Radical Islamists
seek to realise a Caliphate in which political and
religious power are fused and whose hypothetical borders are indicated here. One
should note that it encompasses the Christian, Confucian, Jewish and Hindu
populations of Spain, the Balkans, Greece, central Africa, India and Indonesia.
The deeper context of
jihadist terrorism involves simultaneous bursts of religious enthusiasm across
the Muslim world over thirty years ago. This process was paralleled - without
the same violent effects - in other monotheistic faiths from the 1970S onwards.
These bursts were sustained by a series of secondary conflagrations, which lent
apparent substance to the paranoid jihadist claim that Muslims were the victims
of a temporal 'Crusader-Zionist' aggression unchanged since the Middle Ages.
This self-serving myth resonated with the more widespread assumption of the
moral purity of the oppressed, a source of self-righteous violence from time
immemorial within a variety of cultures and traditions, spiritual and secular.
Criminals were able to find apologists, supporters and sympathisers
from the wider Muslim community by cloaking their activities in an ideology
largely derived from a major religious tradition with one and a half billion
adherents.1
In January 1978 US
president Jimmy Carter visited Iran. He lauded his ally, shah Muhammed Reza
Pahlavi, and pronounced Iran 'an island of stability', praise he coupled with
criticism of the shah's shabby human rights record. The regime's modernizing
emancipation of women was accompanied by the repression symbolized by Savak, the shah's secret police. Carter's contradictory
pronouncements were as helpful to the shah as traffic lights signaling red and
green simultaneously are to a motorist. That summer and autumn, Iran was
convulsed by demonstrations and strikes, which the shah, already suffering from
cancer, answered with limited repression (under a thousand people died in the
course of the Revolution) and concessions which his many different opponents
brushed aside. The shah left his kingdom, never to return, on 16 January 1978;
a year later, an elderly cleric, the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, flew in from
his exile in Paris.2
The Islamic
Revolution was also for export, and two immediate manifestations this were the
creation, by Sunni Palestinian admirers of Khomeini, of a terrorist
organization called Islamic Jihad, which presaged the transformation of a conflict
about rival nationalisms into one involving religion, and the parallel
mobilization of Lebanon's Shi'ites through an Iranian surrogate called Party of
Allah or Hizbollah, founded in late 1982, a process
the Alawite rulers of Syria aided and abetted to extend their domination over
their Westernised Lebanese neighbor. Iran sent an
estimated US$50 million to US$100 million per annum to Hizbollah,
basing hundreds of training personnel in the Bekaa
valley, and using Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, its
ambassador to Damascus, as co-ordinator of Hizbollah's campaign of assassination, bombings and
kidnappings.
On 18 April 1983 a Hizbollah steered pickup truck, swerved into the exit of
the US embassy on Beirut's seafront, and then exploded as it crashed into the
main lobby. Sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans, were killed in a
blast that momentarily lifted up the entire building before most of it
collapsed in a mountain of dust and rubble. The dead included all six members
of the CIA's Beirut station, as well as Robert Ames, the CIA's top man on the
Middle East and its former liaison with Black September's Ali Hassan Salameh.
Ames's hand was found floating a mile away, his wedding ring still visible on a
finger.
Six months later two
massive suicide truck bombs killed 240 US Marines housed in temporary barracks
dubbed the Beirut Hilton, and fifty-eight French soldiers who were also in
Lebanon on peace-keeping duties. In the former case, a five-ton Mercedes truck
smashed its way through flimsy guard posts at fifty miles an hour early one
Sunday morning, enabling the driver to detonate 12,000 pounds of Hexogen high
explosives, with tanks of bottled gas tied on to magnify the deadly brisance.
The effects of both attacks were like some colossal natural disaster. Over at
the French barracks, an uncomprehending lieutenant colonel stared into a huge
crater amid mountains of rubble: 'There are about a hundred soldiers still
under there. The bomb lifted up the building. Right up, do you understand? And
it put it down again over there.' He indicated a distance of about twenty feet.
The Iranian Pasadren and their terrorist helpers in Hizbollah further pressured the West to vacate Lebanon
through a series of kidnappings, including professors at the American
University of Beirut, CNN reporters, priests and the local CIA station chief
Bill Buckley. Kidnapping of Soviet diplomats was less successful, as the KGB
abducted a relative of one of those involved, and began posting pieces of him
back to his family to indicate their earnestness. Hizbollah
also acted as Iran's long arm by assassinating Kurdish dissidents based in
Europe on behalf of its paymasters, who were the biggest state sponsors of
terrorism in the world. Agents based in Iranian embassies would enable Hizbollah to strike at Jewish and Israeli interests as far
away as Argentina.3
Next, increases in
the price of oil after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war enabled the Saudis to
propagate their puritanical Wahhabist strain of Islam
globally. Named after Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab
(1703-92), Wahhabism was the austere version of Islam that underpinned the rule
of the Saud dynasty in Arabia through a contract between clerics and rulers.4
Vast sums were disbursed to build some fifteen hundred mosques around the Sunni
world, as well as in western Europe, which were then equipped with books and
audio sermons, in the hope that they would speak with the voice of a Saudi moralising conservatism, whose existence was paradoxically
underwritten by the kingdom's 'decadent' Western allies. The Saudis further institutionalised their political and financial reach
through the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Islamic Development
Bank, and by donating money to Western and Eastern universities to promote
Islamic and Middle Eastern studies.
This petro-Islamic largesse was one of the main contributors to
the gradual rise in consciousness of a global Muslim ummah or community. This
was more viscerally real than the secular nationalism, whether local or
pan-Arab, or the socialism that had enthused earlier generations. Saudi
influence was also secured through the millions of remittance men drawn to the
Gulf states in the 1970S and 1980s from as far afield as Pakistan and the
Philippines, not to speak of the two million Muslims who each year made the
hajj to Mecca, whose infrastructure had been improved by an immigrant Yemeni
construction tycoon called bin Laden. For this was the essence of the matter.
Whereas the Saudis hoped to keep the words Islam and Revolution separate, the
Iranians wanted them to fuse, notably in Saudi Arabia itself, a regime Khomeini
hated. Behind that fundamental disagreement lay competition between an
ultra-conservative and a reactionary-revolutionary power for dominance within
Islam as whole, a struggle that has only increased in recent decades.5
The venerable texts
which the Saudis were making available on a global basis were amenable to many
interpretations, especially when increased literacy enabled people to read them
for themselves. Using the frequency of citations from certain authors it is
possible to construct a diagram resembling a spider's web of who counts in the
mental universe of the jihadis. Modernity is of little account. High on the
list would be the writings of Ibn Taymiyya
(1268-1323), a contemporary of Dante, who influenced Wahhab
himself. His thought was largely conditioned by the depredations various Arab
Islamic civilizations experienced at the hands of invading Mongols,
depredations made worse by the Mongols' syncretic assimilation of Islam to their
existing paganism. Never afraid to make enemies, Taymiyya
denounced Muslim clerics whose learned elaborations distracted from the
essentials of the faith, as once practiced by the salaf,
the earliest followers of the Prophet. Moreover, rulers who did not accept
clerical guidance, by instituting sharia (Islamic religious law), and living
lives of conspicuous piety, were apostates whom it was the faithful Muslim's
duty to depose. Taymiyya added this duty to the
existing offensive and defensive definitions of jihad, which in turn he
elevated into a sixth pillar of Islam, along with the declaration of faith,
charity, fasting, pilgrimage and prayer. These teachings were subversive in the
fourteenth century - Taymiyya was imprisoned five
times and died in jail - and they remained so six hundred years later to anyone
who dismissed the official clerical ulema (including Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi
clerical Establishment) as venal apologists for corrupt governments.6
At dawn on 20
November 1979 the imam of the Grand Mosque at Mecca prepared to usher in the
Muslim New Year with special prayers. He paid no attention to a group of young
men with red headbands shouldering coffins - for this was where the dead were
often blessed - until they set down their load and produced dozens of weapons.
A young man called Juhayman bin Muhammed bin Sayf al-Utaybi who seemed to be
in charge declared his own brother-in-law the mahdi,
the Islamic messiah, for the date was fourteen hundred years after Mohammed's
Hijra from Mecca to Medina, an anniversary already loaded with apocalyptic
portents. Attempts to halt this armed manifestation by deploying the monarchy's
Bedouin praetorian National Guards proved futile since al-Utaybi
was one of their number and he quickly had the entrance gates barred. As the
day wore on, he issued damning denunciations of the Saudi ruling dynasty,
calling them corrupt apostates who had prospered by allowing their Western
allies to plunder the country's oil wealth. Al-Utaybi's
well-equipped fighters made mincemeat of regular Saudi soldiers who were
dispatched to eject them from the mosque, a mission inhibited by the need not
to destroy it. Eventually the monarchy called in assistance from France's
Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale and the Pakistani army. Three hastily converted
commandos recommended using mass electrocution by putting a high-voltage cable
into the mosque's flooded basements, or nerve gas to flush the Mahdists out.
After two weeks of close-quarter combat, al-Utaybi
and the other surviving fighters were captured, a task made easier when the
construction firm Bin Laden Brothers, which had refurbished the mosque,
provided blueprints essential to storming it. Al-Utaybi
and sixty comrades were quickly beheaded. At the time this siege seemed like a
perplexing incident of cultic violence, as mysterious in meaning, or
meaninglessness, as similar events that happened in the Christian world. The
fact that during the siege rioting Arab and Pakistani students from Pakistan's
Qaid-i-Azam university stormed the US embassy in
Islamabad - on the rumour that the Americans and
Israelis were behind al-Utaybi's seizure of the Mecca
mosque - merely seemed like a bizarre pendant, as did ayatollah Khomenei's warm words to the embassy rioters, which
included the observation: 'Borders should not separate hearts.'7
Although Egypt is the
size of France and Spain combined, 95 per cent of its population of sixty
million live on 5 per cent of its land, the lush, lotus-shaped strip that
follows the course of the Nile. Beyond lies inhospitable desert, whose only
redeeming grace may be that it is unsuited to guerrilla warfare. Mysterious
monuments remind Egyptians that they are not really Arabs, but heirs to one of
the world's greatest polytheistic civilizations, whose mysterious iconography
still shimmers beneath the high art of Christianity. The French left the legacy
of Napoleonic law. Egypt became an independent parliamentary monarchy in 1922,
although the British remained a powerful, and often resented, commercial and
military presence, clinging on to the vestiges of Empire. The flourishing of
Western modernity during the 192os, as manifested in a vibrant press, cinema
and literary culture, inevitably triggered an Islamic response, which
took the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, established in 1928 by a devout
primary school teacher called Hassan al- Banna.
Appalled by British military bases, foreign ownership of utilities, Egypt's
almost foreign-seeming Turko-Circassian upper class,
and a vocal feminist movement, al- Banna incorporated
existing charitable and pious associations into a series of cell-like
'families', which were linked by such modern communications as magazines and
newspapers as well as sermons. Education and charitable work (or da'wa) would
lead to social reformation, provided evil Western influences were contained.
The Brotherhood patiently built a grassroots base that rapidly reached into
every Egyptian province, with a membership of half a million people. One of the
main ideological influences upon al-Banna was Rashid
Rida, an erstwhile moderniser turned salafist who demanded the replacement of Western-influenced
laws by the sharia, and revived the Koranic notion of jahiliyya
- that is the pre-Islamic state of pagan benightedness - to denounce the regimes
of the Arab present. At first viewed sympathetically by a monarch who saw the
Brotherhood as less menacing than secular nationalism or socialism, this mood
changed when its surface network of charitable and pious foundations was
accompanied by an underground military organization, the Secret Apparatus, that
began to infiltrate the armed forces. The Brotherhood was compulsorily
disbanded in 1948, prompting it to assassinate the prime minister responsible.
By way of revenge, a year later, the forty-three-year-old al- Banna was killed in turn. 8
Initially, the
largely lower-middle-class Brothers welcomed the coup which in 1952 chased out
the reforming sybarite king Farouk. They confused their own drive for Islamic
unity with the pro-Soviet crypto totalitarian state being established by Nasser
and his junta of young officers. Nasser invited in some twenty thousand Soviet
'advisers', while sending promising young officers, like the air force pilot
Hosni Mubarak, to the Frunse Military Academy in
Moscow. Relations between Nasser and the Islamists quickly deteriorated to the
point where in October 1954 a young Brother called Muhammad Abd aI-Latif tried to shoot the president at one of the
regime's mass rallies in Alexandria, the shots being broadcast live on radio.
Nasser's response was swift and brutal.
