Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
The Fisk files |
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amatullah |
09/19/01 at 11:47:15 |
Bismillah and salam, © 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd 19 September 2001 04:15 GMT+1 Robert Fisk: 'Smoking them out' is not new in the Middle East 19 September 2001 "Smoking them out of their holes"? "Wanted dead or alive"? President Bush says that he wants justice, but the United States seems close to sanctioning hit squads and liquidation. A new policy for America, maybe but it's an old policy in the Middle East where assassination, kidnapping and murder squads have been a normal part of local "justice" for decades. Iran, Israel, Libya and Iraq have all employed killer squads to hunt down their enemies overseas. The Iranians twice sent teams to murder the Shah's last prime minister, Shahpour Bakhtiar, in Paris on the basis that he was planning a "terrorist" coup d'ιtβt. The first gang killed a policeman and an elderly lady, but the second group, who were armed with knives, almost severed his head from his body. Colonel Gaddafi openly admitted his determination to hunt down and kill the "terrorist stray dogs" of the Libyan opposition abroad, his gunmen murdering the most prominent of his opponents in Rome. Israel arranged the murder of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader, Fathi Shkaki, shot dead by motorcyclists in Malta, and the assassination of Abu Jihad, Yasser Arafat's military commander, in Tunis. But the policy has its devastating failures. In Norway, an Israeli murder squad hunting a leader of the Black September movement shot down an innocent Moroccan waiter. Some of the murderers were found hiding in the home of an Israeli diplomat in Oslo. When Israeli agents tried to kill a Hamas leader in the streets of Amman by injecting him with poison, the victim was saved when King Hussein of Jordan telephoned President Clinton to warn that he would break off diplomatic relations with Israel unless the Israelis provided the antidote. Sheikh Yassin, the Hamas leader, was released from an Israeli prison by Benjamin Netanyahu, then Prime Minister, to express regret to the king. Today, Israel's policy of murdering its militant opponents in the West Bank and Gaza "targeted killings" in Israel's own exclusive lexicon is in full swing. Telephone bombs, booby-trapped cars, helicopter gunships and murder squads have liquidated at least 60 Palestinian "activists" and bombers, with the usual crop of innocent children and women. Palestinians have privately threatened prominent Israeli agents with the same tactics and one was murdered by his own collaborator contact. During Lebanon's 16-year civil war, there were many successful attempts to assassinate heads of state and others. The Druze leader, Kemal Jumblatt, the Prime Minister, Rashid Karami, the President, Rene Mouawad, and the Christian Maronite politician Dany Chamoun were all murdered by gunmen; in Jumblatt's case, many Lebanese blamed Syrian agents for the assassination, while the others may have been killed by right-wing Christian organisations. Egypt has sent police death squads into the Nile valley south of Assiout, where Islamist followers were later shot dead, according to their families, in front of their homes. Syria faced with an Islamic uprising in the city of Hama in 1982 did, quite literally, "smoke out" its Muslim enemies. In medieval tunnels beneath the city, presidential Defence Brig-ades fired smoke grenades at insurgents, forcing them to emerge through drain covers, where they were gunned down with civilians hiding in nearby homes. The Muslim Brotherhood of Syria was referred to by Hafiz al-Assad, then the President, as "terrorists" the same word used by President Mubarak about Egyptian militants, and by the Algerian government about the Islamists whom it has been fighting for a decade. In Algeria's case, there is growing evidence of government involvement in death squads and mass slaughter. Throughout the Middle East, the policy of liquidation seeking enemies "dead or alive" has always been accompanied by torture, human rights violations and the killing of large numbers of innocents. In almost every case, state-sponsored murders were justified by governments on the basis that many civilians had died at the hands of the insurgents/militants/guerrillas/terrorists, and that shoot-to-kill policy was "the only language they understand". Almost all Middle East governments adopting these methods have used the same language. The former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin spoke of "rooting out the evil weed of terrorism" in Lebanon. Mr Mubarak used similar words after Islamist gunmen murdered western tourists in Egypt (and tried to kill Mr Mubarak as well). The Syrians, the Egyptians, the Algerians even the Iranians when confronting their own "mujahedin kalq" opposition have all spoken of "victory over terrorism". Only the Syrians appear to have been successful. Their campaign cost the lives of up to 20,000 Syrians. |
Re: The Fisk files |
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amatullah |
09/19/01 at 11:48:26 |
