy described in Chapter One. There is the hardcore, a small number of committed activists, many of whom are veterans of the Afghan war, who have coalesced around bin Laden and who fill senior administrative positions in the most specialized camps or perform command roles for those who graduate from them; there is the next group of those connected with the ‘network of networks’, men belonging to or recruited by individual groups in their own countries and sent to Afghanistan for training. Many of these men have previous experience in conflicts in Bosnia or elsewhere. Some of them are selected by the first group, the ‘hardcore’ for ‘martyrdom’
operations. Others are merely sent home. Thirdly, there is the broad mass of volunteers who fill camps like Khaldan. Predominantly young men, increasingly drawn from more deprived social groups, these are the cannon fodder who, inspired by the literature of Azzam, the sermons of local firebrand clerics or the message of bin Laden himself, find their way to the camps, ‘ardent for some desperate glory’.

Bin Laden, usually referred to as ‘the sheikh’ or ‘the emir’, is mentioned infrequently. There are occasional requests to send ‘salaams’ to him or mentions of lectures that clearly inspired the young recruits, but little else. Far more frequent are complaints that the training was not appropriate to the war the volunteers were expecting to fight. The basic military skills imparted at Khaldan are not useful in ‘striking the tyrants in the cities where they live’, one recruit complained. Many request training in ‘assassination and bombing’ techniques. One recruit complained about a lack of ammunition to allow live firing exercises. There are, predictably, many references to martyrdom in the letters. ‘We are grateful to God for this training and the chance to die as a martyr,’ says one of Sayyid al-Kurdi’s former students.
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