Osama bin Laden has been elevated to iconic status as the avowed mastermind behind the devastating attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. That focus on his persona exaggerates his individual importance while diminishing the significance of the wider crisis in which he and his movement are embedded. In order to investigate this issue, I will address four key aspects of the Bin Laden phenomenon: the centrality of the fight against the Soviet supported regime in Afghanistan for legitimizing the concept of a twentieth century jihad (holy struggle); the subsequent violent attacks by the returning Arab fighters against their own governments; the mounting resentment against the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia during and especially following the Gulf War of 1990-1991; and the widening of the jihad into a global attack on the United States, as the sole superpower. These four aspects are not exhaustive, and yet they are sufficiently comprehensive to explain why Bin Laden’s message resonates widely in the Middle East and why the demise of the messenger will not, in itself, curb this dangerously militant movement.
THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
The fight against Soviet domination of Afghanistan, which lasted from 1980 to 1989, was not only crucial to Bin Laden’s biography but also to the rise of a new form of transnational Islamist movement. Bin Laden was twenty-two years old, newly graduated from university in Jidda with a degree in civil engineering, when he was shocked into action by the Soviet occupation.1 He initially helped the mujahideen (holy warriors) fight the Soviets by using his family’s construction company to build roads, tunnels, cave bunkers and hospitals. More than that, he joined with the older alim (Muslim religious scholar) Abdallah Azzam to recruit thousands of Arabs to join the struggle. They provided the recruits with rest houses and medical services and also supported their families at home. Bin Laden raised millions of dollars from wealthy Arab businessmen to underwrite the costs of that mission. Moreover, he fought on the front lines inside Afghanistan, gaining credibility for giving up his privileged lifestyle and sharing the hardships and risks alongside the soldiers.2
Muslims widely viewed the war in Afghanistan as a legitimately defensive jihad. Out of that struggle the belief crystallized among many mujahideen that one should fight for Islam against the infidels wherever they attacked, not only in one’s own homeland. Moreover, for many of the fighters, as well as for Bin Laden, jihad became “the acme of [the Islamic] religion”3 – a drastic shift in the priorities and tenets of the faith.
The mujahideen heralded the Soviet pullout in February 1989 as a triumph for their religious dedication. Bin Laden’s Egyptian colleague Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri argued: “The jihad battles in Afghanistan destroyed the myth of a [superpower] in the minds of the Muslim mujahideen young men.”4 They felt hugely empowered by that victory as well as by the camaraderie that built up during the difficult struggle. Al-Zawahiri continued:
These young men revived a religious duty of which the umma [Muslim community] had long been deprived . . . . In the training camps and on the battlefronts against the Russians, the Muslim youths developed . . . an understanding based on shariah [Islamic law] of the enemies of Islam, the renegades, and their collaborators. . . . [And the struggle served as] a great opportunity to get acquainted with each other . . . through their comradeship-in-arms against the enemies of Islam.
RETURNEES’ HOSTILITY TOWARDS GOVERNMENTS
The Arab fighters quickly became disillusioned after the Soviet troops left. Afghan warlords fought to control the devastated land; the jihad ideals vanished amid their power-political rivalries. By the time Azzam was assassinated in October 1989, Pakistan had begun to deport the now-superfluous foreign fighters. Al-Zawahiri noted the irony of Pakistan’s expelling “the very persons who had defended its borders.”5 The Saudi and Egyptian governments also stopped aiding the Arab mujahideen, suddenly fearing that they had created militant cadres who could endanger their own regimes.
