From: "George Pennefather"
Reply-To: communism@lists.econ.utah.edu
To:
Subject: [COMMUNISM LIST]Osama bin Laden: The godfather of terror?
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 19:58:04 +0100
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Osama bin Laden: The godfather of terror?
by Robert Fisk
15 September 2001
Internal links
George Bush: The new statesman?
The first time I met Osama bin Laden inside Afghanistan it was a hot, humid
night in the summer of 1996. Huge insects flew through the night air,
settling like burrs on his Saudi robes and on the clothes of his armed
followers. They would land on my notebook until I swatted them, their blood
smearing the pages. Bin Laden was always studiously polite: each time we
met, he would offer the usual Arab courtesy of food for a stranger: a tray
of cheese, olives, bread and jam. I had already met him in Sudan and would
spend a night, almost a year later, in one of his mountain guerrilla camps,
so cold that I awoke in the morning with ice in my hair.
I had been given a rough blanket and my shoes were left outside the tent.
Whenever we met, he would interrupt our interviews to say his prayers, his
armed followers - from Algeria, Egypt, the Gulf Arab states, Syria -
kneeling beside him, hanging on his every word as he spoke to me as if he
was a messiah.
On 20 March, 1997, I would meet him again. Although only 41 at the time, his
ruggedly groomed beard had white hairs, and he had bags under his eyes; I
sensed some infirmity, a stiffness of one leg that gave him the slightest of
limps. I still have my notes, scribbled in the frozen semi-darkness as an
oil lamp sputtered between us. "I am not against the American people," he
said. "Only their government." I had heard this so often in the Middle East.
I told him I thought the American people regarded their government as their
representatives. Bin Laden listened to this in silence. "We are still at the
beginning of our military action against the American forces," he said.
I remembered those words this week as I watched those airliners scything
into the World Trade Centre towers. And I remembered, too, how in that last
meeting he had seized on the Arabic-language newspapers I was carrying in my
satchel (a schoolbag I use in rough countries) and scurried to a corner of
the tent to read them for 20 minutes, ignoring both his fighters and myself.
Although a Saudi, he did not even know that the Iranian foreign minister had
just visited the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Didn't he even have a radio, I
asked myself? Was this really the "godfather of world terror?" The US
administration and Time magazine had both blessed him with this sobriquet. I
rather thought he would have liked that. And the $5 million reward that the
American administration offered for him. As a multi-millionaire himself, bin
Laden would have been insulted at such a low price on the "wanted" poster.
The bin Ladens are a construction family, respected in their native Saudi
Arabia although their roots lie on the Yemeni border, a family who honoured
the young man who, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, took
his followers and his road construction machinery to a volcanic landscape of
tribal leaders to fight "the West". For the Russians - to a Saudi - were
Westerners and their incursion into Islamic Afghanistan was a heretical,
corrupting act. He paid from his own packet to fly thousands of young Arab
Muslims to fight alongside him.
They came - from Algeria, from Egypt and the Arabian Gulf and from Syria -
and many of them died as martyrs in the ferocious battles, torn to pieces by
mines, shredded by the machine-gun fire of the Soviet Hind helicopter
gunships that raided the villages of Panchir.
The first time we met, in Sudan, I persuaded bin Laden - much against his
will - to talk about those days. And he recalled how, during an attack on a
Russian firebase not far from Jalalabad, a mortar shell had fallen at his
feet. He had waited for it to explode. And in those milliseconds of
rationality, he had - so he said - felt a great sense of tranquillity, a
sense of calm acceptance which he ascribed to God. The shell - and many an
American may now wish the opposite had happened - failed to explode.
Even the Russians came to know of the esteem in which bin Laden was held
among the Afghan resistance. In Moscow in 1993, I met a Soviet adviser who
was supposed to arrange his liquidation. "A dangerous man,'' the Russian
said of bin Laden. At the time, of course, the Americans loved him, provided
him with weapons, never dreaming that within two decades they, too, would be
dreaming of his murder. Bin Laden told me once that he never met an American
agent during the anti-Russian war, never accepted a single bullet from the
West.
But his bulldozers and earth-removers carved highways through the mountains
for the Mujahedin to carry their British-made Blowpipe anti-aircraft
missiles high enough to strike the Soviet Migs; years later, one of his
armed followers would take me up the "bin Laden trail", a terrifying
two-hour odyssey along fearful ravines in rain and sleet, the windscreen
misting as we climbed the cold mountain. "When you believe in jihad [holy
war], it is easy,'' the gunman informed me, fighting with the steering wheel
as stones scuttered from the tyres, bouncing down the valleys into the
clouds below. From time to time - this was in 1997 - lights winked at us
from far away in the darkness. "Our brothers are letting us know they see
us,'' the gunman said. It was two hours more before we reached bin Laden's
old wartime camp, the jeep skidding backwards towards sheer cliffs, the
headlights illuminating frozen waterfalls above. "Toyota is good for
Jihad,'' bin Laden's man smiled. I could only agree. I never heard bin Laden
make a joke.
