Abdullah Azzam’s many admirers claim that he took an active part in the fighting in Afghanistan, but his real contribution was as an organiser and inspirational firebrand who preached locally and published internationally on the duty of every Muslim to make jihad, not just in Afghanistan but wherever Muslims were oppressed. ‘Jihad’, he wrote, ‘continues until Allah’s Word is raised high; jihad until all the oppressed peoples are freed; jihad to protect our dignity and restore our occupied lands. Jihad is the way of everlasting glory.’ From 1980 to 1989 he worked unceasingly but largely unavailingly to persuade the many mujahedeen commanders waging war in Afghanistan to set aside their rivalries and unite – ideally, under one leader.
Abdullah Azzam has been called the ‘Emir of Islamic jihad’, but it would be more accurate to describe him as its godfather. Which leads on, at last, to the present (2005) amir of world jihad, Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad BIN LADEN.
Born in Saudi Arabia in 1957, Osama bin Laden was the seventeenth of 52 children of a Yemeni immigrant contractor, Muhammad bin Laden, his mother a Syrian whom his father subsequently divorced. Bin Laden senior accumulated prodigious wealth through his work as a construction contractor for the Saudi royal family and Osama bin Laden was raised in privileged circumstances, although he himself was never part of the Saudi inner circle. His father kept his children together in one household, usually the family’s main mansion in Jedda, to ensure they received a strict religious education on Wahhabi lines. However, as one of several fourth wives married and then divorced, the status of Osama’s mother was lowly and not enhanced by her being a follower of the Syrian Alawite sect, considered heretical by the Wahhabis. The death of his father in a helicopter crash when he was eleven may well have added to his sense of being an outsider. After this tragedy Prince Faisal, the pro-Wahhabi half-brother of King Saud, stepped in to protect and support the children, but Osama seems to have rejected the opportunity afforded his step-brothers and step-sisters to be educated abroad, in favour of local schooling in Jedda. In 1977 his eldest brother led a family party on the Hajj, during which the twenty-year-old underwent a religious experience that led him to abandon his Western links, grow a beard and commit himself seriously to Islamic studies. At this time he was enrolled as an undergraduate at King Abdul Aziz University at Jedda to study either economics or engineering, a degree course probably never completed. Here he came under the direct influence of the Palestinian and Egyptian radicals Abdullah Azzam and Muhammad Qutb, whose recorded sermons were widely circulated among students at this time. Osama bin Laden may thus be described as a Saudi-born Yemeni raised as a Wahhabi who was politicised by Abdullah Azzam and the revolutionary anti-imperialist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 1979, when he was twenty-two, three disparate but profoundly unsettling events caused Bin Laden to abandon his studies for direct action: the revolution of the ayatollahs in Iran; the violent seizure of the Great Mosque at Mecca; and the Russian intervention in Afghanistan. If the reports are correct, he was one of the first Saudis to fly to Afghanistan, almost certainly with the encouragement of Abdullah Azzam, whom he preceded. The Bin Laden family’s close links with the Saudi royal family now became extremely valuable. The Government of Saudi Arabia was most anxious to show its commitment to the Afghan cause, as were the Wahhabi aid and propaganda organisations overseen by Sheikh Bin Baz. So Bin Laden became an unofficial ambassador and bag-man for Saudi Arabia in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He also committed his own considerable private wealth to the cause, supported by family members and friends. He spent time on the front line, although gilded accounts of him as a battle-hardened jihadi fighting alongside such groups as the Hizb-i-Islami can be dismissed as wishful thinking on the part of his supporters. His real talent lay in ensuring that jihadis went where military commanders most needed them, and that the supplies kept coming. In the process Osama made direct, personal contact with many thousands of volunteers drawn from all corners of the Muslim umma. He is known to have performed many individual acts of kindness towards wounded mujahedeen and the families of martyrs who were suffering hardship – and it may well have been in this connection that he met Mullah Omar, who had recently lost an eye to an exploding rocket. This first encounter is said to have taken place in 1989 in a Deobandi mosque in the Banuri suburb of Karachi. By that time the conspicuously tall and well-dressed Arab known as ‘al-Shaykh’ had become a familiar and greatly admired figure throughout the Frontier region, an unassuming and, at this time, far from charismatic young man who was nevertheless recognised as the personification of Saudi Arabia’s commitment to the Afghanistan jihad.
Yet Bin Laden’s efforts would have counted for little had it not been for his mentor and patron Abdullah Azzam, whose rudimentary set-up for the recruitment, training and support of foreign fighters grew, with Saudi funding, into a highly sophisticated organisation. It became the Maktab al-Khidamat an-Mujahedeen, the Office of Services to the Mujahedeen, with an international network of overseas branches linked by mobile telephones, personal computers and lap-tops. It also became, in effect, a parallel bureau to that established earlier in Peshawar by Pakistan’s ISI. Abdullah Azzam’s control of the Office of Services to the Mujahedeen allowed him to channel financial support to those mujahedeen groups whose agendas came closest to his own: principally, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami (Hekmatyar) and Ittihad-i-Islami (Unity of Islam). Both these mujahedeen fighting forces came increasingly to be seen as Wahhabi lashkars (war parties) with Saudi-led agendas.
In excess of twenty-five thousand foreign jihadis are said to have passed through the portals of the Office of Services to the Mujahedeen, set in a leafy, middle-class extension of Peshawar’s Civil Lines, north-west of the old city. Many of them came from the most militant organisations in the Islamic world, including Islamic Jihad and Hamas. To the local population these volunteer fighters were known collectively as ‘the Arabs’, and they were welcomed and honoured for their courage and sacrifices.
It is no exaggeration to say that from this office the seed of international jihad was planted in the now fertile and receptive soil of the North-West Frontier, to be fertilised by all the resentments real and perceived of fundamentalist, revivalist Islam, watered by Osama bin Laden’s pipeline to Saudi Arabia – and, finally, to take root as Al-Qaeda, the [Military] Base.
Among those who came knocking on the doors of the Maktab al-Khidamat an-Mujahedeen was the bespectacled Egyptian physician and revolutionary Ayman AL-ZAWAHRI, known familiarly as ‘The Doctor’. He was from one of the most respectable middle-class families in Cairo, Arabic in origin, many of whose male members had distinguished themselves as diplomats, academics, doctors and theologians. One of his grandfathers had served as Egypt’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and had founded King al-Saud University in Riyadh in the 1950s. One of his great-uncles had fought against the British in Egypt and after many years’ service as a diplomat had helped found the Arab League, being credited as the man who persuaded Ibn Saud to join that organisation in 1945. Yet another great-uncle had served as the Grand Imam of Cairo’s Al-Aqsa mosque from 1929 to 1933 – and was the man whom Sheikh Hafiz Wahba, in his lecture to the Central Asian Society in 1929, had identified as being linked, together with the then Grand Mufti of Egypt, as a disciple of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab.