The Last Refuge

Gregory D. Johnsen

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781780741185
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An exclusive inside account of how and why al-Qaeda is rebuilding in the unforgiving deserts of Yemen 'Exhausted and on the run, it looked like the end for the small band of men. Looking at the few who had followed him into the desert, Muhammad said, "When disaster threatens, seek refuge in Yemen"… Yemen was the last refuge.' Far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, in an unforgiving corner of Arabia, the US and al-Qaeda are fighting a clandestine war of drones and suicide bombers. The battles began in 2006, when twenty-three men tunnelled out of a maximum-security prison in Yemen's capital to their freedom. Later they were joined by a dozen men released from Guantánamo Bay. Together, they formed the core of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula – and now they and their recruits stand ready to hijack the Arab Spring, from the streets of Syria to hotspots much closer to home.In The Last Refuge, al-Qaeda scholar Gregory D. Johnsen charts the rise, the fall, and the ultimate resurrection of al-Qaeda in Yemen – given new life through a combustion of civil wars, Afghan refugees, and Muhammad's prophetic teachings. Johnsen brings us inside al-Qaeda's training camps and safe houses as the terrorists plot poison attacks and debate how to bring down a plane on Christmas Day. Based on years of on-the-ground interviews and never-before-translated al-Qaeda battle notes, he delivers a riveting and incisive investigation of the state of the Middle East.

1

A Far-Off Land

1980s

The call came late in the morning, the sharp ringing of the telephone echoing off the heavy stones in a Sanaa house. On the other end of the line, an unfamiliar voice crackled through miles of static. “Hisham has been martyred,” the man announced. “Congratulations.”

That was all the family would get, a handful of words from a stranger two thousand miles away. There was no body to bury and no final message to pass along. By the time the call came through from Pakistan, Hisham had been dead twelve days.

A member of one of Yemen’s great religious families, Hisham al-Daylami had left for Afghanistan months earlier to fight in the jihad against the Soviets. Abd al-Wahhab, the patriarch of the family, had twelve sons and a handful of daughters, but Hisham was his favourite. Physically, the two looked nothing alike. Abd al-Wahhab was tall and thin with a lopsided face that sloped down towards his right shoulder. A wiry beard forked down off his chin in a pair of red tangles that he liked to tug at when he was deep in thought. Hisham often made the same motion, stroking his hairless chin in imitation of his father, though the pudgy teenager lacked his father’s beard and his tall, striking looks. Still, the two shared a special bond that had been obvious since Hisham was a boy. When his friends were outside playing football, Hisham was studying the Quran. When they discovered girls in secondary school, shadowing them through Sanaa’s twisting streets, he was devouring the works of the Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb. Nothing touched the heart of the forty-nine-year-old religious shaykh quite like the sight of his chubby son hunched over his books.

An exacting father, Abd al-Wahhab made no secret of his preference. He loved his other sons, but Hisham was special. And now those other sons, who had received the phone call while their father was out, had to give him the news. It was 12 September 1987, and Abd al-Wahhab’s favourite son was dead.

SEPTEMBER IS ONE of the most beautiful times of the year in Sanaa. The mid-afternoon rains from the monsoon clouds that get caught in Yemen’s high northern mountains as they blow off the Indian Ocean in late summer have passed, but the morning frost of winter has yet to set in and turn dawn prayers uncomfortably cold. Temperatures in the early autumn are mild enough for shirtsleeves and sandals as the city’s inhabitants shuffle across the hourglass-shaped mountain basin upon which the city is built. On a clear day, one can easily make out the peak of Nabi Shuayb in the distance, which, at just over 3650 metres, is the highest point in the Arabian peninsula.

On that September morning in 1987, Abd al-Wahhab struggled to speak as he listened to his sons tell him about the phone call from Pakistan. As they talked, Abd al-Wahhab’s mind drifted back to the ancient story of Jacob, and how the Hebrew patriarch had handled the loss of his own favourite son. But there was little comfort in that either. “My heart was sad and my eyes welled up,” he recalled. “I wanted my son.”

