Brothers in Arms

The Story of Al-Qa'ida and the Arab Jihadists

Camille Tawil, Robin Bray

• Publisher: Saqi Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780863564802
• eBook ISBN: 9780863564741
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since 2001 America's War on Terror has achieved what Osama bin Laden could not: the unification of the jihad under al-Qa'ida's banner. Although today al-Qa'ida is seen as the epitome of jihad, when it first emerged other militant Islamists rejected its vision of a holy war against the West. What is the truth of its pre-eminent status and at what cost has it been achieved? Investigative journalist Camille Tawil charts the history of conflict and complicity between al-Qa'ida and its brothers in arms from the late 1980s to the present day. Drawing on a network of contacts in Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Algeria's Armed Islamic Group and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, he shows how the failure of their separate national struggles brought them increasingly under the influence of Osama bin Laden and his global agenda. From prison cells in Morocco to the caves of Tora Bora, Tawil gives us unique access to the key players behind the jihadist movement and the evolution of its violent ideology.

1

Afghan Arabs

Afghanistan was where today’s Salafist jihadist groups originated, the successors to the Arab world’s first jihadist factions. During the 1980s, in the thick of battle between the Afghan mujahidin and the Soviets and their communist allies in Kabul, a new generation of Arab fighters emerged – a generation that believed that the only way to establish a true Islamic state was jihad, a holy war that would sweep away the Arab regimes they regarded as at best failing to implement Islamic law correctly, and at worst apostate dictatorships. These were the Afghan Arabs.

The jihad in Afghanistan began immediately after the Soviet invasion in December 1979. At first it was an exclusively Afghan enterprise, its leaders mainly clerics and intellectuals who had been known since the 1970s for their involvement in the Islamist movement: Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Massoud.¹ These leaders were quick to rally their supporters, starting in the areas along the Pakistani border where millions of Afghans had sought refuge: people who would in due course provide an inexhaustible supply of fighters and an essential support base for the mujahidin factions.

Nonetheless, the Afghan jihad got off to a slow start. In the early 1980s the mujahidin groups had not yet organised their forces, either at their base in Pakistan or inside Afghanistan itself.² The Russians had invaded using massive forces equipped with the latest hardware, supplemented by the military resources of the communist government in Kabul.³ However, as the overlap between the interests of the mujahidin and the United States became clear, the jihad began to gather pace. The mujahidin wanted to free their country from the communist yoke, while America was keen to stop Russia gaining access to the Arabian Sea via Pakistan, given the threat this would pose to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. Accordingly, the Americans supported the Afghan jihad during the early 1980s through both overt and covert means. They supplied the mujahidin with money and arms, usually via the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), while at the same time encouraging Arab countries to provide funds for the Afghan effort themselves, or to send volunteers to take part in the jihad alongside them.

Initially the Arabs played only a peripheral role in the Afghan jihad. In the early 1980s a handful of Arabs went to assist the mujahidin from their logistical base in Pakistan; at that point their involvement was mainly limited to helping the millions of refugees living in the camps that had sprung up along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Of these Arabs, an even smaller number went into Afghanistan itself, to join the Afghan factions and take part in actual combat.

The Algerian, Abdullah Anas, was one of the first Arabs to participate in the Afghan jihad. He claims that in 1984 no more than fifteen Arabs had taken part in the conflict in Afghanistan.⁴ He himself decided to get involved after reading a fatwa which argued that it was the duty of every Muslim to take part in the jihad.⁵ The signatories to this fatwa included the Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, at that time the undisputed leader of the Afghan Arabs. After meeting Abdullah Anas in Saudi Arabia in 1984, Azzam put him in touch with the Afghan warlords.⁶ Anas had gone to Saudi Arabia to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca; from there he went to Karachi and then on to Islamabad, where he met Osama bin Laden for the first time in Azzam’s house. Bin Laden was one of the first Arabs from the Gulf to join the Afghan jihad. From Islamabad, Anas flew to Peshawar, where Azzam introduced him to Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, the emir or commander of the Ittehad-e Islami, the Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan. ‘To date, twelve Arabs have rallied to the Afghan cause,’ Anas quotes Sayyaf as saying. ‘Now that you three have come, there are fifteen,’ he added, referring to Abdullah Azzam, the latter’s son-in-law, and Anas.⁷ However, the Arabs’ modest role in Afghanistan soon began to grow, especially after Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden and others established the Mujahidin Services Bureau, or Maktab Khidamat al-Mujahidin, in late 1984. Its role was to arrange for Arabs who wished to take part in the jihad to join the various Afghan factions.