As Nasser's
supporters burned Brotherhood property, six of its leaders were hanged. Others
disappeared into Tura prison in southern Cairo. Their number included the
Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb, whose thought and
travails are essential to the story of modern jihadi-salafist
terrorism, perhaps the closest way we can describe this ongoing phenomenon
without either indicting Islam and fundamentalism or resorting to terms like Islamofascist or the more appropriate Islamobolshevik.
The hyphenated term, which has the virtue of being culturally specific, means
armed struggle in the service of the creed of the 'pious forefathers' as
reassembled into a politico-religious ideology by men who had no recognized
religious authority outside the circles of their supporters. It might be useful
to explain how we arrive at this definition.
Simply imagine four
circles of diminishing size nestling within one another. The largest circle is
the world's one and a half billion Muslims, divided into Sunni, Shia and
hundreds of other sects like the Sufi and often as historically accommodating
of local non-Islamic beliefs as Christianity is of animism in Africa.
Observance can be as casual or fundamental, as grimly austere or colorfully sensuous
as religious practice is among Jews, Buddhists, Hindus or Christians, which is
why the term fundamentalist does not accurately describe Islamist terrorists.
Islamists are the next, smaller circle, that is people who want states to
introduce Islamic law, a goal they usually pursue through guns and the ballot
box in the tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood. The third smaller circle are salafists, or followers of the wise founders who surrounded
Mohammed. They want to establish Islamic states of an extremely puritanical
kind. The most influential salafist clerics are
Saudis. Most jihadists are salafists, but not all salafists are
jihadists, that is people who seek to bring about the violent transformation of
societies into Islamic states of which the only known model has been the chaos
created by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Some envisage this on a vast scale, a
revived caliphate, stretching from Spain through the Balkans, North Africa and
the Middle East, and on across the former Soviet 'stans' to South Asia,
Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Thailand and parts of China. Within
non-Islamic states, jihadi-salafists take a
territorial approach too, with each radicalized mosque being like a separate
mini-kingdom, bent on dominance over the immediate neighborhood. Victory has
the smell of derelict bars, pubs and dance halls, and the chill of a draught in
a room.
These people would
not like being called Qutbists, for to name them
after a mere mortal would be blasphemous. The son of a teacher in Upper Egypt, Qutb was a typical beneficiary of Egypt's modernization,
before the schools inspector's politico-religious activities led to his being
sent to the US in 1948 on an indefinite fact-finding trip that was intended to
get him out of the way. Qutb was repelled by the
relatively innocent materialist society he found there, and especially by the
succession of women who appeared bent on seducing the middle-aged Arab bachelor
in scenes worthy of the actor Peter Sellers. Ironically, many of his responses
to the West resembled the strain of cultural pessimism which industrial, urban
modernity had evoked among the West's own conservative intelligentsias.9 He had
eccentric observations to make about such subjects as orderly grass lawns and
joyless pigeons in anomic city squares. This exposure to the West - in the form
of soporifically suburban Colorado - led Qutb to the
view that the modern world had reverted to a state of pagan jahiliyya,
against which the true Muslim had to insulate himself through total submission
to Allah. Becoming a slave of God liberated the true believer from the slavery
of merely human rulers, and such false creeds as the separation of religion and
politics, democracy, human rights, liberalism and so on. In local terms, this
meant that wherever Arabs thought they were on the side of the future -
democracy, nationalism, socialism and so forth - they were merely rendering
obeisance to false idols as worthless, despite their greater sophistication, as
the old stone gods of ancient Mecca. They were what Qutb
dubbed 'so-called Muslims' and as such they could be killed along with the
infidel kuffar, in what Qutb envisaged as an endless
jihad.10
Many have compared Qutb's book with Lenin's What is to be Done? Writing with a
directness that was unlike the learned disquisitions of the ulema, Qutb managed to slip in the very Western, Marxist-Leninist
notion of an elite revolutionary vanguard, albeit camouflaged as the belief
that only the imprisoned Brothers were true Muslims, the rest being in various
states of thrall to false idols. Regimes not solely based on sharia law should
be combated with the sword as well as the book. The worst idolaters were the
guards in Qutb's prison, who in 1957 responded to the
prisoners' refusal to break rocks as part of their sentence of hard labour by entering the cells and killing twenty-one of
them. The consumptive Qutb avoided this fate as he
was kept in the infirmary.
By the time of his
release in May 1964, and by virtue of such writings as Signposts, Qutb had become the leading ideologue of the Muslim
Brotherhood as it tentatively sought to regroup. Not every Brother agreed with
his violent prescriptions, preferring instead the slow but steady creation of a
parallel Muslim society outside the state, a tendency that has periodically
enabled Egyptian governments to make peace with the Brotherhood. Qutb was not free for long because in order to boost its
credibility vis-a-vis another security agency, the Military Security Services
uncovered a wide-Fanging conspiracy against Nasser's
regime, of which Qutb was alleged to be a leading
light. Brutal raids on shanty towns and villages where the Brotherhood was
strong, and routine torture of suspects, provided the evidence the regime
needed for the existence of a ramified conspiracy that it hoped would galvanise its own supporters. After trial by a military
court, Qutb and two colleagues were hanged on 29
August 1966. The decades of abuse he suffered, culminating in such a death,
provided a powerful example of martyrdom for the faith that would reverberate
around the Muslim world, not least in the form of a lurid biopic that leaves no
torture unexplored. One of the places where Qutb's
doctrines flourished was in Saudi Arabia. Many exiled Egyptian Brothers were
given refuge there as their intellectual skills were locally in short supply.
One of them was Mohammed Qutb, Sayyid's brother, who
became chief propagator of the martyr's cult, his future disciples including
the young Osama bin Laden.11
For a decade or so
after the Suez Crisis, Nasser basked in the adulation of much of the
non-aligned world. Then his vision fell apart, beginning with the failure of
the United Arab Republic created by amalgamating Egypt and Syria, although the
name lingered on until in 1971 Egypt reverted to being the Arab Republic of
Egypt. Widespread disillusionment with Arab nationalism, in the wake of the
disastrous 1967 Six-Day War with Israel, and Jordan's Black September, gave a
brief boost to socialist alternatives, at least among students who looked to
the Paris of 1968 as a model. The fact that the Jordanian Muslim Brothers had
supported king Hussein's suppression of the Palestinians inclined many rulers
to view Islamism as a useful counterweight. As part of his so-called Corrective
Revolution, Egypt's new ruler Anwar Sadat, who came to power in late 1970,
first ejected Nasser's phalanx of Soviet advisers, and then released all the
Muslim Brothers from prison and allowed exiles to return home.
As elsewhere in the
world, Egyptian universities underwent ill considered
expansion in the 1970s, with student numbers rising from two hundred thousand
in 1970 to more than five hundred thousand seven years later. Facilities and
teaching were atrocious, because any professor of ability had left to earn
better money in the Gulf, leaving behind student-teacher ratios of 1; 100.
Except for a few elite professional faculties, higher education involved
learning mimeographed lecture notes by rote, with crash private tuition before
exams for qualifications that brought some lowly unsatisfying job in societies
where to get ahead one needs some connection to the local Big Man.12 The state
sector could not expand quickly enough to absorb this demi-educated lumped
intelligentsia, whose degrees were the intellectual equivalent of a Western
high-school certificate.13 Overcrowding brought problems peculiar to the
Islamic world, since men and women unaccustomed to close physical proximity
found themselves pressed up against one another on the campus bus, or jostling
three at a time for each available seat in the lecture halls.
The Believing
President, as Sadat was known in his own press, encouraged the Jamaat Islamiya student associations to proliferate on campuses,
seeing only the virtuous side of multiplying numbers of pious young women
wearing veils and bearded men in white robes. Equipped with the funds of the
student unions, they were ever fertile in their solutions to the problems of
universities, providing sexually segregated housing and transport, free
photocopying, and organized camps where religion played a major part.
Inevitably, this attempt to realize Islam within the universities had its dark
side. Concerts, dances and films were bullied into non-existence by Islamists
armed with clubs and iron bars, while intimidation was used to prevent even the
most innocent relations between the opposite sexes. In 1980 hundreds of
militant students stormed the offices of the dean of the science faculty, to
force his compliance with a series of Islamist ultimata.
Meanwhile, radical preachers inveighed against nightlife on Cairo's Avenue of
the Pyramids, where pious visitors from the Gulf got drunk on bottles of whisky
that cost as much as an Egyptian peasant saw in a month, while stuffing
banknotes into the bosoms of belly dancers, and against a regime that
celebrated the millennia of pre-Islamic Egyptian culture. 'Egypt is Muslim, not
pharaonic,' they reminded their own pharaoh when Sadat campaigned to preserve
Ramses II's mummy. That Sadat lived increasingly in Farouk's ten palaces
further fuelled envy and hostility.14
These students
included tiny bands of terrorists committed to the violent overthrow of Sadat,
especially after his efforts to make peace with Israel in the late 1970s,
efforts which meant the Saudis cut off the massive subsidies that mitigated
Egypt's chronic economic problems. The first attempted coup by militant
Islamist students was suppressed before it started and the ringleaders were
hanged. They were succeeded by a group called al-Jamaat al-Muslimin,
or the Islamic Group, led by Shuqri Mustafa, an
ardent Qutbist agronomist, who pronounced that the
whole of Egyptian society was in a state of apostasy, to which the group's
initial response was to dwell in desert caves. There their minds took a
remarkably prescient turn, forecasting the emergence of an Islamic caliphate
that would challenge both the US and the USSR. When a leading Establishment
cleric denounced them as heretics, the group kidnapped and killed him. Shuqri was apprehended and put on trial, a theatre he used
to denounce the ulema, who also got it in the neck from the prosecutors for
allowing 'charlatans' like Shuqri to operate within
the universities. In that respect they resembled liberal university
administrators in the West, with their limitless indulgence towards fanatics'
desire for social justice. In 1978 Shuqri and four
other members of the Islamic Group were executed. These measures did not halt
the proliferation of radical Islamist groups, which found greater grievances
than the colossal corruption of the regime. The issues included Sadat's peace
deal with Israel, which posted an ambassador to Cairo, resulting in the
president becoming a pariah in the wider Arab world; and efforts in 1979,
supported by Sadat's wife Jihan, to rebalance
marriage and divorce laws to benefit women represented the final straw.15
The democratization
of religious Opinion as against received authority, and the rage that ensued
when mass education did not automatically translate into status, was evident in
the group that eventually assassinated Sadat. One cell developed in a Cairo
suburb, where a young electrical engineer called Mohammed Abd aI-Salam Faraj linked up with two men from the prominent
al-Zumr family. Together with Muhammed Zumi, a fugitive from southern Upper Egypt where a further
cell developed, they formed Tanzim aI-Jihad in 1980.
From the start, the group was divided between the northern group which focused
on killing Sadat, and southerners more concerned to persecute Coptic Christian
goldsmiths and jewelers. The latter's numbers and prosperity had exceeded
Islam's threshold of tolerance, while their pope was gaining the ear of
Americans concerned about persecution of fellow Christians. Not only were the
Copts getting above themselves, but it appeared that their greater
assertiveness was being manipulated by their 'Crusader' allies abroad. Minor
incidents, perhaps the charge that someone had put the hex on a buffalo,
resulted in sectarian violence which the police struggled to contain. It spread
to the Cairo slums when in the autumn of 1981 Copts and Muslims attempted to
massacre each other.
The conspiracy
assumed lethal proportions when it was joined by twenty-four-year-old
first-lieutenant Khalid Ahmed Shawqi al Islambouli, like the al-Zumrs
from a prominent family. Frustrated in his desire to become an air force-
pilot, he had washed up in artillery. The electrician Faraj provided the
vision, borrowing bits of Qutb and venerable Taymiyya to justify an attack on the 'near enemy' of apostate
Muslim rulers, preparatory to the assault of a consolidated Islam on the 'far
enemy' of Israel. Clerical endorsement of this strategy was supplied by a blind
lecturer in theology from a southern outpost of Cairo's al-Azhar university,
whom Sadat had released from a nine-month prison sentence when he signaled the
break with the Nasser era. This forty something cleric was sheikh Omar Abdel
Rahman, thenceforth a pivotal figure in several terrorist atrocities.
Recruitment of others
into the developing conspiracy against Sadat occurred in radical mosques, where
the more devout were singled out to attend intensive retreats, part of the
grooming that draws people into the more select group responsible for acts of
terrorism. The next step from these retreats for a select few, whose sense of
being the elite within an elite was consolidated, was basic weapons training.