In fact, many fighters went home expecting to be treated as heroes6 and determined to fulfill their jihadist mission by creating states based on Islamic law. Alienated from their own societies, they decried “the apostasy of the rulers who do not rule according to God’s words [Islamic law] and [asserted] the necessity of going against rulers who are affiliated with the enemies of Islam.”7 One analyst termed them “a ticking time bomb . . . set under many regimes in the Arab world.”8
For example, Algerians who had fought in Afghanistan formed the core of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which denounced the Algerian government as an apostate military regime.9 The GIA condemned the more moderate Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) for supporting pluralist democracy and for being willing to negotiate a cease-fire with the government. GIA cells violently attacked anyone who diverged from its own rigid position. GIA assassinated not only government officials but also FIS cadres, thousands of villagers, women who rejected its strictures and secular intellectuals. Its actions severely alienated much of the public, which felt caught between GIA’s absolutist brutality and the ruling military dictators.
In the case of Egypt, many of the mujahideen had already been involved in the underground Islamist movement that was implicated in President Anwar al-Sadat’s assassination in 1981.10 Afghanistan provided a safe haven where they could rebuild their organizations and train in guerrilla and conventional warfare. Al-Zawahiri noted that they “acquire[d] practical experience in combat, politics, and organizational matters” in Afghanistan.11 Afterwards, most of the leaders did not dare to live in Egypt: Al-Zawahiri settled in Geneva, Shaikh Omar Abd al-Rahman moved to New York, and others established themselves in Sudan or Bosnia. However, many foot soldiers did go home. They became available for mobilization to confront what they viewed as an authoritarian, antireligious government kept in power by U.S. support. Others were smuggled across the border from Sudan, where they received additional training in sabotage operations in camps operated by the Khartoum government.
By 1989 al-Zawahiri’s branch of the Islamist Group engaged in violent shootouts with the police and attacked civilians in rural areas, culminating in the assassination or attempted assassination of at least six senior government officials.12 Its operatives even attacked President Hosni Mubarak – twice in Cairo and once in Addis Ababa – and plotted to kill him on trips to New York, Manila, Sarajevo and Rome. Paradoxically, the fact that they resorted to external operations in the mid1990s indicated that the government’s security crackdown had been effective and that they could only attempt to hit him in vulnerable venues abroad. Moreover, as in Algeria, their violence against civilians alienated them from their potential popular base. Most Islamist leaders inside the country concluded that violence hurt their cause and sought, albeit fruitlessly, a political dialogue with the regime. The murder of foreign tourists at Luxor in November 1997 by operatives sent from Sudan by al-Zawahiri’s cells was designed to block any dialogue.13 To the contrary, it was denounced by Islamists inside Egypt, and it proved to be the last major operation by those cells, rather than the anticipated catalyst for a wider rebellion.
Many mujahideen could not go home after the fighting ended in Afghanistan. Stateless and on the run, they had “nothing to lose and nowhere to go.”14 The new military regime in Sudan, ruled behind the scenes by the Islamist politician Hasan al-Turabi, welcomed many of them and set up special camps to train them for future operations in their home countries.15 Turabi had close connections with Islamist leaders in Tunisia and Algeria, whom he provided with Sudanese diplomatic passports, and he cultivated relations with Islamists in Yemen and Jordan. He had a deep hatred for the Egyptian government and criticized the unconventional religious beliefs of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi.
When Bin Laden, who had returned to Jidda in late 1989, left for Pakistan in April 1991, he was already in contact with Sudanese Islamists. He found the political situation too unstable and dangerous to remain in either Pakistan or Afghanistan, and he therefore accepted Turabi’s invitation to settle in Khartoum. Arriving there in December 1991, he quickly began to fund and organize the foreign mujahideen. Sudan provided a vital training base, an effective substitute for Afghanistan. Numbering at least 5,000 by mid-1994 and augmented by new recruits who were not Afghan veterans, the mujahideen worked on Bin Laden’s agricultural and construction projects while they received military and sabotage training. They then infiltrated Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and East African countries to conduct sabotage raids and foment Islamist takeovers. Those governments sharply condemned Khartoum, tried to pressure it to close the camps, and in some cases broke diplomatic relations.
