Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [14]
In the spring of 1987, bin Laden wrote to Bayazid, summoning him from Karachi to take part in a battle against the Soviets. “[I hope] that you move toward us immediately in anticipation of the attack on the Russians as the time has come,” bin Laden wrote. Bayazid was told to research whether bin Laden needed a visa to travel to Yemen, then visit one of bin Laden’s sick friends, and then come to the front lines with money and men.7
Bayazid went to meet bin Laden for a strike against an Afghan government installation in Khost, just over the border from Pakistan. When he got there, he found bin Laden ill and the Arabs in disarray. The battle went badly, and the Arab fighters were humiliated in front of their Afghan counterparts. Bin Laden learned from his mistakes, though, and the group did better next time, engaging in more and more ambitious attacks.8
By 1988 bin Laden and Azzam were deep into planning the next phase of the jihad. The war against the Soviets was clearly coming to an end, and the mujahideen were emerging victorious. Yet the Afghan factions were poised to start a bloody civil war over who would run the country when the Soviets left. Azzam wanted the Arab volunteers to stay out of that conflict.
These deliberations set the stage for the August 1988 meeting, recorded by Bayazid.9 The idea was to start a new organization from scratch, or “below zero,” as the American wrote it, but the nature of the organization was a point of contention. Bin Laden was moving into waters that Azzam saw as extreme, and tension between the two had been building.
“Disagreement is present,” Bayazid noted laconically. Bin Laden had several bullet points he wanted to achieve, which included inserting himself into the struggle for Afghanistan in opposition to local warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, a veteran of the Soviet jihad whom Azzam supported.10
Bin Laden also argued that the jihad organization owed a debt to its Egyptian faction, led by Ayman Al Zawahiri of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whose ultimate goal was to overthrow the Mubarek regime back home and install an Islamic state. Again Azzam pushed back. One year earlier the Palestinian scholar had helped create Hamas.11 Why would the organization tackle Egypt when the Palestinians were suffering under Israeli occupation?
Finally, bin Laden wanted to run the jihad with an open door recruiting policy in order to increase the numbers available for the newly minted al Qaeda. At the time of the meeting, bin Laden had identified a little more than three hundred candidates for specialized training with the new group. Azzam favored a more discriminating approach that would rely on trusted, proven brothers.12
Some days later the conversation resumed. This time the meeting included a core of eight or nine bin Laden loyalists, and Azzam was not invited. The first day was consumed with complaints about Azzam and his organization. On the second day, the conversation turned pragmatic. The men discussed which training camps would be controlled by al Qaeda and how to direct fighters from one to the other, along with the requirements for new members, which included “obedience,” references, and “good manners.”
On the third day, the minutes read, “the work of al Qaeda commenced.”13
Americans were easy to find among the first recruits. Bin Laden seemed strangely enamored of Americans and people who had spent time in the United States, but the first consideration was practical. Someone with a U.S. passport could travel anywhere in the world without arousing suspicion, and bin Laden needed couriers to ferry money and information for his increasingly global operation.14
One of the first American