The group began by robbing jewellery businesses owned
by Coptic Christians in Upper Egypt, robberies which were designed to finance
major operations and to make the bumptious Copts - one of whom, Boutros Boutros Ghali, was even foreign
minister - feel the Muslim fist. In this climate of sectarian tension, Sadat
announced a new line: 'No politics in religion, and no religion in politics'.
The regime rounded up about fifteen hundred radicals, including Khalid al-Islambouli's brother Muhammed, leader of Islamic students
in the commerce department at Asyut university. This engendered emotions like
those that once prevailed in Lenin's family. Their mother recalled: 'When he
heard the news, Khalid burst out crying and said to me: "Why have they
arrested my brother, who committed no crime?" He cried so much that he had
convulsions. When he finally calmed down, he said to me, "Be patient, mother,
it is the will of God ... every tyrant has his end." On 23 September
1981 Khalid al- Islambouli learned that he was to
participate in the parade on 6 October designed to celebrate the moment in 1973
when Egyptian troops had captured a salient over the canal in Sinai. This was
the thirty eighth attempt on Sadat's life; it was horribly successful.
As an army officer
al-Islambouli was spared the searches which Sadat's
security inflicted on other ranks, who were supposed to surrender their firing
pins and live rounds for the day. No checks were made to see that this had been
done, although the orders had certainly been given. This laxity enabled al-Islam.bouli to smuggle ammunition and grenades provided by
Faraj into his 'quarters concealed in a duffle bag. He also pulled rank to
bring three assassins dressed as soldiers into his barracks; the following day
they took the places of the real soldiers - to whom al-Islambouli
gave a day's leave - in his Zil truck as it towed a
gun carriage across the parade ground. Only the driver did not know what was
going on when al-Islambouli grabbed the handbrake as
the truck neared the reviewing stand. He and his accomplices dismounted,
removing the safety catches from their weapons.
There, Sadat, his
ministers, visiting dignitaries and the 150 men deployed in concentric groups -
supposedly protecting him were distracted by the roaring jets of an air force
fly-past. Sadat was dressed in a natty Prussian-style uniform which had arrived
from a London tailor the day before. He refused to don a bullet-proof vest,
claiming that it would spoil the tunic's line. Besides, as he said when he told
his guards to keep their distance: 'Please go away - I am with my sons,'
meaning the massed soldiery. When Sadat caught sight of five men running towards
him, he stood up, ready with a salute, inadvertently providing them with a
clear target. The five hurled grenades, which sent the Egyptian elite reeling,
and then, reaching the bottom of the reviewing stand, unleashed about
thirty-five seconds of sustained fire from automatic weapons delivered from a
range of about fifteen meters. Despite the efforts of the defense minister, who
tried to shield his president, bullets tore into Sadat's chest and neck causing
massive blood loss. Incredulous at this fate, Sadat's last words were 'Mish Maaqool, Mish Maaqool' or
'impossible, impossible'. Al- Islambouli, whose shots
finished off Sadat, repeatedly shouted, 'My name is Khalid Islambouli,
I have slain Pharaoh, and I do not fear death!' He did not bother to kill Mubarak
too, the self-effacing vice-president. One assassin was killed by security
officers, and the rest were wounded and captured.
The plot to take over
Cairo, starting with the television centre, unraveled
as the captured assassins boasted how these attacks were supposed to unfold, an
interpretation probably over-indulgent of the restraint of their interrogators.
In the south there was a four-day seizure of parts of downtown Asyut, which
ended abruptly when the government sent in paratroopers. Sadat's killers and
more than three hundred radical Islamist defendants were tried in a court
erected in Cairo's Exhibition Grounds. The surviving terrorists gave reasons
for the assassination. They spoke of the 'decadence' represented by alcohol and
discotheques, and the dishonoring contempt Sadat had expressed for women
dressed in 'tents'. One mentioned the example of the Iranian Revolution and the
need to create a Sunni counterweight. There was one exception to the death
sentences passed on the main defendants. Lawyers for Abdel Rahman successfully
dissociated their client from specific injunctions to harm or kill either Copts
or Sadat, while the blind sheikh himself passionately denounced attempts to relativise an immutable Islam so as to conform with modern
Western mores. Incredibly, he was acquitted by a court which knew that what he
was saying would have been well received by most of the ulema, even though one
of Mubarak's first acts had been to get the heads of Cairo's prestigious
al-Azhar university, the Arab world's Oxford, to condemn the assassins.16
Some of the other
defendants would achieve even greater prominence. Ayman al-Zawahiri was a young
surgeon from a distinguished clerical-medical dynasty with a practice in
Cairo's Maadi suburb where he had organized a
jihadist cell that was on the periphery of the plot to kill Sadat. Although he
had learned of the plot only hours before it happened, al-Zawahiri and his
friend Aboud al-Zuma were bent on using Sadat's
funeral to kill Mubarak and any foreign dignitaries who happened along. On 23
October al-Zawahiri was arrested by the police, the gateway to endless horrors
at the hands of Intelligence Unit 75, the government's expert torturers. During
the court hearings, he emerged as the defendants' spokesman, using this public
forum to give chapter and verse about beatings, electrocution and wild dogs,
testimony - all probably true - that provoked chants of 'The army of Mohammed
will return, and we will defeat the Jews' from his co-accused. At the end of
the three-year trial, al-Zawahiri was sentenced to three years in jail, which
he had already largely served on remand. His sentence may have been lightened
by intelligence on other terrorists that he gave his tormentors. When he
emerged from this ordeal in 1984, al-Zawahiri was no longer the retiring
bookish medic with a sideline in militant jihadism. The physical and
psychological humiliations of torture, and perhaps the religious ecstasies that
extreme pain can generate, had created a downtown Algiers, smashing up buses,
road signs, telephone luxury shops where the local jeunesse donree,
or 'tchi-tchi', flaunt their wealth. Much sexual
frustration was vented young women driving flashy sports cars - dubbed Bio by
the street youths. Symbolically, they tore down the Algerien
flag and raised an empty couscous sack to draw attention to of decades of
socialism. When the police counterattacked hundreds of these rioters and
torturing detainees, they were c novel experience for representatives of a
state that was pathologically anti-Zionist.
The failure of
socialism in Algeria provided militant Islamists with their chance, for it was they
who deftly interposed themselves as mediators between the rioters and the
government. The regime had fitfully encouraged this trend. In the 1970S
president (and colonel) Houari Boumedienne,
who had deposed Allmed Ben Bella in 1965, launched a sustained campaign of Arabisation to expunge every vestige of the hated French.
This was despite the fact that French came much more easily to most Algerians
than classical literary Arabic as taught by exiled Egyptian Muslim Brothers,
and was the surest route to the best professions and jobs, which required
expertise in French. Enforced Arabisation did not
please the Berbers either, who were proud of their distinctive dialects and
cultural identity. In the spring of 1980 the Berber heartland of Kabylia was rocked by demonstrations and strikes which the
regime suppressed with its usual violence. The regime also sought to use Islam
when socialism palpably failed to create a united Algerian identity. The 1976
National Charter said that 'Islam is the state religion'; the president had to
be a Muslim who swore an oath to 'respect and glorify the Muslim religion'. In
that year Friday replaced Sunday as a day of enforced rest. Gambling and the
sale of alcohol to Muslims were banned. Three years later Muslims were prohibited
from raising swine. Partly as a result of Saudi largesse, the number of mosques
in the country rose from 2,200 in 1966 to 5,829 in 1980. Many of these were
so-called people's mosques which when left half built technically evaded state
control. Although the state continued to monopolize the production of
audiocassettes, pirate imports brought the radical tidings of Egyptian,
Lebanese and Saudi clerics much as printing presses had once universalized the
words of Luther and Calvin.19
The state's attempt
to exploit Islam for purely political ends was resented by many radical
Islamists such as Mustafa Bouyali, who declared the
regime impious and called for a jihad to overthrow it. After repairing, like
the Prophet, to the mountains, Bouyali founded a Mouvement Islamique Arme, with himself as its emir. Until Bouyali
was killed in 1987, the FLN-army leaders found themselves playing role reversal
with the French who had once battled the FLN in the same bleak countryside,
Cooler-headed Islamists decided simply to push the regime towards higher levels
of Islamisation: An academic called Abassi Madani called for 'respect
for the sharia in government legislation and a purging of elements hostile to
our religion'. Among his other demands was segregation of the sexes in education.
He was immediately imprisoned, his release being a key future demand of
Islamist terrorists. After 1978 the new government of colonel Chadli Benjedid responded to the
rise of Islamism by building more mosques, so as to sideline the multiplying number
of ad-hoc prayer rooms, and controlling who was allowed to preach in them. An
Islamic university was created in the city of Constantine to counter the
foreign influences that held sway in the absence of a local Algerian ulema. Two
distinguished clerics, Muhammad al-Ghazali and Youssef al-Qaradawi,
were imported from Egypt, but craftily ignored the regime's efforts to make
them its own clerical authorities. Worse, the Islamic faction within the sole
ruling party - whom wits called the 'Barbefelenes'
because of their beards - began to drift into the orbit of this incipient
Islamist movement, mosques being the only legal site of opposition in a
one-party state.
Although the October
1988 youth riots petered out, Chadli continued to
treat Islamist intellectuals as interlocutors, even though it was not clear at
all that they, or anyone else, had much purchase on the young rioters. In a
bold move designed to secure his re-election to the presidency, Chadli surprisingly introduced a multi-party system, his
intention being to shuffle the parties around so as to give a democratic gloss
to a much enhanced presidency. One product of this democratizing strategy was
the Islamic Salvation Front or FIS, the Islamist party founded in March 1989,
which temporarily brought together Algerianists who
believed in the creeping, and entirely legitimate, Islamisation
of Algerian society, and salafists who were opposed
to democracy as a secular foreign imposition, at the same time as they
themselves were heavily engaged with fraternal Arab jihadists. The FIS was the
first legal Islamic party in the entire Arab world, and the first openly to
proclaim the goal of an Islamic republic, while simultaneously promising to
restore ethics, justice and warm family kinship. It wanted to revert to the
egalitarianism of the early FLN, a distant memory at a time when a corrupt
business and military elite was stealing the nation's oil wealth.
Unsurprisingly this especially appealed to the first- and second generation
migrants from the conservative countryside huddled in the anomic poor quarters
of big cities.
The FIS was both an
Islamized political party and a social welfare organization. Till; party was
governed by a thirty-eight-member Council, called the Madjlis
ech-Choura in conscious echo of the Prophet, with
day-to-day business in the hands of a twelve-man Executive Bureau. Its local
cells were called ousra or families, another
conscious use of Islamic terminology. Its two main leaders were Ali Benhadji, a charismatic associate of the dead jihadist Bouyali, a demagogue on a motorbike who appealed to young
people, and the older Abassi Madani,
who was respected by pious traders and shopkeepers. Like the parish structures
that had benefited Christian democrat parties in post-war Europe, the mosques
provided the FIS with a major organizational advantage over the forty or so
rival parties, some of which were led by exiles returned from Europe, whose
local appeal was limited. Similar advantages flowed from its charitable
activities, which were subsidized by the Saudis, since it provided hospital and
funeral funds for the poor, while offering to buy indigent women their veils.
In other words, it was like a demoralized version of the early FLN, attracting,
beyond the Islamists who made up its hard core, many more protest voters who
had had enough of a regime that was neither socialist nor Islamic.
In municipal polls
held in 1990 the FIS won 54 per cent of the popular vote, decimating the former
governing party. Success led it to overplay its hand. Control of municipal
councils resulted immediately in prohibitions on alcohol or on people walking
about in shorts and swimming costumes. In Oran, the council banned a ral music concert. Another refused to deal with
correspondence not written in Arabic. In December 1991 the FIS eventually took
part in the first round of legislative elections - after a four-month debate on
the propriety of doing so - winning a respectable 47 per cent of a poorly
attended poll which suggests that many voters were apathetic about the choices
available to them. Four hundred thousand people took part in demonstrations in
the capital, chanting 'No police state, no fundamentalist republic!' Correctly
fearing that the army had had enough, the FIS made desperate attempts to allay
public anxiety about the Islamic society it envisaged for Algeria, even
constructing scaled models of a projected Islamic city with cinemas, libraries
and sports halls. This did not entirely dispel fears that, if the FIS won the
second round of elections, it would abolish democracy, the free press and all
other political parties, that being the message from some mosques. On 11
January 1992 the generals mounted a putsch, sacking Chadli
and going on to ban the PIS and arrest its leaders. They received lengthy jail
sentences, and many of their lesser supporters were despatched
to remote Saharan concentration camps. That August a radical Islamist bomb
killed ten people at Algiers airport, the beginning of a terror campaign that
would eventually be directed at the entire Muslim population.
