The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [78]
Bin Laden understood the resentment, but there was little he could do. Part of the problem was that Egyptians joined al-Qaeda permanently, while those from the Gulf states, especially Saudis, fought for a couple of months and then returned home. Bin Laden called it “vacation jihad,” and jihadi strategist Abu Musab al-Suri often joked that the Gulf Arabs came for a few months to “cleanse themselves after a week of spending time with whores in Bangkok.”
When Abu Jandal told bin Laden that he was returning to Yemen to find a wife, he also told him that he wanted to settle down and that this meant that he could no longer serve him. The al-Qaeda leader seemed unconcerned and gave Abu Jandal $2,500 in cash as a wedding present, telling him to “go and think about it after you are married.” Bin Laden appeared confident that Abu Jandal’s absence would not be permanent.
Sometime after Abu Jandal’s departure for Yemen, bin Laden outlined a plan to his driver, Salim Hamdan: he and Abu Jandal should marry two sisters, as they were two of his most trusted followers and he wanted to bind them in this way. Hamdan did exactly as he was asked. Abu Jandal’s growing misgivings with the direction al-Qaeda was taking were laid aside, and ultimately the two married sisters.
The Yemeni authorities who had raided Bayt Habra questioned Abu Jandal for an hour and a half, concluded that he was not part of the plot, and released him. Four hours later he bumped into another al-Qaeda operative, Ibrahim al-Thawer, alias Nibras (later to become one of the Cole suicide bombers), who warned him that the Yemeni police were searching for him again to ask more questions. Abu Jandal wasn’t going to stay around and see what they wanted. Telling himself that “there is no one for you but the sheikh”—bin Laden—he fled to Afghanistan. Other al-Qaeda members who hadn’t been picked up also left the country.
Bin Laden, pleased to have his trusted bodyguard back, gave Abu Jandal a warm welcome. When Abu Jandal told him about the raid, bin Laden asked worriedly: “Was it against us specifically or did someone do something wrong?” Abu Jandal outlined the full sequence of events, and told the al-Qaeda leader that the arrests seemed to have been made in response to the car thefts, not because the Yemenis were cracking down on al-Qaeda. “That is good to hear,” bin Laden said, and a look of calm relief passed over his face as he invoked the president of Yemen: “The ship of Ali Abdullah Saleh is the only ship we have.”
Mihdhar was executed in front of officials from the Yemeni prosecutor’s office and the interior ministry on October 7, 1999. The al-Qaeda members who were arrested and found to be part of the plot were given jail sentences. As their weeks in jail progressed, their thinking about the Yemeni state changed. So, too, did the thinking of their fellow al-Qaeda comrades living in Yemen who regularly visited them. Until then al-Qaeda members had viewed the Yemeni state as a friend who sometimes erred. They therefore mostly avoided operations in the country. This episode ended that view, and now they saw the Yemeni state as an accomplice of the West. Other actions by the Yemenis around this time helped to poison the relationship, among them the arrest and incarcertation of Khallad (Walid bin Attash), apparently in a case of mistaken identity.
One of the men most deeply affected by his time in jail was Hassan al-Khamiri, who spent nine months behind bars. Khamiri was older than most other al-Qaeda members and was “considered like a father by all the brothers,” in the words of Abu Jandal. He returned to Afghanistan as soon as he was released, and his al-Qaeda brothers saw a changed man. He had become bitter and had developed a deep loathing for the Yemeni government. He already hated the United States: the emir of an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, he had lost a few of his men when the camp was bombed by the Americans in retaliation for the 1998 East African embassy attacks.
Khamiri and other al-Qaeda members tried to pressure bin Laden