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MULLAH OMAR SENT a delegation to Tora Bora to greet bin Laden and learn more about him. Bin Laden’s declaration of war and the subsequent international media storm had shocked and divided the Taliban. Some of them pointed out that they had not invited bin Laden to Afghanistan in the first place and were not obliged to protect a man who was endangering their relations with other countries. The Taliban had no quarrel at the time with the United States, which was nominally encouraging their stabilizing influence on the country. Moreover, bin Laden’s attacks on the Saudi royal family were a direct violation of a pledge Mullah Omar had made to Prince Turki to keep his guest under control.
On the other hand, the Taliban were hopeful that bin Laden could help rebuild Afghanistan’s ravaged infrastructure and provide jobs to revivify the dead economy. They flattered him, saying that they considered themselves like the supporters of the Prophet when he took refuge in Medina. They emphasized that so long as he refrained from attacking their sponsor, Saudi Arabia, or speaking to the press, he would be welcome to remain under their protection. In return, bin Laden endorsed their rule unconditionally, although he immediately broke their trust.
In March 1997, a television crew for CNN was driven into the frigid mountains above Jalalabad to a blanket-lined mud hut to meet with Osama bin Laden. Since arriving in Afghanistan, the exiled Saudi had already spoken with reporters from the London-based newspapers the Independentand Al-Quds al-Arabi, but this was the first television interview he had ever granted. Peter Bergen, the producer, observed that bin Laden seemed to be ill. He walked into the room using a cane and coughed softly throughout the interview.
It is possible that, until now, bin Laden had not killed an American or anyone else except on the field of battle. The actions in Aden, Somalia, Riyadh, and Dhahran may have been inspired by his words, but it has never been demonstrated that he commanded the terrorists who carried them out. Although Ramzi Yousef had trained in an al-Qaeda camp, bin Laden was not connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Bin Laden told the London-based Palestinian editor Abdel Bari Atwan that al-Qaeda was responsible for the ambush of American forces in Mogadishu in 1993, the National Guard Training Center bombing in Riyadh in 1995, and the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, but there is no evidence to substantiate these claims. He was certainly surrounded by men, like Zawahiri, who had plenty of blood on their hands, and he supported their actions in Egypt. He was, as the CIA characterized him at the time, a terrorist financier, albeit a financier without much money. Declaring war on America, however, proved to be a dazzling advertisement for himself and his cause—and irresistible for a man whose fortunes had been so badly trampled upon. Of course, his Taliban hosts forbade such publicity, but once bin Laden had gotten hold of the world’s attention, he would allow nothing to pull it out of his grasp.
Peter Arnett, the CNN reporter, began by asking bin Laden to state his criticism of the Saudi royal family. Bin Laden said that they were subservient to the United States, “and this, based on the ruling of Sharia, casts the regime outside the religious community.” In other words, he was declaring takfir against the royal family, saying that they were no longer to be considered Muslims and therefore could be killed.
Arnett then asked, what kind of society he would create if the Islamic movement were to take over Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden’s exact response was this: “We are confident, with the permission of God, praise and glory be to Him, that Muslims will be victorious in the Arabian Peninsula and that God’s religion, praise and glory be to Him, will prevail in this peninsula. It is a great pride and a big hope that the revelation unto Mohammed, peace be upon him, will be resorted to for ruling. When we used to follow Mohammed’s revelation, peace be upon him, we were in great happiness and in great dignity, to God belongs the credit and praise.”
What is notable about this response, filled as usual with ritualistic locutions, is the complete absence of any real political plan, beyond imposing Sharia, which of course was already in effect in Saudi Arabia. The happiness and dignity that bin Laden invoked lay on the other side of history from the concepts of nationhood and the state. The radical Islamist movement has never had a clear idea of governing, or even much interest in it, as the Taliban would conclusively demonstrate. Purification was the goal; and whenever purity is paramount, terror is close at hand.
Bin Laden cited American support for Israel as the first cause of his declaration of war, followed by the presence of American troops in Arabia. He added that American civilians must also leave the Islamic holy land because he could not guarantee their safety.
In the most revealing exchange, Arnett asked whether, if the United States complied with bin Laden’s demands to leave Arabia, he would call off his jihad. “The reaction came as a result of the aggressive U.S. policy toward the entire Muslim world, not just the Arabian Peninsula,” bin Laden said. Therefore, the United States has to withdraw from any kind of intervention against Muslims “in the whole world.” Bin Laden was already speaking as the representative of the Islamic nation, a caliph-in-waiting. “The U.S. today has set a double standard, calling whoever goes against its injustice a terrorist,” he complained. “It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose on us agents to rule us…and wants us to agree to all these. If we refuse to do so, it will say, ‘You are terrorists.’”
THIS TIME MULLAH OMAR sent a helicopter to Jalalabad and summoned bin Laden to Kandahar. It wasn’t clear whether bin Laden would prove to be an ally or a rival. In either case, Omar couldn’t afford to leave him in Jalalabad, on the opposite side of the country, in an area that the Taliban only marginally controlled. The talkative Saudi obviously had to be restrained or expelled.
The two men met at the Kandahar airport. Omar told bin Laden that the Taliban intelligence service claimed to have uncovered a plot by some tribal mercenaries to kidnap him; whether or not the story was true, it provided the excuse for Mullah Omar to order bin Laden to evacuate his people from Jalalabad and relocate to Kandahar, where the Taliban could keep an eye on him. Omar personally extended his protection to bin Laden, but he said that the interviews must come to a stop. Bin Laden said he had already decided to freeze his media campaign.
Three days later, bin Laden flew all of his family members and supporters to Kandahar, and he followed by car. Once again his entire movement had been uprooted; once again discouraged followers drifted away. Omar gave bin Laden and al-Qaeda the choice of occupying a housing complex built for the workers of the electric company, which had all the necessary utilities, or an abandoned agricultural compound called Tarnak Farms, which had none, not even running water. Bin Laden chose the dilapidated farm. “We want a simple life,” he said.
Behind the ten-foot walls of the compound were about eighty mud-brick or concrete structures, including dormitories, a small mosque, storage facilities, and a crumbling six-story office building. Bin Laden’s three wives were all crowded into a walled compound where they lived, according to one of bin Laden’s bodyguards, “in perfect harmony.” Outside the walls, the Taliban stationed two T-55 Soviet tanks.
As always, bin Laden drew strength from privation and seemed oblivious to the toll such circumstances took on others. When a Yemeni jihadi, Abu Jandal, went to his chief complaining that there was nothing for the men to eat, bin Laden replied, “My son Jandal, we have not yet reached a condition like that of the Prophet’s companions, who placed stones against their middles and tightened them around their waists. The Messenger of Allah used two stones!”
“Those men were strong in faith and God wished to test them,” Abu Jandal protested. “We, on the other hand, have sinned, and God would not test us.”
Bin Laden laughed.
Meals were often little more than stale bread and well water. Bin Laden would dip the hard bread in the water and say, “May God be praised. We are eating, but there are millions of others who wish that they could have something like this to eat.” There was little money to buy provisions. One of the Arabs came to bin Laden asking for funds for an emergency trip abroad; bin Laden went into the house, collected all the cash he could find, and emerged with about $100. Realizing that bin Laden was emptying the treasury, Abu Jandal complained, “Why did you not leave a part of that money for us? Those who are staying here are more deserving than those who are leaving.” Bin Laden replied, “Do not worry. Our livelihood will come to us.” But for the next five days, there was nothing to eat in the camp except the green pomegranates that grew around bin Laden’s house. “We ate raw pomegranates with bread, three times a day,” Abu Jandal recalled.
AFTER ZAWAHIRI LEFT SUDAN IN 1996, he became a phantom. Egyptian intelligence agents tracked him to Switzerland and Sarajevo. He allegedly sought asylum in Bulgaria, but an Egyptian newspaper also reported that he was living luxuriously in a Swiss villa near the French border and that he had $30 million in a secret account. At the same time, Zawahiri nominally edited the al-Jihad newspaper, Al-Mujahideen, which had its office in Copenhagen. Neither Swiss nor Danish intelligence knows whether Zawahiri was ever actually in either country during this time. A fake passport he was using shows that he traveled to Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. He was reported to have been in Holland talking about establishing a satellite television channel. He said he was backed by wealthy Arabs who wanted to provide a fundamentalist alternative to the al-Jazeera network recently launched in Qatar. Zawahiri’s plan was to broadcast ten hours a day to Europe and the Middle East, using only male presenters, but he never pursued it.
Zawahiri also traveled to Chechnya, where he hoped to establish a new home base for al-Jihad. “Conditions there were excellent,” he wrote in a memo to his colleagues. The Russians had begun to withdraw from Chechnya earlier that year after achieving a cease-fire with the rebellious, largely Muslim 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. “If the Chechens and other Caucasian mujahideen reach the shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea, the only thing that will separate them from Afghanistan will be the neutral state of Turkmenistan,” Zawahiri observed in his memoir. “This will form a mujahid Islamic belt to the south of Russia that will be connected in the east to Pakistan, which is brimming with mujahideen movements in Kashmir.” Thus the caliphate would begin to re-create itself. The world he was making seemed very much at hand.
At four in the morning on December 1, 1996, Zawahiri crossed into Russia in a minivan with two of his closest assistants—Mahmoud Hisham al-Hennawi and Ahmed Salama Mabruk, who was head of the al-Jihad cell in Azerbaijan. Traveling without visas, they were detained at a roadblock and taken to the Federal Security Service, which charged them with entering the country illegally. Zawahiri carried four passports, each from a different country and with a different name. The Russians were never able to establish his real identity. They found $6,400 in cash; some other forged documents, including graduation certificates for “Mr. Amin” from the medical school of Cairo University; a number of medical textbooks; and a laptop, fax, and satellite phone. At the trial, Zawahiri posed as a Sudanese merchant. He claimed he was unaware that he had crossed the border illegally and maintained that he had come to Russia “to find out the price for leather, medicine, and other goods.” The judge sentenced Zawahiri and his companions to six months in jail. They had nearly completed the term by the time of the trial, and a few weeks later they were taken to the border of Azerbaijan and sent on their way. “God blinded them to our identities,” Zawahiri boasted in an account of his trip to his disgruntled supporters, who had wondered where he was.
This fiasco had a profound consequence. With even more defectors from his membership and no real sources of income, Zawahiri had no choice but to join bin Laden in Kandahar. Each man saw an advantage in linking forces. Al-Qaeda and al-Jihad were both very much reduced from their salad days in Sudan. However, the Pakistani intelligence service had persuaded the Taliban to return the al-Qaeda camps in Khost and elsewhere to bin Laden’s control in order to train militants to fight in Kashmir. With ISI subsidizing the cost, the training camps had become an important source of revenue. Moreover, bin Laden was still able to call upon a few of his donors from the days of the Soviet jihad. So at least there was a modest income, enough for bin Laden to be able to purchase some expensive vehicles for Mullah Omar and his top commanders, which made him more welcome. Despite the still dire financial circumstances, Zawahiri believed that his fortunes were better served with bin Laden than without him.
MANY OF THE EGYPTIANS REGROUPED in Afghanistan, including Abu Hafs, who was appointed the al-Qaeda military chief after Abu Ubaydah’s drowning. Al-Qaeda was able to provide only a hundred-dollar-per-month stipend, half of what it had paid in Sudan. The leaders of the Islamic Group came, and some other Islamists from Pakistan and Bangladesh. At first they gathered in Jalalabad in the same compound with the al-Qaeda families—about 250 people altogether—and most of them followed bin Laden when he moved to Kandahar. They were dismayed by the squalor, the awful food, the noxious water, and especially the lack of facilities. Hepatitis and malaria were epidemic. “This place is worse than a tomb,” one of the Egyptians wrote home. Eventually their leader, Zawahiri, joined them.