Of the world's one
and a half billion Muslims, only one-fifth live in the Arab world. Arabia bulks
large in the Muslim imagination, and Arabic has enormous prestige as the
language of Allah recorded in sacred texts, but the demographic strength of
Islam lies in the Indian subcontinent and South Asia. Indonesia's 250 million
people, consisting of 250 ethnic groups living on the six thousand inhabitable
islands in the thirteen thousand-island archipelago, are nearly 90 per cent
Muslim. Since Islam was, as it is said, written over other belief systems,
Indonesian Muslims are broadly divided between those who subscribe to this
syncretic version and modernizers who sought to make Indonesia conform more
tightly to Arab exemplars which exert enormous suasion in the region. Power and
wealth in Indonesia sit uncomfortably along ethnic and religious fault lines
too. Excepting that part controlled by the ruling dynasts, economic might is
largely in the hands of an industrious Buddhist, Christian and Confucian
Chinese minority, while bureaucratic, military and political power has been
monopolized by a predominantly Christian-educated elite. Although there is a
modernized Muslim middle class, the majority of the 49 per cent of Indonesians
subsisting on under US$2 a day are Muslims too.
Muslim militias
played an important part in fighting the Dutch colonialists, but they broke
with the newly established Republic over its refusal to introduce shari a law. A movement called Darul
Islam, or the Islamic State of Indonesia, waged a desultory military campaign
from its bases in central Java, Aceh and South Sulawesi, until its leaders were
captured in 1962. The dictators Sukarno and Suharto propagated a state
philosophy called Pancasila, designed to weld this kaleidoscopic nation
together. Although Indonesia is a secular state, this creed consists of
affirmation of belief in one God, respect for the human individual and social
justice, and the unity of the motherland. The pious Muslim minority and the
surviving supporters of Darul Islam insisted on
adding sharia law, a demand known as the Jakarta Charter. Radical Islam's
survival in Indonesia was due to the fact that elements in the security
services saw Darul Islam as a useful tool to suppress
Communism, as well as due to inflows of Saudi money that financed an Institute
for Islamic and Arabic Studies in Jakarta. Another important incubator was the
Javanese version of a madrassa or seminary, known locally as a pesantren, run by two Arabs, Abdullah Sungkar
and Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, at Ngruki
in the Solo region. These two were linked to a series of terrorist attacks on
bars and cinemas in the 1970S and early 1980s, carried out by a shadowy
organization called Komando Jihad. Though the fact
that the attacks always preceded elections may have reflected a government plot
to discredit Islamic parties, these two Arabs were tried and jailed for
fomenting terrorism. Released on license, they fled to Malaysia. The
restoration of democracy in 1999 saw the mainstream Islamic party achieve
fourth place with 11 per cent of the poll. It also saw the development of two
terrorist groups. A preacher of Arab descent who was a veteran of the jihad in
Afghanistan seems to have been responsible for Laskar-Jihad,
a terrorist group formed in West Java to protect Muslims from murderous
Christian militias in the Moluccas islands off Sulawesi. Strictly Wahhabist, it also vehemently rejected the presidency of
Megawati Setiawati Soekarnoputri
(2001-4), largely because of her gender. If Laskar-Jihad has restricted regional ambitions, and would follow
Saudi authorities in condemning Osama bin Laden as a sectarian heretic, the
front organization known as Majelis Mujahidin, whose
spiritual leader is Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, explicitly
wants an Islamic state covering Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the
Philippines. For convenience sake, regional intelligence agencies refer to this
wider South Asian network as Jemaah Islamiyah, and seek to prove its links with
Al Qaeda, certain that this will bring US funds for counter-terrorist
operations. The links are not imaginary.20
The Indian
subcontinent is not far behind Indonesia in numbers of adherents of Islam.
Already in the nineteenth century, a network of madrassas, whose hub was at Deoband, north of Delhi, propagated a rigorously Wahhabist
form of Islam so as to enable Muslims to guard their identity in a hostile
Hindu sea. Although secular Muslim intellectuals, and British-trained army
officers, had created an independent Pakistan in 1947, for want of anything
else with equivalent purchase they had to stress a common Islamic identity to
hold its Baluchi, Pashtun, Sindhi and Punjabi tribes together, a problem that
became more urgent after 1971 with the secession of the eastern Bengalis into
an independent Bangladesh. That loss served to tilt rump Pakistan towards the
warm waters of the Gulf states. There was also the longer-standing contest over
Kashmir, a princely state under the British Raj, with Sunni Muslims dominant in
the Kashmir valley and mixed Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist elsewhere. By force of
arms in 1947-9 India succeeded in imposing its will on most of Kashmir,
including the Sunni valley, leaving Pakistan in charge of the remaining third,
a position it sought to overturn in fighting that recurred in 1965 and 1971.
Indian misrule in Kashmir led to vicious attacks by Muslims on Hindus, many of
whom fled, and the formation of dozens of militant groups, most of them backed
by the army, the intelligence services or Islamist parties in Pakistan, who
provide them with arms, money and volunteer manpower. These groups include Hizb-ulMujahedin and Lashkar-e-Tayyeba,
both of which combine guerrilla warfare with terrorism designed to frighten
Hindus or to intimidate moderate Muslims. (See case study P.1 and P.2)
Pakistani support for these groups makes the country the world's second major
state sponsor of terrorism, even if this sponsorship is much more focused in
scope than the Iranians'. The general aim is to plague India with a running
sore that ties up a quarter of a million Indian troops in the area, while
providing a ventilator for radical Islamists in Pakistan itself who might
otherwise turn on their own government. That strategy has proved too clever by
half, since some Kashmiri and Pakistani militants seek forcibly to Islamize both
countries.
For within Pakistan
successive governments have sought to instrumentalist Islam with varying
degrees of sincerity and success, pandering to a vociferous Muslim lobby that
knows how to incite mobs, but whose electoral record - when there have been
elections - is modest. A few belated gestures towards Islam in the dying days
of the deeply corrupt socialist government of Ali Bhutto did not prevent his
overthrow and execution by the military dictator general Zia-ul-Haq in 1977. Zia was a British-trained cavalry officer who
while on secondment to Jordan in 1970 had led a group of Jordanian troops he
was training into battle against the Palestinians during king Hussein's Black
September crackdown. Looking like a slightly oleaginous movie actor with his
slicked down hair and handlebar moustache, Zia admired the Islamist ideologue Mawlana Mawdudi, the journalist
who in 1941 had founded a jihadist party called Jamaat-e-Islami,
which while harking back to the Prophet's band of followers was also indebted
to the vanguardist parties of Europe in the 1930s.
Mawdudi was one of the millions of Muslims who went to
Pakistan after independence. His party became one element of the broader
Pakistani National Alliance with which Zia hoped to stabilize his military
regime. Zia brought prominent Islamists into government, briefly including Mawdudi himself, while Islamising
education, the law, taxation and so forth. (See also).
Although he
introduced sharia law, the dire penalties for adulterers and thieves were
rarely implemented because of scrupulous insistence on the need for many
eyewitnesses. Down to his death in 1988, Zia succeeded in dividing the Islamic
camp by co-opting the modern Islamist ideologues, while leaving the traditional
clerical elite in charge of educating the poor in their burgeoning,
Saudi-financed madrassas, the alternative to providing a decent public
education system. The number of Deobandi madrassas, which the Wahhabist Saudis favored, spiraled from 354 in 1972 to
seven thousand in 2002. The military regime was also presented with another
cause it could pursue with Muslim radicals when the old struggle over Kashmir
was joined by the new war in Afghanistan.
In the spring of
1978, Afghan Communists killed the country's president Mohammed Daoud,
instituting a reign of anti- Islamic terror that has received less notice than
their desire to have girls attend schools or encouragement of typists to wear
Western skirts and trouser suits. By the end of 1979, some twelve thousand
religious and community leaders were in Kabul's jails, where many were quietly
liquidated. A revolt broke out in Shia-dominated Herat, in which Islamists
hacked to death a dozen Soviet advisers and their families. By way of reprisal,
Soviet aircraft bombed Herat, killing about twenty thousand people. The revolt
spread to Jalalabad, even as the government's troops began to desert to the
mujaheddin. As Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and KGB chief Yuri Andropov
wondered how to respond, in Washington national security advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski persuaded president Carter to authorize non-lethal covert support to
the Afghan rebels. Medicines and radios with a combined value of half a million
US dollars were shipped to Pakistan's Inter Services
Intelligence (ISO for distribution to the Afghan mujaheddin. This was the
modest beginning of a major enthusiasm. After murdering the Soviets' first
client ruler, Hafizullah Amin clambered to the dizzy
pinnacle of power in Kabul, despite KGB suspicions that he was a CIA agent.
That rumor sealed his fate when on Christmas Eve Soviet transporters landed
paratroops at Kabul, with seven hundred KGB paramilitaries in Afghan uniforms
dispatched to kill Amin and the current Communist leadership. They were
followed by Central Asian Red Army troops - 70 per cent of whom were Muslim -
whose armored vehicles rumbled along the metalled
road the Soviets had built in the 1960s. Eventually Soviet forces would peak at
about 120,000, although some 650,000 men served in Afghanistan during the eight
years of conflict, many of them drug-deranged conscripts blasting away from
tanks reverberating with heavy-metal rock music. It is useful to recall that
this Soviet invasion led to the formation of the Arab Afghans and ultimately to
AI Qaeda.
The Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan focused several discrete strategic agendas. The US saw it as a
way of bleeding the Russians by using Afghan proxies. Brzezinski wrote to
Carter: 'Now we can give the USSR its own Vietnam war.'21 It cost both blood
and treasure. Afghanistan is estimated to have cost the Soviet Union some US$45
billion by the time the Russians retreated, leaving a million Afghan dead at
the expense of fifteen thousand Red Army fatalities. Three million Afghans fled
to Pakistan, while the same number ended up as refugees in Iran. The US
expended much less on its support for the Afghan mujaheddin, perhaps US$5
billion in total, much of it scooped out of the country's fathomless defense
budget and re-routed to the CIA to be disbursed via the Pakistanis.
A credulous 'Boy's
Own' Western media boosted the mujaheddin as noble savages, nostalgically
recalling the massacres these tribesmen had once inflicted on the British, as
they contemplated Russian soldiers having their eyes gouged out or genitals cut
off if they did not convert to Islam. Responding to widespread Muslim outrage
at the invasion of Islamic territory by the legions of the Red godless, the
Saudis and other conservative Gulf states saw an opportunity for Sunnis to
rival the brightly burning Shia star of ayatollah Khomenei
with a cause that would also divert their own militant Islamists to foreign
fields. They even introduced discounted fares on the national airline to make
it easier to get rid of them to Afghanistan. The Saudis hated the Russians, and
through a Safari Club had already co-operated with the US in subverting the
spread of Marxist regimes in Africa. In July 1980 the Saudis' intelligence
supremo, prince Turki, agreed to match dollar for dollar US support for the
mujaheddin. Saudi money was sent to the Washington embassy and then transferred
to a Swiss bank account of the CIA, which used these funds to purchase weapons
for those Afghans the CIA and the Saudis deemed most worthy of support. This
meant that the US$200 million the CIA's Mghan programme received in 1984 became US$400 million courtesy
of the Saudis. The problem was that Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence
Directorate was not the only game in town, even assuming that it was
trustworthy. Also supporting the Islamist cause in Afghanistan were private and
semi-official charitable and religious bodies, which funded not only indigenous
Afghan Wahhabis, but also the stream of Gulf Arabs heading to Afghanistan to wage
jihad. An estimated twenty thousand Arabs went to Afghanistan to fight. The
Saudis even paid for the critically wounded to be treated in private Harley
Street clinics in London. Lastly, Pakistan's successive regimes, and an Islamised intelligence agency swollen with Saudi and US
money, saw a chance to install a friendly neighboring Islamist regime that
would afford Pakistan defense in depth. Moreover, the more far-sighted saw that
training camps for Afghan or foreign mujaheddin could become dual purpose,
training jihadists to fight India in Kashmir at a time when the US regarded
India as a suspiciously pink shape on the Cold War map.22
The Afghan-Pakistan
border became the site of a bewildering array of camps for some three million
people fleeing the Soviets, whose tactics included ruining crops, sowing
millions of anti-personnel mines and depopulating villages. Many Afghan boys
were subtracted from the desperate environment of all refugee camps, and sent
as boarders to the network of Pakistani Deobandi madrassas, where through the
medium of ceaselessly chanting the Koran they were refashioned into total
Islamic personalities. Many of these boys would return to Afghanistan in early
adulthood, after the Russians had left, as the all-conquering Taliban. Meanwhile,
foreign intelligence agencies funneled arms into mujaheddin training camps
strung along the Pakistani side of the Afghan border. As agile as goats, the
mujaheddin dominated the high ground, hitting and then running from the
Russians, before retiring for long seasonal breaks in the fighting. Second
World War-era weapons were replaced by AK-47S, heavy machine guns, mortars and
rocket-propelled grenades, together with fleets of trucks to convoy them
forwards into Afghanistan. Many of these weapons were purchased from China,
allowing the CIA to savour using Chinese Communist
arms to kill Soviets. By the mid-1980s the CIA's involvement was deeper,
although it baulked at anything like airlifting its own supplies lest it
trigger a superpower confrontation. US spy satellites were used to track Soviet
positions, which were relayed to the mujaheddin using indecipherable 'burst'
communications systems. Next came powerful sniper rifles, plastic explosives
and sophisticated detonators, variously intended for sabotage operations and
the assassination of Soviet commanders, some of whom were killed by car bombs
in Kabul. When the Soviets showed some success by deploying highly trained Speznaz commandos, inserted to ambush the mujaheddin from
giant armored Hind helicopters, the CIA supplied the Afghans with Stinger
shoulder-launched guided missiles, whose infra-red sensors invariably found
their target. The first successful attack on such helicopters, and the bullets
pumped afterwards into the bodies of their crews, was shown on video in the
Oval Office. The American budget for the Afghan war climbed to US$470 million
in 1986 and US$630 million in 1987, all matched too by the Saudis. The US began
paying select mujaheddin commanders a decent salary, partly to offset worrying
evidence of another presence, for at no point did the CIA arm or promote
foreign Islamist fighters. They moved around in different orbits, with the
foreign fighters drawing on different sources of funds and recruits.23
The majority of
Afghan mujaheddin were suspicious of the Arab volunteers, whom they called Ikhwanis, meaning the Muslim
Brothers, or Wahhabis after the
puritanical Islamism that rejected more mystical Sufi traditions, saints and
shrines. The reason a frontier town like Peshawar was becoming physically Arabised was because that is where the Arabs hung out while
not doing any fighting. They would have done the Afghan cause more good by
donating the cost of their air tickets. The first Arab presence in Afghanistan
consisted of volunteers despatched on humanitarian
missions by a wide array of Islamic non-governmental organisations.