Eventually the full story emerged. Days earlier, Hisham had been part of an operation against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The nineteen-year-old had attempted to fire a rocket without a launcher – an incredibly risky procedure that required balancing the rocket on a rock while using a string as a trigger – and miscalculated, killing himself and wounding two others, who like him had no previous military experience. The teenagers had been posted to a windy outpost in eastern Afghanistan known only as Maasada, or the Lion’s Den, under the command of a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden.

In the years leading up to his son’s death, Abd al-Wahhab had been part of a loose network of clerics and shaykhs who recruited for the jihad, encouraging young men like Hisham to travel to Afghanistan. The clerics preached wherever they could, in unfinished mosques of rebar and bare concrete and in the tiny back rooms of sympathetic shopkeepers. Across the Middle East, mainstream preachers in gleaming mosques ignored the wild-eyed clerics and their ranting sermons, but for the frustrated youths and unemployed young men their simple message struck a chord. Like Muhammad, who had built an army out of society’s discards, clerics like Abd al-Wahhab transformed a movement of ex-cons and outcasts into a jihad. Drawing them in with his rhythmic and strangely looping speeches, Abd al-Wahhab had been one of the best, convincing dozens to travel thousands of miles to a land they had never heard of.

By 1986, the years of listening to his father’s sermons had convinced Hisham. On a trip to Saudi Arabia to perform the hajj, the pilgrimage Islam requires of all believers, the precocious teenager told his father he was dropping out of school to travel to Afghanistan. Standing in the shadow of the Kaabah, the large cubic structure at the centre of Mecca’s massive mosque and the holiest site in Islam, Abd al-Wahhab listened to his son’s carefully rehearsed speech. He was surprised but not really shocked, and eventually promised Hisham his blessing on condition that he finished school first.

Even though he followed his father’s instructions and waited an extra year, Hisham was still a child when he arrived in Peshawar, Pakistan – the dusty gateway to the war next door in Afghanistan. A border town full of shifting loyalties and backbiting politicians, Peshawar was nothing like the Islamic utopia he had dreamed of back in Sanaa. There was no sense of purpose and little unity. Instead of towering warriors and Islamic heroes, Hisham found a city of refugees.

In a picture taken days after he stepped off the plane in Pakistan, Hisham looks lost, a little boy drowning in his father’s clothes. Within weeks of the snapshot he was dead, a martyr to the jihad. His father was supposed to be congratulated, not consoled. In time, Abd al-Wahhab would find the comfort his religion promised, even taking pride in his son’s sacrifice, but on that day in September 1987 the pain was still too new. He wanted his son.

AFGHANISTAN SHOULD NEVER have been Hisham’s war. A Cold War struggle in central Asia, it had little to do with Islam and nothing to do with Yemen. On the chessboard of great power politics, religion was an accident of geography. But driven by something deeper, something more elusive than politics or power, the Arabs were drawn to the war in Afghanistan, stumbling into a country they never quite understood.

The Afghanistan these Arab volunteers found was one of long, colourless winters and bleached deserts that cracked and crumbled underfoot. The bunched mountains in the east, twisted and broken with jagged, river-laced valleys, were nothing like the sweeping deserts and cramped cities most of the jihadis called home. The gritty backwash of a country at war was played out through fractious tribes and drugged-out warlords, petty criminals, spies, and prostitutes. That was the Afghanistan of history and experience. But there was another Afghanistan that existed beyond the chaos and mess. Nurtured to life in the pristine minds of teenage boys like Hisham who would come to form terrorism’s popular armies of the next century, their Afghanistan had always been more of an idea than a destination.

The Soviet Union’s 1979 Christmas Day deployment to shore up the Communist government in Kabul sparked the initial fighting. But the Arabs soon transformed war into jihad. They hadn’t travelled thousands of miles to stem the tide of Communism or fight for national liberation. Instead, the Arabs saw themselves as part of a long tradition dating back to the Prophet. Just as Muhammad had fought unbelievers and infidels, they were battling atheists and Communists. It was a myth, of course, but in time the myth created its own reality.