RESENTMENT AGAINST THE U.S. PRESENCE IN SAUDI ARABIA
Although most mujahideen focused their anger on their own governments, the U.S. military presence became an increasingly important theme. For Bin Laden, the deployment of American troops in Saudi Arabia during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis was particularly galling. Bin Laden had offered to mobilize 10,000 mujahideen to defend the kingdom and/or liberate Kuwait, arguing that only Muslims should defend the holy mosques.16 When King Fahd brought in foreign troops, Bin Laden called for a boycott of U.S. goods, sent up to 4,000 men to Afghanistan for renewed military training, and even smuggled arms into the Asir region from Yemen. The rulers assured him that foreign troops would leave Saudi Arabia as soon as they expelled the Iraqi forces from Kuwait; they then monitored his activities closely.
Bin Laden shared the anger of many Saudis when the Americans set up permanent bases after the war. Those Saudis were also angry at the U.S. government’s rigid enforcement of sanctions against Iraq, which impoverished the population, and U.S. support for Israel, the occupier of Muslim holy places in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Bin Laden became preoccupied with the need to expel U.S. forces from the sacred soil of Arabia. He stressed the perfidy of the Saudi regime for assuring him that the foreign presence would not last. He accused the ruling family of being liars and hypocrites, who would be punished on the day of judgment for allowing non-Muslim troops to defile the holy land. In April 1995, an Islamist leaflet warned that there would be strikes on U.S. and British troops and on the Saudi government if the “crusader” foreign forces did not evacuate Saudi Arabia by June 28, 1995.17 This threat was followed by attacks on the Saudi National Guard headquarters in Riyadh in November 1995 and on the U.S. barracks in Khobar in June 1996, which killed five and nineteen U.S. soldiers, respectively. The United States then withdrew many dependents and relocated its bases into the desert, moves that Bin Laden may have perceived as the first steps toward their withdrawal. Soon afterward, Bin Laden declared that those bombings specifically targeted U.S. troops and avoided killing Saudis. He asserted that the attacks demonstrated that the public rejected turning Saudi Arabia into “an American colony”; the attacks were “the beginning of war between Muslims and the United States.”18
Bin Laden’s first bayan (communiqué), issued in August 1996, after he had moved to Afghanistan, provided a final warning for U.S. troops to leave Saudi Arabia, reminding them that mujahideen had forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan seven years earlier. Al-Zawahiri stated bluntly: prior to the Gulf War, the U.S. government was a “hidden mover of events,” but after the war, when it “moved its military arsenal with fleets and strike forces to the region,” it became the “Muslims’ direct opponent.”19
THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE
In 1996, Bin Laden began to threaten to transform the conflict into a struggle between the Muslim world and the United States. Until then, most radical Islamists had focused on ousting anti-Islamist regimes within the Middle East, combatting the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, or pressuring the United States to leave the Gulf. Indeed, Egyptian Islamists specifically rejected al-Zawahiri’s calls to widen the conflict to encompass targets abroad. And they were not drawn to his ambition to establish “an Islamic caliphate in Egypt . . . [which] could lead the Islamic world in a jihad against the West.”20
Nonetheless, in the early 1990s, there were already signs that the movement was going global. During the Gulf crisis, Turabi launched a pan-Islamic organization dedicated to spreading political Islam throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. This brought together militant Islamists for annual conferences in Khartoum, during which secret conclaves planned coordinated attacks. Mujahideen who had returned to countries as distant as the Philippines and Malaysia used these fora to deepen their ties with comrades-in-arms and renew their determination to fight non-Muslim or apostate regimes. Bin Laden’s visit to Manila in 1993 seemingly laid the groundwork to support indigenous Islamist groups there as well as to prepare plans to assassinate such foreign visitors as U.S. President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II and to blow up U.S. airliners over the Pacific Ocean.
