Obama and Osamarama

The joke Donald Trump is demanding to see Osama’s death certificate will wear thin very quickly if the US doesn’t scuttle rumours he is still alive. According to the president, America finally got its man. The body of Osama Bin Laden was taken into “US custody” after a firefight in Pakistan on the weekend. After facial identification and DNA matching was confirmed, he was buried within 24 hours of his death which was according to Muslim tradition but the burial took place at sea, which wasn’t. Osama was responsible for thousands of deaths, but so were the people who killed him. The least the Americans could to do was to bury him with dignity.

I don’t jump for joy Bin Laden is dead but I don’t mourn him either. His 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania showed no respect for neutrals in his war. His actions killed over 200 people mostly Kenyans and Tanzanians and were designed to do one thing: goad the US into retaliation by waging an unwinnable win in Afghanistan. Backed by Pakistan he succeeded handsomely, surviving ten years as the world hide-and-seek champion before intelligence possibly produced under torture finally gave the US enough clues to his whereabouts.

Born in Riyadh in 1957 of a Yemeni father and Syrian mother, Osama was the inauspicious forty-third of fifty-three siblings. His father Muhammad Bin Laden was a wealthy builder and the family was adopted by the Saudi Royal Family after Muhammad died in a plane crash. Osama was educated at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah where he studied Islamic trends under Muhammad Qutb (brother of the Egyptian Father of Islamism Sayyid Qutb) and Abdullah Azzam. Azzam encouraged Osama to join the Afghan mujahideen in 1982 and fight against the Soviets. Osama set up a database of Arab fighters he called al qaeda – meaning the base or foundation.

Osama spoke out against the US invasion of Iraq in 1990 because it put troops on Saudi soil. It was a sacrilege to have the infidel so close to Mecca. He emigrated to Pakistan, Afghanistan and then Sudan to organise a new jihad against the foreign invader. From Sudan, Osama launched his first attack – on Yemen - and also fought against the Americans in Mogadishu in 1993. Under increasing international pressure in 1996, Sudan president Bashir told him he could no longer protect him from assassination. After meeting Mullah Omah, he moved to Afghanistan and threw his weight behind the Taliban. That year he also sent his declaration of war against Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holiest Sites to British based Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan.

Atwan was one of the last to interview Bin Laden at the Tora Bora Caves in the winter of 1996. He was struck by how modestly Bin Laden lived. His austerity contributed to an air of a champion of revolution and rebellion to many Muslims. After the Taliban overran the Northern Alliance, they refused Americans demands to hand him over. These requests continued "until just days before” 9/11.

The Taliban wanted proof of his involvement in criminal offences; the US demurred. They would never offer the Taliban a face-saving way out of the impasse and continued to insist bin Laden face trial in the US justice system. Even after 9/11, the Taliban offered to handover Bin Laden. Spokesman Amir Khan Muttaqi said in late October 2001, "we do not want to fight. We will negotiate. But talk to us like a sovereign country. We are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama’s involvement, but they have refused. Why?"

The answer was that Osama had nothing to do with the American demand, nor was there any convincing evidence linking him to 9/11. The PNAC had their sights set on war in Afghanistan and Iraq and capturing Osama would not aid that outcome. But the Americans seriously underestimated him. As Guy Rundle said, for Osama surviving the war by three months was an achievement, but 10 years was a major victory. “Bin Laden won this one, every year since 2001, a shelf of premierships, the phantom West versus the phantom al-Qaeda,” Rundle said. “If he lost in the Arab heartland, where it matters, it's because, as a conspiracy rather than a movement, it was always going to, as a real historical process took over there.”

Though many in the Arab world supported Bin Laden as a hero after 9/11, his reputation has been nosediving in recent years. Al Qaeda's indiscriminate attacks on civilians in Jordan and Iraq gradually alienated many Muslims as did his links to hardline Wahhabi extremism. The recent wave of Arab pro-democracy revolutions have also left the terror groups feeling irrelevant. Paul Mason at the BBC said Osama died politically on 25 January due to the events in Tahrir Square in Cairo.

