CHAPTER FIVE Al Qa’ida’s Strategic Alliance
OSAMA BIN LADEN was fond of telling his students a parable, comparing the anti-Soviet War with the Christian assault against Mecca in 570 AD. The much-better-equipped Christian army employed war elephants, and their attack was fearsome enough to warrant mention in the Qur’an, appropriately enough in the chapter Al-Fil (“The Elephant”). The Christians tried to destroy the Ka’aba shrine in Mecca and divert pilgrims to a new cathedral in San’a, located in modern-day Yemen. But birds showered the invading Christian army with pellets of hard-baked clay, and the Arabs eventually defeated the invaders. To bin Laden and other al Qa’ida leaders, the episode exemplified that God would be on their side when they united against a common enemy.1
“In the training camps and on the battlefronts against the Russians,” Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote in Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, “the Muslim youths developed a broad awareness and a fuller realization of the conspiracy that is being weaved” by Christians and Jews. They “developed an understanding based on shari’ah of the enemies of Islam, the renegades, and their collaborators.”2 The Afghan-Soviet War triggered an epiphany among these fighters, who had trekked to Afghanistan from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, and other parts of the Arab world. Inspired by the defeat of the Soviet Union, they began to dream about internationalizing the jihad. The defeat had emboldened them, and many believed they were invincible.
“The USSR, a superpower with the largest land army in the world,” Zawahiri wrote, “was destroyed and the remnants of its troops fled Afghanistan before the eyes of the Muslim youths and as a result of their actions.”3 Saudi Arabia was crucial to the jihad, as significant amounts of money from Saudi government officials and private donors poured into Pakistan and Afghanistan. But, no matter who funded the movement, no country in the Middle East was more important to the birth of al Qa’ida than Afghanistan.
Ideological Origins
In 1745, in Saudi Arabia, Muhammad ibn Saud allied with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792). Inspired by a number of scholars, such as Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), Wahhab criticized the virulent “superstitions” that had adulterated Islam’s original purity. According to Wahhab’s reading of the Qur’an, the Ottoman pilgrims who traveled across Saudi Arabia each year to pray at Mecca were not true Muslims. Rather, they were blasphemous polytheists who worshipped false idols. They were Allah’s enemy, he said, and should be converted or eliminated. In its simplest form, Wahhab preached that the original grandeur of Islam could be regained only if the Islamic community would return to what he believed were the principles enunciated by the Prophet Muhammad.
The Saudis began to export Wahhabi philosophy by distributing money to build mosques. In the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when the Arab oil-exporting nations declared an embargo on oil destined for Israel’s Western allies, Saudi Arabia found itself in an enviable economic position. Its growing oil wealth could finance a wide-ranging proselytizing campaign among the Sunnis in the Middle East and in the broader Muslim world.4
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 came at an opportune time for the Saudis. Under the stewardship of Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, Saudi Arabia began active campaigns in Pakistan and Afghanistan, working closely with the CIA and the ISI to fund the Afghan mujahideen.
One of Saudi Arabia’s key facilitators in Afghanistan was Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian from Jenin. Azzam was born in 1941 and studied sharia between 1959 and 1966, in Damascus, where he joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Over time, he became an inspiring organizer, leading one writer to call him the “Lenin of international jihad.”5 After completing his studies at Al-Azhar University in Cairo in 1973, Azzam became a professor of sharia at the University of Jordan, while supervising the university’s youth sector for the Muslim Brotherhood. He was later evicted from his university post and moved to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where he taught at King Abdulaziz University. Osama bin Laden was one of his pupils.
In 1984, Azzam moved to Peshawar, a Pashtun city in Pakistan thirty miles from the Afghanistan border. A longtime stop on the ancient Silk Road, its bazaars have attracted visitors for centuries with their gold, silver, carpets, pottery, arms, and artwork in wood, brass, and semiprecious stones. It was here, at the age of forty-three, that Azzam founded the Maktab ul-Khadamat (Services Office), which coordinated support for the mujahideen with a range of non-governmental organizations under the guise of the Red Crescent of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He said the cause he “had sought for so long was the cause of the Afghan people,” and acted as the primary connection between the Arabs and Wahhabi interests in Saudi Arabia.6
Unlike some other radicals, Azzam was opposed to targeting Muslims and pro-Western regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But he wrote that jihad in Afghanistan was a requirement for all good Muslims, an argument he made in his book Defending the Land of the Muslims Is Each Man’s Most Important Duty. The novelty of Azzam’s work lies not in its content, since other writers had called for jihad before. Rather, his success was in his skill as an agitator, able to convince Muslims from abroad to come to Afghanistan and fight. Saudi Arabia donated millions of dollars to Azzam’s Services Office and provided a 75 percent discount on airline tickets for young Muslims who wished to join the jihad. In addition, Saudi Arabia became a ferrying port and station for Arab veterans and jihadis, such as Zawahiri, who were journeying to Peshawar on their way to Afghanistan.7 Other countries, including the United States, also played a critical role. U.S. President Jimmy Carter was in favor of the mujahideen insurgency, arguing that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan posed one of the most serious threats to peace since World War II.8 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, likewise noted that the “invasion of Afghanistan made it more important to mobilize Islamic resistance against the Soviets.”9
The Afghan jihad became the great inspiration that brought Islamic radicals together. Muslim ulemas issued fatwas interpreting the Soviet intervention as an invasion of the territory of Islam by sinners. This made it possible to proclaim a “defensive” jihad, which, according to sharia, obliged every Muslim to participate.10 These first-generation volunteers were mainly Arabs from various parts of the Middle East who had come to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. Once they reached Afghanistan, the Services Office generally divided them into small groups that formed entire operational units in eastern Afghanistan, along the Pakistan border.11 A report compiled for Osama bin Laden indicated that more than 2,300 foreign fighters “from eight Arab countries have died in the course of jihad in Afghanistan. Among these martyrs 433 were from Saudi Arabia, 526 from Egypt, 184 from Iraq, 284 from Libya, 180 from Syria, 540 from Algeria, 111 from Sudan and 100 from Tunisia.”12
In the late 1980s, elite foreign fighters began to congregate in a camp near Khowst, Afghanistan, called Al-Maasada (The Lion’s Den). Osama bin Laden was the leader of this group; he said he had been inspired to call the place Al-Maasada by lines from one of the Prophet’s favorite poets, Hassan Ibn Thabit, who wrote: