Will Explorers be re-defined as Terrorists?
There´s no doubt that red tape is getting worse by the day. I don´t know how many explorer friends I have, who can´t get into an area and explore as they´d wish due to silly and un-necessary bureaucracy. This plague is of course nothing new in exploration history, but with all the technical developments we are experiencing and by the day more global transparency due to the Internet, one would think it would become easier. Unfortunately not. It is getting worse. Much worse. So, when CuChullaine O´Reilly sent me the piece below, at first I thought it was really alarmist, but I also know how thorough CuChullaine is in his research and he always finds angles that very few others would, and the more I read it, there´s definitely something the exploration world should consider and be aware of. However, as always when it comes to the Guest Writers, their opinions are theirs and not mine.
Will Explorers be re-defined as Terrorists?
By
CuChullaine O´Reilly
I have just completed chapter 52, “Guns & Trouble,” in the “Encyclopaedia of Equestrian Exploration.” The project is currently up to 1000 plus pages, and includes more than 500 images to date.
The majority of people would expect a book about horse travel to focus on spurs and saddles. That has certainly been the narrow focus of the few books written about this topic in the past. In stark contrast, the Encyclopaedia is designed for 21st century equestrian explorers. In addition to containing information on how to choose horses, etc., it is the first book of its kind to deal with a host of modern problems which did not plague our equestrian forefathers.
For example, most nations only issue transit papers for horses that are destined to cross their country via a truck and trailer. These papers, usually valid for ten days, provide adequate time for a driver to deliver the horse to a competitive event. Yet such short-term transit papers do not provide time for a Long Rider to journey across an entire country.
The need for personal security has also changed. Long Riders are no longer being murdered by rampaging Indians. Today they have to be careful that their blogs do not provide cyber stalkers with information that will allow them to locate, then attack and/or sexually assault, a lone equestrian traveller.
Nor are Long Riders only interested in pack saddles. Like other members of the international exploration community, they too rely on a variety of up to date electronic equipment. This too has brought unforeseen complications.
Because the Guild has Members in 44 countries, we must constantly remind foreigners that Hollywood’s version of the American “Wild West” is not valid. In fact, the Encyclopaedia explains that in a pending court case, the U.S. government has argued its authority to protect the country’s border extends to looking at information stored in electronic devices such as a laptop. Even though the computer owner may not be suspected of a crime, when crossing into the United States, officials regard a laptop the same as a suitcase and can search it without obtaining a warrant. See this report!
Nor is this the only indication of a dramatic change in the American political climate.
In the Encyclopaedia I warn foreign Long Riders of draconian new laws which have taken effect in America. For example, the United States Supreme Court has ruled that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offence, however minor, at any time. History demonstrates that the use of forced nudity by a state is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations. This legislation joins the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which lets anyone in America be arrested forever at any time and HR 347, the “trespass bill”, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. See here!
While these topics will be of long-term interest to equestrian travellers, my research has revealed an interesting/alarming idea which I believe may be of immediate concern to the international exploration community.
In an article in the English press I came across this quote.
“…..the US Anti-Terror Law judges the provision of medical aid to ‘terrorists’, or negotiation with ‘terrorists’ to gain access to wounded, starving or destitute civilians, to constitute a major criminal offence. This has actively removed any identifiable ‘neutral’ status for doctors, nurses or allied health professionals in battlefield, conflict or famines zone. You are either for the ‘terrorists’ or against them.”
I believe there is a danger to exploration hidden within that paragraph.
The American government has announced that it can arbitrarily define as a “terrorist” any doctor or nurse who aids a wounded human. In such cases a victim’s politics overrules his physical suffering.
Thus, for the first time in history, it appears that the neutrality which all civilized nations have traditionally granted to the medical profession has been violated by the Americans.
If doctors can now be classified as “terrorists” by the “land of the free” are explorers next?
Consider the dramatic shift this might hold for exploration.
In
the 19th and 20th centuries explorers were often suspected of spying
for foreign powers. The African continent was suffering severe political
upheaval in 1970, when Scottish Long Rider Gordon Naysmith set off to
ride across 16 countries from South Africa to Austria. When Tanzanian
soldiers mistook the equestrian explorer for an Israeli spy, Gordon was
jailed, and his ribs broken, before he could establish his innocence and
continue his 20,000 kilometre journey. Photo courtesy Gordon Naysmith
For example, in 1906 Baron Carl Gustaf Mannerheim set off on a 14,000 kilometre-long, two-year ride for the Czar. The sharp-eyed cavalry officer spoke Polish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Swedish, Finnish, Russian, French, German and English. The mounted espionage mission took him fromAndizhan in Russian Turkistan toPeking,China. During the ride Mannerheim gathered information on various tribes, befriended the Dalai Lama, surveyed obscure mountain passes, and scoutedChina’s Great Wall, before heading back to share his findings with the Russian government.
In
1906 Baron Carl Gustaf Mannerheim set off on a 14,000 kilometre-long,
two-year espionage expedition for the Russian Czar. But times have
changed since natives suspected explorers of being a spy. By stripping
an explorer of his neutrality and punishing his impartial interaction
with the local populace, the Americans have set the stage wherein we may
soon see travellers accused of being involved with, or sympathetic to,
“terrorists.”
Instead of the natives suspecting the explorer of being a spy, by stripping an explorer of his neutrality and punishing his impartial interaction with the local populace, the Americans have set the stage wherein we may soon see travellers accused of being involved with, or sympathetic to, “terrorists.”
Is such an idea far fetched?
French Long Rider Louis Meunier recently made an extensive journey through Afghanistan. Because Louis is a fluent Farci speaker, he interacted with countless Afghans along the way, including at least one respected local mullah. That incident involved the mullah invoking a blessing on the Long Rider’s horses.
During
Louis Meunier’s journey across Afghanistan a spell was cast on his
horse at the village of Barakhana. Villagers believed that the
mysterious knots tied in the stallion’s mane at night were placed there
by a naked female jinn. To offset this equine witchcraft, Mullah
Khodadad recited a prayer over the afflicted animal. Could the mullah’s
political beliefs have compromised the Long Rider’s credibility in the
eyes of a hostile American government?
What are the implications for explorers who wish to visit countries rocked by political instability, ie Afghanistan, Burma, Eritrea, Kashmir, Mali, Somalia, Syria, Tibet, Yemen, just to name a few?
Arita Baajiens is the Dutch camel traveller who explored the deserts of Egypt and Libya. When rebellion broke out across the Arab world in 2011, the desert traveller found herself swept up by the political storm. “Those kids really pulled it off,” Arita reported to ExWeb from Cairo’s Tahir Square.
Washington maintained a guarded neutrality when dissident citizens toppled Egyptian tyrant Hosni Mubarik. Likewise they ignored Arita’s actions inCairo because it suited their political purposes.
What if Arita interviewed pro-Iranian Shia protestors who are currently trying to topple the pro-American Sunni government in Bahrain?
Could a chance conversation between the Dutch explorer and a politically active student result in statements being voiced which, being in opposition to official American foreign policy, carry an automatic condemnation for the traveller?