His real death was not long in coming. The CIA found him through a Libyan named Abu al-Libi, who was with Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Al-Libi later fled to Peshawar. A courier named Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan contacted al-Libi and asked him to work for Bin Laden. Jan wanted al-Libi to collect donations, organise travel and distribute funds for families in Pakistan. In 2003 al-Libi moved to Abbottabad and worked the link back to Peshawar. The US captured Al-Libi two years later and he was among a network of couriers the CIA interrogated to pin down Bin Laden’s whereabouts.

He was found in the flash suburb of Bilal in the city of Abbottabad named for British army officer General Sir James Abbott. Abbottabad is a military-cantonment city in the hills north of Islamabad, where much of the land is controlled or owned by the Pakistani Army and retired Army officers. Here Osama was housed under state control safe from international action, protected by the human shield of a sympathetic Pakistani military and ISI, or so he thought.

On Sunday, US helicopters stormed the area. One eye witness stood on his roof and saw people attacking a house where women and children could be heard screaming and crying. The women and children were loaded onto a chopper with “some other stuff” and flown away. “Geronimo EKIA,” the mission team reported back to the White House and Obama went on air at 11.55pm Eastern Time to tell Americans the news.

Obama said his troops had killed Osama. The justification was 9/11, “carried out by al Qaeda - an organization headed by Osama bin Laden, which had openly declared war on the United States and was committed to killing innocents in our country and around the globe." Death was the simplest solution, as Robert Fisk said a court would have worried more people than Bin Laden. America never wanted more than his body “in custody”.

Obama would never admit this but did say an intelligence lead in August led them to Osama in Abbottabad. “Last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.” Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA who ran the mission, was rewarded with the Defence Secretary job to replace the retiring Republican appointee Robert Gates.

Now other Republicans want some of the credit for this “justice”. It was the strict laws and waterboarding Bush put in place, they argued, that laid the groundwork for the capture. As left-leaning Talking Points Memo acidly put it, the credit had to extend to two presidents: one who didn't find bin Laden, and one who did.

It is well Obama soak it up while he can. This was the night he probably won the 2012 election he was probably going to win any way. Or perhaps not. For everyone saying this was a massive boost for Obama there were others who said it was not. Of more importance is what does Osama’s death do Obama’s attitude to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Salman Rushdie has called on the world to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. The narrative propelling the $1.3 trillion war on terror and the Western presence in Afghanistan will almost definitely prove harder to sustain. The truth of Bin Laden’s death will also struggle against the weight of conspiracy theories with Pakistan Taliban among those saying he is still alive.

It is not just the theorists having loopy moments, the media are too. There were fake pictures and a fake quote but Twitter bignoted itself best by breaking the news in “a CNN moment”. The firefight was live tweeted by someone who had no idea what he was seeing and then broken by Keith Urbahn, Rumsfeld’s chief of staff who heard rumours of the operation.

This is not the first time the activity has been conflated with the tool, but it was easily the biggest. Within hours, the Internet was awash with speculation and memes. If social media really is the future of news it is a serious worry. As Twin Laden pointed out (and I was guilty of several of these sins in the last 24 hours) we “only deal with news through a prism of pop culture references, manic hysteria and unfettered ego”. Osama’s death will end up adding to the myth of his life.

New Al Qaeda video affirms Bin Laden is still alive

Al Qaeda have released a new video marking the seventh anniversary of 9/11 which claims Osama Bin Laden and former Taliban leader Mullah Omar are both alive and well. The 90 minute video also contains speeches by Al Qaeda’s number two Ayman al-Zawahiri and the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq Abu Ayyub al-Masri, (also known as Hamza al-Muhajir) as well as a reading of the will of 9/11 Flight 93 hijacker Saeed al Ghamdi. Al Qaeda’s video production arm As Sahab released the footage in full on jihadi websites this week after Al Jazeera had broadcast excerpts on 8 September.

The full video comes just days after two suicide car bombers claimed the lives of 17 people (including 6 attackers) at the US embassy in Sana the capital of Yemen. A group calling itself Islamic Jihad has claimed responsibility for the attack but the group is almost certainly linked to Al Qaeda. Bin Laden’s father Muhammad was born in Yemen and Osama remains extremely popular in the Gulf state. A large percentage of his followers and all his bodyguards are Yemenis or from the nearby Assir region of southern Saudi Arabia. Al Qaeda’s first ever attack bombed US soldiers in Aden in 1991. And one of its most notorious attack before 9/11 was on the USS Cole also at Aden in October 2000 in which 17 American sailors died.

