The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [142]
This fiasco had a profound consequence. With even more defectors from his membership and no real sources of income, Zawahiri had no choice but to join bin Laden in Kandahar. Each man saw an advantage in linking forces. Al-Qaeda and al-Jihad were both very much reduced from their salad days in Sudan. However, the Pakistani intelligence service had persuaded the Taliban to return the al-Qaeda camps in Khost and elsewhere to bin Laden’s control in order to train militants to fight in Kashmir. With ISI subsidizing the cost, the training camps had become an important source of revenue. Moreover, bin Laden was still able to call upon a few of his donors from the days of the Soviet jihad. So at least there was a modest income, enough for bin Laden to be able to purchase some expensive vehicles for Mullah Omar and his top commanders, which made him more welcome. Despite the still dire financial circumstances, Zawahiri believed that his fortunes were better served with bin Laden than without him.
MANY OF THE EGYPTIANS REGROUPED in Afghanistan, including Abu Hafs, who was appointed the al-Qaeda military chief after Abu Ubaydah’s drowning. Al-Qaeda was able to provide only a hundred-dollar-per-month stipend, half of what it had paid in Sudan. The leaders of the Islamic Group came, and some other Islamists from Pakistan and Bangladesh. At first they gathered in Jalalabad in the same compound with the al-Qaeda families—about 250 people altogether—and most of them followed bin Laden when he moved to Kandahar. They were dismayed by the squalor, the awful food, the noxious water, and especially the lack of facilities. Hepatitis and malaria were epidemic. “This place is worse than a tomb,” one of the Egyptians wrote home. Eventually their leader, Zawahiri, joined them.
Since there was no more schooling in Afghanistan, the children spent a lot of time with each other. Zaynab Ahmed Khadr, a Canadian citizen and the strong-willed daughter of one of Zawahiri’s prominent supporters, was upset when her family left Peshawar, where they had lived comfortably for fifteen of her eighteen years. Afghanistan was just across the steep ridge of mountains that blocked the sunset, and yet it seemed anchored in another century. Although she already covered herself completely, even wearing gloves and a niqab over her face, she detested the burka, which Afghan women were forced to wear. Her parents promised that she would be happy in this country, where the true Islam was being practiced, and that she would soon find new friends to replace the schoolmates she’d grown up with. Zaynab moodily declared that she didn’t want to make any friends.
Two days later, her mother said they were going to meet the bin Ladens. “I don’t want to meet anybody!” she said defiantly.
“If you don’t behave yourself, you’ll never dream of going to Peshawar again,” her father said impatiently.
As it turned out, bin Laden’s daughters became some of Zaynab’s closest friends. Fatima, the oldest, who was fourteen in 1997, was the daughter of Umm Abdullah, and Khadija, thirteen, was the daughter of Umm Khaled. (Fatima was the name of one of the Prophet’s daughters, and Khadija the name of his first wife.) The age difference between Zaynab and the bin Laden girls was something she simply accepted, since they were living in such a small community.
Bin Laden’s three wives and their children lived in separate houses inside their compound. All the children of al-Qaeda were dressed in rags, and the effort to keep even minimal levels of cleanliness often came to naught. Zaynab observed that each of the bin Laden houses was clean and distinctly different. Umm Abdullah was poorly educated but fun and good-hearted, and she loved to decorate. Whereas the houses of the other wives were neat and well scrubbed, hers was also beautiful. There were flowers and posters, and coloring books for the younger children. Her daughter Fatima had to do a lot of cleaning, Zaynab noticed, because the mother “was not raised to work.”
Fatima was fun but a little slow. She confided