The
first modern hostage crisis occurred in 1901 when an American Long
Rider Ellen Stone was kidnapped by Bulgarian revolutionary Yane
Sandanski. He bragged to the media that he had “stolen” the woman so as
to set his country free from the Ottoman empire. Despite being held
captive in the mountains for six months, it was widely believed that
Stone became sympathetic to the “terrorists.” When the American
government refused to intervene, the $110,000 ransom was paid after an
appeal was made to the public.
Last month pro-Islamic Tuareg rebels seized control of the historic caravan city of Timbuktu. IsWashington prepared to dictate terms to explorers like Alistair who venture there? Will the American government decide that interactions between travellers and native guides counts as evidence of “support for terrorists”?
Could explorers become victims of political entrapment? News stories are revealing how well-paid informants are employed by the American CIA, British MI5 and the Saudi intelligence service, the Mabahith. Is there cause for concern that explorers might be lured into situations that compromise their traditional neutrality?
Who would know, you might ask?
The US Army is preparing to deploy in Afghanistan its latest helicopter-style drone, the A160 Hummingbird, equipped with 1.8 gigapixel colour cameras. Able to hover, unlike current drones, it will have unprecedented capability to monitor activity on the ground. It can track people and vehicles from above 20,000ft, and with a 65sq-mile field of view, it will have 65 steerable “windows” able to follow separate targets.
A government capable of spying on a unsuspecting traveller’s conversations can then use any images of interaction with natives as evidence of support for terrorism.
Nor does this problem reside solely with the individual traveller, as organisations which endorse explorers may also be caught up in this international net of intrigue.
Swedish explorer and Long Rider Mikael Strandberg has just arrived in Yemen, where he is preparing to set off on a perilous camel expedition across that war-torn country. Mikael is carrying flags from the international Long Riders’ Guild and theNew York based Explorers’ Club.
Given the highly volatile political climate in Yemen, what are the chances of Mikael journeying across that nation and not encountering a conversation which includes political themes and voices of dissidence?
In
the past, the granting of an expedition flag was based upon the
explorer’s courage and the expedition’s significance. Will political
overtones influence future decisions?
These are troubling times and disturbing scenarios.
Members of the medical profession, as well as prominent advocates of civil liberties in theUnited States, are deeply concerned at the tremendous erosion of civil rights and basic liberties which political events have inspired.
In the past all civilized nations recognized, and respected, a doctor’s neutrality. He was, it was previously believed, acting for the good of humanity, before supporting any political cause.
That sense of international trust was based upon the Hippocratic Oath, which bound the medical professional to “remain free of all intentional injustice and mischief” regardless of where he might find the wounded or sick.
Likewise, the political neutrality of the explorer is also taken on trust.
Sadly, given the aggressive nature of new American legislation, we may be witnessing the demise of the traditional respect accorded to citizen-explorers.
Respectfully yours,
CuChullaine O’Reilly
In
the 1980s Afghan freedom fighters, known as mujahadeen, were involved
in a bitter conflict with the Soviet Union. CuChullaine O'Reilly was
praised by the American government for his efforts to train these
Afghans to become journalists. At that time, CuChullaine also explored
northern Pakistan on horseback. How times change. Were he to repeat that
journey today, any encounters with the sons of his former Afghan pupils
might prompt the American government to accuse him of involvement with
terrorists.
Please vist The Long Riders Guild and The World Ride
THE WESTERN SATANIC LIES ARE RIGHT HERE FOR EVERYBODY TO SEE!
"AYMAN RAI AL-ZAWAHIRI AND AL-QAIDA BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11TH"
ZAWAHIRI GOES TO PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN IN THE EARLY 1980S
Zawahiri and bin Laden
"My connection with Afghanistan began in the summer of 1980 by a twist
of fate," Zawahiri writes in his memoir. He was covering for another
doctor at a Muslim Brothers' clinic in Cairo, when the director of the
clinic asked if Zawahiri would like to accompany him to Pakistan to tend
to the Afghan refugees. Thousands were fleeing across the border as a
result of the Soviet invasion, which had begun a few months earlier.
Although he had recently got married, Zawahiri writes that he
"immediately agreed." He had been preoccupied with the problem of
finding a secure base for jihad, which seemed practically impossible in
Egypt. "The River Nile runs in its narrow valley between two deserts
that have no vegetation or water," he goes on. "Such a terrain made
guerrilla warfare in Egypt impossible and, as a result, forced the
inhabitants of this valley to submit to the central government and to be
exploited as workers and compelled them to be recruited into its army."
[Source: Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, September 16, 2002]
Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker: "Zawahiri travelled to
Peshawar with an anesthesiologist and a plastic surgeon. "We were the
first three Arabs to arrive there to participate in relief work," he
writes. He spent four months in Pakistan, working for the Red Crescent
Society, the Islamic arm of the Red Cross. When Zawahiri arrived” in
Peshawar “it was teeming with arms merchants and opium dealers. Young
men from other Muslim countries were beginning to hear the call of
jihad, and they came to Peshawar, often with nothing more than a phone
number in their pockets, and sometimes without even that. Their goal was
to become shaheed—a martyr—and they asked only to be pointed in the
direction of the war. Osama bin Laden was one of the first to arrive. He
spent much of his time shuttling between Peshawar and Saudi Arabia,
raising money for the cause. [Ibid]
The city also had to cope with the influx of uprooted and starving
Afghans. By the end of 1980, there were 1.4 million Afghan refugees in
Pakistan—a number that nearly doubled the following year—and almost all
of them came through Peshawar, seeking shelter in nearby camps. Many of
the refugees were casualties of Soviet land mines or of the intensive
bombing of towns and cities. The conditions in the clinics and hospitals
were appalling. Zawahiri reported home that he sometimes had to use
honey to sterilize wounds. He made several trips across the border into
Afghanistan. "Tribesmen took Ayman over the border," Omar Azzam told me.
