Al-Qaeda (27 page)

Though he had been only tangentially involved in the 1992 hotel bombs in Aden, by 1993 bin Laden’s involvement in the Yemen was deepening. Al-Fadl related how he and several others were directed by Abu Ayoub al-Iraqi, one of the founder members of ‘al-Qaeda’ in Pakistan, to take several crates full of weapons from the farm bought by al-Zawahiri and used by Islamic Jihad in Khartoum to Port Sudan, where they were loaded onto a boat to be ferried across the sea to the Yemen. The operation was supervised by agents from the Sudanese government. Independent sources corroborate al-Fadl’s claim that bin Laden was transferring weapons to groups in the north of the Yemen at this time.
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Sudan was not the only state involved in the Yemeni conflict. The fusion, in 1990, of the northern and southern Yemeni regimes in a coalition government pending multi-party elections had failed to smooth over profound differences. The unification of the armies of north and south Yemen was thus delayed. This meant that when a north–south war broke out in 1994 both sides had armed forces that they could call upon. The Saudi government, worried by the prospect of a populous and united state on its borders, committed substantial resources in secret backing for the southern forces. One underlying factor was Riyadh’s desire for a corridor of sovereign territory to allow oil exports to the Arabian Sea. When it actually came to the fighting, the Afghan veterans and Islamic groups supported the north. Their role in securing a northern victory is still debated; it was certainly significant, though probably not decisive.

It was shortly after the 1992 bombs in Aden that bin Laden and the senior Islamic Jihad figures with whom he spent much of his time in
Khartoum began to talk about attacking the Americans in Somalia. The continuing argument over bin Laden’s supposed involvement in Somalia centres on the question of whether fighters linked to or trained by bin Laden, or his close associates, were involved in the battle of Mogadishu in October 1993, where eighteen American servicemen were killed and three helicopters shot down during a botched attempt to seize General Farah Aideed, the Somalian warlord.

An intent to attack the Americans was certainly not lacking. Jamal al-Fadl referred to Mohammed Atef, both a senior figure in Islamic Jihad and nominally loyal to bin Laden, visiting Somalia twice in the months before the battle. Atef, other Islamic Jihad figures and bin Laden sent other Afghan veterans into Somalia to contact local tribes and to offer support and training. One was Mohammed Odeh, a Saudi Arabian-born Palestinian who grew up in Jordan and had been inspired to make his way to Afghanistan after watching a video of Abdallah Azzam. After training in al-Farooq camp and serving as a combat medic near Jalalabad in 1991, he was introduced to Saif al-Adel, the Egyptian former special forces officer, who told him that the war in Afghanistan was over and asked if he would go to Somalia via Kenya. Odeh eventually spent seven months in 1993 training the Um Reham tribe in small arms and battlefield medicine.
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Another man linked to bin Laden and in Somalia during this period was Harun Fazil. Fazil, like Odeh, would later play an important role in the attacks on the east African embassies in 1998. He was actually in Mogadishu during the battle though appears not to have participated.
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There is a possibility Fazil was there to survey possible UN or US targets for an attack.

Bin Laden has repeatedly denied involvement in the Mogadishu battle, telling CNN in 1997: ‘With Allah’s grace, Muslims over there cooperated with some Arab “Mujahideen” who had been in Afghanistan.’
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Some authors have taken this to be an admission of guilt; however, it seems to me that bin Laden was probably telling the truth. American specialists have made much of the fact that the technique of firing rocket-propelled grenades at the rear rotor of a helicopter was one taught to resistance fighters in Afghanistan. Given the number of ‘Arab Afghan’ veterans in east Africa at the time, there seems to me to be no particular reason why it would have to be bin
Laden’s fighters, or even Islamic Jihad’s, who transferred their skills to the Somalis.