The British based Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan would not be surprised to hear the news that Osama is still alive. Atwan is the editor of the London based Arabic newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi and the author of the book The Secret History of Al Qa’ida. He is also one of the few Western based journalists to interview Bin Laden in person. He tells the story of that hair-raising interview in the first chapter of his book. After a secret and dangerous trip via Peshawar and Jalalabad, he arrived at the Tora Bora caves in the Winter of 1996. Atwan complained to Bin Laden how cold it was in the caves. Bin Laden said he was lucky; when the UK Independent journalist Robert Fisk arrived, it was Summer and the caves were infested by scorpions.

Atwan was struck by how modestly Bin Laden lived. His manner, austere living habits, and renouncement of comfort and wealth have all contributed to his air of a champion of revolution and rebellion to many Muslims. He was born in Riyadh in 1957, of a Syrian mother and a self-made construction contractor father Muhammad Awad bin Laden. Muhammad was from the Hadramaut region of southern Yemen whose inhabitants are renowned for their business prowess. Bin Laden senior fit the mould and rose from being a labourer to a billionaire presiding over the largest construction empire in the Arab world.

Osama was the forty-third of fifty-three siblings and the family was adopted by the Saudi Royal Family after his father died in a plane crash. Osama was just 10 years old. He was educated at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah where he studied Islamic trends under Muhammad Qutb (brother of the Egyptian Father of Islamism Sayyid Qutb) and Abdullah Azzam. Azzam was a highly influential Palestinian-born scholar and theologian, and a central figure in preaching for jihad.

Azzam became Osama’s mentor and encouraged him to join the mujahideen rising in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion. He moved there in 1982 and became a key role in fundraising and organising Saudi volunteers for the jihad. He set up his own camps and created a register to inform families of those who were killed. The name of the register was Al Qaeda (“the base” or “the foundation”). After the Soviets withdrew in 1989, he and Azzam fled back to Saudi Arabia, having been warned by Pakistani intelligence that the pair were a target for CIA assassination.

The Saudis placed him under house arrest in 1990 after he was too outspoken about the threat from the “godless regime” of Saddam Hussein. He also predicted Iraq would invade Kuwait. When the panicked Saudis invited US troops into the country after his prediction came to pass, Osama described the deployment of the “infidel soldiers” as the “biggest shock of his life”. He used his royal connections to get a passport and moved to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan where he prepared to organise a new jihad against the invaders of his homeland.

After threats on his life, Osama moved to Sudan in 1991 where he was made welcome by the Bashir Islamic regime which had taken power in a coup two years earlier. Osama invested $200 million in Sudanese infrastructure including an airport in Port Sudan and the 400km Defiance Highway between Port Sudan and the capital Khartoum. From here, he launched his first attacks against the US, the Yemen incident mentioned earlier and he was also instrumental in bringing down two Black Hawk helicopters in the US 1993 mission in Mogadishu.

But under increasing international pressure, Sudan looked for a way to expel its increasingly dangerous guest. In 1996 Bashir told him Sudan could no longer protect him from assassination. Osama took the hint and moved his operation back to Afghanistan. The country was then in chaos as the Taliban were taking city after city. Osama was initially wary but changed his mind after meeting Mullah Omar in Spring 1996. He gave his bayat (pledge of allegiance) to Omar and threw his forces into battle against the Northern Alliance. The safe haven provided by Omar’s successful capture of Kabul allowed Osama to do longer term planning against his implacable enemy – the US.

That year, he faxed Atwan’s newspaper his declaration of war against the US, which he called the “jihad against the Americans occupying the land of the two sacred places” (Mecca and Medina). Atwan believes that planning for 9/11 started in 1998. Under the influence of his Egyptian 2IC Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Osama saw the advantages of the military strategy of suicide bombing. They looked for recruits with religious zeal, courage, mental agility, a clean criminal record, and those with no spouses or family to support. There were hundreds of eager applicants.