He was one of the first outsiders to witness the courage of the Afghan
fighters, who were defending themselves on foot or on horseback with
First World War carbines. American Stinger missiles would not be
delivered until 1986, and Eastern-bloc weapons that the C.I.A. had
smuggled in were not yet in the hands of the fighters. But the
mujahideen already sensed that they were becoming pawns in the
superpowers' game.[Ibid]
Mujahideen prayer
That fall, Zawahiri returned to Cairo full of stories about the
"miracles" that were taking place in the jihad against the Soviets. When
Schleifer called on Zawahiri... he was surprised by his manner. "He
started off by saying that the Americans were the real enemy and had to
be confronted," Schleifer told me. "I said, 'I don't understand. You
just came back from Afghanistan, where you're coöperating with the
Americans. Now you're saying America is the enemy?' " [Ibid]
"Sure, we're taking American help to fight the Russians," Zawahiri
replied. "But they're equally evil." "How can you make such a
comparison?" Schleifer said. "There is more freedom to practice Islam in
America than here in Egypt. And in Afghanistan the Soviets closed down
fifty thousand mosques!" Schleifer recalls, "The conversation ended on a
bad note. In our previous debates, it was always eye to eye, and you
could break the tension with a joke. Now I felt that he wasn't talking
to me; he was addressing a mass rally of a hundred thousand people. It
was all rhetoric." [Ibid]
In March of 1981, Zawahiri returned to Peshawar for another tour of
duty with the Red Crescent Society. This time, he cut short his stay and
returned to Cairo after two months. He wrote in his memoir that he
regarded the Afghan jihad as "a training course of the utmost importance
to prepare the Muslim mujahideen to wage their awaited battle against
the superpower that now has sole dominance over the globe, namely, the
United States." [Ibid]
Zawahiri Returns to Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1986
Pakistan-Afghanistan border area
Zawahiri returned to Peshawar in 1986. Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker: “Peshawar had changed in the five years since Zawahiri had last been there. The city was congested and rife with corruption. Camels contended in the narrow streets with armored vehicles, pickups with oversized wheels, and late-model luxury cars. As many as two million refugees had flooded into the North-West Frontier Province, turning Peshawar, the capital, into the prime staging area for the resistance. The United States was contributing approximately two hundred and fifty million dollars a year to the war, and the Pakistani intelligence service was distributing arms to the numerous Afghan warlords, who all maintained offices in Peshawar. A new stream of American and Pakistani military advisers had arrived to train the mujahideen. Aid workers and freelance mullahs and intelligence agents from around the world had set up shop. "Peshawar was transformed into this place where whoever had no place to go went," says Osama Rushdi, a former emir in a university branch of the Islamic Group, who is now a political refugee in Holland. "It was an environment in which a person could go from a bad place to a worse place, and eventually into despair." [Source: Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, September 16, 2002]
“Across the Khyber Pass was the war. Many of the young Arabs who came
to Peshawar prayed that their crossing would lead them to martyrdom and
then to Paradise. Many were political fugitives from their own
countries, and, as stateless people, they naturally turned against the
very idea of a state. They saw themselves as a great borderless posse
whose mission was to defend the entire Muslim people. This army of
so-called Afghan Arabs soon became legendary throughout the Islamic
world. Some experts have estimated that as many as fifty thousand Arabs
passed through Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets. However,
Abdullah Anas, an Algerian mujahid who married one of Abdullah Azzam's
daughters, says that there were never more than three thousand Arabs in
Afghanistan, and that most of them were drivers, secretaries, and cooks,
not warriors. The war was fought almost entirely by the Afghans, not
the Arabs, he told me. According to Hany al-Sibai, an alleged leader of
Jihad (he denies it) now living in exile, there were only some five
hundred Egyptians. "They were known as the thinkers and the brains,"
Sibai said. "The Islamist movement started with them." [Ibid]
“Zawahiri's brother Mohammed, who had loyally followed him since
childhood, joined him in Peshawar. The brothers had a strong family
resemblance, though Mohammed was slightly taller and thinner than Ayman.
Another colleague from the underground days in Cairo, a physician named
Sayyid Imam, arrived, and in 1987, according to Egyptian intelligence,
the three men reorganized Islamic Jihad. They began recruiting new
members from the Egyptian mujahideen. Before long, representatives of
the Islamic Group appeared on the scene, and once again the old rivalry
flared up. Osama Rushdi, who had known Zawahiri in prison, told me that
he was shocked by the changes he found in him. In Egypt, Zawahiri had
struck him as polite and modest. "Now he was very antagonistic toward
others," Rushdi recalled. "He talked badly about the other groups and
wrote books against them. In discussions, he started to take things in a
weird way. He would have strong opinions without any sense of logic."
[Ibid]
“Zawahiri's wife, Azza, set up house in Peshawar. Azza's mother,
Nabila Galal, says that she visited her daughter in Pakistan three
times, the last time in 1990. "They were an unusually close family and
always moved together as one unit," she told a reporter for the Egyptian
magazine Akher Saa in December, 2001. While Zawahiri was in prison
after the assassination of Sadat, Nabila took care of Azza and her first
child, Fatima, who was born in 1981. She visited Azza again a few years
later, in Saudi Arabia, to attend the birth of Umayma, who was named
after Zawahiri's mother. "One day, I got a letter from Azza, and I felt
intense pain as I read the words," Nabila recalled. "She wrote that she
was to travel to Pakistan with her husband. I wished that she would not
go there, but I knew that nobody can prevent fate. She was well aware of
the rights her husband held over her and her duty toward him, which is
why she was to follow him to the ends of the earth." [Ibid]
Mujahideen fighter with with Enfield rifle in 1985
“In Pakistan, Azza gave birth to another daughter, Nabila, in 1986. A
fourth daughter, Khadiga, arrived the following year, and in 1988 the
Zawahiris' only son, Mohammed, was born. Nearly ten years later, in
1997, another daughter, Aisha, arrived. "Azza and her family lived a
good life in Peshawar," her brother Essam told me. "They had a two-story
villa with three or four bedrooms upstairs. One of the rooms was always
available for visitors—and they had a lot of visitors. If they had
money left over, they gave it to the needy. They were happy with very
little." [Ibid]
“The Egyptian filmmaker Essam Deraz, who worked in Afghanistan between
1986 and 1988, received special permission to visit the mujahideen's
main base camp in a complex of caves in the Hindu Kush mountains known
as Masaada (the Lion's Den). "It was snowing when we arrived at the
Lion's Den," Deraz told me. "The Arabs hated anybody with cameras,
because of their concern for security, so they stopped me from entering
the cave. I was with my crew, and we were standing outside in the snow
until I couldn't move my legs. Finally, one of the Arabs said that I
could come in but my crew must stay out. I said, 'Either we all come in
or we all stay out.' They disappeared and came back with Dr. Abdel
Mu'iz." (The name was Zawahiri's nom de guerre. In Arabic, Abdel means
"slave," and Mu'iz, one of the ninety-nine names of God, means "bestower
of honor.") The man who called himself Dr. Abdel Mu'iz insisted that
Deraz and his crew come into the cave, where he served them tea and
bread. "He was very polite and very refined," Deraz said. "I could tell
that he was from a good background by the way he apologized for keeping
us outside." That night, Deraz slept on the floor of the cave, next to
Zawahiri.”
Abdullah Azzam
Abdullah Azzam
A key to Osama bin Laden’s transformation into a committed jihadist,
Peter Bergen wrote in Vanity Fair “was his encounter with the
charismatic Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam. Azzam was the critical
force both ideologically and organizationally for the recruitment of
Muslims from around the world to engage in the Afghan struggle against
the Soviets.
Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker: “ In the mid-eighties, the
dominant Arab in the war against the Soviets was Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a
Palestinian theologian who had a doctorate in Islamic law from Al-Azhar
University. (He is not related to the Azzam family of Zawahiri's
mother.) Azzam went on to teach at King Abdul Aziz University, in Jidda,
where one of his students was Osama bin Laden. As soon as Azzam heard
about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he moved to Pakistan. He
became the gatekeeper of jihad and its main fund-raiser. His formula for
victory was "Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no
conferences, and no dialogues." [Source: Lawrence Wright, The New
Yorker, September 16, 2002]
Many of the qualities that people now attribute to bin Laden were seen
earlier in Abdullah Azzam, who became his mentor. Azzam was the
embodiment of the holy warrior, which, in the Muslim world, is as
popular a heroic stereotype as the samurai in Japan or the Hollywood
cowboy in America. His long beard was vividly black in the middle and
white on either side, and whenever he talked about the war his gaze
seemed to focus on some glorious interior vision. "I reached Afghanistan
and could not believe my eyes," Azzam says in a recruitment video,
produced in 1988, as he holds an AK-47 rifle in his lap. "I travelled to
acquaint people with jihad for years. . . . We were trying to satisfy
the thirst for martyrdom. We are still in love with this." Azzam was a
frequent speaker at Muslim rallies, even in the United States, where he
came to raise money, and he often appeared on Saudi television. Generous
and elaborately polite, Azzam opened his home in Peshawar to many of
the young men, mostly Arabs, who had heeded his fatwa for all Muslims to
rally against the Soviet invader. When bin Laden first came to
Peshawar, he stayed at Azzam's guesthouse. Together, they set up the
Maktab al-Khadamat, or Services Bureau, to recruit and train resistance
fighters.