If the United States regarded him as the foremost "terrorist'' in the
world - as I told him they did - then "if liberating my land is called
terrorism, this is a great honour for me.'' There was no difference, he
said, between the American and Israeli governments, between the American and
Israeli armies. But Europe - especially France - was beginning to distance
itself from the Americans. He did condemn French policy towards north
Africa; although he did not mention Algeria, the name hovered over us for
several minutes like a ghost.
Bin Laden gave me a Pakistani wall poster in Urdu which proclaimed the
support of Pakistani scholars for his "holy war'' against the Americans; he
even handed to me colour photographs of graffiti on the walls of Karachi
that demanded the ousting of US troops from "the place of the two Holy
shrines [Mecca and Medina]''. He had, he claimed, received some months ago
an emissary from the Saudi royal family who said that his Saudi
citizenship -- taken away after pressure from Washington - would be restored
along with a new Saudi passport and 2 billion Saudi riyals (£339 million)
for his family if he abandoned his jihad and went back to Saudi Arabia. He
and his family, he said, had rejected the offer.
At the time, bin Laden had three wives, the elder of them the mother of his
bright, 16-year-old Bon Omar, the youngest herself a teenager. Another son,
Saad, was brought to meet me; they spoke some English and were clearly
excited - in an innocent way - to be surrounded by so many armed men. All
lived with him - along with other Mujahedin wives and children -- and stayed
in a compound outside Jalalabad. Bin Laden even invited me to visit these
hot, dank, miserable homes in the company of one of his Egyptian fighters.
Of course, his wives - the youngest was later to return to her family in the
Gulf - were not there. "These are ladies who are used to living in
comfort,'' the Egyptian said. The encampment was protected by sheets of
canvas and a few strands of barbed wire; a drainage ditch and three separate
latrines had been dug in the earth, in one of which floated a dead frog. The
Egyptian's teenage son, sitting beside us with a rifle in his lap, insisted
that Egyptian Intelligence men had viewed the camp. "There are people in the
towns who work for the Americans,'' he said. "We see these people and we
have to be careful.''
Another of the Arabs in that camp was more forthcoming. There was, he said,
"no other country left for Mr bin Laden'' outside of Afghanistan. "When he
was in Sudan, the Saudis wanted to capture him with the help of the Yemenis.
We know that the French government tried to persuade the Sudanese to hand
him over to them because the Sudanese had given them a south American. The
Americans were pressing the French to get hold of bin Laden in Sudan. An
Arab group paid by the Saudis tried to kill him, but bin Laden's guards
fired back and two were wounded.''
In all, bin Laden lost 500 of his men in the war against the Russians. Their
graves lie near the Pakistani border at Torkum. After the Russian
withdrawal, bin Laden left for Sudan, disgusted by the Afghans' internecine
fighting. His closest followers went with him to build highways and invest
in Sudanese industry.
Bin Laden is a tall, slim man and towers over his companions.
He has narrow, dark eyes which stared hard at me when he spoke of his hatred
of Saudi corruption. Indeed, in my long conversation with bin Laden in
1996 - on that hot night of mosquitoes - the Saudi kingdom and its
apparatchiks probably consumed more time than his views of America. He
picked his teeth with a piece of miswak wood, a habit that accompanied all
his conversations with me. History - or his version of it - was the basis of
almost all his remarks. And the pivotal date was 1990, the year Saddam
Hussein invaded Kuwait. "When the American troops entered Saudi Arabia, the
land of the two Holy places, there was as strong protest from the ulema
[religious authorities] and from students of the Sharia law all over the
country against the interference of American troops.
"This big mistake by the Saudi regime of inviting the American troops
revealed their deception. They had given their support to nations that were
fighting against Muslims. They helped the Yemen communists against the
southern Yemeni Muslims and are helping [Yasser] Arafat's regime fight
Hamas. After it insulted and jailed the ulema ... the Saudi regime lost its
legitimacy.''
Bin Laden paused to see if I had listened to his careful if frighteningly
exclusive history lesson. "We as Muslims have a strong feeling that binds us
together... We feel for our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon. The explosion
at Khobar did not come as a direct result of American occupation but as a
result of American behaviour against Muslims...
"When 60 Jews are killed inside Palestine [in suicide bombings in 1996], all
the world gathers within seven days to criticise this action, while the
deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children [under UN sanctions] did not receive the
same reaction. Killing those Iraqi children is a crusade against Islam. We,
as Muslims, do not like the Iraqi regime but we think that the Iraqi people
and their children are our brothers and we care about their future."