Al Qaeda are also sophisticated users of the Internet. Electronic jihad is a “sacred duty” in which believers are called on to defend Islam and also hack into, destroy American and Israeli websites. Jihadi groups have four elements: a leader, religious guide, members and IT specialists. Prior to his death in 2006, Iraqi Al Qaeda leader Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi gained enormous status almost entirely due to his use of the Internet. He averaged nine communications a day and released numerous videos on the Net. Al Qaeda is now believed to have almost five thousand websites promoting the movement.

Al Qaeda has been mostly extremely successful in meeting its goals. Its 9/11 operation cost $500,000 to fund and caused billions in financial damage. American troops left Saudi Arabia in 2003 and a year later Spain overthrew its pro Iraqi invasion right-wing government just three days after the Al Qaeda killed 200 people in the Madrid bombings. Osama has tapped into the worldwide Muslim umma, most of whom see him as a David figure, bringing down the American Goliath. As Atwan says, not many Muslims necessarily want Wahhabi-style caliph rule that Osama says he wants to bring back, but that is not an issue for now.

Osama is hoping to stretch American hegemony in the Middle East to breaking point (much like how the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989). Then, he believes, it will be easy overthrow the weak and corrupt Arab and Gulf regimes once US power in the region is destroyed. As Atwan concludes matter-of-factly and chillingly “as long as connections continue to be made between US policy, actual or perceived, and the continuing instability in much of the Middle East, we can expect that Al-Qaeda will grow stronger and expand the sphere of its operations”.

Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism: a toxic combination

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is in the news for yet another of its barbaric practices. This time it is the story of a woman about to be executed on a charge of witchcraft. The court convicted her on the evidence of a man’s claim she had made him impotent and also that of a divorced woman who reportedly returned to her ex-husband during the month the accused woman predicted. The woman, Fawza Falih, also made a forced confession which she later retracted. She told the court she was illiterate and did not understand the document she was forced to fingerprint.

Human Rights Watch said the charges were absurd and had no basis in Saudi law. Saudi Arabia does not have a written penal code, and “witchcraft” is not a defined crime. HRW have called on King Abdullah to halt the execution. They said judges never investigated whether her confession was voluntary or reliable nor did they investigate her allegations of torture. They also did not enquire whether she could have been responsible for the supernatural occurrences she supposedly did. Instead, the court judges sentenced her to death for the benefit of “public interest” and to “protect the creed, souls and property of this country.”

Of one thing there is no doubt and that is the creed, souls and property of Saudi Arabia need protection; but the danger does not come from witchcraft. The real problem with the oil-rich kingdom is the nefarious alliance between the ruling House of Saud and its venomous court of Wahhabi scholars, the “uluma” that is a key part in Saudi decision making. Not only do the uluma rule on the law, they are also responsible for spreading a toxic brand of intolerant Islam that is spreading across the world. Funded by the world’s largest oil reserves, it is an alliance that has directly led to the rise of Al Qaeda and 9/11 and is responsible for sponsoring an education of hatred in Saudi-funded madrassas in the Third World and beyond.

The story of this alliance and its terrible consequences for the world is brilliantly told in Dore Gold’s “Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia supports the new global terrorism” (2003). Gold is a partisan: He is an Israeli and the president of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs who served as Israel’s ambassador to the UN between 1997 and 1999. But he is also superbly knowledgeable about Greater Middle East affairs. He was a diplomatic envoy to the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf States and the Palestinian Authority. He also has a PhD in International relations and Middle Eastern studies and is a world-renowned expert on Saudi Arabia.

Gold's thesis in Hatred’s Kingdom is America has grossly overlooked Saudi Arabia’s role in the promotion of international terrorism. In fact, says Gold, Saudi is responsible for Middle-Eastern inspired terror. The cause is its dominant religious creed: Wahhabism, which regards all non Wahhabists (not just non-Muslims) as “mushrikun” (polytheists), or idolaters. According to Saudi religious textbooks, mushrikun have no rights to live and it is permissible to “demolish, burn or destroy” the bastions of these infidels. Gold says the Wahhabists who preach this dangerous nonsense are not extremist “Saudi versions of the Ku Klux Klan”, but are instead the product of Saudi mainstream society and culture and are sponsored by the government.