Bismillah and salam, Now this article i have a problem with. I think he fails to see that the condemnation of the attacks does not mean lack of support for taliban. there is an underlying assumption here! © 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd 19 September 2001 04:20 GMT+1 Taliban finds few Muslim friends Middle East By Robert Fisk in Beirut 18 September 2001 They have been lining up in their condemnation. Mullahs, sheikhs and sayeds, from Beirut to Tehran, are criticising last week's assault on the United States, sending condolences and sympathy and by their actions distancing themselves from the atrocity that millions of Arab Muslims watched live on television. There is genuine outrage, true, but it would be as well to place it in context. Because the Taliban, the shield of Osama bin Laden, has almost as many enemies in the Middle East as it has in America. For two consecutive days, Sayed Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual guide to the Hizbollah guerrilla movement the group that reinvented the art of suicide bombing against the Israeli occupation army in Lebanon and which Washington still blames for the kidnapping of Americans in Beirut in the 1980s has been excoriating those responsible. "No religion justifies such an action," the Shia Muslim cleric announced in Beirut. "It is not permissible to use innocent and peaceful civilians as a card to change a specific policy." Muslims and Islamists opposed American policy in the region "which is totally biased in favour of the Zionist enemy" but they wanted to be friends with the American people, the cleric said. Sheikh Abdul-Amir Qabalan, the vice-president of the Higher Shia Muslim Council in Lebanon, insisted Islam was "a religion of justice and equality and it condemns any attack on civilians and the innocent". Now this makes interesting reading. No such condemnations followed the Palestinian suicide bombings that killed 15 civilians, including six children, in a Jerusalem pizzeria in August or the suicide bombing that slaughtered 21 Israeli teenagers in Tel Aviv. Hizbollah's satellite groups were held responsible for the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut in which more than 50 Lebanese civilians were killed. In Iran, whose boy soldiers perfected suicide attacks on the Iraqi army in the 1980-88 war and whose government has always supported Palestinian suicide bombers, President Mohammad Khatami and his conservative opponents condemned totally the New York and Washington bombings. This is not surprising. For in Tehran the rulers of Afghanistan have been called the "black Taliban" for years, long before the US identified them as Mr bin Laden's protectors. The Iranians, and, by extension, their Hizbollah protιgιs, have long regarded the Taliban's "Wahabi" Sunni Muslim leaders as obscurantists and potential "terrorists". At least two million Afghan refugees are living in great poverty in eastern Iran, many of whom would have stayed at home were it not for the Taliban's rule and the mass starvation that the Taliban has done little to alleviate. Iran has now closed its border with Afghanistan to prevent a further exodus of refugees and America has said that it would "consider" inviting Iran to join a coalition against "world terrorism". Iran will most certainly decline. The Saudis, of course, can scarcely do anything but join in the chorus of condemnation. They helped to create the Taliban, to legitimise its presence in Afghanistan and to fund and arm the so-called students who destroyed most of the rival mujahedin groups who had been pillaging Kabul and other great Afghan cities in the years that followed the Soviet military withdrawal. Mr bin Laden is himself a Saudi though one officially deprived of his citizenship and, as is becoming clearer, some of the hijackers were Saudi citizens. In Egypt, Sunni Muslim clerics added their own condemnation, although President Mubarak has been one of the few Middle Eastern leaders to warn of the consequences of indiscriminate American retaliation. He it was who warned just two short weeks ago that, unless a peace was restored, he feared there would be "an explosion outside the region". Back in Lebanon, the Hizbollah itself issued a crafty statement yesterday, regretting the loss of innocent lives in America but warning Washington not to take advantage of the atrocities "to practise all sorts of aggression and terrorism under the pretext of fighting aggression and terrorism". Also from the Middle East section Middle East ceasefire boosts US hopes of building wider coalition Bush to lean on his friends in the Gulf Sharon feels US anger after Arafat seizes the diplomatic high ground Robert Fisk: 'Smoking them out' is not new in the Middle East Arafat announces unilateral ceasefire, Israel halts military actions |
Re: The Fisk files |
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Anonymous |
09/25/01 at 23:31:45 |