Certainly journalists who worked in Somalia at the time found little evidence of any ‘al-Qaeda’ involvement in the ‘Black Hawk Down’ episode. When asked in 1999, General Mohammed Aideed’s aides laughed at the claim that bin Laden helped them and said unanimously that they had never even heard of bin Laden until he began boasting about Somalia years later.
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Bin Laden’s involvement in Somalia was also examined during the African embassy bombing trial in New York. Prosecution evidence linking al-Qaeda to the attacks on the US forces failed to stand up and was struck from the court record. The evidence was largely based on the interception of communications in Arabic during the battle, which suggested to the US government that bin Laden’s associates were involved. It was pointed out, however, that Arabic is widely spoken in the region and that those tribes named by witnesses as having been in contact with ‘al-Qaeda’ were in fact fighting
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General Aideed not for him. Only after strong protests from the prosecution did the judge agree to rule that no members of ‘al-Qaeda’ affiliated to defendants in the trial were at the battle, rather than ruling that no ‘al-Qaeda’ members at all had taken part.
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Senior American officials at the time called bin Laden’s boast of involvement in the Somali deaths ‘preposterous’.
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Madeline Albright, the US Ambassador to the UN, and others briefed reporters that Aideed was getting ‘significant’ help from Iranian and Sudanese advisers, as well as cash from Libya.
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US officials told Peter Bergen that ‘the skills involved in shooting down those helicopters were not skills that the Somalis could have learned on their own’, but it is worth remembering that, after the battle of Little Big Horn, American press reports blamed the defeat on secret French advisers fighting alongside the native American tribes.
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Another interesting point is that the trainers appear to have been sent to Somalia by Mohammed Atef, albeit with bin Laden’s assent. Jamal al-Fadl told the court that ‘al-Qaeda’ had a military committee, headed by Atef with Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri as his deputy. Both had taken a bayat to bin Laden but were Egyptians and involved with Islamic Jihad long before they met the Saudi. In fact, the more closely one examines the composition of the group said to comprise ‘al-Qaeda’
in Sudan, the more one can see that it is dominated by Islamic Jihad. In Peshawar, before the move to Sudan, the sheer number of Egyptians holding senior positions had prompted complaints of discrimination from other members of the group.
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In a sense, this dominance is to be expected. Egypt has historically enjoyed a degree of cultural, and often political, supremacy in the Middle East. But the sheer number of Egyptian militants, all of whom had practical experience of Islamic activism that far outweighed bin Laden’s own, raises significant questions about who exactly was in charge of whom. Alliance with bin Laden, even nominal obedience to him as emir, brought great benefits to the impoverished Islamic Jihad group. As well as lacking funds, Ayman al-Zawahiri, though an effective organizer and military tactician, also lacked the spiritual authority of his main rival in Egyptian militancy, Sheikh Omar Rahman. Association with bin Laden, who made up for what he lacked in clerical credentials in charisma and reputation, was thus doubly useful. The more one examines the relation between al-Zawahiri and bin Laden in this period, the more obvious it is that the older man was manipulating the younger rather than vice versa. Al-Zawahiri was also the more sophisticated thinker of the two. He was, and is, a huge influence on bin Laden. His story is worth looking at in some detail.

Ayman al-Zawahiri was born in a wealthy Cairo suburb on 19 June 1951. His family had moved from Heliopolis and, though both parents were from prominent families connected among the Egyptian elite, they were not well off. Al-Zawahiri’s father was a professor of pharmacology but, with five children to educate, he could not afford a car. Though al-Zawahiri’s upbringing was religious it was not overtly pious. He was a bright child, known at school as introverted and intense.
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Al-Zawahiri’s background thus shows many of the elements seen in that of radical political Islamists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere: recent migration from the provinces to the capital, middle-class professional parents, a family full of aspirations and ambitions that were unlikely to be fulfilled.

Interestingly, Al-Zawahir also came from what Montasser al-Zayat, the Egyptian Islamist lawyer, calls ‘an old revolutionary heritage.’ His
grandfather had been a renowned scholar who had resisted both the British colonial administation and the monarchy, and his maternal grandfather had been the first secretary of the Arab League. So in three generations of the al-Zawahiri family we see the classic historical shift from anti-colonialism, through pan-Arabism to radical Islam as discourses or ideologies of dissent.

