Al-Qaeda (60 page)

8
. Rubin,
The Political Fragmentation of Afghanistan
, p. 39; Roy,
Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan
, p. 35.

9
. It is wrong to overemphasize the detail here. Mullah Omar and many of his early comrades were from the Hotaki tribes and thus Ghilzai.

10
. Rashid,
Taliban
, p. 29.

11
. The two best-known medressas were the Haqqania medressa at Akora Khattak and the Jamiat ul Uloom i Islamiya Binoria in Karachi. The former, which, by the mid 1990s, had accommodation for 2,000 students and facilities for 3,000, provided dozens of senior Taliban leaders who often returned to attend
dastarbandi
, turban-tying or graduation ceremonies. The Binoria school had room for 8,000 students. Though Mullah Omar never studied there as often reported, many other Taliban did. Smaller medressas were established by men like Javed Ibrahim Parachar, a tribal leader and Islamic judge in the frontier town of Kohat. He started the 1980s with one medressa teaching 100 pupils. By the middle of the next decade he was running four with a total of more than 1,000 pupils. Parachar is a Pakistani, but also a Pashtun and a Deobandi, and it was these ties that proved crucial in the early days of the Taliban. In late 1994, after being approached by senior Deobandi clerics, Parachar started sending his students across the border to fight for the new group. Hundreds of other clerics did the same. Author interview with Javed Parachar, Kohat, June 2002. Interview with Sami-ul Haq, leader of Haqqania medressa, September 1998; interview with senior teaching staff at Binoria medressa, Islamabad, June 2002. An unclassified US State Department memo, February 1995, says, ‘the medressa network in Pakistan’s NWFP and Baluchistan was able to provide willing recruits in a short space of time.’

12
. Interviews with UNDCP officials, Islamabad, 1999.

13
. Maley,
The Afghanistan Wars
, pp. 235–6.

14
. Interviews with senior British officials, Islamabad, 1998, UNDCP officials, Islamabad, 1999.

15
. Interviews with UNDCP officials, Islamabad, 1999.

16
. Interview with Iranian drug smuggler, Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, August 2002, with UNDCP officials and British Customs and Excise officials, Islamabad, September 1999; Burke, ‘The Desert Village that Feeds UK Heroin Habit’,
The Observer
, 12 December 1999.

17
. Interviews with Western diplomats, London, September 2002. Mohammed Ilyas Khan, ‘The ISI-Taliban Nexus’,
Herald
, November 2001.

18
. It was Fazl-ur Rehman, the leader of the Deobandi political party in Pakistan, who arranged for a series of Arab princes to go bustard hunting with the Taliban in the desert around Kandahar in the spring of 1994. Rashid, in Maley,
Fundamentalism Reborn?
, p. 76.

19
. Interview with British diplomat, London, September 2002.

20
. Interview with Jaffar, Intercontinental employee since 1969, August 1998.

21
. Multiple interviews with taliban. Two that were particularly useful were with Maulvi Mahmud Waziri Abdurrahman, Minister for Internal Affairs, and Ahmad Hotaqi, the Taliban’s Deputy Information Minister, Kabul, August 1998.

22
. Maley,
The Afghanistan Wars
, p. 10.

23
. Esposito,
Unholy War
, p. 131; Martin,
Creating an Islamic State
, p. 156.

24
. A similar distortion took place during the early days of the Iranian Revolution. Few reporters were prepared, or able, to travel into the rural areas and thus relied over-heavily on middle-class elite sources for information. This is described in Martin,
Creating an Islamic State
, p. 177.

25
. Esposito,
Unholy War
, p. 131.

26
. Kepel,
Jihad
, pp. 170, 117.

27
. The seclusion of women after puberty in Afghanistan has resulted, particularly in the Pashtun areas, in a rich tradition of male homosexuality celebrated in poems such as the famous, and oft-quoted, couplet: ‘I saw a boy across a river with a bottom like a peach, but alas I could not swim.’ There are even crude Afghan jokes about ‘the crows flying over Kandahar with one wing behind their backs’. Purdah was, of course, reinforced in the chaotic and threat-filled world of the refugee camps.

28
. Roy,
The Failure of Political Islam
, p. 58.

29
. Nancy Hatch Dupree, in Maley,
Fundamentalism Reborn?
, p. 163.

30
. I recommend Latifa,
My Forbidden Face
for an excellent insight into the attitudes and experiences of middle-class, educated, politically conscious Kabuli women in the early days of the Taliban’s rule in the city. There are, for obvious reasons, no similar accounts written by rural Pashtun peasant women in Oruzgan province.