Since there was no more schooling in Afghanistan, the children spent a lot of time with each other. Zaynab Ahmed Khadr, a Canadian citizen and the strong-willed daughter of one of Zawahiri’s prominent supporters, was upset when her family left Peshawar, where they had lived comfortably for fifteen of her eighteen years. Afghanistan was just across the steep ridge of mountains that blocked the sunset, and yet it seemed anchored in another century. Although she already covered herself completely, even wearing gloves and a niqab over her face, she detested the burka, which Afghan women were forced to wear. Her parents promised that she would be happy in this country, where the true Islam was being practiced, and that she would soon find new friends to replace the schoolmates she’d grown up with. Zaynab moodily declared that she didn’t want to make any friends.
Two days later, her mother said they were going to meet the bin Ladens. “I don’t want to meet anybody!” she said defiantly.
“If you don’t behave yourself, you’ll never dream of going to Peshawar again,” her father said impatiently.
As it turned out, bin Laden’s daughters became some of Zaynab’s closest friends. Fatima, the oldest, who was fourteen in 1997, was the daughter of Umm Abdullah, and Khadija, thirteen, was the daughter of Umm Khaled. (Fatima was the name of one of the Prophet’s daughters, and Khadija the name of his first wife.) The age difference between Zaynab and the bin Laden girls was something she simply accepted, since they were living in such a small community.
Bin Laden’s three wives and their children lived in separate houses inside their compound. All the children of al-Qaeda were dressed in rags, and the effort to keep even minimal levels of cleanliness often came to naught. Zaynab observed that each of the bin Laden houses was clean and distinctly different. Umm Abdullah was poorly educated but fun and good-hearted, and she loved to decorate. Whereas the houses of the other wives were neat and well scrubbed, hers was also beautiful. There were flowers and posters, and coloring books for the younger children. Her daughter Fatima had to do a lot of cleaning, Zaynab noticed, because the mother “was not raised to work.”
Fatima was fun but a little slow. She confided to Zaynab that she would never marry any of the men around her father, because “he’d be wanted everywhere in the world.”
“His crime would be marrying you, Fatima,” Zaynab said.
“Oh, right.”
Zaynab was not joking. In the world the girls lived in, marriage was a union of families, not just individuals. It seemed to Zaynab that Fatima had forgotten who she was. (Of course, Fatima had no say about whom she would marry; her eventual husband—one of bin Laden’s followers—would be killed four years later in the evacuation of Kandahar.)
Life was very different in Umm Khaled’s house—quieter and more organized. Unlike Umm Abdullah, Umm Khaled made an attempt to educate her three daughters and one son. A private school for the Arab boys started up in the compound, but the girls studied at home. Umm Khaled, who had a doctorate in the subject, helped Zaynab study Arabic grammar, and she often pitched in with the girls to make dinner. Bin Laden taught his daughters math and science, spending time with them every day. Sometimes he would give them quizzes to make sure they were keeping up.
Umm Khaled’s oldest daughter, Khadija, liked to read history and biography. Although in Zaynab’s opinion none of the children were well educated, she thought that Khadija was “very, very bright.”
Umm Hamza had only one child—a son—but in Zaynab’s opinion, compared to the other wives “Umm Hamza was the greatest.” She was also the oldest, and seven years older than her husband. Her eyesight was weak and her constitution frail. She suffered frequent miscarriages. As a Saudi woman from a wealthy and distinguished family, she exuded a regal quality, but she was deeply committed to the cause. When bin Laden had proposed to her, Umm Hamza’s family was deeply offended because she would be his second wife, but she consented because she wanted to marry a true mujahid. Umm Hamza was very popular in the al-Qaeda community. Other women felt that they could go to her, and she would talk to them as if their problems were important to her. “We knew things might collapse around us, and we’d get depressed,” said Zaynab. “She’d keep everybody going.”
Bin Laden also depended on her. Although he tried to treat his wives equally, as the Quran commands, everyone knew that Umm Hamza was his favorite. She was not beautiful, but she was sensible and devoted. Her house was always the neatest. There was a bed in the house and a box that contained all her clothes. She would have a shalwar kameez (the typical Afghan gown) on the back of the door clean and ready for bin Laden. In the bathroom there was a small shelf with a bottle of perfume for her and one for her husband.