Robert Fisk: Bush is walking into a trap 16 September 2001 Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was supposed to have learnt that the rule of law comes above revenge, President Bush appears to be heading for the very disaster that Osama bin Laden has laid down for him. Let us have no doubts about what happened in New York and Washington last week. It was a crime against humanity. We cannot understand America's need to retaliate unless we accept this bleak, awesome fact. But this crime was perpetrated it becomes ever clearer to provoke the United States into just the blind, arrogant punch that the US military is preparing. Mr bin Laden every day his culpability becomes more apparent has described to me how he wishes to overthrow the pro-American regime of the Middle East, starting with Saudi Arabia and moving on to Egypt, Jordan and the other Gulf states. In an Arab world sunk in corruption and dictatorships most of them supported by the West the only act that might bring Muslims to strike at their own leaders would be a brutal, indiscriminate assault by the United States. Mr bin Laden is unsophisticated in foreign affairs, but a close student of the art and horror of war. He knew how to fight the Russians who stayed on in Afghanistan, a Russian monster that revenged itself upon its ill-educated, courageous antagonists until, faced with war without end, the entire Soviet Union began to fall apart. The Chechens learnt this lesson. And the man responsible for so much of the bloodbath in Chechnya the career KGB man whose army is raping and murdering the insurgent Sunni Muslim population of Chechnya is now being signed up by Mr Bush for his "war against people''. Vladimir Putin must surely have a sense of humour to appreciate the cruel ironies that have now come to pass, though I doubt if he will let Mr Bush know what happens when you start a war of retaliation; your army like the Russian forces in Chechnya becomes locked into battle with an enemy that appears ever more ruthless, ever more evil. But the Americans need look no further than Ariel Sharon's futile war with the Palestinians to understand the folly of retaliation. In Lebanon, it was always the same. A Hizbollah guerrilla would kill an Israeli occupation soldier, and the Israelis would fire back in retaliation at a village in which a civilian would die. The Hizbollah would retaliate with a Katyusha missile attack over the Israeli border, and the Israelis would retaliate again with a bombardment of southern Lebanon. In the end, the Hizbollah the "centre of world terror'' according to Mr Sharon drove the Israelis out of Lebanon. In Israel/Palestine, it is the same story. An Israeli soldier shoots a Palestinian stone-thrower. The Palestinians retaliate by killing a settler. The Israelis then retaliate by sending a murder squad to kill a Palestinian gunman. The Palestinians retaliate by sending a suicide bomber into a pizzeria. The Israelis then retaliate by sending F-16s to bomb a Palestinian police station. Retaliation leads to retaliation and more retaliation. War without end. And while Mr Bush and perhaps Mr Blair prepare their forces, they explain so meretriciously that this is a war for "democracy and liberty'', that it is about men who are "attacking civilisation''. "America was targeted for attack,'' Mr Bush informed us on Friday, "because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.'' But this is not why America was attacked. If this was an Arab-Muslim apocalypse, then it is intimately associated with events in the Middle East and with America's stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be added, would rather like some of that democracy and liberty and freedom that Mr Bush has been telling them about. Instead, they get a president who wins 98 per cent in the elections (Washington's friend, Mr Mubarak) or a Palestinian police force, trained by the CIA, that tortures and sometimes kills its people in prison. The Syrians would also like a little of that democracy. So would the Saudis. But their effete princes are all friends of America in many cases, educated at US universities. I will always remember how President Clinton announced that Saddam Hussein another of our grotesque inventions must be overthrown so that the people of Iraq could choose their own leaders. But if that happened, it would be the first time in Middle Eastern history that Arabs have been permitted to do so. No, it is "our'' democracy and "our'' liberty and freedom that Mr Bush and Mr Blair are talking about, our Western sanctuary that is under attack, not the vast place of terror and injustice that the Middle East has become. Let me illustrate what I mean. Nineteen years ago today, the greatest act of terrorism using Israel's own definition of that much misused word in modern Middle Eastern history began. Does anyone remember the anniversary in the West? How many readers of this article will remember it? I will take a tiny risk and say that no other British newspaper certainly no American newspaper will today recall the fact that on 16 September 1982, Israel's Phalangist militia allies started their three-day orgy of rape and knifing and murder in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila that cost 1,800 lives. It followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon designed to drive the PLO out of the country and given the green light by the then US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig which cost the lives of 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all of them civilians. That's probably three times the death toll in the World Trade Centre. Yet I do not remember any vigils or memorial services or candle-lighting in America or the West for the innocent dead of Lebanon; I don't recall any stirring speeches about democracy or liberty. In fact, my memory is that the United States spent most of the bloody months of July