Osama bin Laden Breaks with Abdullah Azzam and Bonds with al-Zawahiri
Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1980s
Peter Bergen wrote in Vanity Fair: “Bin Laden’s military ambitions and
personality evolved in tandem. He became more assertive, to the point
that he ignored the advice of many old friends about the folly of
setting up his own military force. That decision also precipitated an
irrevocable (but carefully concealed) split with his onetime mentor,
Abdullah Azzam. [Source: Peter Bergen, Vanity Fair, January 2006]
Hutaifa Azzam told Bergen: “You could say that bin Laden separated
from my father in 1987. Bin Laden said that he wanted to make special
camps for the Arabs only, where we can start our own jihad and we give
the orders. We will gather all the Arabs in Afghanistan in one area in
Jalalabad [in eastern Afghanistan]. My father was against that. He was
shocked. So in 1987, Osama decided to separate and create special camps
for the Arabs.” [Ibid]
Bergen wrote” It was not an accident that bin Laden’s split from
Abdullah Azzam began around the time of his first meeting with the
Egyptian jihadist Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 1986. For bin Laden, the
slightly older, cerebral Zawahiri (a surgeon by training) must have
presented an intriguing figure. Zawahiri had first joined a jihadist
group at 15 and had recently served three years in Egypt’s notorious
prisons for his jihadist activities. For Zawahiri, bin Laden was on his
way to becoming a genuine war hero, and his deep pockets were well
known. In 1987, Zawahiri set up his own jihad group, which was soon
supported by bin Laden.
Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker: “Unlike the other leaders of
the mujahideen, Zawahiri did not pledge himself to Sheikh Abdullah Azzam
when he arrived in Afghanistan; from the start, he concentrated his
efforts on getting close to bin Laden. He soon succeeded in placing
trusted members of Islamic Jihad in key positions around bin Laden.
According to the Islamist attorney Montasser al-Zayat, "Zawahiri
completely controlled bin Laden. The largest share of bin Laden's
financial support went to Zawahiri and the Jihad organization, while he
supported the Islamic Group only with tiny morsels." [Source: Lawrence
Wright, The New Yorker, September 16, 2002]
“Zawahiri must have recognized—perhaps even before bin Laden himself
did—that the future of the Islamic movement lay with "this heaven-sent
man," as Abdullah Azzam called bin Laden. Azzam soon felt the
gravitational force of Zawahiri's influence over his protégé. "I don't
know what some people are doing here in Peshawar," Azzam complained to
his son-in-law Abdullah Anas. "They are talking against the mujahideen.
They have only one point, to create fitna"—discord—"between me and these
volunteers." He singled out Zawahiri as one of the troublemakers.
[Ibid]
“Bin Laden's final break with Abdullah Azzam came in a dispute over
the scope of jihad. Bin Laden envisioned an all-Arab legion, which
eventually could be used to wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Sheikh
Abdullah strongly opposed making war against fellow-Muslims. Zawahiri
undermined Azzam's position by spreading rumors that he was a spy.
"Zawahiri said he believed that Abdullah Azzam was working for the
Americans," Osama Rushdi told me. "Sheikh Abdullah was killed that same
night." On November 24, 1989, Azzam and two of his sons were blown up
by a car bomb as they were driving to al-Falah Mosque in Peshawar.
Although no one claimed credit for the killings, many have been blamed,
including Zawahiri himself, and even bin Laden.“ It was the second
Azzam’s life in a month.. At Azzam's funeral, Zawahiri delivered a
eulogy. [Ibid]
Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden in the 1990s
Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri is believed to have been connected with Osama
bin Laden since 1985, when the two men met in Pakistan during the
Afghanistan War. Zawahiri is credited by some with making bin-Laden an
Islamic radical with a global agenda. Fluent in English, he sometimes
acted as an interpreter for bin Laden. Peter Bergen wrote in Vanity
Fair: For bin Laden, the slightly older, cerebral Zawahiri must have
presented an intriguing figure. Zawahiri had first joined a jihadist
group at 15 and had recently served three years in Egypt’s notorious
prisons for his jihadist activities. For Zawahiri, bin Laden was on his
way to becoming a genuine war hero, and his deep pockets were well
known. In 1987, Zawahiri set up his own jihad group, which was soon
supported by bin Laden. [Source: Peter Bergen, Vanity Fair, January
2006]
Lawrence Wright, “Each man filled a need on the other. Zawahiri wanted
money and contacts...Bin laden, an idealist given to causes, sought
direction. Zawahiri, a seasoned propagandist, supplied it...For
Zawahiri, bin Laden was a savior—rich and generous, with nearly
limitless resources, but also pliable and politically unformed.”
Wright wrote in The New Yorker: “Osama bin Laden, who was based in
Jidda, was twenty-eight and had lived a life of boundless wealth and
pleasure. His family's company, the multinational and broadly
diversified Saudi Binladin Group, was one of the largest companies in
the Middle East. Osama was a wan and gangly young man—he is estimated to
be six feet five inches—and was by no means perceived to be the
charismatic leader he would eventually become. He lacked the underground
experience that Zawahiri had and, apart from his religious devotion,
had few settled beliefs. But he had been radicalized by the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and he had already raised hundreds of
millions of dollars for the mujahideen resistance. [Source: Lawrence
Wright, The New Yorker, September 16, 2002]
"Bin Laden had followers, but they weren't organized,"Essam Deraz, an
Egyptian filmmaker who made several documentaries about the mujahideen
during the Soviet-Afghan war, told Wright. "The people with Zawahiri
had extraordinary capabilities—doctors, engineers, soldiers. They had
experience in secret work. They knew how to organize themselves and
create cells. And they became the leaders." "Bin Laden had an Islamic
frame of reference, but he didn't have anything against the Arab
regimes," Montasser al-Zayat, an Islamist lawyer told Wright. "When
Ayman met bin Laden, he created a revolution inside him." [Ibid]
Deraz observed that bin Laden had become dependent on Zawahiri's
medical care. "Bin Laden had low blood pressure, and sometimes he would
get dizzy and have to lie down," Deraz told Wright. "Ayman came from
Peshawar to treat him. He would give him a checkup and then leave to go
fight." Deraz recalls that, during one of the most intense battles of
the war, he and the two men were huddled in a cave near Jalalabad with a
group of fighters. "The bombing was very heavy," Deraz said. "Bin Laden
had his arm stretched out, and Zawahiri was preparing to give him
glucose. Whenever the doctor was about to insert the needle, there was a
bombing and we would all hit the ground. When the bombing stopped for a
while, Zawahiri got up and set up the glucose stand, but as soon as he
picked up the bottle there would be another bombing. So one person said,
'Don't you see? Every time you pick up the bottle, we are bombed.' And
another said, 'In Islam, it is forbidden to be pessimistic,' but then it
happened again. So the pessimistic one got up very slowly and threw the
glucose bottle out of the cave. We all laughed. Even bin Laden was
laughing." [Ibid]
Zawahiri in Sudan and the United States
Sudan
Zawahiri later followed bin Laden to Sudan. Lawrence Wright wrote in
The New Yorker: “Zawahiri's relatives expected him to return to Egypt;
throughout the Soviet-Afghan war and for several years afterward, he
continued to pay rent on his clinic in Maadi. But he felt that it was
not safe for him to return. Eventually, he followed bin Laden to Sudan.