Umm Abdullah was extremely jealous of their relationship. Although she was first in the rank of wives, and the mother of eleven of bin Laden’s children, she was also the youngest and least educated. Her beauty was her only advantage, and she worked hard to keep herself attractive. Whenever other women traveled, especially to Western countries, Umm Abdullah gave them a shopping list of brand-name cosmetics and lingerie, preferring American products that no one else would consider buying. Bin Laden’s wives all lived within a small inner court in the larger compound, and Umm Abdullah would put on a jogging suit and run around the perimeter to keep in shape. “She would always be fighting with Osama,” her friend Maha Elsamneh recalled. “I would tell her this man could be taken away from you in the blink of an eye. You should enjoy him while he is with you. Don’t make him so miserable every time he’s around.”
The girls sometimes played childish pranks on each other. On one occasion, when Fatima didn’t want Zaynab to go home, she cajoled her younger sister Iman into hiding Zaynab’s shoes and her head covering until the curfew sounded, so she was stuck there all night.
Bin Laden’s children did not see him as being nearly as pious and intransigent as the rest of the community did. When Fatima wanted to borrow several cassette tapes, Zaynab told her, “I’ll give them to you on one condition. Your dad shouldn’t hear them, because some men are very strict.”
“My dad is not going to destroy them,” Fatima protested. “He’s not really that hard. He just acts like that in front of the men.”
“He actually listens to songs?” Zaynab asked, amazed.
“Oh, yeah, he doesn’t mind.”
Reflecting his love of horses, bin Laden kept a library of books on the subject in Umm Khaled’s house, and even tolerated coloring books and calendars with pictures of horses on them, although no one else in the community allowed pictures on the walls. Zaynab concluded, “The Sheikh was pretty broad-minded.”
The older bin Laden boys were usually with their father nearby in Tora Bora. Among the teenagers, there was a strange, unstable mix of boredom and mortal danger. Unlike the girls, the boys had the opportunity to go to school, but they did little other than memorize the Quran all day. Bin Laden let his younger sons play Nintendo because there was not much else to entertain them. The boys were quite wild and inclined to reckless behavior to escape the monotony. One of Zaynab’s younger brothers, Abdul Rahman, became friends with bin Laden’s son by the same name. They were the only two boys in the compound whose fathers could afford a horse for them. Sometimes, instead of riding, they would goad their animals into fighting each other. Abdul Rahman bin Laden’s horse was a spirited Arabian, but when Abdul Rahman Khadr brought a stronger horse that nearly killed the Arabian, the bin Laden boy chambered a bullet in his gun and pointed it at Khadr, saying he would shoot him if he didn’t pull his horse off. Murder and mayhem were always brewing.
In the afternoons, the boys often played volleyball, and Osama would sometimes join in the game. He was apparently in excellent health. Once, he bought a horse from the Taliban, who said they had captured it from Ahmed Shah Massoud. It was a large golden stallion with three white stockings. Nobody could ride it until bin Laden jumped on its back and galloped off. Twenty-five minutes later, he rode back into the compound with the horse completely under his control.
The men who were so feared and despised in the rest of the world did not seem so terrifying in their own homes, where they roughhoused with the children and helped with their homework. Zaynab remembered one occasion when her family was at the Zawahiris’ house in Kandahar and the father came in carrying his machine gun. As he was going up the stairs, Zaynab’s ten-year-old brother grabbed Zawahiri’s legs and begged him to give it to him. “Abdul Kareem, just wait until we go to the room!” said Zawahiri. The boy wouldn’t let go; he kept begging and grabbing for the weapon. Zawahiri finally relented and let the boy examine his weapon. This struck Zaynab and the others as a tender moment. “And this is the man, they make him seem like a monster!” she exclaimed.
The four Zawahiri daughters were bright, outspoken, and beautiful, particularly Nabila. When she turned twelve, she became a subject of intense interest among the bride-shopping mothers in the community. Mohammed, the Zawahiris’ only son, was also very attractive, the pet of his older sisters. As he got older, however, he was spending more time with the men and with his classmates. It was a rough environment for such a delicate, well-mannered boy, and he was constantly teased and bullied. He preferred to stay at home and help his mother.
