A close connection had thus existed between Al-Zawahri’s family and the Sauds for two generations – until Ayman al-Zawahri broke with family tradition by joining the Egyptian Islamic Jihad revolutionary party. He was among the several hundred suspects rounded up and jailed following President Sadat’s assassination in 1981, and emerged three years later an embittered man. He moved to Saudi Arabia and then on to Pakistan and Afghanistan, which he twice visited in the early 1980s as a volunteer doctor working for the Kuwait Red Crescent Society.
In 1986 Bin Laden flew his several wives and children from Jedda to Peshawar and set up home in a rented house outside the city. That same summer he established a training camp for a group of his Arab volunteers at Khost, on the lower slopes of the Spin Ghar mountain range close to the Pakistan border. Copying Abdullah Azzam, he named this camp Bait al-Ansar, the House of Ansar, and used his family construction equipment to turn long-abandoned Buddhist caves above his camp into fortified bunkers. His plans suffered a setback when Russian Special Forces attacked the camp in the following year, forcing its Arab defenders to retreat across the border. However, the Khost complex survived to became the Afghan equivalent of the Fanatic Camp of the Hindustanis at Sittana, where thousands of international jihadis received the military training and political indoctrination they later applied in domains of war as far afield as Algeria, Chechnya and Xinjiang.
One of these ‘Arabs’ was the man who currently (September 2005) masterminds the bombing campaign in Iraq, as well as presiding over some of the worst terrorist beheadings and atrocities: the Jordanian Abu Musab AL-ZARQAWI. Al-Zarqawi arrived in Peshawar as a twenty-year-old in the summer of 1989, bringing with him an unenviable reputation as a street thug and bully. He had missed the boat as far as taking up arms against the Russians was concerned, so he began working for a radical Islamist newsletter, where he came under the influence of a fundamentalist cleric named Sheikh Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a fellow Jordanian whose Salafi beliefs made him a natural ally of the Deobandis. These beliefs appear to have caused Al-Maqdisi and his new student to hold back from joining either Abdullah Azzam or Bin Laden. Instead, they formed their own group, naming it Bait al-Imam, the House of the Imam, before returning to Jordan with the intention of overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy. Both men were arrested for plotting against the state and given long prison sentences.
In the meantime, the Egyptian doctor Al-Zawahri had followed Bin Laden’s example by also moving his family from Arabia to Peshawar, where he and other Egyptian revolutionaries set up a local faction of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Inevitably, a rivalry developed between the Egyptians led by Al-Zawahri and the Arabs led by Abdullah Azzam from the Office of Services to the Mujahedeen. These differences became acute when in 1988 Soviet Russia decided to cut its losses in Afghanistan and began to pull out its troops. A decade of warfare against the Russian infidels had created a battle-hardened and highly politicised international brigade. Abdullah Azzam wished these foreign jihadis to remain in Afghanistan and secure it for the Islamist cause, after which they would join forces with the Deobandi politico-religious parties and other Islamist groups to liberate Pakistan and Kashmir. Al-Zawahri, however, argued that the pan-Islamist armed movement created in the course of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan should now be employed in liberating the entire umma, beginning with Egypt.
In the late summer of 1989 a plot by persons unknown to assassinate Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was foiled when a large cache of primed explosive was found under the pulpit of a mosque where he was about to preach. A face-to-face confrontation followed at which Al-Zawahri accused Abdullah Azzam of indulging in ‘cat’s-piss politics’. It ended with the Doctor winning over to his camp the idealistic and impressionable man whom he was then treating for a kidney complaint: Osama bin Laden, aged thirty-one to Al-Zawahri’s thirty-eight. On Friday 24 November of that same year Abdullah Azzam, now increasingly isolated, was targeted once again as he and his teenage sons made the journey from their home to the local mosque for evening prayers. In a narrow lane just short of the mosque they got out of their vehicle to walk the rest of the way – at which point three mines were detonated. ‘A great thundering was heard over the city,’ relates a website dedicated to Abdullah Azzam:
People emerged from the mosque and beheld a terrible sight. The younger son Ibrahim flew 100 metres into the air; the other two youths were thrown a similar distance away, and their remains were scattered among the trees and power lines. As for Sheikh Abdullah Azzam himself, his body was found resting against a wall, totally intact and not at all disfigured, except that some blood was seen issuing from his mouth. That fateful blast indeed ended the worldly journey of Sheikh Abdullah, which had been spent well in struggling, striving and fighting in the Path of Allah.
Although the CIA was blamed, the most obvious beneficiary of the Sheikh’s death was the man who spoke the eulogy at his funeraclass="underline" Dr Ayman al-Zawahri, who now became world jihad’s leading ideologue.
Although the withdrawal of Soviet troops was completed in February 1989 it was not until 1992 that a coalition of mujahedeen forces finally overthrew the Soviet-backed Afghan Government. To the dismay of their foreign patrons, the seven mujahedeen armies then turned their guns on each other, leading to a catastrophic breakdown of law and order. Ever since 1980 Afghan refugees had been crossing into the border areas of Pakistan and Iran to escape the fighting, but as conditions worsened in the early 1990s their numbers swelled to a point where the Government of Pakistan found itself having to absorb and shelter well over three million refugees, mostly Pathans.
The emergence of the Taliban in the winter of 1994–5, seemingly from nowhere, and its rapid rise to power, culminating in the capture of Kabul in September 1997, has been meticulously chronicled by the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. The rise of Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda over this same period has been no less meticulously researched and graphically told by Malise Ruthven, Bernard Lewis, Giles Keppel, Jason Burke and other respected authorities. It remains only for a few last gaps in the convergence of these two movements to be filled in.
After the withdrawal of Soviet troops many of the foreign jihadis left Afghanistan and Pakistan to take the struggle to their homelands. But before the final departure of the bulk of the ‘Arabs’ a meeting took place in Bin Laden’s camp at Khost in the spring of 1988. Here Al-Zawahri and perhaps a dozen like-minded individuals representing Islamic Jihad and other organisations agreed to form a loose-knit organisation that would take jihad to wherever Islam was under threat – and to whoever threatened it. The name given to this organisation, Al-Qaeda, with its connotations of a military base, may be seen as an indirect homage to the burra godown, the ‘big storehouse’ in the Mahabun Mountain first established by Syed Ahmad in 1827 and known thereafter to the British as the Hindustani or Fanatic Camp. Directly after this meeting at Khost Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayyaf, leader of the Wahhabi Ittihad-i-Islami group, left Peshawar with a large party of his followers for the Philippines where, as the ‘Abu Sayyaf gang’, they introduced Wahhabi terror to the Western Pacific. Others fanned out to take the Islamist revolution as far north as Chechnya and Kyrgyzstan and as far west as Algeria, Morocco – and the United States.