and August 1982 calling for "restraint". No, Israel is not to blame for what happened last week. The culprits were Arabs, not Israelis. But America's failure to act with honour in the Middle East, its promiscuous sale of missiles to those who use them against civilians, its blithe disregard for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children under sanctions of which Washington is the principal supporter all these are intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who plunged America into an apocalypse of fire last week. America's name is literally stamped on to the missiles fired by Israel into Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. Only four weeks ago, I identified one of them as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their factory in of all places Florida, the state where some of the suiciders trained to fly. It was fired from an Apache helicopter (made in America, of course) during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when hundreds of cluster bombs were dropped in civilian areas of Beruit by the Israelis in contravention of undertakings given to the United States. Most of the bombs had US Naval markings and America then suspended a shipment of fighter bombers to Israel for less than two months. The same type of missile this time an AGM 114-C made inGeorgia was fired by the Israelis into the back of an ambulance near the Lebanese village of Mansori, killing two women and four children. I collected the pieces of the missile, including its computer coding plate, flew to Georgia and presented them to the manufacturers at the Boeing factory. And what did the developer of the missile say to me when I showed him photographs of the children his missile had killed? "Whatever you do," he told me, "don't quote me as saying anything critical of the policies of Israel." I'm sure the father of those children, who was driving the ambulance, will have been appalled by last week's events, but I don't suppose, given the fate of his own wife one of the women killed that he was in a mood to send condolences to anyone. All these facts, of course, must be forgotten now. Every effort will be made in the coming days to switch off the "why'' question and concentrate on the who, what and how. CNN and most of the world's media have already obeyed this essential new war rule. I've already seen what happens when this rule is broken. When The Independent published my article on the connection between Middle Eastern injustice and the New York holocaust, the BBC's 24-hour news channel produced an American commentator who remarked that "Robert Fisk has won the prize for bad taste''. When I raised the same point on an Irish radio talk show, the other guest, a Harvard lawyer, denounced me as a bigot, a liar, a "dangerous man'' and of course potentially anti-Semitic. The Irish pulled the plug on him. No wonder we have to refer to the terrorists as "mindless''. For if we did not, we would have to explain what went on in those minds. But this attempt to censor the realities of the war that has already begun must not be permitted to continue. Look at the logic. Secretary of State Colin Powell was insisting on Friday that his message to the Taliban is simple: they have to take responsibility for sheltering Mr bin Laden. "You cannot separate your activities from the activities of the perpetrators,'' he warned. But the Americans absolutely refuse to associate their own response to their predicament with their activities in the Middle East. We are supposed to hold our tongues, even when Ariel Sharon a man whose name will always be associated with the massacre at Sabra and Shatila announces that Israel also wishes to join the battle against "world terror''. No wonder the Palestinians are fearful. In the past four days, 23 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza, an astonishing figure that would have been front-page news had America not been blitzed. If Israel signs up for the new conflict, then the Palestinians by fighting the Israelis will, by extension, become part of the "world terror'' against which Mr Bush is supposedly going to war. Not for nothing did Mr Sharon claim that Yasser Arafat had connections with Osama bin Laden. I repeat: what happened in New York was a crime against humanity. And that means policemen, arrests, justice, a whole new international court at The Hague if necessary. Not cruise missiles and "precision'' bombs and Muslim lives lost in revenge for Western lives. But the trap has been sprung. Mr Bush perhaps we, too are now walking into it. www.independent.co.uk |
Re: The Fisk files |
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Anonymous |
09/25/01 at 23:32:32 |