The founder of Wahhabism was Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab who was born around the start of the 18th century in a village in east central Arabia. His father was a qadi (a religious judge) and he instilled a love of learning of Islamic law in his son. Wahhab travelled to Medina where he learned the Hanbali Islamic tradition and later moved to Baghdad and Damascus where he learned the ways of the Shiites and the Sufi. He became an exponent of mystical Sufism but later abandoned it. On his return to his homeland, he announced that Islam had been corrupted by foreign influences. In his Book of Tawhid, he expounded on his view of Islam which was a rejected of all Gods except Allah. He also denounced the veneration of tombs as a Christian influence. In the name of strict monotheism, he launched a jihad against the mushrikun (polytheists).

Wahhab antagonised the local uluma (religious leadership) with his extremist ideas and was expelled from his home town. He sought refuge from the ruler of Riyadh Muhammad ibn Saud. Wahhab married Saud’s daughter and the two men launched an alliance that survives to this day. Saud would provide military protection for Wahhab while the latter would legitimise Saudi rule over local Bedouin tribes subjugated by jihad.

The Wahhabists were brutal to their enemies. If captured, they were offered the choice of conversion to Wahhabism or death. Unlike most Muslims, they gave no respite to the “people of the book” (Jews and Christians). Wahhab himself advocated an anti-Christian and Jewish agenda describing believers as “sorcerers who believed in devil worship”. Wahhabi writings elevated jihad to the “ultimate manifestation of Islam”. When ibn Saud died in 1765, the cause was taken up with relish by his son Abdul Aziz. Wahhab himself died in 1791 but the Saudi empire expanded in his memory. In 1802 an army of Wahhabists attacked the southern Iraqi city of Kerbala. There they massacred 4,000 Shiites and sacked the shrine of the tomb of Hussein, the martyred grandson of the prophet Muhammad.

The Saudis stormed Mecca in 1803 where again they attacked shrines including the chapel on Jebel Nur mountain where Muslim traditions says the angel Gabriel brought the Koran to Muhammad. Controlling the entire Arab peninsula they were now a serious threat to the Ottoman Empire. The empire fought back led by the Albanian born governor of Cairo Muhammad Ali who launched a series of raids across the Red Sea. French trained Egyptian forces retook the cities of Mecca and Medina and captured King Abdullah in 1818 to end the first Saudi reign.

But the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance was to survive this setback. After the Egyptian army was forced to withdraw to bases in the 1840, the Saudis retook Riyadh with Wahhabism firmly seated at the centre of power. This second Saudi state was terminated in the late 1860s by an Ottoman Empire revived by the newly built Suez Canal. But this was a temporary respite for the Sick Man of Europe. Britain was starting to assert its influence on the region. They struck an alliance with a new Saudi leader. Abdul ibn Saud returned to power in Riyadh in 1903 with help from Lord Curzon’s naval flotilla in the Persian Gulf.

Ibn Saud co-opted his old family allies the Wahhabists and provided them with funds and religious instructors. In World War I, Britain took control of all of the old Ottoman Arab territories and established a relationship with Sharif Hussein, the Hashemite ruler of Mecca since 1908. The end of the war meant that the map would need to be redrawn to establish the border between Hussein’s and Saud’s kingdoms. Wahhabi armies terrorised its neighbours but were hemmed in by the airpower of the RAF.

When the new Turkish republic abolished the Ottoman caliphate, King Hussein proclaimed himself caliph. An enraged Saud declared a jihad against the Hashemites. The war was enthusiastically pursued by the Wahhabists who wanted to “purify” the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Hussein abdicated and his son Ali fled to Iraq in 1925. Seeing the changed landscape, Britain transferred the northern cities of Maan and Aqaba to Hashemite Transjordan. Saud returned in triumph to Mecca.

The greater Muslim world was appalled by the Saudi government of the Holy Cities. Indian Muslims called for an internationalisation of the Hijaz area and the Egyptians also voiced their disapproval. Ibn Saud succeeded in calm Muslim fears by declaring they had nothing to fear from Wahhabism. But quietly the movement was building up a new head of steam. In 1928 Muhammad Rida set up a new militant movement in Cairo called the Muslim Brotherhood. Rida espoused Wahhabi doctrines and was now about to export them overseas.