Moreover, the Islamists took up new causes as part of the effort to defend Muslims against foreign attack. Turabi and Bin Laden provided funds and at least 3,000 Arab fighters to support the militia of Muhammed Farah Aidid in Somalia, whose violent confrontations with U.S. forces compelled Washington to withdraw its troops by March 1994. They aided the northern government in Yemen against secularist rebels in the south and supported Islamist dissidents in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Islamists also assisted the beleaguered government in Bosnia, under attack by Serbia but faced with an arms embargo from the West. Islamists argued that the Christian West refused to aid the Bosnian Muslims against the Christian Serbs. They denounced the United Nations as a tool of the United States and threatened to attack U.N. peacekeepers who came to Bosnia in late 1995 to implement the U.S.-brokered Dayton Accords.21 Those accords were seen as ratifying the territorial gains made by the Serbs and Croats at the expense of the Bosnian Muslims.
Further afield, militants apparently linked to Shaikh Abd al-Rahman attacked the World Trade Center in February 1993 and subsequently plotted to blow up the U.N. headquarters, the Holland Tunnel and other important buildings in New York City. The GIA conspired to crash an Air France airliner into the Eiffel Tower on Christmas 1994, the same year that a plot to fly a plane into the CIA headquarters was discovered. The globalization of the Islamist network peaked after Bin Laden left Sudan for Afghanistan in May 1996. His forced departure was a belated reaction by the Sudanese government to the attempt to assassinate Mubarak in Addis Ababa in June 1995, orchestrated by Egyptian Islamists based in Sudan and Pakistan. When the U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions on Sudan in January 1996, that government moved to divest itself of its no-longer-welcome guest.
Bin Laden and several hundred mujahideen arrived in Afghanistan just as the Taliban was consolidating its power. Bin Laden praised the Taliban government as the only pure “Muslim state that enforces God’s laws, that destroys falsehoods, and that does not succumb to the American infidels.”22 He called on believers to leave their defiled countries and recreate a community modeled on the state of the Prophet Muhammad and his immediate successors.
Afghanistan not only had a seemingly pure Islamic government but also provided an isolated sanctuary in which training for sabotage operations could take place. Just before he left Sudan, Bin Laden claimed that his network encompassed 51 militant groups in thirteen countries.23 This network expanded substantially in the following years, recruiting a new set of young people from the Gulf, Asia and Europe who had not served in the first Afghan war and who had “clean” records.24
Moreover, in February 1998, Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri’s militants formalized their well-established ties by announcing the World Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. This Front and like-minded groups issued multiple dawas (calls to the faithful) and fatwas (formal legal opinions) that legitimized attacks against American civilians and military personnel.25 Bin Laden stated later that year:
It is unacceptable to see [world Christianity] mount attacks, desecrate my land and holy shrines, and plunder the Muslims’ oil . . . . We believe that it is our religious duty to resist this occupation with all the power we have and to punish it using the same means it is pursuing against us . . . . I hold in great esteem and respect these great men because they removed the brand of shame from the forehead of our umma [community of Muslims] when they carried out the bombings in Riyadh, al-Khubar, East Africa and elsewhere.26
The militant network credited itself with numerous victories against the United States: the Marines’ abrupt departure from Somalia, the redeployment of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the destruction of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, the damaging of the USS Cole in Aden harbor in October 2000, and the closure of the U.S. consulates in Istanbul and Adana after threats against them.27 The ineffective Cruise missile strikes on training bases in Afghanistan and the counterproductive strike on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory enhanced their perception that the United States was incapable of an effective counterstrike. They hoped that the widely dispersed terror attacks would cause sufficient disarray within the U.S. administration to lead to the withdrawal of American troops from the Gulf and the wider Middle East.