Since many professionals, such as doctors, were stalwarts of the Muslim
Brotherhood, this was how Ayman Arabs come to wage jihad were a mixture of
fantasists, who simply had themselves photographed with an AK -47 in front of
menacing rocks, and the sort of men who would pitch white tents so as to
attract the lethal attentions of Soviet aircraft. They actually wanted to die
so as to precipitate the sounds and smells of paradise. Bin Laden himself
exhibited many of the characteristics of any spoiled rich kid seeking an older
mentor and a higher purpose. He found the former in Azzam, but
then gradually migrated to al-Zawahiri. In addition to being personally
extremely rich, bin Laden had a network of even wealthier supporters.25
Gnarled mujaheddin
who met the lanky Gulf Arab (his family were originally from Aden in Yemen)
thought his hands felt weak while his simpering smile reminded them of a
girl's. Actually, the soft exterior, which was slowly reconfigured so that bin
Laden seemed like a modest, slow-speaking sage despite his relative youth,
concealed a huge ego, a ferocious temper and a cunning organizational mind.
Most Arab leaders do not need to be eloquent as repression stands in for the
arts of persuasion. By contrast, bin Laden was highly eloquent in his native
Arabic. He opened his own training camp - the Lion's Den - at Jaji exclusively designed for Arab jihadists. This was an
assertion of independence from Azzam. When the Russians attacked in April 1987,
bin Laden and fifty of his supporters allegedly held off two hundred Russian
troops for a week. This engagement gave birth to a legend of Arab fighting
prowess that served to attract further recruits.
Bin Laden showed an
adroit awareness of how to use the media. He had a fifty-minute video made of
himself riding horses, firing weapons and lecturing his fighters. These have
the indirectness of home videos because bin Laden never addresses the camera.
He summoned trusted foreign journalists, notably Robert Fisk, to sit at the feet
of this prodigal phenomenon: the millionaire Saudi who had given up the high
life to share Afghan caves with scorpions. An easy familiarity enhanced the
sensation of celebrity. Visitors noted his simple consumption of water, flat
bread, rice and potato and tomato stew.26 If many Afghan mujaheddin found his
renunciation of the good life incomprehensible - most of their own warlords
lived rather well in urban villas kitted out with consumer gismos - it played
well among his fellow Gulf Arabs. He did not demur when his followers took to
calling him 'the sheikh', a dual title that means clan ruler and religious
sage. While bin Laden had no theological expertise or spiritual authority
whatsoever, any more than the doctors and engineers around him, and was physically
hundreds of miles from the traditional sites of Islamic learning, gradually
through his mountainside appearances he assumed all of those roles within the
new disorder he was hatching even as US policymakers spoke airily in their
big-talking way of the order they were about to impose as the USSR
disintegrated. While they described the future architecture of the world in
Foreign Affairs, National Interest and similar journals, thousands of miles
away others construed the world through the life and times of the Prophet.27
As the Soviet Union
under Gorbachev resolved to pullout of its disastrous eight-year campaign in
Afghanistan, bin Laden and the other leading Arabs determined to keep the
spirit of jihad alive through a secret organization concealed within a wider
guerrilla-training programme which included huge
Saudi-financed bases at places like Zhawar Khili and Tora Bora.28 They may have helped defeat a global
superpower, the first major Muslim victory after decades in which Israel had
defeated the Arabs and Indian Hindus the Muslim Pakistanis, but the ensuing
Afghan civil war showed that they had failed to create an Islamist state in
Afghanistan.
AI Qaeda probably
came into existence in May 1988, but it was only in August of that year that
the leading Arab Mghans discussed it. Originally the
word meant 'base' as in military base, so that the US base at Bagram is
'al-Qaeda Bagram'. While the camps would train Arab fighters destined for
Islamist mujaheddin factions battling to control Mghanistan
after the Soviets had left an isolated client regime behind, AI Qaeda would
consist of a more select cadre, of between 10 and 30 per cent of the trainees,
destined for open-ended operations. That is the second meaning of AI Qaeda: as
a revolutionary vanguard, similar to the Jacobins or Bolsheviks. Recruits came
from a variety of social, religious and national backgrounds, which gradually
dissolved into a new global jihadi-salafist identity
that picked and mixed from secular geopolitics and several extreme Islamic traditions
in a thoroughly eclectic postmodern fashion. One can unthread some of the
ideological and religious genealogies, but this entirely conventional approach
to understanding the jihadists does not really explain the state of mind any
more than learned tomes of Teutonic Geistesgeschichte
which chart the ground from Luther to Lanz von Liebenfels say much about Nazism.
AI Qaeda opened an
office in the affluent Peshawar suburb of Hyatabad,
where it processed would-be recruits from the thousands of Arabs, and others,
who flooded in after the departure of the Soviets to fight fellow Muslims who
were squabbling over the ruins of Afghanistan.
There were detailed
application forms, terms and conditions of employment, and job specifications
for senior positions within the organization. Suddenly it seemed to the
jihadists as if they had got a job with any Western corporation, an impression
reinforced by AI Qaeda's use of the language ·of international business as a
code in the network's communications. It even has its own logo, of a white
Arabian stallion. On being accepted after extensive vetting, volunteers
received a salary of between US$l,OOO and US$1,500
depending on marital status, a roundtrip airfare to visit home, medical care
and a month's vacation. A ruling shura or council sat atop various functional
sections, which included experts in computers and publicity and the
interpretation of dreams. The person chosen to head AI Qaeda's military
operations had to be over thirty, with five years' battlefield experience and a
degree in a relevant subject.29
Quite a lot is known
now about AI Qaeda's initial membership. Many of the Arabs, and especially the
Egyptians, did not have much choice other than to remain in Afghanistan or
Pakistan since they were wanted men in their homeland. Ayman al-Zawahiri would
not be availing himself of the free round-trip to Cairo. The psychologist and
former CIA analyst Marc Sageman has studied a representative cross-section of
AI Qaeda terrorists, including those who were there at its inception. The most
important recruits were Egyptians such as al-Zawahiri, Abu Ubaidah
al-Banshiri, who drowned prematurely in a Kenyan
lake, and Mohammed Atef, its military supremo. Many of these men had already
combined terrorism with careers as policemen or soldiers, which explains why
Egyptians supplied a disproportionate number of AI Qaeda's ruling group as well
as its top military commanders. Like al-Zawahiri himself, many of them had been
through Egypt's prison torture system, emerging as implacable and steely.
Egyptians made up over 60 per cent of AI Qaeda's ruling group, and nearly 60
per cent of them had been imprisoned for political reasons before they had
volunteered for jihad in Afghanistan. They were dominant within a wider Arab
representation from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the U AE and Yemen, the latter making
up bin Laden's personal bodyguard. Some of these men arrived as little family
bands. One Kuwaiti group is instructive, because it shows how a terrorist group
relies on existing ties of kinship and friendship. The personal loyalties were
semi-forged before AI Qaeda had even emerged.
Approximately half
the population of Kuwait are 'bidoon', or foreign
migrants servicing the oil industry. Many of these second-class citizens are Baluchis, a people straddling several states including
Pakistan. Among these expatriates were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his nephew,
Abdul Karim, who had been sent by Khalid Sheikh's three elder siblings to study
mechanical engineering in the US, where their existing piety had been
reinforced in the Muslim circles that Middle Easterners recoiled into upon
experiencing the Western world. The three elder brothers went independently to
Peshawar. Khalid Sheikh joined them, moving into the orbit of Azzam and bin
Laden. He would become the mastermind of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade
Center. 30
Close ties were also
cemented by marriage alliances within the emerging group, so that Mohammed
Atef's daughter married one of bin Laden's sons, while Al Qaeda's treasurer
married bin Laden's niece. That is true of other terrorist groups. Jemaah
Islamiyah's Mohammed Noordin Top has two wives, both
sisters of fellow jihadists. The next cluster that would become important in Al
Qaeda, especially after the false dawning of the Islamic Salvation Front,
consisted of Arabs from the North African Maghreb, that is Algeria, Morocco and
Tunisia, and a separate group from South Asia, most graduates of two boarding
schools run by Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia and Malaysia, with the occasional Uighur
from China's westerly Xinjiang province,3l The Maghreb Arabs were the only ones
to have prior records for petty criminality such as handbag snatching and
credit-card fraud. Those who were not represented in Sageman's sample are no
less interesting. There were virtually no Afghans, except for two friends of
bin Laden's, and no representatives of the vast Muslim populations of
Bangladesh, India, Turkey or Pakistan, although radicalized second- and
third-generation Anglo-Pakistani jihadists would make up the deficit. Contrary
to expectations, only 17 per cent of these men had received an Islamic
education; the majority were products of secular schooling, with over 60 per
cent having received some tertiary-level education, and many spoke several
languages. Their learning was overwhelmingly in scientific and technical
disciplines, such as computer science, engineering and medicine, which in other
religious traditions too seem to correlate with fundamentalist religious
beliefs born of a desire to extrapolate knowledge from authority. Of course,
this could also simply reflect the prestige of utilitarian disciplines in
developing societies, although that would not explain why so many engineers and
mathematicians are Christian fundamentalists. Unlike other types of terrorist
group, some 83 per cent were married men, although only a few - above all bin
Laden and al-Zawahiri - insisted on imperilling their
wives and children. Marriage for the rest was simply a preliminary to having a
child before consigning both wife and offspring to a separate existence.
The Afghan civil war,
and the heterogeneous backgrounds of the leaders, led to visceral - and often
personal - splits over how AI Qaeda should be deployed. One conspicuous
casualty of these was Azzam, who in addition to trying to avoid Arabs fighting
Afghans had identified the Lion of the Panjshir, Ahmed Shah Massoud,
a minority Tajik, as the most impressive mujaheddin commander, at a time when
most Arabs were backing the Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatayar (initially supported by Pakistan). That sealed
Azzam's fate, as al-Zawahiri had been spreading lies that he was a CIA agent,
and Massoud had been one of the CIA's main clients.
On 24 November 1989, Azzam and two of his sons were killed by a roadside bomb
as they went to a mosque. AI-Zawahiri spoke sweetly at his funeral.