Back in Arabia, ibn Saud was suffering from the world’s Great Depression. With his country on the verge of bankruptcy he signed a deal in 1933 with Standard Oil of California (SOCAL) to grant them a huge oil concession in Eastern Arabia. They struck oil five years later and Saudi royalties grew fast as war demand grew. Saudi royalties went from $3 million in 1938 to $10 million in 1946. By 1952 that had increased to $212 million. The Wahhabi uluma were not happy about the “infidels” in their country but bought ibn Saud’s argument they were helping to extract the material resources “placed by Allah” underneath the land.

In return for their support, ibn Saud allowed the Wahhabis a monopoly over education and religious policies. After ibn Saud died in 1953, his weak second son, Saud became king. Saud terminated the US airbase in Dhahran and plunged his country’s finances into disarray. The uluma deposed him in 1964 in favour of his younger brother Faisal. Faisal’s mother was a direct descendent of the original Muhammad Wahhab and her father was a major Wahhabi scholar.

As a counterweight to the secular Arabism espoused by Egypt’s Nasser, Faisal turned to Islam. Arabia established the Muslim World League dedicated to the spread of the religion. The League became a mouthpiece for Saudi Arabia, run by Saudi government employees and was an effective promoter of Wahhabi Islam. At home, Faisal created new government ministries in 1970 and the Wahhabists won control of justice and education, including universities. The entire generation of Saudis born in the 1960s grew up on Wahhabi doctrines.

Faisal gave renewed powers to the mutawain (religious police). They scrutinised public behaviour, ensured men and women did not mingle, checked for suitable attire, and made sure people attended public prayers. Thanks to Faisal they were given back powers of arrest, which they had lost in the 1930s under ibn Saud. Meanwhile Saudi oil revenue was skyrocketing. They earned $22.6 billion in 1974 and funds were becoming available for the export of Wahhabism.

Riza’s Muslim Brotherhood had suffered under Nasser in Egypt and many members had fled to Saudi Arabia. There they became prominent scholars and were influential in the creation of the Islamic University of Medina. The Brothers had a great deal of affinity with the Wahhabists. The university was directly controlled by Wahhabi clerics and it quickly became a hotbed of Islamic militancy. Later 85 percent of the university’s students would be foreigners, making it a crucial tool for the export of Wahhabi ideas.

The university also imported Muslim brotherhood ideas especially from the hugely influential Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb. Qutb spend some time in the US where he became extremely anti-American. He predicted a clash of civilisations between Islam and the West which Islam would win. Although executed by Nasser, Qutb’s call for a militant jihad was taken to Arabia by his brother Muhammad who taught Islamic studies in Jeddah. In the 1980s Saudi Arabia welcomed another Egyptian radical Ayman al-Zawahiri who had been jailed for a part in Sadat’s assassination. Later he would leave for Afghanistan where he became Al Qaeda’s second-in-command and chief ideologue.

A lesser known but equally important import was the Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam. Azzam was also a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and he joined Muhammad Qutb at Jeddah University. There Azzam and Qutb were both teachers of a young Saudi student named Osama Bin Laden. Azzam was instrumental in the resurgence of jihad as a central facet of Islamic fundamentalism and said it was “obligatory on all Muslims”. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan was the trigger Azzam needed to preach jihad. He went to Pakistan where he ran the Muslim World League office as a terrorist front. This office would become a feeder for Bin Laden’s later network. Although successful in removing the Russians, he was killed in 1989 by a car bomb, probably planted by Afghanistan’s pro-Soviet intelligence services.

Azzam’s effective successor was his Saudi student Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden was heavily influenced by his Wahhabi upbringing. He was immersed in officially sanctioned Saudi religious texts that labelled Christians as “polytheists” which effectively removed the protection they were owed as “people of the book”. This teaching also influenced Juhaiman al-Utaibi who attacked Mecca’s grand mosque in 1979 taking hundreds of hostages. He declared himself to be the “mahdi” (guided one). Al-Utaibi held a particularly pure strain of Wahhabism believing Muslims should not have any contact with the kufar (infidels) and called the Saudi regime corrupt. After two weeks, Saudi troops stormed the mosque and killed and executed the kidnappers.