Osama bin Laden: The godfather of terror? by Robert Fisk 15 September 2001 Internal links George Bush: The new statesman? The first time I met Osama bin Laden inside Afghanistan it was a hot, humid night in the summer of 1996. Huge insects flew through the night air, settling like burrs on his Saudi robes and on the clothes of his armed followers. They would land on my notebook until I swatted them, their blood smearing the pages. Bin Laden was always studiously polite: each time we met, he would offer the usual Arab courtesy of food for a stranger: a tray of cheese, olives, bread and jam. I had already met him in Sudan and would spend a night, almost a year later, in one of his mountain guerrilla camps, so cold that I awoke in the morning with ice in my hair. I had been given a rough blanket and my shoes were left outside the tent. Whenever we met, he would interrupt our interviews to say his prayers, his armed followers from Algeria, Egypt, the Gulf Arab states, Syria kneeling beside him, hanging on his every word as he spoke to me as if he was a messiah. On 20 March, 1997, I would meet him again. Although only 41 at the time, his ruggedly groomed beard had white hairs, and he had bags under his eyes; I sensed some infirmity, a stiffness of one leg that gave him the slightest of limps. I still have my notes, scribbled in the frozen semi-darkness as an oil lamp sputtered between us. "I am not against the American people," he said. "Only their government." I had heard this so often in the Middle East. I told him I thought the American people regarded their government as their representatives. Bin Laden listened to this in silence. "We are still at the beginning of our military action against the American forces," he said. I remembered those words this week as I watched those airliners scything into the World Trade Centre towers. And I remembered, too, how in that last meeting he had seized on the Arabic-language newspapers I was carrying in my satchel (a schoolbag I use in rough countries) and scurried to a corner of the tent to read them for 20 minutes, ignoring both his fighters and myself. Although a Saudi, he did not even know that the Iranian foreign minister had just visited the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Didn't he even have a radio, I asked myself? Was this really the "godfather of world terror?" The US administration and Time magazine had both blessed him with this sobriquet. I rather thought he would have liked that. And the $5 million reward that the American administration offered for him. As a multi-millionaire himself, bin Laden would have been insulted at such a low price on the "wanted" poster. The bin Ladens are a construction family, respected in their native Saudi Arabia although their roots lie on the Yemeni border, a family who honoured the young man who, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, took his followers and his road construction machinery to a volcanic landscape of tribal leaders to fight "the West". For the Russians to a Saudi were Westerners and their incursion into Islamic Afghanistan was a heretical, corrupting act. He paid from his own packet to fly thousands of young Arab Muslims to fight alongside him. They came from Algeria, from Egypt and the Arabian Gulf and from Syria and many of them died as martyrs in the ferocious battles, torn to pieces by mines, shredded by the machine-gun fire of the Soviet Hind helicopter gunships that raided the villages of Panchir. The first time we met, in Sudan, I persuaded bin Laden much against his will to talk about those days. And he recalled how, during an attack on a Russian firebase not far from Jalalabad, a mortar shell had fallen at his feet. He had waited for it to explode. And in those milliseconds of rationality, he had so he said felt a great sense of tranquillity, a sense of calm acceptance which he ascribed to God. The shell and many an American may now wish the opposite had happened failed to explode. Even the Russians came to know of the esteem in which bin Laden was held among the Afghan resistance. In Moscow in 1993, I met a Soviet adviser who was supposed to arrange his liquidation. "A dangerous man,'' the Russian said of bin Laden. At the time, of course, the Americans loved him, provided him with weapons, never dreaming that within two decades they, too, would be dreaming of his murder. Bin Laden told me once that he never met an American agent during the anti-Russian war, never accepted a single bullet from the West. But his bulldozers and earth-removers carved highways through the mountains for the Mujahedin to carry their British-made Blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles high enough to strike the Soviet Migs; years later, one of his armed followers would take me up the "bin Laden trail", a terrifying two-hour odyssey along fearful ravines in rain and sleet, the windscreen misting as we climbed the cold mountain. "When you believe in jihad [holy war], it is easy,'' the gunman informed me, fighting with the steering wheel as stones scuttered from the tyres, bouncing down the valleys into the clouds below. From time to time this was in 1997 lights winked at us from far away in the darkness. "Our brothers are letting us know they see us,'' the gunman said. It was two hours more before we reached bin Laden's old wartime camp, the jeep skidding backwards towards sheer cliffs, the headlights illuminating frozen waterfalls above. "Toyota is good for Jihad,'' bin Laden's man smiled. I could only agree. I never heard bin Laden make a joke. If the United States regarded him as the foremost "terrorist'' in the world as I told him they did then "if liberating my land is called terrorism, this is a great honour for me.'' There was no difference, he said, between the American and Israeli governments, between the American and Israeli armies. But Europe especially France was beginning to distance itself from the Americans. He did condemn French policy