The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [35]
As the Taliban gained control of more and more parts of the country, it began hosting radical Islamist groups from across the world, inviting them to use Afghanistan as a base. One such group was al-Qaeda. Worldwide reaction to the gradual takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban was decidedly mixed. The United States initially supported the Taliban, which was seen as a barrier to the Shiite Iranian expansion in Afghanistan, and U.S. officials also welcomed the Taliban’s opposition to the drug trade. The fact that the Taliban was religiously intolerant—infamously destroying (together with al-Qaeda) two sixth-century Buddhas carved into a cliff in central Afghanistan—and were oppressive to women was not enough to change U.S. policy.
When the Taliban captured Kandahar in April 1996, Mullah Omar removed the rarely seen eighteenth-century Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad from the mosque in which it resides, showing it to the assembled crowd as part of an effort to demonstrate that he had been ordained by God to lead Afghanistan. His followers named him Amir al-Mu’minin, “commander of the faithful”—the emir of the country.
The Taliban took Kabul on September 26, 1996, and their first action was to capture Muhammad Najibullah, who had been driven from power and was living in a United Nations compound. They castrated the former president, dragged his body around the city tied to a jeep, shot him, and hanged him and his brother from a pole. The action brought forth a stream of recruits from madrassas, including those in Pakistan.
The largest grouping of opponents of the Taliban was the Northern Alliance, led by the charismatic mujahideen general Ahmed Shah Massoud. Called the Lion of Panjshir after the valley in which he was born (Panjshir means “valley of five lions”), Massoud, a Tajik and a devout Muslim, was one of the most successful commanders fighting the Russians, with numerous victories to his credit. He had also fought the communists in Afghanistan. The Soviets had come to see him as an unbeatable master of guerrilla warfare. However, Massoud’s weakness was that he was a poor diplomat, and the fact that he was a Tajik in a tribal society with a Pashtun majority prevented his rise to power before the Taliban came to dominate the country—and prevented would-be allies from joining the Northern Alliance. Nonetheless, many in the West eventually came to see him as the best hope in stopping the Taliban.
“Brothers, listen to me, I have something important to say.” Muhannad bin Attash stood up and raised his hands in the air to silence the young men who had been chatting among themselves. They fell silent and turned to face him. It was mid-1996, and they were gathered at an al-Qaeda–funded guesthouse on October Street in Sanaa, where young men in the neighborhood sympathetic to the radical jihad movement frequently gathered. Muhannad first reminded his audience of the heroics of the previous generation of mujahideen who had expelled the Russians from Afghanistan, and then, having sufficiently riled them up, told them that their opportunity had now come. He had, he continued, an important message from Osama bin Laden for them.
By this point the young men were listening intently. Muhannad was a persuasive speaker, and bin Laden was well known and admired for his role in the first Soviet jihad. Most of the young fighters were not newcomers to jihad, having served in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia. Once again the enemy was the Russians, Muhannad said. And this time Russia had sent fighters into Tajikistan—to take control of that country and from there expand further into Muslim lands. The young men asked Muhannad how they could help Sheikh Osama counter the Russians. Muhannad replied that he was traveling the next day to Afghanistan to see bin Laden and would send back instructions.
Muhannad returned to Afghanistan, accompanied