The Zawahari girls would often get together for games or exercise. Azza, their mother, liked to have small parties, although there was little to offer her guests—sometimes no more than noodles and tomatoes. When Zaynab visited the Zawahiris for the engagement of their second daughter, Umayma, the girls talked and talked through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Late at night, they were still singing, making so much noise that they couldn’t hear Dr. Ayman knocking on the door asking them to keep it down. “I thought about how this guy scares the whole world but he doesn’t even scream at us. We see them as nice and gentle.”
Despite her modest manner, Zawahiri’s wife insisted on retaining a certain elegance. Azza sewed her own clothes, preferring classical styles. She obtained some patterns from Iran, and she taught herself enough Persian to understand the instructions. She also sewed nightgowns to raise money, usually donating a portion of her income to various needful projects. She and the girls made floral strands out of candy wrappers and strung them on the wall, and arranged stones in a pleasing design in front of their humble mud cottage.
In 1997 Azza had a surprise: She was pregnant again, almost a decade after the birth of her last child. The baby was born in the winter, severely underweight. Dr. Ayman realized at once that his fifth daughter suffered from Down syndrome. Azza, already pressed by the responsibility of taking care of a large family in extraordinary circumstances, accepted this new burden as well. They named the baby Aisha. Everyone loved her, but Azza was the only one who could attend to all her needs.
Looking back at her friendships with the bin Laden and the Zawahiri children, Zaynab observed that the families “had their ups and downs, but they were pretty much normal kids. They had pretty much a normal childhood.”
IN JULY 1997, two months after Zawahiri returned to Afghanistan, he was infuriated by a development in Egypt that threatened to undermine his entire movement. The Islamist lawyer Montassir al-Zayyat had brokered a deal between the Islamic Group and the Egyptian government. The nonviolence initiative, as it was called, had originated in the same prisons where Zayyat and Zawahiri had been incarcerated together sixteen years before. With twenty thousand Islamists in Egyptian custody, and thousands of others who had been cut down by the security forces, the fundamentalist movement had been paralyzed, and it was clear to the leaders of the Islamic Group that unless they formally renounced violence they would never see daylight.
After the initiative was declared, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman added his imprimatur from his prison cell in the United States. While denying that a deal had been struck, the government released two thousand members of the Islamic Group within the following year. Many senior members of Zawahiri’s own al-Jihad joined the movement to reconcile with the regime.
At first, Zawahiri was alone in his dissent. “The political translation of this initiative is surrender,” he raged. “In which battle is a fighter forced to end his fighting and incitement, accept captivity, and turn in his men and weapons—in exchange for nothing?” The barrage of letters over this matter between Zawahiri and other Islamists to the editor of an Arabic paper in London came to be called the War of the Faxes. Zawahiri said he understood the suffering of the imprisoned leaders, but “if we are going to stop now, why did we start in the first place?”
Zawahiri’s stance divided the Egyptian Islamists between those still in the country, who wanted peace, and those outside Egypt who opposed reconciliation. Zawahiri enlisted Mustafa Hamza, the new emir of the rival Islamic Group, and its military leader, Rifai Ahmed Taha, both of whom were in Afghanistan, to join him. (As for the blind sheikh’s participation in the initiative, he may have thought of it as a bargaining chip with the Americans, whom he hoped would set him free. When it later became clear that would not happen, he retracted his support.) The Egyptian exiles decided to justify the continuing use of violence through a single transformative blow.
The attack may have been intended for a performance of Aida, Verdi’s opera of ancient Egypt, which was staged in October 1997 in front of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor. The splendid ruin is one of the great artifacts of the New Kingdom. Suzanne Mubarak, the president’s wife, hosted the opening-night gala.
The Islamic Group’s strategy was to attack tourism, the life force of the Egyptian economy and the main source of foreign exchange, in order to provoke the government into repressive, unpopular responses. Al-Jihad had always disdained this approach as counterproductive. But with so many VIPs and government officials in attendance, including the president himself, the performance also presented the opportunity to accomplish al-Jihad’s goal of decapitating the government. The presence of three thousand security officers initially deterred this attack, however.