It was around this time that the number of Arabs involved in the conflict in Afghanistan increased significantly. Nonetheless, they remained a mere drop in the ocean compared to the Afghan mujahidin, who played the most important part in the war of attrition against the Russians. Initially, the Arabs merely performed an auxiliary role, fighting alongside the Afghan groups but not independently of them. Throughout the jihad the Arabs were greatly outnumbered by their local counterparts, but they soon began to organise themselves into a fighting force of their own. Between 1984 and 1985 they established a guesthouse in Peshawar known as the Abu ‘Uthman Hostel. Then Abdullah Azzam founded the Sada camp for Arab fighters, near the border with Afghanistan. The camp started out with a modest twelve men, increasing to twenty-five in 1985. By the following year the number of trainee fighters had shot up to almost 200.⁸

However, it was not until 1986 that the Arab mujahidin made the transition to fighting in their own right, rather than going into battle as a mere contingent of the Afghan factions. That same year Osama bin Laden established a new camp with more than thirty Arab fighters. It was located on a supply route used by the Afghan mujahidin in a mountainous area of Jaji in Paktia Province, close to the Pakistani border. The site consisted of two parts: a meeting place at the foot of a mountain and another, known as al-Ma’sada, the ‘Lion’s Den’, at its peak. It is unclear how much support its creation received from other Arabs in Afghanistan, who had hitherto been distributed between the various Afghan groups. However, it does not appear to have met with serious opposition from either the Arab or the Afghan mujahidin leaders, most of whom visited the site.

Soon after the foundation of the Lion’s Den, there was a major clash between the Arab fighters and Russian forces. The Arabs were led by bin Laden and two Egyptian EIJ members known as Abu Hafs and Abu ‘Ubayda al-Banshiri.⁹ In the spring of 1987 the Russians launched a long-awaited attack on the Jaji front, having surrounded the area for forty-eight days and pounded the mountains incessantly.¹⁰ Al-Banshiri proved himself a brave and audacious military commander in the course of the fighting. Having discovered that the Russians had sent in paratroopers, he quickly led a group of fighters over the mountains and beyond the point where the Russians had landed, trapping them between his men and the rest of the Arab forces. When the Russians attempted to advance, they found themselves surrounded and suffered heavy losses in the fighting which ensued.¹¹

The former Egyptian military intelligence officer, Essam Deraz, covered the Battle of Jaji as a journalist and spent months in the area with bin Laden and his comrades. He says that the Russians bombarded the area very heavily before beginning their assault in late May 1987. In contrast to the bombardment, which lasted almost two months, the fighting itself lasted a mere 24 hours.¹² ‘It was epic,’ he says of the mujahidin’s victory against the odds:

A group of Arabs led by Abu ‘Ubayda and Abu Hafs spotted the Russian commandos landing on a mountain opposite the Arabs’ position. The Russians thought the Arabs had been wiped out in the aerial bombardment. But a group of Arabs advanced to the mountain around the other side [from where the Russians had landed] and lay in wait. The Russian commandos consisted of a single platoon of twenty to thirty men; they began advancing into the forest, unaware that they were surrounded. It was only when a young Saudi called Mukhtar began shooting at them that they realised the situation they were in. In the heat of battle, the Russians even shot at their own men, unable to work out where the enemy fire was coming from. They were annihilated. In light of the Russians’ heavy casualties, the surviving soldiers were ordered to withdraw; on the Arab side, only three mujahidin were martyred in the fighting.

