Al-Qaeda (20 page)

Some of the Arabs who stayed in Pakistan were thoroughly domesticated, working in the scores of Arab NGOs that maintained a presence in the city. The exact role of these charities is often difficult to determine. Many were involved in perfectly legitimate relief work. Others acted as conduits for funds for the training camps or other military activities. Some did both. Azzam’s Maktab al-Khidamat kept several offices open in Peshawar and opened an ‘office of information’ in Jalalabad in 1992.
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Though bin Laden’s
beit al-ansar
was shut down in 1992 he continued to fund the maintenance of several guesthouses for itinerant militants in Peshawar. They included a
beit al-shuhada
(house of martyrs),
beit al-salaam
(house of peace) and
beit al-momineen
(house of the faithful) and a fourth guesthouse in Hayatabad, the suburb in the west of the city.
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Of course, there were scores of
other groups all running their own guesthouses too. The groups were broadly divided along national lines, as they had been during the war against the Soviets. Each had their own lines of funding, ideologies, tactics and ambitions. Many individual activists, including those acting as instructors in the training camps, were not directly linked to any organization but were effectively freelance. They worked for whoever had sufficient funds to support them. One such man was an Egyptian–American called Ali Mohammed who, in Peshawar in 1992, taught surveillance to a number of men who were close to bin Laden. Ali Mohammed, a former American special forces supply sergeant, had made contact with Islamic Jihad around 1985 and through them had been introduced to bin Laden in 1991. Ali Mohammed, like a number of other individuals and groups, appears to have been hired by bin Laden for short periods for specific tasks.
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The camps opened by the Pakistanis supplemented rather than supplanted the training camps that had been built during the war against the Soviets. Camps such as Khaldan and those around Zhawar Khili remained open and full. Indeed, several new camps, funded by donations from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, were opened to cater for a surge in volunteers making their way to Pakistan from all over the Islamic world for training. Though Sayyaf’s and Hekmatyar’s vocal attacks on Riyadh during the Gulf War crisis of 1990 and 1991 had ended the flow of official Saudi funds there was no shortage of funds from wealthy private individuals.

Various groups ran the camps. Harkat ul-Mujahideen and the Pakistani secret services were, of course, involved in the administration of several. As both Hekmatyar and Maulvi Younis Khalis had maintained their links to the ISI and to wealthy patrons in the Gulf they were able to access the necessary funds for their respective Hizb-e-Islami factions to continue running facilities. As they had found during the Afghan war, running camps was essential to sustained political and military success. Recruits, whatever their original background, naturally felt some allegiance to the group that trained them. An element of credit from the trainees’ subsequent activities was reflected on their patrons. That credit in turn attracted more recruits and more funds and so created a virtuous circle. Outside Jalalabad, Hekmatyar
abandoned an attempt to set up a radio station in an old Soviet army base called Darunta and turned it into a camp where Arabs could train alongside his Afghan fighters. Khalis evacuated the cold and uncomfortable caves of Tora Bora and moved the Arabs who had been training there down to camps just south of Jalalabad, near an old Soviet collective farm called Hadda.
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As Hekmatyar had nurtured and sustained his links in Pakistan, so Sayyaf had kept his longstanding connections in Saudi Arabia. His Khaldan camp was still running, under a Palestinian or Algerian ‘emir’ and Middle Eastern Arab instructors. An overflow camp, the al-Aqsa camp, was built in Afghanistan, near Torkham on the Pakistani border.
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These two facilities were perhaps the most international of all the camps at the time, with volunteers from the Balkans, southwest China, the former USSR and the Philippines all training alongside the Pakistanis pouring out of the new religious schools of the Punjab and NWFP. Khaldan in particular crops up repeatedly in the testimony of captured terrorists and militants. As early as 1990 it appears to have been acting as a ‘clearing camp’ for foreign volunteers providing basic training to those with no experience of military activities and allowing instructors to select the best recruits for further training in more advanced techniques elsewhere.

