Osama was educated at Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he was powerfully influenced by the Palestinian Sheikh Abdullah Azzam who was teaching at the university at the time. Azzam was a political cleric who practised what he preached. He was one of the co-founders of Hamas in Gaza, and he saw Hamas through the same prism as the jihad in Afghanistan.6 No doubt the Israelis had marked his card.
Azzam had been influenced by the writings of the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, the leading intellectual force behind the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, among the aims of which was to reclaim ‘Islam’s manifest destiny: an empire founded in the seventh century that stretched from Spain to Indonesia’.7 In 1949 Qutb spent some time in the United States, and concluded that Western civilisation had led humanity to ‘corruption and irreligion from which only Islam can save it’.8 Qutb was executed in 1966 as the leader of a group that was plotting to overthrow the Egyptian government. Six other Muslim Brotherhood members were executed with him.
Qutb’s brother Mohammed also taught at Abdul Aziz University, where he spread his brother’s word. Osama Bin Laden attended Mohammed Qutb’s public lectures.9 The influence on Bin Laden of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s violent insurgent groups cannot be overestimated. The relationship was cemented when the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), Ayman al-Zawahiri, joined Al Qaeda in 1998 (see p. 84). He subsequently went on to become Bin Laden’s number two, credited with being the military brains behind the organisation. Zawahiri, a surgeon and a committed revolutionary, was arrested following the assassination of the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. He was convicted of dealing in weapons, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. On his release he spent time practising medicine at a clinic in Jeddah before travelling to Peshawar in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas to treat the wounded in the anti-Soviet jihad. It was there that he first met Osama Bin Laden, and forged the ideological bond that was later to elevate him to a terrorist status second only to that of Bin Laden himself. Each man came to rely on the other.10 Zawahiri was a seasoned revolutionary who brought with him an equally experienced cadre of militants. Bin Laden had all the money and contacts in the Afghan jihad that Zawahiri lacked.
These were the powerful radical influences that lay behind the evolution of Osama Bin Laden’s ideology, cemented by his close association with Abdullah Azzam. Together in the mid-1980s Bin Laden and Azzam established the Bureau of Services (Mektab al Khidmat) in Peshawar, through which money and mujahideen recruits were channelled into Afghanistan. The Bureau also provided humanitarian aid to the thousands of refugees who streamed across the border. Initially Azzam was the Bureau’s titular head, until Bin Laden effectively took it over. In time fundamental differences developed between the two allies. Bin Laden wanted the Arab contingents of mujahideen to train and operate separately, and not as part of joint forces with the native Afghan jihadis. Azzam opposed this, on the grounds that the Arabs would bring greater Islamic understanding to the Afghans, who were not necessarily au fait with the ideologies espoused by himself and Bin Laden. Meanwhile Bin Laden secretly set about putting together an organisation in his own image made up entirely of a small group of Arab mujahideen. It became known as Al Qaeda Al Askariya, ‘the Military Base’. It seems to have been established during a three-day meeting in mid-August 1988 held at Bin Laden’s house, believed to have been near Kandahar. One of its purposes was to compile a directory of trusted mujahideen, initially a list of those who had fought in Afghanistan but subsequently including many more who had proved themselves in jihadi campaigns elsewhere.
Remarkably, the minutes of that meeting were recovered among computer files in Bosnia in March 2002 as part of a US investigation into a Muslim charity based in Chicago known as the Benevolence International Foundation which had long supported jihadis around the world.11 They show Bin Laden and a handful of his closest Arab associates deciding on the new organisation’s initial military strategy. Recruits were to be trained at a camp on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border before they joined the jihad. They would then enter a ‘testing camp’, and the ‘best brothers’ would be chosen to enter Al Qaeda Al Askariya. Requirements for admission included an open-ended commitment, the ability to listen and obey, good manners, recommendation from a trusted source, and agreement to abide by the statutes and instructions of Al Qaeda. It was estimated that within six months, ‘314 brothers will be trained and ready’. To what extent Abdullah Azzam was aware of all this is unclear. Just over a year later he was dead, killed by a car bomb in Peshawar. Who or what agency was behind his death has never been satisfactorily established. Some believe that Bin Laden wanted his main rival out of the way, and sanctioned the attack. Others see in the methodology the hand of the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad,t which is certainly possible given that Abdullah Azzam was a founder of Hamas, whose aim is the destruction of Israel. Whatever lay behind Azzam’s assassination, the way for Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was now clear, with no powerful figure to oppose him.
On 15 February 1989 the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, the second most powerful army in the world humiliated by a guerrilla band of Islamic fighters financed, supported and equipped by the United States and the West, largely channelled through Pakistan’s controversial intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI).u Afghanistan had been the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. Bin Laden could point to the victory of the mujahideen as an illustration of how the power of Islam could defeat the armies of the ungodly, however powerful they were and however great the odds. He subsequently drew on the precedent to convince his increasing number of followers that America, the Great Satan, could be defeated too.
In 2006 I secretly met Abdullah Azzam’s son Hutheifa at his flat in Amman, Jordan. Given his father’s fate, he was meticulous about security. He told me he’d been to Bosnia – I assumed, as he was the son of the father of jihad, that he had been there to do more than just observe. When I asked if he’d fought jihad in Iraq, he was suitably evasive. Jihadis tend not to give details about their military activities, and often explain their presence in a theatre of conflict by claiming they were involved in the delivery of humanitarian aid. In some cases this may be true. In many others it most certainly is not. Hutheifa was nervous: ‘I am considered by the United States as a terrorist. I can’t move freely to any of the Western countries because I know they [the Americans] will get me and send me to Guantánamo.’
Hutheifa was not what I expected. As so often, he didn’t fit the popular stereotype of a terrorist. He was urbane, charming and, as my colleague Patricia de Mesquita, who had arranged the meeting, pointed out, ‘very good-looking’. He was married, but we never set eyes on his wife, who according to custom was kept well out of sight. Patricia was adept at finding her way into the kitchens of strict Islamic households and chatting to wives who I was never allowed to meet or see. One wife once told her that she and her daughters secretly listened to Western music, but said that her husband would be furious if he ever found out.
Hutheifa made us welcome, and brought a tray with small glasses of thick black Arab coffee and an array of incredibly sweet biscuits. It was getting close to midnight, and coffee usually keeps me awake at night, but it would have been ill-mannered to refuse. I also calculated that several draughts of hot, sugary coffee would see me through what looked like being a very long evening. It brought back memories of listening to Brendan