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VIII—CRACKDOWN IN EGYPT
In 1993, bin Laden dispatched Mohamed Atef to Somalia to look for ways of attacking the American military forces that were participating in an international famine-relief effort. Bin Laden gloried in the fact that his men had trained the Somali militiamen who shot down two American helicopters in the "Black Hawk Down" incident, in October of that year, prompting President Clinton to withdraw all American soldiers from the country. "Based on the reports we received from our brothers in Somalia," bin Laden said, "we learned that they saw the weakness, frailty, and cowardice of U.S. troops. Only eighteen U.S. troops were killed. Nonetheless, they fled in the heart of darkness."

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.

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!"

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?"

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.

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. However, 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.

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.

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.

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.")

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.

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. (The Saudi government stripped bin Laden of his citizenship in 1994.) He had already survived two attempts on his life. A deranged Islamic extremist, intending to assassinate him, shot up a mosque in Khartoum and was captured as he made his way to bin Laden's house. On another occasion, a Toyota pickup carrying four Yemeni mercenaries opened fire on bin Laden's home and his guesthouse, where he had his office. Three of the Yemenis and two of bin Laden's bodyguards were killed in the ensuing gunfight; the other attacker was captured and executed by the Sudanese authorities. Bin Laden, in his sometimes oblique language, told a reporter that he blamed "regimes in our Arabic region" for the assaults. Zawahiri increased bin Laden's security, surrounding him with Egyptian bodyguards. But Zawahiri was also a target.

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.

"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.

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?" Some members of Islamic Jihad proposed that bin Laden undergo plastic surgery and sneak into Egypt, but Zawahiri said that Egypt was too dangerous. In May of 1996, bin Laden chartered a jet and took a number of his colleagues, along with his ever-growing family, to Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. The expulsion from Sudan reportedly cost him three hundred million dollars in lost investments.

Zawahiri's next movements 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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Emboldened by the success of the "Black Hawk Down" incident in Somalia, bin Laden escalated his campaign against America. In November of 1995, Al Qaeda bombed the National Guard communications center, in Riyadh, where American troops were training Saudis in surveillance methods. Five Americans were killed. Al Qaeda struck again in June of 1996, with a bombing at the Khobar Towers dormitory, in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen American servicemen. (U.S. intelligence officials suspected that Iranian extremists were responsible, but they subsequently learned that Zawahiri called bin Laden immediately afterward to congratulate him on the operation.)

Bin Laden declined to take credit, but two months later, on August 23, 1996, he issued an edict entitled "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." In this lengthy statement, published in the London newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, bin Laden boldly lays out his case against the Saudi ruling family and its American backers. "Everyone agrees that the shadow of a stick cannot be straightened as long as the stick is crooked," he writes. "Hence, it is imperative to focus on attacking the main enemy." He argues that the West deliberately divided the Muslim world into "states and mini-states," which could be easily controlled. He declares, "There is no higher priority, after faith, than pushing back the American-Israeli alliance." He calls upon all Muslims to participate in jihad in order to liberate Saudi Arabia and restore the dignity of the Islamic community. "In view of the enemy's strength, fast and light forces must be used and must operate in absolute secrecy."

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Courtesy: The New Yorker

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