There he placed himself under the protection of the philosopher king of
Islamist ideologues, Hassan al-Tourabi, a graduate of the University of
London and the Sorbonne, who was instituting Sharia and trying to
establish in Sudan the ideal Islamic republic that Zawahiri and bin
Laden longed for in their countries. In Khartoum, Zawahiri set about
reorganizing Islamic Jihad. Jamal al-Fadl said in his testimony in New
York that Zawahiri gave him two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to
buy a farm north of the Sudan capital, where members of Jihad could
receive military training. [Source: Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker,
September 16, 2002]
In the early 1990s, Zawahiri entered the United States with a false
passport for a brief fund-raising trip. In 1996 he visited Australia to
find new recruits and sources of money. Wright wrote in The New Yorker,
“Zawahiri decided to look for money in the world center of venture
capitalism—Silicon Valley. He had been to America once before, in 1989,
when he paid a recruiting visit to the mujahideen's Services Bureau
branch office in Brooklyn. According to the F.B.I., he returned in the
spring of 1993, this time to Santa Clara, California, where he was
greeted by Ali Mohamed, the double agent. Mohamed introduced him to Dr.
Ali Zaki, a gynecologist and a prominent civic leader in San Jose. Zaki
disputes the F.B.I.'s date of the visit, maintaining that Zawahiri's
trip to Silicon Valley took place in 1989, a few years after President
Reagan compared the mujahideen to America's founding fathers. People at
the F.B.I., however, told me that Zawahiri arrived in America shortly
after the first bombing of the World Trade Center. [Source: Lawrence
Wright, The New Yorker, September 16, 2002]
“In any event, Zaki claims not to remember much about Zawahiri. "He
came as a representative of the Red Crescent of Kuwait," Zaki said. "I
was also a physician, so they asked me to accompany him while he was
here." He met Zawahiri at the Al-Nur Mosque in Santa Clara after evening
prayers, and he escorted him to mosques in Sacramento and Stockton. The
two doctors spent most of their time discussing medical problems that
Zawahiri encountered in Afghanistan. "We talked about the children and
the farmers who were injured and were missing limbs because of all the
Russian mines," Zaki recalled. "He was a well-balanced, highly educated
physician." But financially the trip was not a success. Zaki says that,
at most, the donations produced by these visits to the California
mosques amounted to several hundred dollars. Immediately after this
dispiriting trip, Zawahiri began working more closely with bin Laden,
and most of the Egyptian members of Islamic Jihad went on the Al Qaeda
payroll. [Ibid]
“During the early nineties, Zawahiri travelled tirelessly, setting up
training camps and establishing cells. During this period, he is
reported to have visited the Balkans, Austria, Dagestan, Yemen, Iraq,
Iran, the Philippines, and even Argentina, often using a false passport.
He was particularly engaged by the war in Bosnia, because the country
was home to one of the largest Islamic populations in Europe. [Ibid]
Zawahiri’s and Islamic Jihad’s "Terrorist" Activities in Egypt
Flag of jihad
Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker: “Sudan seemed an ideal spot
from which to launch attacks on Egypt. The active coöperation of Sudan's
intelligence agency and its military forces provided a safe harbor for
the militants. The long, trackless, and almost entirely unguarded border
between the two countries facilitated secret movements; and ancient
caravan trails provided convenient routes for smuggling weapons and
explosives into Egypt on the backs of camels. Iran supplied many of the
weapons, and the Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah
provided training in the use of explosives. [Source: Lawrence Wright,
The New Yorker, September 16, 2002]
“Islamic Jihad began its assault on Egypt with an attempt on the life
of the Interior Minister, who was leading the crackdown on Islamic
militants. In August of 1993, a bomb-laden motorcycle exploded next to
the minister's car, killing the bomber and his accomplice. "The minister
escaped death, but his arm was broken," Zawahiri writes in his memoir.
"A pile of files that he kept next to him saved his life from the
shrapnel." The following November, Zawahiri's men tried to kill Egypt's
Prime Minister with a car bomb as he was being driven past a girls'
school in Cairo. The bomb missed its target, but the explosion injured
twenty-one people and killed a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, Shayma
Abdel-Halim, who was crushed by a door blown loose in the blast. Her
death outraged Egyptians, who had seen more than two hundred and forty
people killed by terrorists in the previous two years. As Shayma's
coffin was borne through the streets of Cairo people cried, "Terrorism
is the enemy of God!" [Ibid]
“Zawahiri was shaken by the popular outrage. "The unintended death of
this innocent child pained us all, but we were helpless and we had to
fight the government, which was against God's Sharia and supported God's
enemies," he notes in his memoir. He offered what amounted to blood
money to the girl's family. The Egyptian government arrested two hundred
and eighty of his followers; six were eventually given a sentence of
death. Zawahiri writes, "This meant that they wanted my daughter, who
was two at the time, and the daughters of other colleagues, to be
orphans. Who cried or cared for our daughters?" [Ibid]
“Zawahiri was a pioneer in the use of suicide bombers, which became a
signature of Jihad assassinations. The strategy broke powerful religious
taboos against suicide and the murder of innocents. (For these reasons,
the Islamic Group preferred to work with guns and knives.) Although
Hezbollah employed truck bombers to attack the American Embassy and the
U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, such martyrdom operations had
not yet worked their way into the modern vocabulary of terror. In
Palestine, suicide bombings were virtually unknown until the
mid-nineties, when the Oslo accords began to unravel. Another of
Zawahiri's innovations was to tape the bomber's vows of martyrdom on the
eve of the mission. [Ibid]
Obsessed with secrecy, Zawahiri imposed a blind-cell structure on the
Jihad organization, so that members in one group would not know the
activities or personnel in another. Thus, a security breach in one cell
should not compromise other units, and certainly not the entire
organization.
