The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [170]
18
Boom
THE MEN WHO CAME TO TRAIN in Afghanistan in the 1990s were not impoverished social failures. As a group, they mirrored the “model young Egyptians” who formed the terrorist groups that Saad Eddin Ibrahim had studied in the early eighties. Most of the prospective al-Qaeda recruits were from the middle or upper class, nearly all of them from intact families. They were largely college-educated, with a strong bias toward the natural sciences and engineering. Few of them were products of religious schools; indeed, many had trained in Europe or the United States and spoke as many as five or six languages. They did not show signs of mental disorders. Many were not even very religious when they joined the jihad.
Their histories were more complicated and diverse than those of their predecessors who fought the Soviets. The previous generation had included many middle-class professionals—doctors, teachers, accountants, imams—who had traveled to Afghanistan with their families. The new jihadis were more likely to be young, single men, but there were also criminals among them whose skills in forgery, credit card fraud, and drug trafficking would prove to be useful. The former group had been predominantly from Saudi Arabia and Egypt; many of the new recruits spilled out of Europe and Algeria. There were practically none from Sudan, India, Turkey, Bangladesh, or even Afghanistan or Pakistan. In the jihad against the Soviets, some Shia Muslims had participated; there had even been a Shia camp in bin Laden’s outpost of Maasada. This new group of jihadis was entirely Sunni. Their immediate goal was to prepare themselves for combat in Bosnia or Chechnya and then to return to their own homelands and establish Islamist governments. Between ten and twenty thousand trainees passed through the Afghan camps from 1996 until they were destroyed in 2001.
The recruits were interviewed about their background and special skills. The information gathered was useful in determining what kinds of assignments they would be given; for instance, Hani Hanjour, a young Saudi, noted that he had studied flying in the United States. He would become a part of the 9/11 plot.
In addition to the strenuous physical training the new recruits endured, they were also indoctrinated with the al-Qaeda worldview. The class notes of some of the trainees spelled out the utopian goals of the organization:
1. Establishing the rule of God on Earth.
2. Attaining martyrdom in the cause of God.
3. Purification of the ranks of Islam from the elements of depravity.
These three precisely stated goals would frame al-Qaeda’s appeal and its limitations. They beckoned to idealists who did not stop to ask what God’s rule would look like in the hands of men whose only political aim was to purify the religion. Death, the personal goal, was still the main attraction for many of the recruits.
They studied past operations, both the successful ones, such as the embassy bombings, and the unsuccessful, like the attempt on Mubarak’s life. Their text was a 180-page manual, Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, which included chapters on counterfeiting, weapons training, security, and espionage. “The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates…Platonic ideals…nor Aristotelian diplomacy,” the manual begins. “But it does know the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun.”
There were three main stages in the training. The raw recruits spent a period of fifteen days in boot camp, where they were pushed to total exhaustion, with