Unlike other Arab governments, who publicly supported the jihad while privately discouraging their young men from travelling to Afghanistan, North Yemen, then a separate state, sent scores of its best and brightest. For an entire generation of young Yemenis, a trip to the front lines in Afghanistan became a rite of passage. There were three channels that fed Yemen’s pipeline to Afghanistan. The first was the government headed by President Ali Abdullah Salih, a short, leathery military commander who in the mid-1980s favoured an Afro and aviator shades. He had come to power nearly a decade earlier, in 1978, as North Yemen’s fifth president. Salih invited recruits to the presidential palace, seating the awkward teenagers in huge, overstuffed chairs. Lost in the flowery opulence and gilded edges of the presidential decor, the boys listened as Salih compared them to Muhammad’s earliest companions.

The second channel drew from Yemen’s tribes, which often acted as a state in their own right, controlling territory and imposing their own laws in the country’s rugged mountains. North of Sanaa two large tribal confederations, Hashid and Bakil, held sway. Referred to as the two wings of the state, the tribes were Yemen’s most enduring social institution. Shaykh Abdullah al-Ahmar, the stately-looking head of the massive Hashid tribal confederation and its thousands of armed fighters, often hosted video parties at his walled compound in downtown Sanaa, screening grainy videos from the front lines and organizing lectures by returning fighters from Afghanistan.

The third channel was Yemen’s network of mosques. Every Friday, in sermons across the country, clerics echoed government ministers and tribal shaykhs, telling their congregations that they had a duty to fight. Along with Abd al-Wahhab al-Daylami, Abd al-Majid al-Zindani, a tall, well-built preacher with a carrot-coloured beard, spearheaded the effort. A former student actor who had found religion in the late 1950s, Zindani knew how to work a room. He mesmerized audiences with tales from his trips to Afghanistan. Zindani told the eager-eyed young men of the miracles of jihad: of angels falling to earth to fight beside men and of corpses refusing to decompose. With signs like these, he explained in a booming voice, God was calling them forward.

OUTSIDE SANAA, part-time preachers in small villages across Yemen took their cues from clerics like Abd al-Wahhab and Zindani, repeating from their own pulpits the stories they had heard in the capital. Around the same time Hisham was petitioning his father for permission to go to Afghanistan, another young Yemeni was coming to a similar decision. Mustafa Badi, a curly-haired Yemeni in his twenties, was just back from a stint working in Saudi Arabia when he headed to the local village mosque one Friday with his cousin. “The sermon that day,” he remembered years later, “changed the course of my life for ever.”

The Shaykh spoke about Afghanistan, a place few in the audience had ever heard of. “I didn’t even know where Afghanistan was,” Badi confessed. Glancing at his cousin kneeling beside him, he asked in a whisper if he knew. His cousin shrugged a response with his eyes.

Afghanistan, the Shaykh’s voice rang out from the front of the mosque, is a land where Muslims are under attack. Soviet pilots strike from the air, murdering entire families in their homes as they sleep, he said. Communists rape women and disguise mines as toys, maiming children too young to pray. As he spoke, a few of the men kneeling in front of him started to cry. Slowly the sobs worked their way back through the congregation, washing over the worshippers. Touching his cheek with his hand, Badi felt his own tears.

Armed with nothing but their faith in God, the Shaykh continued, the Afghans were fighting back. But they needed help. Pausing slightly in his delivery, the Shaykh waited for the sniffling and muffled sobs to fade. He wanted every man’s face turned towards his. His eyes swept across the room, taking in the worshippers and the wordless promises that were already forming. When he spoke again, his voice was a challenge. Badi didn’t need to hear any more. The next morning he bought a ticket to Pakistan.

Days later, on the flight to Karachi, Badi considered what he was doing. He didn’t know anyone in Pakistan or Afghanistan and had no idea what to do or where to go when the plane landed. A week earlier he hadn’t even heard of Afghanistan, and now he was on his way there.

In a queue to use the plane’s lavatory, he struck up a conversation with a pair of young Yemeni men. The two listened as Badi repeated the Shaykh’s sermon, telling them of the crimes the Soviets were committing in Afghanistan. The men had told Badi they were students on their way to the Islamic University in Pakistan, but as the plane crossed over the Arabian Sea, they let slip that they too were headed to Afghanistan. The Yemenis took Badi under their care, guiding him through the wild port city of Karachi to a quiet hotel and getting him a ticket on their flight across the country to Peshawar.

In the arrivals lounge a Palestinian, who introduced himself simply as Abu Turab, was waiting for them. Along with a grubby Afghan fighter who didn’t seem to speak, the jihadi packed the Yemenis into a tiny bus, dropping them across town in front of a house in the University Town section of Peshawar. This, Abu Turab explained, was the Services Bureau, a hostel and bureaucratic clearing house for Arab volunteers run by Abdullah Azzam, the godfather of the Arab jihad in Afghanistan. Inside, the three surrendered their passports, identity cards, and money and selected new identities. The jihadi names, they were told, would protect them during their time in Peshawar’s underground. Badi chose the name Ibrahim after his favourite prophet, the Old Testament and Quranic figure Abraham. For the rest of his time in Afghanistan he would be known only as Abu Ibrahim.

ABDULLAH AZZAM BECAME a father figure to the young men who arrived at his door in Peshawar. In Azzam’s deep voice and expressive eyes, the teenagers and young men like Hisham and Badi found a man who could articulate the secret desires of their hearts. Azzam even looked like a leader. In Afghanistan, he had adopted the pakul, a soft woollen cap favoured by the mujahidin, and let his beard grow until it reached past his collar, two white streaks that turned back to black beneath his chin.

A Palestinian by birth, Azzam was seven years old when the state of Israel was created in 1948, and the shock of its founding shaped the arc of his life. Two decades later, the 1967 Arab–Israeli war pushed him out of Palestine and into exile. A graduate student at the time, Azzam moved to Cairo, where he completed his PhD at the prestigious al-Azhar University in 1973 before accepting a university position in Saudi Arabia. Throughout the 1960s, Egypt and Saudi Arabia had struggled for supremacy of the Arab world, fighting their own version of a cold war on proxy battlefields across the Middle East. Egyptian dissidents found refuge in Saudi Arabia, while the kingdom’s critics fled to Cairo. In Saudi Arabia, Azzam fell in with Egyptian exiles like Muhammad Qutb, the younger brother of Sayyid Qutb, the radical thinker and Islamist who had been sent to his death by Egypt’s President Gamal Abd al-Nasser in 1966. Saudi Arabia put Egyptians like Qutb on a salary, giving them positions in state mosques and schools where they would go on to mould a generation of students with their understanding of the Quran and jihad.

By the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Azzam was ready to put his theories into practice. He took a job at the Islamic University in Islamabad in 1980. But life in the quiet, tree-lined Pakistani capital was still too far from the war he sought. Within months of his arrival in Pakistan, Azzam had uprooted his family a second time and moved them 120 miles west to Peshawar. Here, in the shadow of the Khyber Pass and the jihad that lay just beyond its snowcapped mountains, he found his life’s work.

On trips across the border, Azzam watched the Afghan mujahidin push back repeated Soviet offensives with little more than antique rifles and their faith in God. Their courage under fire impressed the Palestinian exile, who believed his own homeland had been stolen by invaders. Soon Azzam was back in Peshawar, developing a vision for a pan-Arab army that would travel the world liberating Muslim lands from foreign occupation. In 1984, he distilled his thinking down to a religious ruling known as a fatwa. In it, Azzam argued that jihad in Afghanistan was a duty incumbent on all Muslims. That same year he established the guesthouse and office in Peshawar that he called the Services Bureau. The nerve centre of Arab efforts in Afghanistan, the Services Bureau was designed to catch the expected flow of volunteers. But for the first few years after Azzam’s fatwa there was only a trickle, teenagers and young men like Hisham and Badi.