Bin Laden’s network also increased its support for liberation struggles by Muslim peoples in Chechnya, western China and Kashmir as well as for Islamist movements in Indonesia and Malaysia. The United States remained the primary enemy, since its hand was seen in these conflicts, either directly or through manipulating the United Nations. This, in al-Zawahiri’s view, compelled Islamists to make the United States the target and required a concerted effort to prepare Muslims “to wage their awaited battle against the superpower that now has sole dominance over the globe, namely, the United States.”28 The attacks on September 11, 2001, were the logical outcome of the decision to hit the symbols and centers of American military and financial power. Al-Zawahiri boasted that, for the first time, Americans felt danger coming directly at them.29
CONCLUSION
The issues raised by these Islamist militants resonate in the Middle East and the Islamic world. There is widespread condemnation of the U.S. military presence, its sanctions against Iraq, its support for a hegemonic Israel and its apparent endorsement of repressive regimes. These militants “Islamized the traditional discourse of Western anti-imperialism”30 in their call for a religious-based confrontation. Bin Laden explicitly essentialized the struggle when he declared that “this war is fundamentally religious . . . . [This] enmity is based on creed.”31
This approach is deeply disturbing to many people in the Middle East. Essentializing the conflict makes it impossible to negotiate political resolutions based on calculations of interest. Reducing Islam to jihad seriously distorts the faith. It is noteworthy that the spiritual leader of Lebanon’s Hizballah movement, Shaikh Muhammad Hussain Fadlallah, condemned the attacks on the United States as “not compatible with Shariah law” or with the real meaning of jihad. Jihad, in his view, could not involve killing innocent people in a distant land and could not mean “aggressive combat.”32 Similarly, the respected Egyptian theologian Shaikh Yusuf Abdallah al-Qaradawi stated:33
Islam, the religion of tolerance, holds the human soul in high esteem, and considers the attack on innocent human beings a grave sin. Even in times of war, Muslims are not allowed to kill anybody save the one who is engaged in face-to-face confrontation with them. Killing hundreds of helpless civilians is a heinous crime in Islam.
Nonetheless, the U.S. government’s unilateralist and militarized reactions to the crisis in the Middle East continue to fuel popular anger. The U.S. endorsement of the Israeli government’s crackdown on Palestinians and U.S. threats to overthrow the regime in Iraq stoke that fire. Resentment at the way the United States wields its overwhelming power in the global arena is intensifying rather than abating. Even without the presence of Bin Laden, this popular anger “can be exploited by demagogues of all colors.”34
Indeed, al-Zawahiri’s own background provides an instructive lesson. In his recent book,35 al-Zawahiri pointed out that the Egyptian government thought they had eradicated the Islamist movement in 1965 when they jailed 17,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood and executed the prominent thinker Sayyid Qutb, along with two associates. But al-Zawahiri formed a jihad group the very next year, when he was only sixteen years old. That crackdown – followed quickly by Israel’s defeat of the Arab armies in 1967 and the consequent Muslim loss of control over the holy places in Jerusalem – “spawned a new generation” of jihadists within Egypt, he claimed. His threat was clear: The current crackdown could “ignite” a new jihad movement, this time on an even wider scale. While that result is certainly not inevitable, one can argue that failure to address the deep political grievances that inflame the region will spawn the next generation of militants who will create new transnational movements designed to transform the region according to their image.
1 Some argue that Bin Laden was also deeply affected by the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca for three weeks in November 1979 by Juhaiman al-Utaibi and several hundred supporters. For example, Jason Burke reported in The Observer (London), October 28, 2001, that a close friend of Bin Laden told him that “he was inspired by them. He told me these men were true Muslims and had followed a true path.”
2 Mamoun Fandy, Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent (New York: Palgrave, 1999), p. 180; Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man who Declared War on America (New York: Forum, Random House, 1991), p. 11; Ahmed Rashid, Taliban (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 85; Mary Anne Weaver, A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey Through the World of Militant Islam (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), pp. 180-182, 191-193, 197-199; excerpts from the book by Ayman al-Zawahiri, published in al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 2 and 3, 2001. Bin Laden’s recruits fought mostly with the forces of the Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hikmetyar and the Islamist fighter Professor Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, both of whom received substantial funding from the Saudi government. Hikmetyar’s main support came from the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which funneled CIA military aid to his forces. Sayyaf had lived for many years in Saudi Arabia. The Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines grew out of Sayyaf’s movement.