Al-Zawahiri is believed to have heavily involved in the 1995 bombing
of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan which left 15 dead and 60 injured
and terrorist operations. He has been sentenced to death in absentia in
1999 by the Egyptian government for organizing terrorist camps and
trying to incite uprisings and assassinate top officials,
Attempt to Assassinate (FREEMASON DICTATOR) Mubarak and Crackdown on Islamic Jihad in Egypt
Mubarak
Lawrence Wright wrote un The New Yorker: “In 1993, Egyptian
authorities arrested Jihad's membership director, Ismail Nassir. "He had
a computer containing the entire database," Osama Rushdi, a former
member of the Islamic Group, told me. "Where the member lived, which
home he might be hiding in, even what names he uses with false
passports." Supplied with this information, the Egyptian security forces
pulled in a thousand suspects and placed more than three hundred of
them on trial in military courts on charges of attempting to overthrow
the government. The evidence was thin, but, then, the judicial standards
weren't very rigorous. "It was all staged," Hisham Kassem, the
publisher of the Cairo Times and the president of the Egyptian
Organization for Human Rights, told me. "The ones you think are
dangerous, you hang. The rest, you give them life sentences." Under
Zawahiri's leadership, Islamic Jihad had succeeded, unintentionally, in
assassinating the Speaker of Parliament, in 1990—the intended target was
the Interior Minister—and in killing a schoolgirl. In the process, the
organization lost almost its entire Egyptian base. If Islamic Jihad was
to survive, it would have to be outside Egypt. [Source: Lawrence Wright,
The New Yorker, September 16, 2002]
“Both Jihad and the Islamic Group had been decimated by defections and
arrests. The Group's leader, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, had emigrated to
the United States, and was arrested following the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing. He and nine followers were convicted in 1996 of
conspiring to destroy New York landmarks, including the Lincoln and
Holland Tunnels, the Federal Building, and the United Nations
headquarters. In April of 1995, Zawahiri chaired a meeting in Khartoum
attended by the remaining members of the two organizations, along with
representatives of other terrorist groups. They agreed on a spectacular
act: the assassination of the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak. It was a
dangerous bet for the Islamists. The attack was carried out in June in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where Mubarak was on a state visit. There was a
shootout between Mubarak's bodyguards and the assassins; two Ethiopian
policemen were killed, but Mubarak escaped unharmed. [Ibid]
“The Egyptian government responded with a furious determination to
finish off Islamic Jihad. "The security forces used exemplary
punishment," Hisham Kassem told me. "They torched houses in a village
because a member of Jihad had come from there. A mother would be
stripped naked in front of a guy, who was told, 'Next time we'll rape
her if your younger brother is not here.' " A recently instituted
anti-terrorism law had made it a crime even to express sympathy for
terrorist movements. Five new prisons were being built to hold political
prisoners. (Human-rights organizations estimate the number of Islamists
still incarcerated in Egypt at fifteen thousand; Islamists put the
figure at sixty thousand. Many of the prisoners have never been charged
with any specific crime, and some have simply "disappeared.") [Ibid]
“Zawahiri's response to the crackdown was to blow up the Egyptian
Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. On November 19, 1995, two cars filled
with explosives crashed through the embassy gates, killing the bombers
and sixteen other people. Sixty were wounded. This act of mass murder
was Jihad's first success under Zawahiri's administration. "The bomb
left the embassy's ruined building as an eloquent and clear message,"
Zawahiri boasts in his memoir. [Ibid]
Zawahiri gets "Kicked Out" of Sudan
Khartoum backstreet
Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker: “Zawahiri and bin Laden might
have remained in the sanctuary of the Sudan had it not been for the
determination of the Egyptian and Saudi intelligence services to kill
them before they caused any more trouble...After the bombing of the
embassy in Pakistan, Egyptian intelligence agents devised a fiendish
plan. They lured an Egyptian boy, the son of one of bin Laden's
accountants, into a room, and drugged and sodomized him, photographing
the scene. Yasser al-Sirri, an alleged member of Islamic Jihad who had
met Zawahiri in Khartoum, told me that the Egyptian agents blackmailed
the boy, who was thirteen or fourteen, into working for them, and then
persuaded him to lure another boy into the intelligence network, using
the same method of sexual entrapment. The agents taught the boys how to
plant microphones in their own homes, a ploy that yielded valuable
information, and led to the arrest of Jihad members. The agents gave the
accountant's son a suitcase filled with explosives, which he was to
leave near a place where Zawahiri was expected to meet some of his
colleagues. The plan failed when Sudanese intelligence agents spotted
the boy in the company of Egyptian Embassy personnel. They arrested him
while he was holding the suitcase. [Source: Lawrence Wright, The New
Yorker, September 16, 2002]
"The Sudanese captured the other boy and put them both in jail," Hany
al-Sibai, who has become a kind of historian of the Islamist movement,
told me. "Most of the Islamic groups were in Sudan, so the rumors about
the story were huge. The Jihad organization considered the whole thing a
scandal for them." Zawahiri went to the Sudanese authorities and asked
that the boys be temporarily released from jail so that he could
interrogate them. He promised to return them safely. The Sudanese, who
were now dependent on bin Laden's financial generosity, agreed. Zawahiri
convened an Islamic court, put the boys on trial for treason, convicted
them, and had them executed, to make an example of them. In a
characteristic gesture, he made a tape of their confessions and had it
distributed as a warning to others who might betray the organization.
"Many Islamists turned against Zawahiri because of this," Yasser
al-Sirri told me. [Ibid]
“The Sudanese, furious at Zawahiri's duplicity, and also under intense
pressure from the United States and Saudi Arabia to stop harboring
terrorists, decided to expel Zawahiri and bin Laden and their followers.
According to Hany al-Sibai, the Sudanese did not even give them time to
pack. "All we did was to apply God's Sharia," Zawahiri complained. "If
we fail to apply it to ourselves, then how can we apply it to others?"
The expulsion from Sudan reportedly cost him three hundred million
dollars in lost investments.
Zawahiri in Switzerland and Russia
Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker, Zawahiri's next movements
after his expulsion from Sudan are unclear. “He was tracked by Egyptian
intelligence agents in Switzerland and Sarajevo, and he allegedly
sought asylum in Bulgaria. An Egyptian newspaper reported that Zawahiri
had gone to live in luxury in a Swiss villa near the French border, and
that he had thirty million dollars in a secret account. Zawahiri did
claim on several occasions to have lived in Switzerland, but the Swiss
say they have no evidence that he was ever in the country, much less
that he was granted asylum. He turned up briefly in Holland, which does
not have an extradition treaty with Egypt. He had talks there about
establishing a satellite television channel, backed by wealthy Arabs,
that would provide a fundamentalist alternative to the Al Jazeera
network, which had recently been launched in Qatar. Zawahiri's plan was
to broadcast ten hours a day to Europe and the Middle East, using only
male presenters. Nothing came of the idea. [Source: Lawrence Wright, The
New Yorker, September 16, 2002]
“A memo that Zawahiri later wrote to his colleagues—it was "recovered
from an Al Qaeda computer obtained by a Wall Street Journal reporter
after the fall of the Taliban*"—reveals that in December of 1996 he was on
his way to Chechnya to establish a new home base for the remnants of
Islamic Jihad. "Conditions there were excellent," he wrote in the memo.
The Russians had begun to withdraw from Chechnya earlier that year after
achieving a ceasefire with the rebellious region. To the Islamists,
Chechnya offered an opportunity to create an Islamic republic in the
Caucasus, from which they could wage jihad throughout Central Asia.