Arabs and Afghans

The Battle of Jaji boosted the confidence of the Arabs who took part, encouraging them to seek greater autonomy from the Afghan mujahidin. This had become more urgent, given the power struggles among the latter, which were often more violent than the fighting against the Russians. Until then, the Arabs had been scattered between the seven Afghan groups, of which the most important were Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami, the Jamiat-e Islami, led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf’s Ittehad-e Islami. Sayyaf’s group was by far the Arabs’ preferred option; Sayyaf himself was a charismatic figure with a Salafist background who enjoyed the support of clerics in the Gulf. His group was not the most powerful militarily, however, especially in comparison with the two other main Afghan factions. Hekmatyar had considerable influence, particularly in Afghanistan’s eastern provinces, as well as the support of Pakistan’s powerful security establishment. All this had helped him attract numerous aspiring Arab jihadists into his ranks. A certain number also fought alongside Rabbani’s Jamiat-e Islami, most notably the Algerian, Abdullah Anas, who became the right-hand man of Rabbani’s military commander Ahmad Shah Massoud.¹³

Massoud’s successes did not count for much with decision-makers in Pakistani intelligence, however. They continued to allocate most of their Afghan aid to Hekmatyar’s group. For the Pakistanis, Hekmatyar’s appeal did not lie merely in his military strength: as a member of Afghanistan’s majority Pashtun community, which straddles the border with Pakistan, they also saw him as an instrument of Pakistani influence. By contrast, Massoud was a Tajik whose power base lay not on the Pakistani border but in the Panjshir Valley and the provinces of northern Afghanistan – areas which the Pakistanis do not seem to have considered strategically significant.¹⁴

It remains unclear whether the Pakistanis were involved in turning the Arabs against Massoud and driving them into the arms of his rivals. But his trusted aide, Abdullah Anas, suggests that that is what happened. He has described how in Peshawar in 1988 the Arabs staged a ‘trial’ of Massoud in absentia, on the basis of a report containing lurid allegations against him. Anas says the original Arabic version of the report was translated into several languages and then widely circulated, hinting that Pakistani intelligence may have played a role in the smear campaign. The trial itself remains a source of division between the Afghan Arabs to this day. At the time, it was an indication that Abdullah Azzam’s influence was on the wane: his support for Massoud would no longer suffice to persuade Arab fighters to back the Afghan warlord. The first signs of this had already emerged in 1986, when Osama bin Laden established his own group in Peshawar, separate from the Maktab al-Khidamat.¹⁵

Massoud’s ‘trial’ sheds light on the relationship between the Arabs and the Afghan mujahidin factions at this time. Abdullah Anas was on a training course with Massoud in the Panjshir Valley when he heard about the claims the Arabs had made against his comrade.¹⁶ A message came over the radio from Abdullah Azzam asking Anas to make haste to Peshawar. Massoud was surprised, but told Anas he would have to wait until the course had ended in a couple of weeks. Four days later Anas received another message from Azzam. ‘Have you set off yet?’ it asked insistently. ‘If not, get moving immediately.’ Sensing that something important must have happened, Anas again sought Massoud’s permission to leave; this time it was granted. When he arrived in Peshawar nine days later, Anas went straight to see Azzam, who was accompanied by a Saudi called Wa’il Julaydan.¹⁷ Azzam explained that Anas’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Afghan Arabs
• 2. Brothers and Rivals:The Foundation of the Jihadist Groups
• 3. Libya: Jihadists Supplant Nationalists
• 4. Algeria: The Descent into the Abyss
• 5. The Sudanese Interlude
• 6. Egyptians in Sudan: A State within a State
• 7. Londonistan: Jihadists in the Lion’s Den
• 8. Setbacks: Jihad in Decline
• 9. The Return to Afghanistan
• 10. The Approach to 9/11
• 11. Hellfire
• 12. Al-Qa‘ida & Co: The Jihad Franchise
• Index