3 Fandy quoting Bin Laden (1997), p. 191.
4 Al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 2, 2001. Al-Zawahiri spent six months in 1980 and 1981 in Afghanistan, one of the first Arab doctors to assist Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan. Jailed in Egypt for three years after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, he returned to Afghanistan in 1986 to work in a Kuwaiti-funded hospital in Peshawar.
5 Al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 2, 2001.
6 Rashid, p. 133, notes that Bin Laden formed a welfare organization for veterans and families of martyrs, based in Jidda. Rashid mentions that the 4,000 veterans who lived in Mecca and Medina (the holiest cities in the kingdom) were upset by the lack of recognition for their efforts to fight in Afghanistan on behalf of Islam.
7 Al-Zawahiri, al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 7, 2001.
8 Adam Robinson, Bin Laden (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2001), p. 114. Robinson states (without providing a source for his information) that Bin Laden helped to fund the return home in 1989 of about 5,000 Saudis, 3,000 Yemenis, 2,000 Egyptians, 2,800 Algerians, 400 Tunisians, 370 Iraqis and 200 Libyans, as well as other nationalities.
9 Mohammed M. Hafez, “Armed Islamist Movements and Political Violence in Algeria,” Middle East Journal, No. 4, Fall 2000, pp. 574, 577, 582, 585.
10 These included not only Dr. al-Zawahiri, but also Shaikh Omar Abd al-Rahman and his sons, Ahmed Shawqi Islambouli (a brother of Sadat’s assassin) and Mustafa Hamza, who later coordinated the plot to kill Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995.
11 Al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 3, 2001.
12 Al-Zawahiri in al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 6, 2001; Bodansky, pp. 122, 142. They killed a minister of interior, the speaker of parliament (by accident: they intended to kill the interior minister) and a major general in intelligence and attacked another interior minister, the information minister, the prime minister and the commander of the central military zone. In November 1995, operatives killed an Egyptian intelligence officer in Geneva who was investigating al-Zawahiri (Bodansky, p. 142) and blew up the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan. According to al-Zawahiri, they initially planned to hit the U.S. embassy, but found that it was too well protected: They “left the embassy’s ruined building as an eloquent and clear message” to the Egyptian regime (al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 3, 2001).
13 Weaver details the Luxor attack and reactions to it, pp. 257-265, 269-272, 280-285, 288-290. Islamist lawyer Montasir al-Zayyat, who supported the Egypt-based movement’s unilateral cease-fire, stated: “Luxor was the last straw. Is it Islam to kill children and women and slit open their stomachs? I’ve always warned against the Algerianization of the struggle in Egypt,” p. 269.
14 Dr. Roy Allison of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London), quoted in Barrons, October 1, 2001.
15 Ann M. Lesch, “The Sudan: Militancy and Isolation,” The Middle East and the Peace Process, Robert O. Freedman, ed. (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 322-323, 329-331, 334; Lesch, “Osama bin Laden’s ‘Business’ in the Sudan,” Current History, May 2002.
16 Robinson, p. 129; Bodansky, pp. 29-31; al-Zawahiri in al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 3, 2001. Burke in The Observer, op. cit., says Bin Laden offered to mount a force of 30,000 Afghan veterans, noting “the last thing the House of al-Saud wanted was an army of zealous Islamists.” Bin Laden stated to Qatar’s al-Jazeera TV station (December 1998, broadcast on September 20, 2001): “We do not want American women soldiers, including . . . Jewish and Christian women soldiers, defending” the holy places. He added, “by God, Muslim women refused to be defended by these American and Jewish prostitutes. Our aim is to work according to God’s shariah and to defend the Holy Kaaba.”
