The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [109]
At this point, in the early nineties, bin Laden was still refining the concept of al-Qaeda. It was only one of his many enterprises, but it offered him a potentially extraordinary base of power. His actions, such as his foray into Somalia, were small and speculative; but with sufficiently powerful tools—nuclear or chemical weapons, for example—al-Qaeda could change the course of human events.
BY 1994 BIN LADEN’S LIFE had reached a pinnacle. His first two years in Sudan had been full of pleasure and good fortune. His wives and families were all together in his large villa; his business interests were expanding; al-Qaeda was gaining energy and momentum—but also raising alarms. Although Western intelligence agencies were still largely unaware of bin Laden, or simply failed to appreciate the scale of his enterprise, the Saudis and the Egyptians had taken notice of the activities in Sudan. Al-Qaeda proved difficult to penetrate, however. Loyalty, kinship, and fanaticism were formidable barriers against curious outsiders.
On Fridays, bin Laden normally went to pray in the Ansar al-Sunnah Mosque, across the Nile from Khartoum in the suburb of Omdurman. It was a Wahhabi mosque, frequented by Saudis. On February 4, a small group of takfiris, armed with Kalashnikovs and headed by a Libyan named Mohammed Abdullah al-Khilaifi, brazenly broke into two police stations, killing two policemen and seizing weapons and ammunition. Khilaifi and two companions then went to the mosque just as the evening prayers concluded. They fired indiscriminately into the crowd, killing sixteen people at once and wounding about twenty others. The killers hid out behind the airport. The next day, driving around Khartoum seeking other targets, they shot at policemen on the streets and at some of bin Laden’s employees in the Wadi El Aqiq office downtown. They were wild and undisciplined, but it seemed clear that they were gunning for bin Laden.
At five in the afternoon, when he normally opened his salon to visitors, bin Laden was having a dispute with his eldest son, Abdullah. Since childhood, Abdullah had suffered from asthma, and the experience in Peshawar and Khartoum had been difficult for him. He was sixteen years old, and he longed to be with his friends and his cousins in Jeddah, just across the slender ribbon of the Red Sea. Abdullah was, after all, a member of a very wealthy clan, and in Jeddah he could enjoy the family beach resort, the yachts, the parties, the cars, and all the luxuries that his father abhorred. He also worried that his father’s home tutorials had left him far behind his peers—in fact, the bin Laden children of his first wife could scarcely read. Osama believed that his family was already much too comfortable in Sudan. He wanted to make their lives more austere, not less.
As the father and son were talking in bin Laden’s house, his guests began arriving at his office across the street. “At that moment, I heard the sound of a shotgun coming from the direction of the guesthouse,” bin Laden recounted. “Then several shots were fired at the house.” He took his pistol out of the pocket of his gallabea and handed another weapon to Abdullah.
The killers had driven into the street between bin Laden’s two houses and immediately opened fire. Khilaifi and his two companions had expected bin Laden to be entertaining at his office. “They had targeted the spot where I used to sit,” bin Laden said. He and Abdullah, along with Sudanese security