This is not to say that bin Laden was completely without representation in Pakistan and Afghanistan at this time. He was primarily involved with the logistics of processing recruits through Peshawar. This was why he had kept the four guesthouses open in the city. A young Palestinian called Zein al-Abideen Mohammed Hassan, known as Abu Zubaydah, handled many of the young men who arrived in Peshawar, assigning them to different camps. Abu Zubaydah, who had been wounded in fighting in Afghanistan, was later to become a key member of the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’, though his exact relationship with bin Laden and al-Zawahiri at this time is unclear. It appears he was working for a rump Maktab al-Khidamat rather than al-Qaeda. Many other key figures who were later to emerge as significant were also in Peshawar at this time.

Bin Laden also had connections at al-Farooq, a camp run largely by Egyptians near Khost and under the nominal authority of Sayyaf.
Trainers in al-Farooq included L’Hossaine Khertchou, who was to become key in later years in the Sudan, an Egyptian called Abu Rahman Abu Hajer and a Palestinian called Mohammed Sadeeq Odeh. The latter two were both to be involved in the 1998 African embassy bombings.
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Another instructor at al-Farooq was Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, bin Laden’s Egyptian-born military coordinator who was a key member of the al-Qaeda hardcore until he was killed in 1996 in a boat accident in Africa. Abu Ubaidah was a former Cairo police officer who had been dismissed for Islamic activism and who had made his name fighting alongside Ahmed Shah Massoud against the Soviets; he was one of those who had joined bin Laden’s al-Qaeda in 1989 and was in touch with bin Laden during this period. It is possible that bin Laden made a contribution to the cost of the camp. Bin Laden’s relations with Sayyaf were good. This does not, however, make it a ‘bin Laden’ camp.

Khertchou, like al-Fadl, was a prosecution witness in the trial of those responsible for the 1998 bombings and may have been tempted to fit his evidence to the FBI’s mode of thinking. In his testimony he said men like al-Banshiri and Odeh had declared their loyalty to bin Laden and al-Qaeda by the early 1990s. Even if this is the case, they were only a few among many thousands of militants training in the camps at any one time. There were so many foreign militants in the region at the time that moderate Afghan commanders wrote to the American and Saudi Arabian ambassadors to warn them.
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A CIA memo dating from around 1996, declassified and released in 1998, claims that bin Laden funded the ‘Kunar camp’, presumably located in Kunar province north of Jalalabad, in this period. Kunar camp, the memo says, ‘provides training to Islamic Jihad and al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya members’. The memo mentions no other camps connected to the Saudi, and extensive interviews with former mujahideen, Hizb-e-Islami and Sayyaf activists have confirmed that bin Laden’s involvement was marginal in the Afghan training camps at this time.
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Bin Laden did, however, leave one important legacy. Some time between 1990 and 1992, the eleven-volume ‘Encyclopedia of the Jihad’, codifying the teaching in the camps, was compiled with his financial assistance.

Of all the terrorists learning and planning in the guesthouses, religious schools and camps in western Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan from 1989 to 1995, perhaps the most effective, and certainly the most high profile, was Ramzi Yousef.