On November 17, 1997, the glorious ruin looked out on the amber sand of the southern desert as it had for thirty-five centuries—long before Jesus or Mohammed or even Abraham, the father of the great monotheistic religions. The summer heat had ebbed, marking the beginning of the high season, and hundreds of tourists were strolling through the grounds, some in groups with Egyptian guides, others snapping photos and shopping in the kiosks.
Six young men dressed in black police uniforms and carrying vinyl bags entered the temple precinct shortly before nine in the morning. One of the men shot a guard, and then they all put on red headbands identifying themselves as members of the Islamic Group. Two of the attackers remained at the gate to await the shoot-out with the police, who never arrived. The other men crisscrossed the terraced temple grounds, mowing down tourists by shooting their legs, then methodically finishing them off with close shots to the head. They paused to mutilate some of the bodies with butcher knives. One elderly Japanese man was eviscerated. A pamphlet was later found stuffed in his body that said, “No to tourists in Egypt.” It was signed “Omar Abdul Rahman’s Squadron of Havoc and Destruction—the Gama‘a al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group.”
Caught inside the temple, cowering behind the limestone colonnades, the tourists tried to hide, but there was no escape. It was a perfect trap. The screams of the victims were echoed by cries of “Allahu akhbar!” as the attackers reloaded. The killing went on for forty-five minutes, until the floors streamed with blood. The dead included a five-year-old British child and four Japanese couples on their honeymoons. The ornamented walls were splattered with brains and bits of hair.
When the job was done, the attackers hijacked a bus, looking for more tourists to kill, but at last they ran into a police checkpoint. In the shoot-out that followed, one of the attackers was wounded. His companions killed him, then fled into the hills, chased by tour guides and villagers on scooters and donkeys, who had little more to fight with than shovels and stones.
The attackers’ bodies were later found in a cave, arranged in a circle. The Egyptian press speculated that they had been murdered by the outraged village posse, but they apparently killed themselves in a ritualistic suicide. One of the men had a note in his pocket, apologizing for not carrying out the operation sooner.
Fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians had died, not counting the attackers. It was the worst act of terror in modern Egyptian history. The majority of the victims—thirty-five of them—were Swiss; others came from Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Bulgaria, and Colombia. Seventeen other tourists and nine Egyptians were wounded. One Swiss woman had seen her father’s head cut off in front of her eyes.
The following day, the Islamic Group claimed credit for the attack. Rifai Taha said that the attackers were supposed to take hostages in order to free the imprisoned Islamist leaders, but the systematic slaughter put the lie to that claim. The death of the killers showed the influence of Zawahiri; until this point, the Islamic Group had never engaged in suicide operations. The Swiss federal police later determined that bin Laden had financed the operation.
Egypt was in shock. Revolted and ashamed, the population decisively turned against the Islamists, who suddenly began issuing retractions and pointing fingers in the usual directions. From prison, the blind sheikh blamed the Israelis, saying that Mossad had carried out the massacre. Zawahiri blamed the Egyptian police, who he said had done the actual killing, but he also held the victims responsible for coming to the country. “The people of Egypt consider the presence of these foreign tourists to be aggression against Muslims and Egypt,” he said. “The young men are saying that this is our country and not a place for frolicking and enjoyment, especially for you.”
Luxor proved to be the turning point in the counterterrorist campaign in Egypt. Whatever the strategists in Afghanistan had thought would come of their one great blow, the consequences had landed on them, not on their adversaries. Their support evaporated, and without the consent of the population, there was nowhere for them to hide. In the five years before Luxor, Islamist terror groups in Egypt had killed more than 1,200 people, many of them foreigners. After Luxor, the attacks by the Islamists simply stopped. “We thought we’d never hear from them again,” one Cairo human-rights worker observed.
PERHAPS, IN THEIR ISOLATION IN KANDAHAR, the jihadi leaders, especially the Egyptians, could not appreciate the nature of their defeat. They were locked into a logic of their own making. They spoke mainly to each other, fortifying their opinions with selected verses from the Quran and lessons from hadith that made their destiny appear inescapable. They lived in a country so brutalized by endless violence that the horror of Luxor could not have seemed all that significant; indeed, the Taliban revolution had inspired them to become even bloodier and more intransigent. And yet, immediately after Luxor, there was a period of introspection among the leaders, who analyzed their predicament and prescribed a strategy for the triumph of Islam and the final showdown with the unbelievers.