[Ibid]
“Soon after Zawahiri and two of his top lieutenants, Ahmad Salama
Mabruk and Mahmud Hisham al-Hennawi, crossed into the Russian province
of Dagestan, they were arrested for entering the country illegally. The
Russians discovered, among other documents, false identity papers,
including a Sudanese passport that Zawahiri sometimes used. Zawahiri's
passport indicated that he had been to Yemen four times, Malaysia three
times, Singapore twice, and China (probably Taiwan) once—all within the
previous twenty months. At the trial, in April, 1997, Zawahiri insisted
that he had come to Russia "to find out the price for leather, medicine,
and other goods." He said he was unaware that he was crossing the
border illegally. The judge sentenced the three men to six months in
jail. They had nearly completed the term by the time of the trial, and
the following month they were released. "God blinded them to our
identities," Zawahiri boasted in the account of his trip. [Ibid]
“Once again, his disgruntled followers chastised him for his
carelessness. An e-mail from colleagues in Yemen referred to the Russia
adventure as "a disaster that almost destroyed the group." A measure of
bin Laden's feelings about Zawahiri's mishaps was that he gave Jihad
only five thousand dollars during the leader's absence. Jihad had been
crushed in Egypt and run out of Sudan, and the organization's hardships
were having personal consequences as well. Zawahiri confided to
colleagues that he had developed an ulcer. [Ibid]
Zawahiri’s Returns to Afghanistan in the 1990s and Steps Up His Position in Al-Qaida
Zhawar Kili Al-Badr Camp
an Al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan
Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker: After the fiasco in Russia,
Zawahiri and his family had no alternative but to join bin Laden in
Jalalabad, a military center that had become the new headquarters for Al
Qaeda. Islamists from all over the world were pouring into the camps
that bin Laden had established in the surrounding Hindu Kush mountains.
[Source: Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, September 16, 2002]
“Zawahiri formally sealed his new alliance with bin Laden on February
23, 1998, when Zawahiri's name appeared as one of the signatories on a
document published in Al-Quds al-Arabi. The document announced the
formation of the International Islamic Front for Jihad on the Jews and
Crusaders. "In compliance with God's order," the text read, "we issue
the following fatwa to all Muslims: the ruling to kill the Americans and
their allies—civilian and military—is an individual duty for every
Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."
Included in the alliance were jihad groups in Afghanistan, Sudan, Saudi
Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya, Pakistan, Bosnia,
Croatia, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Tajikistan,
Chechnya, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Azerbaijan, and Palestine. The document
gave the West its first glimpse of the worldwide conspiracy that was
beginning to form. [Ibid]
Many members of Islamic Jihad were wary of bin Laden's designs on the
"distant enemy." Zawahiri called a meeting of Islamic Jihad in
Afghanistan to explain the new global organization, but there was so
much resistance that he threatened to resign. "The members were shocked
that their leader joined without asking them," Hany al-Sibai told me.
"Only a few, who could be counted on the fingers, supported it." [Ibid]
Divisions and Attacks on Islamic Jihad as It Bonds with Al-Qaida and Focus on America
Translation of Al-Qaida document
"Get the Idolaters Out of Arab Island"
Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker: “Zawahiri's brother
Mohammed, the military commander of Islamic Jihad, had long been a
controversial figure in the group, and yet he remained a fixture in the
hierarchy of the "company," as the Jihad members called themselves. The
two brothers had been together from their underground days. They had
sometimes been at odds with each other—on one occasion, Ayman went so
far as to denounce Mohammed in front of his colleagues for mismanaging
the group's meagre finances. But Mohammed was popular among many of the
members, and, as deputy emir, he had run the organization whenever Ayman
was travelling. According to Sibai, Mohammed refused to accept the
alliance with Al Qaeda, and he left Islamic Jihad not long after the
meeting in Afghanistan. [Source: Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker,
September 16, 2002]
“Several members of the Islamic Group tried to have Sheikh Omar named
emir of the Islamic Front, but the proposal was brushed aside. Clearly,
bin Laden had had enough of the fighting between the Egyptian factions.
He told members of Jihad that their ineffectual operations in Egypt were
too expensive, and that it was time for them to "turn their guns" on
the United States and Israel. Zawahiri's assistant Ahmed al-Najjar later
told Egyptian investigators, "I myself heard bin Laden say that our
main objective is now limited to one state only, the United States, and
involves waging a guerrilla war against all U.S. interests, not only in
the Arab region but also throughout the world."Since the early nineties,
Egyptian authorities had felt stymied in their efforts to stamp out
Islamic fundamentalists by the protection that Western governments
afforded fugitives. The Egyptians complained that more than five hundred
terrorists had found refuge in England, France, Germany, Austria,
Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and the United States, among other countries,
on the ground that they would be subject to political persecution and
perhaps torture if they were sent home. Many European governments
refused to return a suspect to face a trial in which he might receive
the death penalty. [Ibid]
“After years of fending off criticism of his leadership, Zawahiri
resigned as the emir of Islamic Jihad in the summer of 1999. He was
angry at the Jihad members who found fault with him from comfortable
perches in Europe. He disdainfully called them "the hot-blooded
revolutionary strugglers who have now become as cold as ice after they
experienced the life of civilization and luxury, the guarantees of the
new world order, the gallant ethics of civilized Europe, and the
impartiality and materialism of Western civilization." Many of his
former allies, exhausted and demoralized by years of setbacks, had
become advocates of an initiative by Islamist leaders imprisoned in
Egypt, who had declared a unilateral ceasefire. Those who remained loyal
to the movement no longer wanted to endure the primitive living
conditions in Afghanistan. Yet, even as the organization was
disintegrating, Zawahiri rejected any thought of negotiation with the
Egyptian regime or with the West. But without his leadership Islamic
Jihad was adrift, and several months after he resigned his successor
relinquished the post. Zawahiri was back in charge. According to
testimony given at the trial of the Albanian cell members, however, the
membership of Islamic Jihad outside Egypt had diminished to forty.”
[Ibid]
“Zawahiri's continual efforts to maintain a semblance of autonomy
ended in June, 2001, when Islamic Jihad and Al Qaeda merged into a
single entity, Qaeda al-Jihad. The name reflected the fact that the
Egyptians were still in control; indeed, the nine-member leadership
council includes only three non-Egyptians—most prominently, bin Laden.
Within the organization, the dominance of the Egyptians has been a
subject of contention, especially among the Saudis. According to an
American investigator, bin Laden has tried to mollify the malcontents by
explaining that he can always count on the Egyptians, since they are
unable to go home without being arrested; like him, they are men without
a country. [Ibid]
Zawahiri’s Input on the African Embassy and USS Cole Attacks
Nairobi Embassy bombing
Al-Zawahiri is thought to have helped organize the 2000 suicide
bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen. He is believed to have
heavily involved in the planning of the September 11th attacks and the
1998 bombing of the embassy in Kenya and Tanzania.
Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker: “According to officials in
the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., Zawahiri has been responsible for much of the
planning of the terrorist operations against the United States, from
the assault on American soldiers in Somalia in 1993, and the bombings of
the American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and of the U.S.S. Cole in
Yemen in 2000, to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon on September 11th.” [Source: Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker,
September 16, 2002]
“The suicide bombings of the American embassies in East Africa were
planned and executed, in large part, by Egyptian members of Al Qaeda...
On October 12, 2000, Al Qaeda bombed the U.S.S. Cole, one of the Navy's
most advanced destroyers, in Aden, Yemen. By now, American intelligence
knew enough about Zawahiri to realize that he was in charge of the Yemen
cell. He was also closely affiliated with the Saudi terrorist Tawifiq
bin Atash, who is now thought to have been the planner of that
operation. Moreover, the C.I.A. believes that Atash was one of the chief
organizers of the September 11th attacks.”
