The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [148]
Outside of Afghanistan, members of the Islamic Group greeted the declaration with disbelief. After the catastrophe of Luxor, they were appalled to find themselves part of a coalition that they hadn’t been asked to join. Taha was forced to withdraw his name from the fatwa, lamely explaining to fellow members of the Islamic Group that he had only been asked over the telephone to join in a statement of support for the Iraqi people.
Al-Jihad was also in an uproar. Zawahiri called a meeting of his supporters in Afghanistan to explain the new global organization. The members accused him of turning away from their primary goal of taking over Egypt, and they protested al-Jihad’s being drawn into bin Laden’s grandiose war with America. Some objected to bin Laden personally, saying he had a “dark past” and could not be trusted as the head of this new coalition. Zawahiri responded to the attacks on bin Laden by e-mail: “If the Contractor [bin Laden] made promises in the past he did not carry out, then now the man has changed…. Even at this time, almost everything we enjoy comes to us from God first and then from him.” His attachment to bin Laden by now was total. Without bin Laden’s money, however scarce it had become, there was no al-Jihad.
In the end, Zawahiri pledged to resign if the members failed to endorse his actions. The organization was in such disarray because of arrests and defections, and so close to bankruptcy, that the only choice was to follow Zawahiri or abandon al-Jihad. Many members chose the latter option, among them Zawahiri’s own brother Mohammed, who was also his military commander. The two brothers had been together from their underground days. They had sometimes been at odds with each other—on one occasion, Ayman denounced Mohammed in front of his colleagues for mismanaging the group’s paltry finances. But Mohammed was popular, and, as deputy emir, he had run the organization whenever Ayman was off on his lengthy travels or in jail. The alliance with bin Laden was too much for Mohammed, however. His defection was a shocking blow.
Several members of the Islamic Group tried to have the blind sheikh named emir of the new Islamic Front, but the proposal was brushed aside, since Sheikh Omar was in prison in America. Bin Laden had had enough of the infighting between the Egyptian factions. He told both groups that their operations in Egypt were ineffectual and too expensive and that it was time for them to “turn their guns” on the United States and Israel. Zawahiri’s assistant, Ahmed al-Najjar, later told Egyptian investigators, “I myself heard bin Laden say that our main objective is now limited to one state only, the United States, and involves waging a guerrilla war against all U.S. interests, not only in the Arab region but also throughout the world.”
16
“Now It Begins”
AL-QAEDA’S FORTUNES began to improve after the coalition’s fatwa to kill Americans wherever they might be found. Until then, bin Laden’s name and his cause had been obscure outside of Saudi Arabia and Sudan, but news of the fatwa excited a new generation of fighters. Some came from the madrassas in Pakistan, others from the streets of Cairo or Tangier. The call was heard also in Muslim enclaves in the West. In March 1998, only a month after the fatwa, Ahmed Ressam came from Montreal. A petty thief of Algerian origin who would later be arrested for trying to blow up the Los Angeles International Airport, Ressam was one of about thirty Algerians in the Khaldan camp, the entry point for al-Qaeda trainees in Afghanistan. That same month, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent who was living in London, arrived; he would later plead guilty to planning to attack the United States. Young men from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Turkey, and Chechnya came to Khaldan, and each nationality had its own emir. They created cells that they could then