The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [154]
Each part of the operation betrayed al-Qaeda’s inexperience. As Jihad Ali drove into the rear parking lot of the embassy, ‘Owhali jumped out and charged toward the guard station. He was supposed to force the unarmed guard to raise the drop bar, but the guard refused. ‘Owhali had left his pistol in his jacket in the truck. He did carry out a portion of his mission, which was to throw a stun grenade into the courtyard. The noise drew the interest of people inside the buildings. One of the lessons Zawahiri had learned from his bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad three years before was that an initial explosion brought people rushing to the windows, and many were decapitated by flying glass when the real bomb went off.
‘Owhali abruptly faced a moral choice that he believed would determine his eternal fate—at least, that was what he later told an FBI agent. He had expected to be a martyr; his death in the operation would assure him his immediate place in Paradise. But he realized that his mission of setting off the stun grenade had already been accomplished. If he were to go forward to his own certain death, that would be suicide, he explained, not martyrdom. Damnation would be his fate, not salvation. Such is the narrow bridge between heaven and hell. To save his soul, ‘Owhali turned and ran, failing in his main task of raising the drop bar so that the truck could get closer to the building.
‘Owhali didn’t get far. The blast knocked him to the sidewalk, shredding his clothes and pounding shrapnel into his back. When he managed to stand, in the weird silence after the blast, he could see the results of his handiwork.
The face of the embassy had sheared off in great concrete slabs. Dead people still sat at their desks. The tar-covered street was on fire and a crowded bus was in flames. Next door, the Ufundi Building, containing a Kenyan secretarial college, had completely collapsed. Many were pinned under the rubble, and soon their cries arose in a chorus of fear and pain that would go on for days, until they were rescued or silenced by death. The toll was 213 dead, including 12 Americans; 4,500 were injured, more than 150 of them blinded by the flying glass. The ruins burned for days.
Nine minutes later, Ahmed the German drove his truck into the parking lot of the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam and pushed the detonator wired into the dashboard. Fortuitously, between him and the embassy there was a water tanker truck. It was blown three stories high and came to rest against the chancery of the embassy, but it prevented the bomber from getting close enough to bring the building down. The toll was 11 dead and 85 wounded, all of them Africans.
Beyond the obvious goal of calling attention to the existence of al-Qaeda, the point of the bombings was vague and confusing. The Nairobi operation was named after the Holy Kaaba in Mecca; the Dar es Salaam bombing was called Operation al-Aqsa, after the mosque in Jerusalem; neither had an obvious connection to the American embassies in Africa. Bin Laden put forward several explanations for the attack. He initially said that the sites had been targeted because of the “invasion” of Somalia; then he described an American plan to partition Sudan, which he said was hatched in the embassy in Nairobi. He also told his followers that the genocide in Rwanda had been planned inside the two American embassies.
Muslims all over the world greeted the bombings with horror and dismay. The deaths of so many people, most of them Africans, many of them Muslims, created a furor. Bin Laden said that the bombings gave the Americans a taste of the atrocities that Muslims had experienced. But to most of the world and even to some members of al-Qaeda, the attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except to provoke a massive response.
But that, as it turned out, was