Zawahiri and Biological and Chemical Weapons
Al-Zawahiri may have been directly involved in Al-Qaida’s biological
weapons program. His house in Kabul contained a laboratory with
explosives, blasting caps, electronic components and “various solid and
liquid substances,” including fine, silvery powders in jars and
mysterious liquids in shampoo bottles labeled special medicine. One
sample turned up a “positive indicator” for anthrax.
BpsMH, "potential biological weapon"
Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker: “As a man of science,
Zawahiri was interested in the use of biological and chemical warfare.
In a memo from April of 1999, he observed that "the destructive power of
these weapons is no less than that of nuclear weapons," and proposed
that Islamic Jihad conduct research into biological and chemical agents.
"Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the
enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that
they can be produced simply," he noted. He pored over medical journals
to research the subject, and he met with an Egyptian scientist in
Afghanistan, Medhat Mursi al-Sayed, whose Jihad name was Abu Khabab.
[Source: Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, September 16, 2002]
“ C.I.A. officials believe that Khabab prepared the explosives for the
bomb that hit the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad. Khabab supervised
elementary tests of nerve gas; satellite photos purportedly show corpses
of dogs scattered about one of the camps near Tora Bora, and Al Qaeda
training videos recently acquired by CNN show that poison gas had been
tested on dogs. "We knew from hundreds of different sources that Al
Qaeda was interested in biological and chemical weapons," says Richard
A. Clarke, who was the Clinton Administration's national coördinator for
counterterrorism in the National Security Council and is now in charge
of cybersecurity for the N.S.C. Clarke told me that in one of the camps
human volunteers, wearing protective clothing, were exposed to chemicals
in tests similar to ones that the U.S. Army has conducted. “ [Ibid]
During the invasion of Afghanistan, American forces discovered a
factory under construction, near Kandahar, that intelligence officials
say was to be used for the production of anthrax. A sample of anthrax
powder was reportedly found in Zawahiri's house in Afghanistan.
According to reports from Israel and Russia, bin Laden paid Chechen
mobsters millions of dollars in cash and heroin to obtain radiological
"suitcase" bombs left over from the Soviets. He declared in November,
2001, "We have chemical and nuclear weapons," and vowed to use them "if
America used them against us."
Zawahiri and American Intelligence
Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker: “One of Zawahiri's most
trusted men was in fact a double agent, named Ali Mohamed. Fluent in
English, French, and German, as well as Arabic, Mohamed held both
Egyptian and American citizenship. From 1986 to 1989, he served in the
U.S. Army as a supply sergeant at the Special Warfare School, at Fort
Bragg, North Carolina, where he was commended for his exceptional
physical fitness. In 1984, Mohamed approached the C.I.A. in Cairo, and
after that meeting the agency sent him to Germany. There he made contact
with a Hezbollah cell, but apparently he boasted of his C.I.A.
connection, and the agency cut him loose. He then began his association
with Islamic Jihad. In 1989, he instructed a group of Islamic militants
in Brooklyn in basic combat techniques; four years later, some of these
militants bombed the World Trade Center. The same year, Mohamed talked
to an F.B.I. agent in California and provided American intelligence with
its first inside look at Al Qaeda; inexplicably, that interview never
found its way to the F.B.I. investigators in New York. In 1994, he
travelled to Khartoum to train bin Laden's bodyguards.[Source: Lawrence
Wright, The New Yorker, September 16, 2002]
“Zawahiri's name had been in American intelligence files at least
since the Soviet-Afghan war. The F.B.I. became interested in him after
the Islamic Jihad bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, but at
that point he was still seen as an Egyptian problem. When Zawahiri
signed the alliance with bin Laden, in February, 1998, the Bureau opened
a file on him. Then came the suicide bombings of the American embassies
in East Africa, which were planned and executed, in large part, by
Egyptian members of Al Qaeda. American intelligence agencies now
realized that there was not just one leader of the organization. They
began regarding Zawahiri as an equal partner with bin Laden in the
planning and carrying out of the terrorist agenda. [Ibid]
Osama bin Laden declaration in February 1998 that "to kill Americans”
was the “duty of every Muslim,”* Wright wrote, “prompted a new
vigilance in the West. The C.I.A., which had sporadically tried to keep
track of Islamic Jihad over the years, acted quickly. In July of 1998,
American agents kidnapped Ahmad Salama Mabruk and another member of
Jihad outside a restaurant in Baku, Azerbaijan. Mabruk's laptop computer
turned out to contain vital information about Jihad members in Europe.
The same summer, the C.I.A. moved against an Islamic Jihad cell in
Tirana, Albania; the cell, with sixteen members, had been created by
Mohammed al-Zawahiri in the early nineties. Albanian agents, under
C.I.A. supervision, kidnapped five members of the cell, blindfolded
them, interrogated them for several days, and then sent the Egyptian
members to Cairo. They were put on trial with more than a hundred other
suspected terrorists. Their lawyer, Hafez Abu-Saada, maintains that they
were tortured. The ordeal produced twenty thousand pages of
confessions, and both Zawahiri brothers were given death sentences in
absentia. [Ibid]
As these pieces came together, American intelligence worked more
closely with its Egyptian counterparts, and the C.I.A., in conjunction
with Egyptian authorities, began to target not just Zawahiri but his
brothers. In November, 1999, Mohammed's wife, Aliya, with their five
children, surrendered to Egyptian authorities in Yemen, saying that her
husband had abandoned them. A few months later, according to Islamist
sources, Egyptian intelligence kidnapped Mohammed from the United Arab
Emirates and took him back to Cairo, where he "disappeared." Aliya
allegedly told Egyptian authorities where the youngest Zawahiri brother,
Hussein, could be found. Hussein had been arrested several times on
suspicion of having ties to Islamic Jihad, but nothing was ever proved
against him. In the late nineties, he was employed as an engineer for a
Malaysian company called Multidiscovery, which was building electrical
plants. According to a senior intelligence officer in the Clinton White
House, American agents ordered the kidnapping of Hussein in Malaysia and
flew him to Cairo, where he, too, "disappeared." Six months later, he
reemerged, in the middle of the night, wearing the same clothes in which
he had been abducted. [Ibid]
According to a source in the C.I.A., American agents came close to
apprehending Zawahiri a month before September 11th, when he travelled
to Yemen for medical treatments. "The Egyptian intelligence service
briefed us that he was in a hospital in Sanaa," the person told me. "We
sent a few people over there, and they made a colossal screwup. While
our guys were conducting a surveillance of the hospital, the guards
caught them with their videocameras." The plan was compromised, and
Zawahiri returned to Afghanistan. [Ibid]
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons except bin Laden in the 1980s, Time, bin Laden and Zawahiri, Redshirt Alignment blog
Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, The Guardian, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Global Viewpoint (Christian Science Monitor), Foreign Policy, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, NBC News, Fox News and various books and other publications.
© 2008 Jeffrey Hays
Last updated July 2012
"to kill Americans” was the “duty of every Muslim,”*
(Comments of BAFS)
THE MASS KILLING OF MUSLIMS THEY DO NOT LIKE HAS BEEN THE WORK OF THE SATANIC WEST AND OF THEIR ALLIES FOR MORE THAN SEVERAL CENTURIES UP TO THIS VERY DAY AND THE END OF IT IS STILL NOT NEAR UNLESS WE STOP THEM!
fall of the Taliban*
And in 2013, they (including the Royals) are still murdering "the Taliban"!
No comments:
Post a Comment