Having destroyed the
Soviets, as he pretentiously viewed it, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia as
the prodigal become all-conquering hero. The manner began to resemble those
self-righteous superannuated rock stars with delusions of grandeur who harangue
world leaders about Africa. He tried to interest the Saudi regime in his plans
to destroy the Marxist government of the newly minted Republic of Yemen. Yemeni
pressure resulted in the confiscation of bin Laden's passport. He warned Riyadh
of the threat posed by the secular dictatorship of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, even
as the latter was fabricating tensions in order to invade neighboring Kuwait.
When this took place, unleashing a reign of Iraqi terror on the inoffensive
little emirate, the desperate Saudis immediately availed themselves of US
offers of assistance to prevent Saddam from extending his campaign towards
their oilfields. Despite their bingepurchasing of Western
armaments, for which the ruling clique were rewarded with bribes and kickbacks,
the fact remained that the Saudi army numbered only fifty-eight thousand
troops, facing a higWy mechanized foe with a standing
army of one million. In order to prevent the stationing of defensive US forces
in the kingdom, bin Laden offered to raise a force of 'one hundred thousand'
from the Arab Afghan mujaheddin and the kingdom's own large numbers of male
idle. This offer was rejected as ridiculous. Bin Laden's mood was not improved
when the senior clergy issued fatwas to permit the stationing of Christian,
Jewish and female US forces in remote parts of the kingdom. Disgusted by his
homeland's craven dependence on infidels and females, bin Laden pulled strings
to have his passport returned and flew back to Peshawar. Meanwhile, Saddam
began to cloak himself not only in Arab nationalism - thereby securing the
support of a PLO that was always the unlucky gambler - but in Islamic
rectitude, inveighing against the corrupt rulers of Riyadh and proclaiming
'Allahu Akhbar' upon reaching the Kuwaiti shoreline.,
Although the multinational coalition expelled Saddam from Kuwait in Operation
Desert Storm, unleashing a tempest of high-tech violence that sickened even
those responsible for it, in the process Saudi Arabia forfeited its
unimpeachable Islamic credentials in the eyes of parts of the Muslim world. The
kingdom reaped what it had sown everywhere else, It faced unprecedented
domestic discontent, both from Saudis seeking to liberalise
the regime through such symbolic acts as allowing women drivers, and, by way of
a backlash, from radical Islamists who thought the kingdom needed to restore
Islamic fundamentals. When some of these extremists were expelled, Saudi
Arabia's British ally and arms supplier inevitably provided them with a safe
haven in London, where they could propagandise
amusing tabloid slanders against the Saudi ruling elite entitled 'Prince of the
Month'. These were people who would give an aide £1,000 to buy a drink, and
then. be offended when the aide offered something so mysterious as £990 change.
Even bin Laden was allowed to establish offices of a Reform and Advice
Committee in the British capital. For 'Londonistan' would soon provide a home
from home for more dangerous kinds of Islamist subversive, in one of the most
complacent, decadent and irresponsible acts of policy and policing of any
Western democracy, all undertaken under the delusion that there was an
unwritten 'pact of security' in which the hosts would be safe from attack. 32
One emerging rival to
a discredited Saudi Arabia was the military Islamist regime of Hassan al-
Turabi in the Sudan. The Western -educated al- Turabi advocated the Islamic
emancipation of women as well as reconciliation between Sunni and Shia, while
waging war on the African animists and Christians of the south. His regime
hosted an Arab and Islamic junket to rival the Saudi-dominated Organization of
the Islamic Conference, to some extent seeking to take over the mantle of the
dead Khomeini as a beacon of radical Islam. Who contacted whom remains in
doubt, but in 1991 bin Laden arrived in Khartoum. He cemented his ties with al-
Turabi by taking the latter's niece as his third wife. In a country ruined by
war and political turbulence, bin Laden's wealth counted. He deposited US$50
million in the Al-Shamal Islamic Bank, which virtually gave him control.33 He
gave the Sudanese an US$80 million loan to purchase wheat to prevent mass
starvation. He helped build an airport and a road from Khartoum to Port Sudan,
and invested in a variety of enterprises, including an Islamic bank, a bakery,
cattle stations, stud farms, and various import and export businesses. Like
many unsuccessful entrepreneurs bin Laden diversified beyond his ken, as when
he began importing bicycles fr~m Azerbaijan into a
country where nobody rode them. A series of farms doubled as Al Qaeda training
camps, for with the aid of Sudanese passports a small multinational army of
jihadi-salafists descended upon Sudan. It was one of
those curious, lull-like interludes before the storm. Bin Laden spent much time
horse-riding, strolling by the Nile and talking bloodstock, with Izzam al- Turabi, his host's son. Family affairs bulked
large too as he had all four of his wives, and their children, with him. One
wife elected to divorce him; there were concerns about a disabled child. Money
flew out at such an alarming rate that bin Laden began calling for
retrenchment. This led to rancid recriminations between different ethnic groups
among his supporters, and the defection of a Sudanese, ultimately into the
hands of the CIA, after he had embezzled a lot of money.
The Sudan period also
saw some tentative terrorist operations, especially after the head of Hizbollah's security service, Imad Mugniyah,
came to lecture in Khartoum, in the wake of which he set up a suicide bombing
course for Al Qaeda operatives in Lebanon. He had been the prime mover behind
the 1983 bombing of US and French peacekeeping troops in Beirut. The first
targets were two hotels in Aden where US troops often rested en route to Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. No Americans
were hurt in two bomb attacks which killed an Australian tourist and a Yemeni
waiter. Ten months later bin Laden's envoys, drawn like mosquitoes to a swamp,
watched as khat -crazed Somalia militiamen downed two US helicopters and
barbarously killed their crews and US commandos in the middle of Mogadishu. Bin
Laden would subsequently claim that it had been Al Qaeda men who shot the Black
Hawks down, although in reality his men had run away. Still, behind the
retrospective boasting, an idea took shape. His Egyptian mentor was not idle
either.
Al-Zawahiri had taken
the remnants of aI-Jihad to Khartoum because he
needed bin Laden's money to pay his men after a month-long fundraising trip to
California had yielded a paltry US$2,000. Although he was effectively on bin
Laden's payroll thereafter, al-Zawahiri ran his own operations in his native
Egypt. In August 1993 a suicide bomber on a motorbike tried to kill the
Egyptian interior minister. Three months later al-Zawahiri tried to murder the
prime minister, Atef Sidqi, with a car bomb designed
to coincide with the trials of a large number of jihadists. The bomb killed a
young girl instead, leading to cries of 'Terrorism is the enemy of God' at he!.
well-attended funeral. AI-Zawahiri would persist in these attacks until they
led to AI Qaeda being expelled from Sudan. The next level of violence followed
a series of events that remobilized the ummah in ways not seen since the
response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the wake of this, AI Qaeda
would emerge as the brightest star in a vaster nebula of violence.
For much of the 1980S
the struggle of the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviets eclipsed the
Palestinian cause as an emotional rallying point for many Muslims. Afghanistan
was where the Gulf money flowed, partly because events in the Middle East failed
to conform to the simple binary enmities that all myths require. Some
neighboring Arab states like Egypt and Jordan made their cold peace with the
Israelis, and the PLO entered into a protracted US-driven process while
continuing to practice terrorism. This climate changed with the two Palestinian
Intifadas. Together with wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, these provided endless
scenes of Muslim victimhood, and sacred causes which legitimized jihadist
violence.
The conflict between
Israelis and Palestinians has never been the sole conflict in the Middle East,
but the formula 'Jews = News' might lead one to imagine that. The world's
Muslims see things this way; judging by the indifference of Western Christians
to the predicament of their Maronite co-religionists in the Lebanon, a sense of
oecumene is much weaker among Christians despite
efforts by the Barnabas Trust to raise awareness. A brief recapitulation of
Palestinian history is needed to situate the two Intifadas. The PLO had
dissipated its energies in the civil wars of the Lebanon, resulting in the
ejection of its fighters from Beirut in August 1982 and a Syrian-backed mutiny
within the PLO against Arafat. In December 1983, the Saudis brokered a deal
with Syria, which was about to crush Arafat's northern redoubt in
Tripoli, permitting him and his men to withdraw by sea to Tunis. One minor
victory, in the midst of this final debacle, lay in the 4,500 Palestinian
prisoners the Israelis exchanged for six of their own captives as the IDF
pulled out of Lebanon. These would play a crucial role in events that put the
plight of the Palestinians back in the world's spotlight.
There was always,
strain between the PLO's foreign-based representatives, with their nice
apartments, suits and ties, and their hotel suites in Europe, and the
Palestinians in the occupied territories. To them the PLO counselled
'fortitude' or 'steadfastness' while Arafat vainly attempted to defend Fatah's
military presence in the Lebanon, whence liberation would come from outside.
Arafat may have enjoyed immense personal prestige among the Palestinians as the
father of their nation, but his madcap diplomatic gambits had become near
irrelevant to the grim experiences of young Palestinians in the occupied
territories.34
The Gaza Strip is
twenty-eight miles long and between three and eight miles wide, and in the
1980s was home to 650,000 Palestinians, including those crammed densely and
insalubriously into refugee camps, a burden resented by the indigenous Arab
population. There are also powerful clans, which operate somewhere between
extended families and Mafia gangs, with memberships of up to five thousand.
When it suits them, they adopt titles like Army of Islam to disguise the crime
of kidnapping for ransoms. Half the population were under fifteen, the result
of an exceptionally high birth rate, Unemployed young men hung around, angry
and bored, in the burning summer heat, a problem afflicting the Arab world from
the Gulf to the Algerian Maghreb, which teems with superfluous young men, a
problem common to many post-industrial Western societies. A skeletal Israeli
Civil Administration controlled the Strip with a rigorous inefficiency against
which there was little legal redress. The Strip was riddled with undercover
officers of the domestic security agency Shin Beth, on the lookout for pliant
informers. Although standards of education were good, thanks to external aid,
job opportunities were few, with the lucky hundred thousand or so performing
manual labor for neighboring Israelis. Demeaning treatment by Arab or Israeli
contractors, squeezing muscles as if they were assessing a mule, was followed
by degrading treatment at the exit checkpoints, where bored guards sometimes
gave meaning to their dull day by messing Arabs around with that irritating air
of nonchalant gun-toting punctiliousness. Every hour in a queue was an hour's
lost pay and less for a family to eat. Passive anti-Arab racism was as
consequential as the active variety which exists in Israel. The majority of
Israelis averted their eyes from the occupied territories and the festering
hatreds they were engendering. Their government regarded disturbances as
episodic and containable, the handiwork of malign extraneous influences.
The first Palestinian
Intifada, or uprising, originated in a sequence of bizarrely random even.ts that crowned months of tension. In May 1987 six
members of the terrorist group Islamic Jihad broke out of Gaza Central prison,
where they had been confined for such acts as killing Israeli taxi drivers.
Sunni admirers of the ayatollah Khomeini, Islamic Jihad's three hundred
militants were armed and directed by Islamist elements in Fatah's Western
Sector command. Although the fugitives were mostly run to ground, while on the
loose they continued their terrorist attacks, thereby acquiring folkloric kudos
among young people receptive to their calls for the liberation of Palestine as
the prelude to a wider Islamic revival. Even when Shin Beth agents ambushed and
killed three of the Islamic Jihad fugitives in October, they lived on in
handbills as 'ghosts who will pursue the Jews everywhere and for all time'.
(See also: Intifada and the new Arab Media)
The autumn months of
1987 saw a spate of stabbings of lone Israelis, culminating on 6 December when
an Israeli was knifed to death in Gaza's main market. Two days later, the
driver of an Israeli truck lost control and hit a car, killing four Palestinian
day laborers. A flyer connected the two events as an act of revenge by the
Israelis for the earlier stabbing, although the two episodes were wholly
unconnected. Thousands of mourners attended the funerals of the four men,
shouting 'Jihad! Jihad!' at the fifty-five Israeli reservists holed up in their
post in Jebalya, with its sixty thousand inhabitants,
the largest of the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. When patrols sallied forth
they came under hails of stones from demonstrators who would not disperse.
Further patrols the following day got into difficulties when one unit stopped
to pursue a rock-throwing teenager into a house, a move that resulted in their
being surrounded by an angry mob. The reservists had no equipment or training
to deal with a civilian riot. Warning shots in the air, which had become so
frequent during riots that they were ignored, were followed by shots at the
demonstrators' legs, and the death of a seventeen-year-old boy. Rioting spread
to other sites within the Gaza Strip, each flashpoint marked by acrid smoke
from piles of burning rubber tires. The uprising quickly spread to the West
Bank, where similarly only one in eight Palestinian graduates of the seven
universities luxury hotels, seemed symbolic of a wider, abrasive stance,
whether from American or Russian settlers seeking to establish facts on the
ground, or a Likud party whose rhetoric tilted rightwards to dark talk, on the
part of Israeli right-wing blow-hards, of
transferring the Palestinians to Jordan.
