Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [240]
The Sudan period also saw some tentative terrorist operations, especially after the head of Hizbollah’s security service, Imad Mugniyah, came to lecture in Khartoum, in the wake of which he set up a suicide-bombing course for Al Qaeda operatives in Lebanon. He had been the prime mover behind the 1983 bombing of US and French peacekeeping troops in Beirut. The first targets were two hotels in Aden where US troops often rested en route to Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. No Americans were hurt in two bomb attacks which killed an Australian tourist and a Yemeni waiter. Ten months later bin Laden’s envoys, drawn like mosquitoes to a swamp, watched as khat-crazed Somalia militiamen downed two US helicopters and barbarously killed their crews and US commandos in the middle of Mogadishu. Bin Laden would subsequently claim that it had been Al Qaeda men who shot the Black Hawks down, although in reality his men had run away. Still, behind the retrospective boasting, an idea took shape. His Egyptian mentor was not idle either.
Al-Zawahiri had taken the remnants of al-Jihad to Khartoum because he needed bin Laden’s money to pay his men after a month-long fund-raising trip to California had yielded a paltry US$2,000. Although he was effectively on bin Laden’s payroll thereafter, al-Zawahiri ran his own operations in his native Egypt. In August 1993 a suicide bomber on a motorbike tried to kill the Egyptian interior minister. Three months later al-Zawahiri tried to murder the prime minister, Atef Sidqi, with a car bomb designed to coincide with the trials of a large number of jihadists. The bomb killed a young girl instead, leading to cries of ‘Terrorism is the enemy of God’ at her well-attended funeral. Al-Zawahiri would persist in these attacks until they led to Al Qaeda being expelled from Sudan. The next level of violence followed a series of events that remobilised the ummah in ways not seen since the response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the wake of this, Al Qaeda would emerge as the brightest star in a vaster nebula of violence.
VI ANGER, RAGE AND TV
For much of the 1980s the struggle of the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviets eclipsed the Palestinian cause as an emotional rallying point for many Muslims. Afghanistan was where the Gulf money flowed, partly because events in the Middle East failed to conform to the simple binary enmities that all myths require. Some neighbouring Arab states like Egypt and Jordan made their cold peace with the Israelis, and the PLO entered into a protracted US-driven process while continuing to practise terrorism. This climate changed with the two Palestinian Intifadas. Together with wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, these provided endless scenes of Muslim victimhood, and sacred causes which legitimised jihadist violence.
The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has never been the sole conflict in the Middle East, but the formula ‘Jews = News’ might lead one to imagine that. The world’s Muslims see things this way; judging by the indifference of Western Christians to the predicament of their Maronite co-religionists in the Lebanon, a sense of oecumene is much weaker among Christians despite efforts by the Barnabas Trust to raise awareness. A brief recapitulation of Palestinian history is needed to situate the two Intifadas. The PLO had dissipated its energies in the civil wars of the Lebanon, resulting in the ejection of its fighters from Beirut in August 1982 and a Syrian-backed mutiny within the PLO against Arafat. In December