Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [147]
And so it was that on August 20, 1998, we said our goodbyes to the fighters at Farouk and went to Kabul.
The guest house was a detached, three-storey white villa surrounded by a beautiful green garden with lots of trees. I was hoping that we would remain there, but soon after we arrived, the head of security came rushing to my father, saying that he had received the most dreadful news over his handheld transmitter. Farouk, the camp we had left only two hours before, had just been hit. In a massive attack, U.S. cruise missiles had rained down on the camp, killing or wounding many of the men we had so recently left behind.
My father soon discovered that the missiles had been launched from U.S. warships in the Red Sea. Khartoum had been hit as well, although we couldn’t imagine why.
I had left several good friends in Farouk. I silently prayed they had survived the attack.
My father usually accepted bad news with a calm countenance, but upon hearing about the damage and death at Farouk, he was struck with the most violent, uncontrollable rage. His face turned red and his eyes flashed as he began rushing about, repeatedly quoting the same verse from the Koran, “The God kills the ones who attacked! The God kills the ones who attacked!” Punching the air wildly with his fists, he shouted, “May God kill the ones who attacked! How could anyone attack Muslims? How could anyone attack Muslims? Why would anyone attack Muslims?”
At that moment I agreed with him, but then later in life I recalled the many times he had proclaimed that Americans were on a mission to kill Muslims, which made me ponder his genuine astonishment that Muslims had been killed. Curiously, none of us considered that it was my father who had caused the bombing of his camp by first bombing the American embassies. An eye for an eye.
We soon learned that there had been strikes on numerous training camps throughout Afghanistan. I felt physically ill until we learned that the Kandahar compound escaped attack. My mother, aunties, and younger siblings were safe, at least from what we heard.
Once my father composed himself, he thanked God that the Americans had failed to kill him. Certainly, we would have lost many more men had the Americans fired their missiles only two hours earlier.
One idea after another flew through my father’s mind until he finally decided that the guest house was no longer safe. We would go underground in the way that American Mafia bosses drop out of sight during their turf wars. You might say that my father, his top leaders, and his sons “went to the mattresses” when we rushed from the guest house in Kabul to a safe house in the same city.
Even his sons did not know the location of the safe houses my father maintained in all the major cities of Afghanistan, but we were quickly transported to one nearby. The safe house was more ordinary than the guest villa, but more secure because it was set in the middle of a large, populated area. We were concealed among the innocent because my father had often noted that the Americans were keen to avoid killing civilians.
We hid there for over thirty days. Knowing the Americans were desperate to find my father and his leaders, everyone stayed out of sight, even from our neighbors, who had no idea that the top-ranking al-Qaeda commanders were dangerously close. The only freedom my father would allow his sons was an occasional peek out the front windows. Opening the curtains no more than a tiny bit, my brothers and I would study the nearby houses and watch the Afghans walking past. Meanwhile, my father and his top men were learning which fighters had died and calculating the damage to the organization, yet taking time on occasion to savor the death tally from the bombings at the American embassies.
Our Muslim deaths were lamented, African deaths ignored, and American deaths celebrated. I was too young to understand the full madness of such thinking.
That dreary month passed too slowly. We were all eager to return to Farouk and the other bombed