towards north Africa; although he did not mention Algeria, the name hovered over us for several minutes like a ghost. Bin Laden gave me a Pakistani wall poster in Urdu which proclaimed the support of Pakistani scholars for his "holy war'' against the Americans; he even handed to me colour photographs of graffiti on the walls of Karachi that demanded the ousting of US troops from "the place of the two Holy shrines [Mecca and Medina]''. He had, he claimed, received some months ago an emissary from the Saudi royal family who said that his Saudi citizenship -- taken away after pressure from Washington would be restored along with a new Saudi passport and 2 billion Saudi riyals (£339 million) for his family if he abandoned his jihad and went back to Saudi Arabia. He and his family, he said, had rejected the offer. At the time, bin Laden had three wives, the elder of them the mother of his bright, 16-year-old Bon Omar, the youngest herself a teenager. Another son, Saad, was brought to meet me; they spoke some English and were clearly excited in an innocent way to be surrounded by so many armed men. All lived with him along with other Mujahedin wives and children -- and stayed in a compound outside Jalalabad. Bin Laden even invited me to visit these hot, dank, miserable homes in the company of one of his Egyptian fighters. Of course, his wives the youngest was later to return to her family in the Gulf were not there. "These are ladies who are used to living in comfort,'' the Egyptian said. The encampment was protected by sheets of canvas and a few strands of barbed wire; a drainage ditch and three separate latrines had been dug in the earth, in one of which floated a dead frog. The Egyptian's teenage son, sitting beside us with a rifle in his lap, insisted that Egyptian Intelligence men had viewed the camp. "There are people in the towns who work for the Americans,'' he said. "We see these people and we have to be careful.'' Another of the Arabs in that camp was more forthcoming. There was, he said, "no other country left for Mr bin Laden'' outside of Afghanistan. "When he was in Sudan, the Saudis wanted to capture him with the help of the Yemenis. We know that the French government tried to persuade the Sudanese to hand him over to them because the Sudanese had given them a south American. The Americans were pressing the French to get hold of bin Laden in Sudan. An Arab group paid by the Saudis tried to kill him, but bin Laden's guards fired back and two were wounded.'' In all, bin Laden lost 500 of his men in the war against the Russians. Their graves lie near the Pakistani border at Torkum. After the Russian withdrawal, bin Laden left for Sudan, disgusted by the Afghans' internecine fighting. His closest followers went with him to build highways and invest in Sudanese industry. Bin Laden is a tall, slim man and towers over his companions. He has narrow, dark eyes which stared hard at me when he spoke of his hatred of Saudi corruption. Indeed, in my long conversation with bin Laden in 1996 on that hot night of mosquitoes the Saudi kingdom and its apparatchiks probably consumed more time than his views of America. He picked his teeth with a piece of miswak wood, a habit that accompanied all his conversations with me. History or his version of it was the basis of almost all his remarks. And the pivotal date was 1990, the year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. "When the American troops entered Saudi Arabia, the land of the two Holy places, there was as strong protest from the ulema [religious authorities] and from students of the Sharia law all over the country against the interference of American troops. "This big mistake by the Saudi regime of inviting the American troops revealed their deception. They had given their support to nations that were fighting against Muslims. They helped the Yemen communists against the southern Yemeni Muslims and are helping [Yasser] Arafat's regime fight Hamas. After it insulted and jailed the ulema ... the Saudi regime lost its legitimacy.'' Bin Laden paused to see if I had listened to his careful if frighteningly exclusive history lesson. "We as Muslims have a strong feeling that binds us together... We feel for our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon. The explosion at Khobar did not come as a direct result of American occupation but as a result of American behaviour against Muslims... "When 60 Jews are killed inside Palestine [in suicide bombings in 1996], all the world gathers within seven days to criticise this action, while the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children [under UN sanctions] did not receive the same reaction. Killing those Iraqi children is a crusade against Islam. We, as Muslims, do not like the Iraqi regime but we think that the Iraqi people and their children are our brothers and we care about their future." But it was America that captured bin Laden's final attention. "I believe that sooner or later the Americans will leave Saudi Arabia, and that the war declared by America against the Saudi people means war against Muslims everywhere. Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, the ulema, have given us a fatwa that we must drive out the Americans. The solution to this crisis is the withdrawal of American troops... their military presence is an insult to the Saudi people.'' I've been thinking a lot about that last statement this week. American forces are still in Saudi Arabia. And about his earlier remark in July, 1996 after a truck bomb had killed 19 Americans that this incident marked "the beginning of the war between Muslims and the United States". Of the later bombing and the killing of 24 US servicemen, he was to tell me that it was "a great act in which I missed the honour of participating". He spoke then in a chilling, lower voice of his hatred of the American "occupiers". Intelligent and eloquent in Arabic bin Laden undoubtedly is. But his understanding of foreign affairs is decidedly eccentric. At one point, he even suggested to me that individual US states might secede from the Union because of Washington's support for Israel. But the historical perspective was deeply disturbing. "We believe that God used our holy war in Afghanistan to destroy the Russian army and the Soviet Union,'' he said. "We did this from the top of this very mountain on which you are sitting and now we ask God to use us one more time to do the same to America, to make it a shadow of itself. We also believe that our battle against America is much simpler than the war against the Soviet Union because some of our Mujahedin who fought here in Afghanistan also participated in operations against the Americans in Somalia [during the doomed UN mission] and they were surprised at the collapse of American morale. This convinced us that the Americans are a paper tiger. He was also to tell me that "swift and light forces working in complete secrecy" would be needed to oust America from Saudi Arabia. In the following two years, bin Laden was to form his al-Qaeda movement and declare war on the American people not just the government and army of the United States. There would follow the near-sinking of the USS Cole in Aden harbour by suicide bombers and the Cruise missile attacks on the old CIA base that bin Laden uses in southern Afghanistan. He walks now with a stick a development of the foot problem I noticed four years ago and speaks more slowly. But could he really command an army of suicide bombers from the desolation of the Afghan mountains? He did admit to me once that he knew two of the three men executed beheaded in Saudi Arabia for bombing the second American military base. He wanted a "real" Islamic sharia law government in Arabia there would, I suspected, be even more head-chopping in a bin Laden regime and he wanted an end to those dictators installed by the Americans, those men who supported US policies while repressing their own people. And it occurred to me that this was, for many millions of Arabs in the Middle East, a very powerful message. You didn't need instructions from bin Laden to form your own small group of followers, to decide on your own individual actions. Bin Laden wouldn't have to plan bombings or the overthrow of regimes. You had only to listen to the thousands of cassette tapes of his voice circulated clandestinely around the Middle East. Which is why I wonder always supposing bin Laden is connected to the crime against humanity committed in the United States this week if it would even be necessary to command a para-military organisation for such acts to happen. Arabs are angry enough with the injustices that they blame on America without needing orders from Afghanistan. Inspiration might be just enough. And I wondered, after those images from New York last week, whether bin Laden was not as astonished as myself to see them. Always supposing he watched television. Or listened to the radio. Or read a newspaper. Life Story Born: Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden in 1955. Family: seventh son of a Saudi businessman who made a fortune out of Saudi Arabia's oil-fuelled construction boom (died in a helicopter crash when Osama was 13); mother was a Syrian beauty and his father's official wife; 51 siblings. Married: first to his Syrian cousin in 1972 (believed to have three wives); two sons. Education: degree in civil-engineering at Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah 1979. Military career: from 1979 fought and raised funds for Mujahedin in the Afghan conflict against the Russians with his Al Qaeda group (backed with American dollars and had the blessing of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan); from 1984 channelled Arab volunteers to the Afghan guerrillas in Pakistani border town. Fortune: estimated to have about $300m in personal financial assets. Charges: 1993 bombing of World Trade Centre which killed six people and injured more than 1,000; 1995 and 1996 bombings of Saudi cities of Riyadh and Khobar which killed 24; 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which killed 224 people and wounded 4,000; 2000 suicide bombing of USS Cole in Yemen which killed 17; 2001 destruction of the World Trade Centre and attack on Pentagon. Bounty: $5m. Aliases: The Prince, The Emir, Abu Abdallah, Mujahid Shaykh, Hajj, the Director. He says: "It does not worry us what the Americans think. What worries us is pleasing Allah." They say: "If you were to kill Osama tomorrow, the Osama organisation would disappear, but all the networks would still be there." David Long, former official in the State Department |
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