The storm-like force
of this 'rock revolution' caught both the Israelis and the PLO napping,
although the latter's functionaries hastened to take charge. The leadership of
the Intifada was elusively mysterious, while its foot soldiers quickly
encompassed laborers and devout shopkeepers. As they picked up the first
hundred or so putative ringleaders, Israeli interrogators were baffled to
discover how apolitical the demonstrators appeared to be. Most were ignorant of
even the most elementary PLO platforms. They were young male laborers, rather
than students, who had had enough of high-handed treatment by the Israelis.
Their tactics mutated too, from a straightforward riot to more sophisticated
passive resistance, involving a wholesale disengagement from the Israeli
economy. Bits of ground were used to grow vegetables, while chicken coops and
rabbit hutches proliferated on roofs.
N or did the Israelis
have a coherent strategy for dealing with riots that involved women and
children as well as young men. If it had once sufficed for an Israeli soldier
to expose himself to send prudish Palestinian women fleeing, now women appeared
to be egging on the demonstrating males. A fifth of the casualties of the first
three months' riots were among women, a further outrage to Muslim
sensibilities. Soon even grannies were involved, although as they were the
bearers of the inter-generational national flame this is perhaps unsurprising.
Historically,
revolutions often develop when a regime has many soldiers but few police; the
opposite was true of nineteenth-century London, which had plenty of police and
no 1848 revolution. The Intifada exposed a fatal blind-spot in Israel's
security capability. Soldiers were useless against women and children hurling
rocks or firing catapults from within large crowds. Under the massing lenses of
the world's photographers and TV, the Israelis blundered into a propaganda
disaster, which not only diminished international sympathy, but in its
simple-minded misrepresentation of events outraged the wider Muslim world.
Although Muslims did not stop to ponder this, Israel is a democracy which
allows open access to the media, in marked contrast to conditions prevailing in
the entire Arab world. Domestic opponents of the Israeli government gave
interviews to the world's press, avenues which do not exist for critics of the
governments of, for example, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco or Saudi Arabia, unless
they are among well-populated exiled diasporas. Inevitably coverage
concentrated on instances of Israeli brutality, without inquiring about the
ways in which prolonged exposure of conscripts and reservists to mob violence
was responsible for this. Arguably, Israel has never recovered from this public
relations disaster, acquiring the reputation of a thuggish bully among mainly
left-liberal and Christian circles, already fed up with Jewish moralizing about
the European Holocaust. Their ranks included an increasing number of liberal
Jews in the US too, although for them the Holocaust was alternatively a
surrogate religion.35
As the Intifada
spread to shopkeepers, the Israelis first forced them to keep their shops open,
and then welded up their shutters if they refused. This was a small price to
pay compared to what the rioters would have done to them. Many of these
shopkeepers were devout middleclass Muslims, a matter of import to how the
social composition of the uprising mutated from rock-throwing teenagers to more
respectable people. A few communities were subjected to collective punishments,
involving cutting power supplies and restricting the inflow of food. Although
it was infinitely preferable to shooting rioters, the decision to arm soldiers
with batons (manufactured by other Palestinians in Gaza) was a public relations
disaster, for the world's media focused on outrageous scenes of Israeli troops
kicking and bludgeoning Palestinians beyond anything resembling proportionate
force, as several cases of people with broken ribs, collarbones or arms that
came before Israeli courts confirmed. In the most disgraceful incidents,
Israeli high-school students on outings, or drivers ferrying officers about,
had been invited to beat up detainees inside army camps. The deployment of
rubber rounds was also a mixed blessing as these can be fatal when fired into
someone's face. Adverse press coverage, from Israeli and international media,
led frustrated ID F soldiers to take out their resentments on journalists and
photographers, who met nothing but willingness from the other side, an
arrangement that in turn impacted on how the Intifada was reported. The
uprising began to leach towards the hitherto quiescent eight hundred thousand Israeli
Arabs, who donated blood, medicines and money to the mounting casualties of the
uprising.
The PLO leadership
succeeded in re-establishing a vestige of remote control over the local Unified
National Command which steered the Intifada. This used secretly produced flyers
to co-ordinate the myriad grassroots committees that controlled each local
epicenter of riot. Local mainstays of both levels of command were students and
academics, especially from Bir Zeit university, and the thousands of security prisoners
Israel had released in exchange for six soldiers taken hostage, men who had
coolly taken the measure of their enemy while in jail 36 Many of these former
detainees joined the strong-arm security squads that proliferated to enforce
the Intifada among the Palestinians. Inevitably, the international media did
not descend in the same strength on victims of Palestinian violence, notably
the Arab 'collaborators', seventy of whom the Intifada's ad-hoc security units
killed, or the countless Arabs for whom there was no court to redress the
beatings and intimidation they received from Fatah and the Intifada's
grassroots supporters, and increasingly from a new actor amid the Days of Rage.
There was a further
Israeli own-goal, the result of an idea that both CIA and State Department
officials thought 'tried to be too sexy'. As the PLO's bureaucrats and
intellectuals clambered aboard the Intifada's bandwagon, a very different type
of organization bid for control The Civil Administration in the Gaza Strip had
encouraged Islamic fundamentalist groups as a way of confounding the
left-leaning PLO, especially if they eschewed the terrorism of Islamic Jihad. Defence minister Moshe Arens
recalled viewing the rise of radical Islamism 'as a healthy phenomenon'.
Right-wingers, by contrast, may have been hoping that the rise of Islamism
among the Palestinians would permanently scupper the lengthy talks known as the
Oslo peace-process by dividing the enemy.37
Funded by the
Jordanians, Israelis and Saudis, the number of mosques in Gaza rose from 77 to
160 within two decades, with forty new mosques constructed in the West Bank
each year. Despite warnings from moderate Gazan Muslims, the Israelis elected
to ignore the rampant anti-Semitism of the Islamic Congress, the local guise of
the Muslim Brotherhood. They regarded its charitable and educational surface
activities as preferable, in their steady incremental way, to the bomb and gun
attacks of Fatah terrorists. Even better, the Congress's supreme leader, the
quadriplegic sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin, regularly denounced Arafat and the PLO
leadership as 'pork eaters and wine drinkers' who even allowed women into their
senior councils. Born in 1938 into a middle-class farming family, Yassin grew
up in the al-Shati refugee camp. At twelve he was
injured in a wrestling bout; as his condition deteriorated he went from
crutches to a wheelchair. After studying at Cairo's Ain Shams university, he
returned to Gaza to work as a teacher, and religio-political
agitator, until his disabilities forced him to retire in 1984, by which time he
had had eleven children. That year the Israelis discovered an arms cache in the
mosque Yassin preached in, which flatly contradicted the strategy of
encouraging a pacific Islamist rival to Fatah terrorism. Although Yassin
received a fifteen-year jail sentence, he was one of those released in exchange
for Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon.38
Yassin led a
formidable Islamist network, which included al-Azhar university in Gaza, from
which Communist and Fatah rivals were expelled by stabbings and acid attacks in
an entirely symptomatic striving for totalitarian control. Everywhere the
network physically manifested itself: places selling alcohol, displaying female
models or playing pop music were smashed up, as was anyone presuming to eat
with his or her left hand. The intention was to extrude anything that smacked
of a Western hedonism and materialism which, the Islamists thought, was
destroying Palestinian resistance by corrupting its austere spirit. Unlike the
PLO, the Islamic Congress offered personal redemption as well as national
salvation; unlike the PLO it abandoned any attempts to camouflage hatred of
Jews. This was a starkly compelling platform for younger people rebelling
against both the social hierarchy and the politics of their parents'
generation, who could relate to the old sheikh in ways they could not with PLO
bosses as they sped from diplomatic junket to junket, or from sell-out to
sell-out, in their fleets of Mercedes, in between tripping the light fantastic
in villas and luxury hotels. Islamism licensed defiance of the older
generation, breaking the narrow bonds of clan or custom in favor of vaster
loyalties that at the same time were warmly personal through God.
Yassin was one of the
founders in February 1988 of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, whose
Arabic acronym was altered from HMS to Hamas, the word for zeal. The others
were sheikh Salah Shehada, from the Islamic
university in Gaza, an engineer called Issa al-Nasshaar,
a doctor, Ibrahim al-Yazuri, Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, another doctor from Khan Younis, a headmaster and
a schoolteacher, all aged between forty and fifty years 0ld.39 These people did
not use the same diplomatic niceties as the PLO. Arriving in Kuwait after being
expelled from Gaza, one of its leaders, Halil Koka,
baldly announced: 'Alhih brought the Jews together in
Palestine not to benefit from a homeland but to dig their grave there and save
the world from their pollution. Just as the Muslim pilgrim redeems his soul in
Mecca by offering up a sacrifice, so the Jews will be slaughtered on the rocks
of al-Aqsa.'
In its rivalry with
the PLO, Hamas began to dictate the pace of events in the Intifada, by
deliberately establishing its own cycle of demonstrations, shop closures and
strikes like an alternative calendar to that of the secular nationalists. It
issued a charter, which called the destruction of Israel a religious duty. The
charter was an odd document, managing as it did to call the Jews Nazis while
citing the forged 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' as proof of a Jewish conspiracy
for world domination from the French Revolution onwards. Even the Rotary Club
gets a discredit. To call the charter ahistorical would be to understate the
ways in which it collapsed time into an eternal struggle between Muslims, Jews
and 'Crusaders' from the West.40 Hamas's public attitude towards terrorism was
also changing, although its armed wing, and secret department for killing Arab
collaborators, actually predated the founding of the political movement. In
July 1988 it lauded a young Gazan who knifed two prison guards while visiting a
jailed relative. The organization had for several years had a small military
wing of 'holy fighters of Palestine' who, it now transpired, were planning
terrorist attacks on Israel.
That summer, the
Israelis struck first at Islamic Jihad by getting the US to force king Hussein
to eject the three Fatah chieftains who planned Islamic Jihad's operations. All
three were killed by a mystery Mossad car bomb shortly after reaching their
sanctuary in Cyprus. Next, Israel detained hundreds of Hamas activists,
confining them in Khediot detention camp, where they
continued to direct operations by passing and receiving messages through kisses
from their families. After initially sparing sheikh Yassin, the Israelis
finally detained him too. Despite his disabilities, he and one of his younger
sons seem to have been treated in a brutal manner unworthy of a quadriplegic,
including being slapped in the face and bashed on the head with a metal tray.
Repression only increased the domestic and international appeal of Hamas.
Its candidates began
to win elections on Palestinian professional bodies, while in 1990 Kuwait alone
donated US$60 million to Hamas as opposed to US$27 million to the PLO. The
PLO's attempts to neutralize Hamas by co-opting it on to the umbrella Palestinian
National Council, as it had done with the PFLP acnd
the Communists, failed when Hamas demanded half the Council seats. The PLO's
acceptance of Israel and public renunciation of terrorism through the Oslo
Accords deepened the rift between implacable Islamists and Arafat's more
diplomatically focused Fatah, however fake Arafat's subscription to
non-violence proved.
The human cost of the
first Intifada was considerable. By the summer of 1990, over six hundred
Palestinians had been killed by the IDF, including seventy-six children under
fourteen, with a further twelve thousand people injured. Ten thousand
Palestinians were held in detention camps and prisons, a shared experience that
served to radicalize even further those affected. On the Israeli side, eighteen
people had been killed, including ten civilians, with 3,391 injured, the
majority of them soldiers.
During the 1990s
Hamas increasingly made the running in terms of devastating terrorist attacks
within Israel. In addition to money coming from both Saudi Arabia and Iran,
Hamas built a vast charitable money laundering operation that had important
nodal points in the USA, where the Irish republican NORAID was said to have
shown how easy it was to raise dollars for foreign terrorism (though NORAID has
always denied the allegation that it funded the IRA). Unlike Fatah, or the
smaller Marxist Palestinian terrorist groups, Hamas used tight five-man cells
to insulate itself against traitors and people who caved in under Shin Beth's
notorious interrogation methods. It hit Israel at a very delicate spot when it
used killers disguised as Orthodox Jews and cars with yellow Israeli license
plates to abduct and kill IDF soldiers hitchhiking home. Hamas members also ran
over and abducted an Israeli border police sergeant, whose body - bearing signs
of strangulation and stabbing turned up in a desert gulley. In response to
this, Israel dumped 415 Hamas organizers in the hilly no-man's land on the
border with Lebanon. Predictably, the world's left-liberal media descended in
sympathy upon these middle-aged accountants, clerics, dentists, doctors and
lawyers, shivering in their coats and long-johns around dismal potages of
stewed lentils. They did not note that they were fed at night by Hizbollah and Iranian Pasadren
agents, who offered money and advanced terrorist training at state facilities
in Iran. The men on the hillsides included Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi,
Hamas's second in command until Yassin and he were assassinated, and Ismail Haniyah, its bear-like current leader.