Ramzi, who called himself ‘Pakistani by birth, Palestinian by choice’, was born in a working-class suburb of Kuwait City on 27 April 1968. His real name is probably Abdul Karim Basit. He is the son of a tribesman from the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan who had moved to Kuwait during the boom years of the oil industry in the early 1970s. In Kuwait, Ramzi’s father, an engineer, became influenced by a group of local religious conservatives.
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When Ramzi was 18, the family moved back to Baluchistan but were able to arrange a visa for their son to travel to Britain to study ‘computer-aided electrical engineering’ at a college in Swansea. In the summer of 1989, Ramzi travelled back to Pakistan and put his newly acquired skills to use by spending his summer vacation teaching electronic bomb-making skills in the training camps around Peshawar.
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Ramzi returned to Pakistan in 1991. Within months he was back in the camps. During this time he is believed to have met Abdurajak Abu Bakr Janjalani, the Muslim militant born on the island of Basilan in the southern Philippines. Janjalani had studied
fiqh
, Islamic jurisprudence, in Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s before taking part in the war against the Soviets. Since 1989 he had been travelling between Pakistan, Afghanistan and his native Philippines, where he had set up the Abu Sayyaf group, named after the man in whose mujahideen faction he had fought and the Prophet Mohammed’s swordbearer. He asked Ramzi to go with him to the Philippines to train militants. Yousef spent several months with Janjalani but by mid 1992 was back in Pakistan. According to Simon Reeve’s excellent book
The New Jackals
, Ramzi was teaching electronics and bomb-making to militants at the ‘University of Da’wa and Jihad’ in Pabbi. The university was part of the complex run by Sayyaf and so extensive that it was dubbed ‘Sayyafabad’. It was, contrary to many reports, primarily a religious school.
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Its extensive air-conditioning, funded by Sayyaf’s Arab patrons, contributed to its popularity. However, Sayyaf did run occasional training camps for students at the university who wanted to learn about more
than the holy texts, and it is certainly possible that Ramzi was teaching bomb-making skills in one of its classrooms at some stage. At least one activist who visited the university at the time said that many militants ran such courses in the guesthouses nearby where many of the volunteers lived. So as not to attract the attention of nearby Pakistani military personnel, light bulbs were used instead of explosives when testing a bomb’s circuits.
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Ramzi also appears to have spent some time as a tutor in Sayyaf’s Khaldan, where he trained alongside Pakistani sectarian militants.
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It was in Khaldan that he met Ahmed Mohammed Ajaj, his accomplice in the World Trade Center bombing.
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Ajaj was a former pizza delivery man in Texas who left his job and travelled to Pakistan via Saudi Arabia, where he had picked up an introduction letter to Khaldan camp. He may well have spent time in Sayyaf’s compound at Pabbi too.
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Ajaj and Ramzi flew first class from Karachi to New York together on 31 August 1992. Ajaj was detained when his poorly forged passport was spotted as a fake and bomb manuals were found in his luggage. Ramzi, travelling on a fake Iraqi passport, scraped through.

Ramzi’s movements after the attack on the World Trade Center are as revealing as those preceding it. He left New York on the night of the blast and went straight to Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan. When his home there was raided by Pakistani investigators he moved north to Peshawar, staying for some time, according to Pakistani investigators, in bin Laden’s beit-al-shuhada.
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He appears to have received some funding from wealthy Pakistani or Gulf businessmen and picked up old associations with the Pakistani sectarian militants with whom he had trained in Khaldan and elsewhere. In July 1993, he was asked by unidentified Pakistani militants to assassinate Benazir Bhutto, then starting her second term as Pakistani prime minister, but the bomb he was planting outside her home in Karachi detonated prematurely, injuring his face. The sources Ramzi had drawn on to bring together the elements he needed for the attack are interesting. One of his accomplices in the attack had been trained in al-Farooq camp (run by Sayyaf) a year previously; the
matériel
required for the bomb was purchased with money from a mysterious Saudi donor
passed to Yousef by a Middle Eastern businessman known as ‘Khaled’ and was picked up from a refugee camp in Pabbi. The camp is also unidentified but, being in Pabbi, was almost certainly run by Sayyaf too. Ramzi was actually visited in hospital by senior figures in the radical Pakistani terrorist group the Sipa-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP).
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The SSP were one of the biggest and most brutal of the various sectarian groups that had sprung up in Pakistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Though there had been outbreaks of sectarian violence before, the roots of the wave of attacks that swept across Pakistan lay in the policies of General Zia, the effects of the war in Afghanistan, the meddling of overseas states and the willingness of private donors in the Islamic world to provide funds to killers. All these factors compounded the fundamental weaknesses of the Pakistani state outlined in the previous chapter.