The main point of their diagnosis was that the Islamic nation was in misery because of illegitimate leadership. The jihadis then asked themselves who was responsible for this situation. They pointed to what they called the Christian-Jewish alliance that had emerged following the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which Britain and France divided Arab lands between them, and the Balfour Declaration the following year, which called for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Soon thereafter the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and with it the Islamic caliphate. This was all seen as an ongoing campaign by the Christian-Jewish alliance to suffocate Islam, using such tools as the United Nations, compliant Arab rulers, multinational corporations, satellite channels, and international relief agencies.
Radical Islamist groups had risen in the past, only to fail because of disunity and the lack of a clear plan. In January 1998, Zawahiri began writing a draft of a formal declaration that would unite all of the different mujahideen groups that had gathered in Afghanistan under a single banner. It would turn the movement away from regional conflicts and toward a global Islamic jihad against America.
The language was measured and concise, in comparison with bin Laden’s declaration of war two years before. Zawahiri cited three grievances against the Americans. First, the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia seven years after the end of the Gulf War. “If some people have formerly debated the fact of the occupation, all the people of the peninsula have now acknowledged it,” he observed. Second, America’s intention to destroy Iraq, as evidenced by the death of what he said was more than a million civilians. Third, the American goal of propping up Israel by incapacitating the Arab states, whose weakness and disunion are Israel’s only guarantee of survival.
All this amounted to a “war on God, his messenger, and the Muslims.” Therefore, the members of the coalition were issuing a fatwa: “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.”
On February 23, Al-Quds al-Arabi in London published the text of the fatwa by the new coalition, which called itself the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. It was signed by bin Laden, individually; Zawahiri, as leader of al-Jihad; Rifai Taha, as leader of the Islamic Group; Sheikh Mir Hamzah, secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema of Pakistan; and Fazlul Rahman, leader of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh. The name al-Qaeda was not used. Its existence was still a closely held secret.
Outside of Afghanistan, members of the Islamic Group greeted the declaration with disbelief. After the catastrophe of Luxor, they were appalled to find themselves part of a coalition that they hadn’t been asked to join. Taha was forced to withdraw his name from the fatwa, lamely explaining to fellow members of the Islamic Group that he had only been asked over the telephone to join in a statement of support for the Iraqi people.
Al-Jihad was also in an uproar. Zawahiri called a meeting of his supporters in Afghanistan to explain the new global organization. The members accused him of turning away from their primary goal of taking over Egypt, and they protested al-Jihad’s being drawn into bin Laden’s grandiose war with America. Some objected to bin Laden personally, saying he had a “dark past” and could not be trusted as the head of this new coalition. Zawahiri responded to the attacks on bin Laden by e-mail: “If the Contractor [bin Laden] made promises in the past he did not carry out, then now the man has changed…. Even at this time, almost everything we enjoy comes to us from God first and then from him.” His attachment to bin Laden by now was total. Without bin Laden’s money, however scarce it had become, there was no al-Jihad.
In the end, Zawahiri pledged to resign if the members failed to endorse his actions. The organization was in such disarray because of arrests and defections, and so close to bankruptcy, that the only choice was to follow Zawahiri or abandon al-Jihad. Many members chose the latter option, among them Zawahiri’s own brother Mohammed, who was also his military commander. The two brothers had been together from their underground days. They had sometimes been at odds with each other—on one occasion, Ayman denounced Mohammed in front of his colleagues for mismanaging the group’s paltry finances. But Mohammed was popular, and, as deputy emir, he had run the organization whenever Ayman was off on his lengthy travels or in jail. The alliance with bin Laden was too much for Mohammed, however. His defection was a shocking blow.
Several members of the Islamic Group tried to have the blind sheikh named emir of the new Islamic Front, but the proposal was brushed aside, since Sheikh Omar was in prison in America. Bin Laden had had enough of the infighting between the Egyptian factions. He told both groups that their operations in Egypt were ineffectual and 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.”