However the rattled government began to take on al-Utaibi’s ideologies. Women were banned from appearing on television. Music disappeared from the media. Stores closed during daily prayers and the religious police were granted further prohibitive powers. Wahhabists were angered by the US build up in the region in response to the Iranian revolution and the Carter Doctrine. The Saudis supported the Iraqi Sunni Saddam Hussein in his war against the hated Shiite Iranian leadership. Meanwhile they poured $4 billion towards the Afghan mujahideen via Azzam’s Peshawar office. After Azzam was killed, Bin Laden evolved the movement into Al Qaeda. Bin Laden was dedicated to the task of spreading Wahhabism in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia supported the Taliban militia who had similar radical ideas about Islam. The Saudis were one of just three countries (Pakistan and UAE were the others) to recognise the Taliban rule of Afghanistan.

But the biggest impact to the homeland was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Overnight, Saudi Arabia’s 1980s ally was now its primary enemy. King Fahd (who inherited the throne after Faisal’s assassination by his nephew in 1975) consulted the uluma and reluctantly allowed an American force into the country. After the 1991 Gulf War thousands of US troops roamed the country even setting up their own radio station which could be picked up across the kingdom. Their presence fed a huge sense of anti-Americanism. The uluma began to tell Fahd the real enemy was not Iraq – but the west. In 1994 Fahd denied Bill Clinton’s request to agree to host a US armoured brigade.

Bin Laden meanwhile had moved to Sudan on the invite of local Islamic leader Hassan al-Turabi. There he established contacts with Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Hamas and Algeria’s Front Islamique du Salut (FIS). Bin Laden sent forces to oppose the US in Somalia and an affiliated group bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. He also attacked King Fahd as not sufficiently Wahhabi. But he was not in favour of the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy. He supported Crown Prince Abdullah who succeeded Fahd in 1995. Abdullah was noticeably less pro-Western. In 1998 Bin Laden called for a jihad “against Jews and Crusaders” and lambasted the American “occupation” of the lands of Islam’s holiest places. He was supported within Saudi Arabia by mosque sermons which were full of anti-Jewish themes. The Clinton administration put pressure on Sudan to extradite Bin Laden but Saudi Arabia refused to take him. He was expelled to Afghanistan instead in 1996.

In 1998 Al Qaeda struck the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing 240 people. Two years later they bombed the USS Cole in port in Yemen. Saudi citizens and money were responsible for all three attacks. On 11 September 2001, 15 Saudi citizens and four others hijacked four airplanes attacking the Pentagon and destroying the World Trade Center at the second attempt. Saudi Arabia denied all involvement. Yet within days of the attack, Saudi Sheik Hamud al-Shuaibi issued a fatwa announcing “whoever supports the infidel against Muslims is considered an infidel”.

The Saudis had a deep PR problem and they paid US advertising company Burston-Marsteller $2.7 million to place ads in American media depicting Saudi Arabia as a staunch ally. They paid retainers to Congress insiders and paid Patton Boggs to educate congressmen and their staff on issues of concern to the kingdom. Back home however, a confidential poll of Saudi men found 95 percent approval of Bin Laden’s cause. Meanwhile, the religious police showed their contempt for human values when in 2002 they prevented Saudi firemen from rescuing 15 girls caught in a school fire in Mecca because they were not wearing their headscarves.

Though Abdullah took responsibility for girl’s education away from the Wahhabists in response to the Mecca fire, he cannot afford to unduly rock the boat. The uluma’s power remains strong. Wahhabi hatred remains at the core of Saudi society. Through the Muslim World League and the sponsorship of madrassas and Islamic universities they have taken this peculiarly Arabic version of Islam across the globe. Oil money has spread what Bernard Lewis called “this fanatical, destructive form of Islam” all over the Muslim world and among Muslims in the west. Without oil, they would have remained a lunatic fringe. Instead they are a serious world power dedicated to hatred. And a poor illiterate witch pays the same price for this hatred as the Western mushrikun.

Bases Covered

In his book “Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern”, the English philosopher John Gray argues that the human condition is not a cakewalk towards modernism and enlightenment. Gray examines Al Qaeda to show that it is not a throwback to medieval times but rather a fluid modern hybrid of Islam reinterpreted in the light of contemporary Western thought.