When the men wouldn’t come to Afghanistan, Azzam brought Afghanistan to them. On recruiting trips across the Middle East, he roused crowds with his booming voice and onstage theatrics. “Jihad and the rifle alone,” he shouted, shaking a rifle in the air. He repeated the performance wherever there were Muslims, travelling to Europe and the US to recruit fighters for his war. The US, eager to see the Soviets bogged down in their own Vietnam, allowed Azzam to establish satellite centres across the country, in cities like Brooklyn, New York; Kansas City, Missouri; and Tucson; Arizona. The broad-shouldered Palestinian in his Afghan cap was a tireless recruiter, screening videos and delivering speeches night after night. “Your brothers and sisters in Afghanistan need you,” he beseeched the uncertain crowds.

Listening to Azzam, one jihadi recalled years later, “made me want to find a blanket and withdraw from the world”. The men that emerged were Azzam’s soldiers, pledging their loyalty and obedience to him. Everything Azzam did – the lectures, the videos, and especially his battlefield stories, when he would grab his listener by the hand, clenching his calloused fist around their fingers while he whispered what he’d seen on the front lines – was designed to attract the pious and the adventurous.

By the late 1980s, just as the Soviets were preparing to withdraw, the trickle of Arab volunteers had turned into a flood. Many of these men gravitated to Azzam and his Saudi protégé, Osama bin Laden, on 15 February 1989. The final Soviet soldier in Afghanistan, General Boris Gromov, walked across the concrete and steel Friendship Bridge and into Soviet Uzbekistan. That doesn’t matter, bin Laden told the legions of new fighters who had gathered around him in Peshawar. The Soviets had left behind a puppet government in Kabul, and bin Laden wanted to finish the job. The thirty-one-year-old Saudi was full of confidence after the Soviet retreat, and he was planning one final trip over the border into Afghanistan. No one expected much of a fight. In Langley, Virginia, the headquarters of the CIA, analysts agreed with the mujahidin’s assessments, and together with Pakistani intelligence they put together a plan to support the rebel fighters as they pushed west out of Pakistan towards Kabul. Already the subject of fawning articles back home in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden wanted to reach a wider audience. His march to Kabul would be a victory lap that would secure his reputation as a hero of the jihad.

On the other side of the Khyber Pass, the Arabs reassembled in the freezing mountains outside the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. Tucked inside the city, protected by a winding river fed by the winter snows and lines of Russian mines, sat several thousand soldiers loyal to Afghanistan’s Communist government. Along with bin Laden’s Arabs, several groups of Afghan mujahidin had taken up positions in the mountains around the city in March and April, all hoping to deliver the knockout blow before advancing on Kabul, just over one hundred miles to the west. This was the loose alliance of shaggy-haired rebels and warlords that had impressed Azzam years earlier and which had eventually chased the Soviets out. Despite a decade of war, few of the mujahidin commanders had experience in taking a city. They had been guerrilla fighters, slipping out of the mountains to disable Soviet tanks or popping up from behind pine trees to bring down low-flying helicopters with Stinger missiles. Many of the commanders had been rivals for the foreign funding and arms that fuelled the war, and the years of competition had fostered a culture of mistrust.

Early efforts to take the city failed, as Communist fighters easily turned back the mujahidin’s wild frontal assaults. Suspicious commanders, who worried their rivals were playing a double game and holding out for more cash now that the war was winding down, blamed one another for the setbacks. Instead of the quick romp to victory predict...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Map of Yemen
• Prologue
• I RISE AND FALL
• 1 A Far-Off Land
• 2 The Next Afghanistan
• 3 The Dogs of War
• 4 Faith and Wisdom
• 5 The Southern Job
• 6 Allies
• 7 A New War
• 8 Attrition
• 9 Victory
• II FORGETTING
• 10 Rehab
• 11 A Revolt in the North
• 12 Prison Cells
• 13 Policy Shift
• III THE NEXT GENERATION
• 14 The Great Escape
• 15 Resurrecting al-Qaeda
• 16 Echoes of Battles
• 17 The Merger
• 18 Targets
• 19 Out of the Shadows
• Principal Characters
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Sources and Transliteration
• Notes
• Index