17 Bodansky, p. 120. According to Bodansky, the communiqué was issued in the name of the Islamic Change Movement – the Jihad Wing in Arabian Peninsula. It also criticized the royal family for arresting Muslim preachers.
18 Interview in July 1996 with Robert Fisk of the Independent (London), as quoted in Bodansky, pp. 189191; see pp. 186, 192 for Bin Laden’s August 1996 bayan. Bin Laden stated in the interview: “Not long ago, I gave advice to the Americans to withdraw their troops from Saudi Arabia. Now let us give some advice to the governments of Britain and France to take their troops out – because what happened in Riyadh and Khobar showed that the people who did this have a deep understanding in choosing their targets. They hit their main enemy, which is the Americans. They killed no secondary enemies, nor their brothers in the army or the police of Saudi Arabia.”
19 Al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 8, 2001.
20 Al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 7, 2001.
21 Bodansky, pp. 155-156. He states that at one time there were as many as 5,000 Islamists in Bosnia.
22 Video produced in spring 2001. In his interview with al-Jazeera in December 1998 (broadcast on September 20, 2001), Bin Laden articulated a powerful parallel with the life of the Prophet Muhammad: “with the establishment of the State of Medina – despite its small size amid the big Persian and Roman empires and the warring Arab tribes . . . – right triumphed in the end. We call upon Muslims to back Afghanistan with all their capabilities, thoughts, alms, and funds. Afghanistan today carries the banner of Islam.”
23 Interview published in Rose al-Yousef (Cairo), June 17, 1996. Bin Laden lost considerable money in his businesses in Sudan, especially when the government failed to pay for his major construction projects involving roads, the railway and airports. Al-Zawahiri’s family, which lived in Khartoum, was forced to leave for Afghanistan along with Bin Laden’s family and most of the Arab militants.
24 Bodansky, p. 197.
25 See, for example, Bodansky, pp. 223-229. This part of the fatwa stated: “The ruling to kill Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate al-Aqsa mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Holy Mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim . . . . We – with God’s help – call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan’s U.S. troops and the devil’s supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.”
26 Interview with al-Jazeera in December 1998, broadcast on September 20, 2001.
27 In his video in spring 2001, Bin Laden gloated over the attack on the USS Cole: “In Aden, our brothers rose and destroyed the mighty destroyer, a ship so powerful it spread fear wherever it sails . . . . [It sailed] to its own destruction, drawn by the illusion of its own power.” Bin Laden and his associates did not mention the failures, such as the failed GIA plot to attack the World Football Cup in Paris in June 1998, the failure to blow up the U.S. embassy in Uganda in September 1998, the scheme to crash a plane into Ankara’s Ataturk memorial during a commemorative ceremony in 1998, the millennium conspiracies in Jordan and the United States set for January 1, 2000, and the plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Delhi, revealed in June 2001.
28 Al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 8, 2001; also December 3, 2001. Islamists blamed the United States for expelling Egyptian militants from Bosnia in the late 1990s to stand trial in Cairo. In his video broadcast by alJazeera on November 3, 2001, Bin Laden claimed that “the United Nations is nothing but a tool of crime.” It sits “idly by” when Kashmiris are massacred whereas it quickly mobilized “crusader Australian forces” to sever East Timor from Indonesia. (Text in The Washington Post, November 7, 2001.)
29 Statement on the video found in Kandahar and transcribed on December 13, 2001.
30 The French scholar Olivier Roy, quoted in The New York Times, January 27, 2002.
31 Video broadcast on al-Jazeera, November 3, 2001; text in The Washington Post, November 7, 2001.
32 Quoted in The New York Times, January 27, 2002.
33 Ibid.
34 A Tunisian official, quoted in The Washington Times, January 14, 2002.
35 Al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 4, 2001.
Middle East Policy is fully accessible through the Wiley Online Library
Click below to subscribe to the online or print edition of Middle East Policy and gain access to all journal content.