Al Qaeda is Arabic for “the base” but it can also mean that very modern conceit: “the database”. They use satellite phones, laptop computers and encrypted websites. They use satellite TV to mobilise support in the Arab world. Its organisation is the cellular structure of drug cartels and resembles a virtual business corporation. Al Qaeda is a modern global multinational company.

Their origins lie in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The CIA with the help of Pakistani’s equally shadowy ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) bankrolled the mujahideen resistance. With Abdullah Azzam, Osama Bin Laden was a founder member of Maktab al-Khadamāt (MAK) which raised funds in the US and elsewhere to support the war effort against the Soviets throughout the 1980s. As the decade went on, it was increasingly clear that this was a war the Red Army could not win. They bowed to the inevitable and announced their withdrawal in 1987. When the war ended Azzam and Bin Laden fought over what should be the new strategic goals of MAK. Azzam wanted to concentrate on installing an Islamic government in post-Soviet Kabul whereas Bin Laden wanted to launch global jihad. In 1989 Azzam was killed by a massive car bomb in Peshawar, Pakistan allowing Bin Laden to assume full control of the organisation. MAK split up but Bin Laden launched a new body called Al Qaeda.

Bin Laden returned to his native Saudi Arabia. He was there when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. Suddenly the ruling House of Saud was looking very shaky with a massive and belligerent army on their northern border. Bin Laden offered Al Qaeda’s services to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraq. King Fahd turned down his offer and allowed US troops to deploy instead. Bin Laden was enraged and spoke out publicly about the profane presence of foreign troops in the "land of the two mosques".
The now ostracised Bin Laden accepted an offer to come to Sudan in 1991. The Islamists had taken power there and wanted Al Qaeda operations to help their new government. They helped the government with major infrastructure projects and ran military camps.

From there, Bin Laden launched the next crusade and raised the Bosnian Mujahideen to help newly independent Bosnia in its war with Serbia. Bin Laden was forced to flee Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996 after the US implicated him in an attempted assassination of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Kabul had just fallen to the Taliban at this time. The fundamentalist Taliban and Al Qaeda were a perfect match. Al Qaeda camps proceeded to train militant Muslims from around the world in the art of warfare. Around this time, Bin Laden started to focus on Saudi Arabia’s biggest ally, the US. In 1998, he and co-leader Egyptian Ahman Al-Zawahiri issued a fatwa against America and its allies.

Almost immediately they bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Though the US retaliated by bombing an Al Qaeda base, Bin Laden struck again in 2000. While the missile destroyer USS Cole was at anchor in Aden, a small boat of suicide bombers attacked the ship and killed 17 sailors. Planning then commenced for the biggest attack yet. Mohammed Atta led a team of 17 hijackers to capture four aeroplanes in US airspace and killed 3,000 people in New York and elsewhere on 9/11. Though Al Qaeda never claimed responsibility, the US used the fatwa to pin the blame on them. The US plan to strike Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and remove Al Qaeda. The invasion destroyed much of their infrastructure, but they survived and moved to the rugged Pakistani border territory. On 13 December 2001, the US government released a video tape of Osama speaking with associates talking about how they carried out 9/11. Its authenticity and English translation has been challenged but remains the single-most damning piece of evidence linking Al Qaeda with the attack.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 gave new impetus to Al Qaeda. Initially it posed a dilemma. Iraq is a largely Shiite nation, and Al Qaeda is composed of Sunnis who believe that the Shia are heretics. However the renegade Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi affiliated his organisation with Al Qaeda in 2004 and declared loyalty to Osama. Although it may simply have been designed to boost his own legitimacy it gave Al Qaeda a boost. Abu Ayyub al-Masri took over as head of al-Qaeda in Iraq since al-Zarqawi’s death. Al-Qaeda are now active in Kashmir and have links to Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Toiba. Although rumours abound of Osama’s death due to typhoid fever, the movement he started is still healthy. Its ultimate goal remains the downfall of the Arabian House of Saud. While many in the West would support the removal of this autocratic and secretive empire, it is highly unlikely the US would ever consent to allowing the world’s richest oil reserves fall into the hands of militant extremists.