Though the death of Qutb and the trials of the Egyptian Islamists had elicited little sympathy among the general population, the ignominious failure of Egypt and the Arab powers in the 1967 war with Israel had a huge impact. In 1970, Nasser died and Anwar al-Sadat, his replacement, recognized that his predecessor’s ideas had gone to the grave with him. Sadat, who cultivated an image of Islamic piety, hoped to use Islam against the Communists and released many activists from jail.
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They gravitated towards the fertile political ground of the universities.

During the 1970s, various small militant groups formed, unformed and reformed. Many were instigated or aided by the secret services, which had been ordered by Sadat to counter the left by promoting socially conservative strands of Islam among young Egyptians. In 1977, the banned Muslim Brotherhood, tacitly allowed by the regime to operate under the name of ‘al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya’ (Islamic societies), won a majority in the Egyptian Students’ Union. During the 1970s, the number of Egyptian students had doubled, educational facilities were stretched to breaking point and graduate unemployment was a serious problem.

The students were largely drawn from the rural petty bourgeois, who had always provided the backbone of the support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Sadat’s economic policy, particularly his attempt to woo overseas investment from the West, had led to growing inequality. Between 1964 and 1974, the share of the Egyptian GDP of the politically critical middle 30 per cent of the Egyptian population had halved while the top 10 per cent had doubled their income.
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The Gamaa proposed an Islamic solution of varying degrees of radicalism which was profoundly attractive to many.

Most of those involved with the Gamaa, as befits the Muslim Brotherhood under another name, restricted themselves to providing facilities where the state failed. The agenda was Islamicization. So, for
example, women were offered segregated classes (solving the problem of overcrowding) or free public transport (if they wore the veil). Many Egyptian militants looked to the blind sheikh, Abdel Omar Rahman, who lived in Fayoum, two hours’ drive south of Cairo, for spiritual leadership. Rahman had been influenced by Qutb and Maududi and had taught in Saudi Arabia before returning home in 1980, soon after Sadat signed the Camp David peace treaty with Israel. Within months of his return, his fiery sermons, taped and distributed at mosques, had become notorious. As a qualified and learned scholar with a doctorate from al-Azhar, Rahman was able to take on the Egyptian ulema, who had issued fatwas justifying the peace treaty, on their own ground.

Al-Zawahiri graduated from medical school in 1974. By the end of the decade, a variety of radical groups were emerging on the fringes of the Gamaa. A young electrical engineer called Abdessalam Faraj had the strength of character and ideological sophistication to weld some of the disparate elements of Egyptian Islamic militancy into something useful. On 6 October 1981, President Sadat was assassinated by a group led by Faraj, who justified their act by reference to ibn Taimiya and Qutb. Al-Zawahiri was arrested as he headed to the airport to fly back to Pakistan for another stint tending wounded mujahideen and refugees in Peshawar. In the clampdown that followed the assassination, al-Zawahiri, like thousands of other militants, was imprisoned and brutally tortured. In jail, the tenuous unity brokered by Faraj fell apart and the Egyptian Islamists split once more into various groups. The two largest were al-Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad and a group led by Abdel Omar Rahman, which re-used the name al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya. Where Islamic Jihad were strong in and around Cairo and Alexandria, reflecting the more urban background of their cadres, al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya were most active further south, particularly in the Nile valley around Aswan, Luxor and Asyut. Both groups believed that a twin approach of da’wa and violent struggle would enable them to achieve the familiar Salafi-Wahhabi aim of ‘compelling good and driving out evil’.
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By 1989, after several brief periods in jail, Abdel Omar Rahman was in America, having somehow obtained a visa in Cairo, and had settled down to teach in Jersey City, where he remained
until his arrest in 1993. Al-Zawahiri was released from prison in 1984 and had returned to Pakistan by 1985.