9: Home

1
. Interview with Mohammed Din Mohammed, who was present at the meeting. Peshawar, October 2002. There is some debate over whether bin Laden was received by Crown Prince Sultan or Prince Turki al-Faisal. Mohammed Din Mohammed and the majority of sources consulted insist it was the former.

2
. Al-Jazeera television, 10 July 2002, interview with Sheikh al-Awaji; Bergen,
Holy War, Inc.
, p. 85.

3
. Interviews with senior Hizb and Sayyaf commanders, Peshawar, October 2001.

4
. Al-Rasheed,
A History of Saudi Arabia
, p. 168.

5
. Schneider, ‘Saudi Missteps Helped Bin Laden Gain Power’,
Washington Post
, 15 October 2001.

6
. Interview with Peter Arnett, CNN, March 1997.

7
. Fandy,
Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent
, p. 183.

8
. Ibid., p. 180.

9
. Ibid., p. 183.

10
. Jacquard,
Les Archives Secrètes d’al-Qaida
, p. 346.

11
. Brian Whitaker, ‘Violence Dominates Lawless Province’,
The Guardian
, 19 December 2001.

12
. Bergen,
Holy War, Inc.
, pp. 185, 188–9; Jamal Kashoggi, ‘How we Hit the Americans in Aden’,
al-Hayat
, 21 February 1994.

13
. Shelagh Weir, ‘A Clash of Fundamentalisms: Wahhabism in Yemen’,
Middle East Research and Information Project
, July – September 1997.

14
. Brian Whitaker kindly made several chapters of his forthcoming book on the Yemen available to me.

15
. Bergen,
Holy War, Inc.
, p. 188.

16
. Ibid., p. 86.

17
. Bin Laden told al-Jazeera this in 1999.

18
. Documentary on bin Laden, broadcast June 1999, on al-Jazeera; London
al-Quds al-Arabi
, 24 November 2001.

10: Flight

1
. Interview with Libyan Islamic activist who was in Khartoum between 1992 and 1995, London, February 2003. His eyewitness account of bin Laden’s house is confirmed in Corbin,
The Base
, p. 35. Corbin’s book is not annotated, so I have only used material that appears to have been collected firsthand by the writer or that is identifiably from another work. London
al-Quds al-Arabi
interview with Mahjub al-Aradi, bin Laden’s gardener in Sudan, published 24 November 2001, was also helpful. Charles Sennott of the
Boston Globe
visited the house while bin Laden was there and confirmed the details to the author.

2
. Interview with Libyan Islamic activist, London, February 2003.

3
. Al-Fadl testimony, New York, February 2001.

4
. Kepel,
Jihad
, p. 177.

5
. Ruthven,
Islam in the World
, p. 321.

6
. Kepel,
Jihad
, pp. 178–9; Huband,
Warriors of the Prophet
, pp. 150–53.

7
.
Al-Quds al-Arabi
, 24 November 2001.

8
. Bin Laden gave his first interview to a Western journalist, Robert Fisk of the
Independent
, while building the ‘challenge highway’ in 1993. London
al-Quds al-Arabi
, 24 November 2001. Which road bin Laden paid for is disputed. Some sources say it was a new route heading north from Sudan towards the Egyptian border.

9
. Al-Fadl testimony, USA
v
. Usama bin Laden, 5 February 2001.

10
. Al-Ridi testimony, USA
v
. Usama bin Laden, 7 February 2001.

11
. Al-Fadl testimony.

12
. Also in Sudan at the time was Carlos the Jackal. He was handed over to the French in 1994.

13
. Ali Mohammed was born in Egypt in 1952, served 13 years in the Egyptian army, rising to the rank of major and obtaining a degree in psychology. He was discharged in 1984, moved to the USA, married an American and enlisted in the American army. By 1988, despite having used his leave to travel to Afghanistan to fight, he was teaching seminars on Islam at the Fort Bragg special forces school. He left the army in 1989 and gave courses in basic military tactics to Islamic radicals in New York. In 1991 and 1992, he returned to Afghanistan to train militants there. Ali Mohammed is an extraordinary figure whose complex career (he was finally arrested in September 1998 in America) shows the difficulty of trying to pigeonhole terrorists as members of one or other organization. He seems to have worked for, or with, anyone with the requisite facilities or cash. Details from Ali Mohammed plea agreement and transcript of appearance by Ali Mohammed before Judge Sand, Southern District Court, New York, on 20 October 2000.