A by-product of this
expulsion was Hamas's Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade, one
of whose first acts was to kill a young Shin Beth agent in a Jerusalem safe
house, ing axes, knives and hammers to do the job.
The flat looked like an abattoir afterwards. They also machine-gunned two
traffic policemen dozing in their idling patrol car. The decision to deny
Ayyash his chance to study in Jordan to support his wife and son became
fateful, as he quickly rose within Hamas as its stellar 'Engineer'. A first
attempt to bring the mores of Lebanon to Israel came in April 1993 when a
suicide bomber drove a huge bomb hidden in a VW transporter between two buses
parked at a crowded service station. Miraculously the blast mainly went
upwards, killing a Palestinian who worked in the centre,
and the bomber himself.
The murder by Baruch
Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born Jewish fanatic, of fifty-five Palestinian
worshippers in February 1994 led to the mobilization of Ayyash's talents in the
service of revenge. His chosen instrument was a nineteen-year-old Palestinian,
three of whose family had been killed by the Israelis. This youth drove an Opel
Ascona in front of a school bus in the town of Afula,
detonating five fragmentation grenades nestling within seven propane-gas
cylinders, in turn wrapped with thirteen hundred carpenters' nails. Nine young
people died and fifty-five were injured. On 13 April a twenty-one-year-old Arab
detonated a duffel bag on a bus in Hadera, killing six and injuring thirty. A
pipe bomb exploded as the rescuers arrived, in a double tap which indicated
some tactical sophistication. As Ayyash moved at each onset of dusk from safe
house to safe house, this otherwise modest man assumed the celebrity of a pop
star among young Palestinians. His deeds were celebrated by songs recorded on
cheap cassettes. Admirers sent wigs and women's clothing to help him with his
multiple disguises. In October, Ayyash dispatched a suicide bomber on a number
5 bus as it sped through the morning bustle of Tel Aviv's Dizengoff
district. The bomber detonated an Egyptian land mine which had been filled with
twenty kilograms of TNT. The bomb killed twenty-one Israelis, and the nails and
screws it spewed out also seriously wounded fifty people.41 Ayyash's relentless
campaign of suicide bombing began to impact on domestic Israeli politics in
that successive prime ministers engaged in peace talks with the Palestinians
had to visit the scenes of Ayyash's depredations, increasingly under the gaze
of hostile Jewish crowds. Ayyash was also training members ofIslamic
Jihad in bomb making, including Hani Abed, Islamic Jihad's star terrorist. Abed's sudden death in November 2004 after his Peugeot was
destroyed by a booby-trap bomb led to combined operations by Hamas and Islamic
Jihad with Ayyash as the mastermind. In January 2005 two men dressed in ID.fyniforms blew themselves up sequentially amid soldiers
returning from weekend leave. Twenty-one men died and sixty were critically
injured in this bombing which occurred at a junction near Ashmoret
maximum-security prison - home to sheikh Yassin. As a grim prime minister Rabin
surveyed the site of this atrocity, he was lucky that a third bomber had been
delayed, making it impossible for him to trigger a bomb hidden in a kitbag by
the second suicide bomber. This treble tap might have killed Rabin.
Massive Israeli
resources were put into killing Ayyash, who continued with a campaign of
suicide bombings that reduced going out to a form of Russian roulette for many
urban Israelis. Two senior Izzedine al-Qassam leaders
were killed when an apartment blew up in Gaza, and another senior figure was
snatched off a Nablus street after he failed to notice two sweaty Sudanese day labourers loitering outside a mosque who were Ethiopian
Falasha Shin Beth agents. Islamic Jihad's leader, Fathi
Shiqaqi, was assassinated by a Mossad team on Malta.
So self-confident was Mossad that, as the killer sped off on a motorbike and
caught a boat to Sicily, his colleagues hung around disguised as bystanders to
give Maltese police hopelessly inaccurate descriptions. Ayyash's weakness was
his family - his wife and son in Gaza, whom he regularly visited, while keeping
in touch with his mother and father by mobile phone. Shin Beth stepped up
pressure on his mother, with raids on the family home, and prolonged ten-hour
bouts of interrogation, designed to infuriate her son. Ayyash was also too
comfortable in his routines and grew sloppy.
He accepted the offer
of a safe house from a Hamas member in Gaza, unaware that the man's businessman
uncle, who owned the building, was on Shin Beth's payroll. Ayyash enjoyed the
joke that his apartment was a thousand yards from a major Israeli police
checkpoint. Unknown to him this was where his destiny was being settled. He had
also discovered mobile phones as an alternative to erratic and easily monitored
landlines. He changed them every few weeks, but not before having long calls
with his mother and father. On 25 December 1995 Ayyash proudly announced that
his wife had borne a second son, rashly telling his father they would speak
again on 5 January. In the interim, Shin Beth technicians adapted a mobile
phone, inserting fifty grams of RDX high explosive beneath the battery, and a
minute detonator that could be remotely triggered. The phone still weighed the
same and functioned normally. The phone was passed to his landlord's nephew who
said Ayyash could use it any time he liked. The landline in his apartment began
to play up. Ayyash told his father that this mobile number, 050-507-497, was
his 'preferred number. Freshly returned home at 4.30 a.m. after a night's
mystery activities, Ayyash removed his female clothes and settled down for a
few hours' sleep in his purple boxer shorts. The mobile rang at 8-40 a.m.; it
was his father. After exchanging a few words, the father found the line
disconnected. High in the sky above Gaza, an Israeli agent in a spotter plane
had detonated the shaped charge in the phone that took half of Ayyash's head
off. A hundred thousand gun-toting Palestinians attended his funeral, straining
for a last touch of his coffin. His landlord's uncle was slipped away by Mossad
to a new life in the US. An Israeli demolition team erased Ayyash's family home
in Riffat. Within four days of Ayyash's death, Hamas
suicide bombers killed fifty-seven people in an orgy of attacks that by May
1996 felled the government of Shimon Peres. His tough Likudnik successor,
Netanyahu, decided to strike at Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas in
otherwise friendly Jordan. In October 1997 two Mossad agents posing as Canadians
waylaid Mashaal in his Amman offices, spraying a lethal synthetic opiate into
his ear. This was designed to kill him, painfully, forty-eight hours later.
Both agents were caught by the Jordanians, who were outraged by this botched
violation of their sovereignty. Since king Hussein threatened to hang their
agents, the Israelis were forced to hand over an antidote to the poison, and to
release fifty Hamas prisoners including sheikh Yassin. When Israeli voters went
to the polls they dismissed Netanyahu in favour of
Ehud Barak, a war hero we have already encountered in his dealings with Black September in Beirut.
1 Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God. The Resurgence of Islam,
Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (University Park, Pennsylvania
1994) is an excellent comparative study of the resurgence of the three
Abrahamic faiths from the mid-1970S
2 Patrick Clawson and
Michael Rubin, Eternal Iran. Continuity and Chaos (London 2005) pp. 87-93
3 Mike Davis, Buda's
Wagon. A Brief History of the Car Bomb (London 2007) pp. 78-86 and Robert Baer,
See No Evil (London 2002) pp. 97ff.
4 See especially Charles
Allen, God's Terrorists. The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad
(London 2006) pp. 42ff.
Gilles Kepel, Jihad. The Trail of Political Islam
(London 2002) pp. 69-75
6 Jarret Brachman
(ed.), Militant Ideology Atlas (West Point 2006) Appendix 1 p.12
7 Steve Coil, Ghost
Wars. The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet
Invasion to September 10,2001 (London 2005)
pp. 24-37; Yaroslav Trofimov,
The Siege of Mecca (London 2007)
8 Brynjar
Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt. The Rise of an Islamic Mass
Movement (Reading 1998)
9 As discussed by Ian
Buruma and Avishai
Margalit, Occidentalism. A Short History of Anti- Western ism (London 2004)
10 For a good
explication of his views see Mary Habeck, Knowing the
Enemy. Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven 2006) pp. 35-7
11 For an informed
discussion see Gilles Kepel, The Roots of Radical
Islam (London 2005) pp. 36ff.
12 As starkly
depicted in Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building
(London 2007)
13 Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Mobilizing Islam. Religion, Activism, and
Political Change in Egypt (New York 2002) PP.36ff.
14 Ibid., pp. 145-55
15 For a brilliant
memoir of contemporary Egypt see Mary Anne Weaver, A Portrait of Egypt. A
Journey through the World of Militant Islam (New York 1999) which is especially
good on the Sadat years
16 See YoussefH. Aboul-Enein, 'Islamic
Militant Cells and Sadat's Assassination' Military Review (2004) pp. 1-8; and
Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York 2002) pp.
81-5
17 Lawrence Wright,
The Looming Tower. AI-Qaeda's Road to 9/11 (London 2006) pp.49-59
18 Martin Stone, The
Agony of Algeria (London 1997) p. 97
19 Benjamin Stora, Algeria 18]0-2000. A Short History (Ithaca 2001) pp.
171ff.
20 See Martin
van Bruinessen, 'Genealogies of Islamic Radicalism in
Post-Suharto Indonesia' at http://www.let.uu.nl/-Martin.van. Bruinessen! personal! publications! genealogies_islamic
- r
21 Wright, Looming
Tower p. 99
22 Coll, Ghost Wars pp.
81-2
23 Marc Sageman,
Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia 2004) p. 57
24 Sean 0' eill and Daniel McGrory, The Suicide Factory. Abu Hamza and
the Finsbury Park Mosque (London 2006) pp. 23-9 for
the two versions of this story. In the other, the engineer Hamza was tracing
the outlines of structures on the ground with a stick and triggered a land mine
25 J. Millard Burr
and Robert o. Collins, Alms for Jihad. Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic
World (Cambridge 2006) pp. 51-2. Alms for Jihad has been me subject of legal
action in London. Citing it does not imply that I endorse all its assertions
26 See interview in
Abdel Bari Atwan, The Secret History of AI-Qaeda
(London 2006) pp. 19-30
27 See Faisal Devji, Landscapes of Jihad. Militancy, Morality, Modernity
(London 2005)
28 Jason Burke,
AI-Qaeda. The True Story of the Radical Islam (London 2003) pp.77-8
29 For extensive
documentation on Al Qaeda see West Point CounterTerrorism
Center's Harmony Project. Employment Contract AFGP2002-600045 and Organisational arrangements AFGP-2002-00078 and AFG P
-2002-000080
30 Terry McDermott,
Perfect Soldiers. The 9/11 Hijackers (New York 2005) pp.107-19
31 Peter Brookes, A
Devil's Triangle. Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Rogue States
(Lanham, Maryland 2005) p. 102
32 Melanie Phillips,
Londonistan. How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within (London 2006)
33 Burr and Collins, Alms
for Jihad p. 94 34 For the above see mainly Tony Walker and Andrew Gowers,
Arafat. The Biography (London 2003) pp. 208ff.
35 Bernard Lewis,
'The Other Middle East Problems' in his collection From Babel to Dragomans.
Interpreting the Middle East (London 2004) pp. 332-42
36 Ze'ev Schiff and
Ehud Ya'Ari, Intifada. The Palestinian Uprising and
Israel's Third Front (New Yark 1989) p. 154
37 David Pratt,
Intifada. The Long Day of Rage (Glasgow 2006) p. 51
38 As well as
numerous obituaries of the sheikh, see Matthew Levitt, Hamas. Politics,
Charity, and Terrorism in the Service ofJihad (New
Haven 2006) pp.34-7
39 Zaki Chehab, Inside Hamas. The Untold Story of Militants,
Martyrs and Spies (London 2007) p. 23 and Shaul
Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas. Vision, Violence, and
Coexistence (New York 2006)
40 'Hamas Covenant
1988' in the Avalon Project edition available at
www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/ hamas.htm pp. 1-25 and as an appendix: in
Mishal and Sela, The Palestinian Hamas pp. 175-99
41 Samuel M. Katz,
The Hunt for the Engineer. How Israeli Agents Tracked the Master Bomber
(Guilford, Connecticut 2002) is a brilliant account of Ayyash's career
42 Pratt, Intifada
pp. 108ff
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