True to his word, the Reverend Ian Paisley was not a signatory. It was all the more remarkable therefore when almost ten years later, on 8 May 2007, he was sworn in as First Minister in the new Northern Ireland devolved government, with his old IRA enemy Martin
McGuinness as his Deputy. I was filming in America at the time, and could hardly believe what I heard, read and saw. Why did Paisley perform such an astonishing volte-face and embrace his long-hated opponents? I heard one (probably apocryphal) story that he had been very ill, possibly close to death, but had made a remarkable recovery, and believed it was because the Lord had saved him for one final mission – to help bring peace to the tortured province. It is more likely that he believed the Union was secure, given that any change to the status of Northern Ireland would have to be agreed by the majority of its population – which remained firmly Protestant and Unionist – and that the IRA was effectively beaten once it had finally put its arms ‘beyond use’. In other words, although the phrase never passed Paisley’s lips, the Protestants had won. Nationalists, however, pinned their hopes on Catholics one day becoming a majority in Northern Ireland, although predictions put that far in the future. In his remarkable opening speech as First Minister, Paisley said, ‘I believe Northern Ireland has come to a time of peace, a time when hate will no longer rule. How good it will be to be part of a wonderful healing in our province.’2 On 4 March 2008, at the age of eighty-one, Paisley announced that he was stepping down as First Minister. Martin McGuinness paid tribute: ‘The decision he took to go into government with Sinn Féin changed the course of Irish history forever.’3
Perhaps in the case of Paisley and McGuinness the mellowing effects of age also played their part. Some young Republicans, however, of the age that McGuinness and his contemporaries were at the outset of the Troubles in the late sixties and early seventies, were alienated and disaffected, feeling that the peace process had done nothing for them, and seeing any hope of a united Ireland disappearing over a distant horizon. As a result, a growing number of them were inclined to give their practical and moral support to the dissidents of the Real and Continuity IRA, whose increasingly sophisticated military campaign risks threatening the stability of the power-sharing government at Stormont.
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On 7 August 1998, four months after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, Al Qaeda suicide bombers in trucks loaded with explosives blew up America’s embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing over two hundred people. I suddenly became aware of a threat potentially far more deadly than that posed by the IRA, a threat confirmed by Al Qaeda’s subsequent suicide attack on 12 October 2000 on the US Navy destroyer the USS Cole, refuelling in Aden harbour, in which seventeen American sailors were killed. But I remained focused on Ireland. Al Qaeda still seemed far away. Then came 9/11.
Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 changed the world, and shook me as they did the untold millions who watched the scenes of unimaginable horror taking place before them. Everyone remembers what they were doing when they heard of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. It’s the same with 9/11.
I was at the BBC with my producer Sam Collyns, editing True Spies, a series on Britain’s intelligence services, when someone rushed into the edit suite and asked breathlessly if we’d seen what had happened. We switched on BBC News, and were transfixed as we watched events unfold. First reports had indicated that an aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Center, possibly as a result of pilot error, but this was immediately discounted the moment the second plane hit home. I remember speculating about who might lie behind the attack, and what their motives could have been. It was not long before Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda came into the frame, and I knew that I would have to turn my attention from Ireland to Al Qaeda. The prospect was daunting. I was almost starting from scratch. It was reminiscent of the moment on Bloody Sunday almost thirty years earlier when I realised how little I knew about the Irish conflict, and how much I would have to learn even to begin to catch up. As with Ireland, I had to start at the beginning – the difference being that with Ireland the beginning was many centuries earlier. By contrast, Al Qaeda was barely a quarter of a century old.
Where did it come from? Just as it’s necessary to consider the history of the IRA in order to understand it, it’s equally important to look at the much shorter history of Al Qaeda. In the process of doing so I talked to a ‘terrorist’ – who believes the USA still regards him as such – who has first-hand experience of the controversial origins of Al Qaeda, since his father was Osama Bin Laden’s spiritual and military mentor, and ultimately became his rival. His name is Hutheifa Azzam, a former jihadi whose father, Abdullah Azzam, is widely regarded as the father of jihad. But first, a brief history.
Al Qaeda was conceived in the mountains and sand of Afghanistan, where the superpowers America and the Soviet Union were fighting out their ideological and geopolitical rivalries through their proxies. Afghanistan has been the cockpit of conflict from the late nineteenth century to the present day because of its crucial strategic position, sandwiched between the former Soviet Union and Asia.
In 1978 a pro-Moscow Communist government was established in Kabul, but was no more able to exercise control over the whole country than the pro-Western regime of President Hamid Karzai is today. The lesson of history is that Afghanistan appears to be unconquerable and ungovernable. To maintain its grip on its key strategic client, the Soviet Union sent in troops the following year, triggering fierce resistance from Muslims not only in Afghanistan but from all over the world. In 1979 the Afghan jihad was born. At the time there was no question as to its legitimacy. Jihad was to be waged in accordance with the tenets of the Koran against the infidel invaders of a Muslim land. Thousands of volunteers poured in to join the mujahideen, most from the Arab world, primarily from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria and Morocco. They were known as the ‘Afghan Arabs’, and came to exercise the key strategic and military role in the jihad and subsequently in Al Qaeda.
One of these volunteers was called Osama Bin Laden. He came from one of Saudi Arabia’s richest families, its wealth based on a conglomeration of construction companies that had grown fabulously wealthy in the oil boom of the 1970s, and beyond that financed the Kingdom’s infrastructural development. The Bin Laden Group built 13,000 miles of roads and was responsible, among many other things, for the refurbishment of the Muslim world’s most sacred mosques at Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. The Group was the Saudi royal family’s builder of choice. Its founder, Mohammed Bin Laden, was originally a poor immigrant from Yemen who had twenty wives and sired fifty-four children. Osama Bin Laden was his seventeenth son.