But it was America that captured bin Laden's final attention. "I believe
that sooner or later the Americans will leave Saudi Arabia, and that the war
declared by America against the Saudi people means war against Muslims
everywhere. Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in
Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, the ulema, have given us a fatwa that
we must drive out the Americans. The solution to this crisis is the
withdrawal of American troops... their military presence is an insult to the
Saudi people.''
I've been thinking a lot about that last statement this week. American
forces are still in Saudi Arabia. And about his earlier remark in July,
1996 - after a truck bomb had killed 19 Americans - that this incident
marked "the beginning of the war between Muslims and the United States". Of
the later bombing and the killing of 24 US servicemen, he was to tell me
that it was "a great act in which I missed the honour of participating". He
spoke then in a chilling, lower voice of his hatred of the American
"occupiers".
Intelligent - and eloquent in Arabic - bin Laden undoubtedly is. But his
understanding of foreign affairs is decidedly eccentric. At one point, he
even suggested to me that individual US states might secede from the Union
because of Washington's support for Israel. But the historical perspective
was deeply disturbing. "We believe that God used our holy war in Afghanistan
to destroy the Russian army and the Soviet Union,'' he said. "We did this
from the top of this very mountain on which you are sitting - and now we ask
God to use us one more time to do the same to America, to make it a shadow
of itself. We also believe that our battle against America is much simpler
than the war against the Soviet Union because some of our Mujahedin who
fought here in Afghanistan also participated in operations against the
Americans in Somalia [during the doomed UN mission] - and they were
surprised at the collapse of American morale. This convinced us that the
Americans are a paper tiger.
He was also to tell me that "swift and light forces working in complete
secrecy" would be needed to oust America from Saudi Arabia. In the following
two years, bin Laden was to form his al-Qaeda movement and declare war on
the American people - not just the government and army of the United States.
There would follow the near-sinking of the USS Cole in Aden harbour - by
suicide bombers - and the Cruise missile attacks on the old CIA base that
bin Laden uses in southern Afghanistan. He walks now with a stick - a
development of the foot problem I noticed four years ago - and speaks more
slowly.
But could he really command an army of suicide bombers from the desolation
of the Afghan mountains? He did admit to me once that he knew two of the
three men executed - beheaded - in Saudi Arabia for bombing the second
American military base. He wanted a "real" Islamic sharia law government in
Arabia - there would, I suspected, be even more head-chopping in a bin Laden
regime - and he wanted an end to those dictators installed by the Americans,
those men who supported US policies while repressing their own people.
And it occurred to me that this was, for many millions of Arabs in the
Middle East, a very powerful message. You didn't need instructions from bin
Laden to form your own small group of followers, to decide on your own
individual actions. Bin Laden wouldn't have to plan bombings or the
overthrow of regimes. You had only to listen to the thousands of cassette
tapes of his voice circulated clandestinely around the Middle East. Which is
why I wonder - always supposing bin Laden is connected to the crime against
humanity committed in the United States this week - if it would even be
necessary to command a para-military organisation for such acts to happen.
Arabs are angry enough with the injustices that they blame on America
without needing orders from Afghanistan. Inspiration might be just enough.
And I wondered, after those images from New York last week, whether bin
Laden was not as astonished as myself to see them. Always supposing he
watched television. Or listened to the radio. Or read a newspaper.
Life Story
Born: Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden in 1955.
Family: seventh son of a Saudi businessman who made a fortune out of Saudi
Arabia's oil-fuelled construction boom (died in a helicopter crash when
Osama was 13); mother was a Syrian beauty and his father's official wife; 51
siblings.
Married: first to his Syrian cousin in 1972 (believed to have three wives);
two sons.
Education: degree in civil-engineering at Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah
1979.
Military career: from 1979 fought and raised funds for Mujahedin in the
Afghan conflict against the Russians with his Al Qaeda group (backed with
American dollars and had the blessing of the governments of Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan); from 1984 channelled Arab volunteers to the Afghan guerrillas in
Pakistani border town.
Fortune: estimated to have about $300m in personal financial assets.
Charges: 1993 bombing of World Trade Centre which killed six people and
injured more than 1,000; 1995 and 1996 bombings of Saudi cities of Riyadh
and Khobar which killed 24; 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania which killed 224 people and wounded 4,000; 2000 suicide bombing of
USS Cole in Yemen which killed 17; 2001 destruction of the World Trade
Centre and attack on Pentagon.
Bounty: $5m.
Aliases: The Prince, The Emir, Abu Abdallah, Mujahid Shaykh, Hajj, the
Director.
He says: "It does not worry us what the Americans think. What worries us is
pleasing Allah."
They say: "If you were to kill Osama tomorrow, the Osama organisation would
disappear, but all the networks would still be there." David Long, former
official in the State Department.
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