The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [220]
The question is what happened to Zawahiri. “The higher you were in the organization, the more you were tortured,” Habib says. “Ayman knew a number of officers and had some weapons. He was subjected to severe torture.” Several former prisoners told me that the most common form of torture was to have one’s hands tied behind him and then to be hoisted onto a doorjamb—hanging, sometimes for hours, by one’s hands behind one’s back. For Habib, it took years to lose the numbness in his arms. Zawahiri himself never talks about his own experience, but he writes, “The brutal treadmill of torture broke bones, flayed skins, shocked nerves, and killed souls. Its methods were lowly. It detained women, committed sexual assaults, called men feminine names, starved prisoners, gave them bad food, cut off water, and prevented visits to humiliate the detainees” (al-Zawahiri, “Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner,” part 4). One can imagine that the humiliation was all the greater for a man as prideful as Dr. Zawahiri.
Zawahiri’s reference to the use of “wild dogs” as a form of torture is a frequent allegation by ex-prisoners. Sayyid Qutb was allegedly mauled by dogs during his second arrest. Dogs are lowly outcasts in Islamic culture, so such a punishment is particularly degrading.
56 “We were defeated”: interview with Usama Rushdi.
driver arrived: ibid.
57 Zawahiri pointed out: interview with Montassir al-Zayyat.
58 they had had visions: Ibrahim, Egypt Islam and Democracy, 20.
“model young Egyptians”: ibid., 19.
“You have trivialized”: interview with Saad Eddin Ibrahim.
worried about the political consequences: interview with Mahfouz Azzam.
a surgery fellowship: Heba al-Zawahiri, personal communication.
59 a tourist visa to Tunisia: interview with Usama Rushdi.
3. The Founder
60 arrived in the Kingdom in 1985: interview with Ahmed Badeeb.
“scars left on his body”: al-Zayyat, The Road to al-Qaeda, 31.
testifying against his comrades: ibid., 49.
“situation in Egypt”: Tahta al-Mijhar [Under the Microscope], al-Jazeera, February 20, 2003.
61 Zawahiri and bin Laden met: al-Zayyat, “Islamic Groups,” part 4, Al-Hayat, January 12, 2005. Zayyat claims that Zawahiri gave him this information, although Zayyat did not tell me this when we spoke in 2002. At that time, he said that Zawahiri and bin Laden probably met in 1986 in Peshawar. This new information, he contends, is based on subsequent conversations with Zawahiri. Mohammed Salaah, the Al-Hayat correspondent in Cairo, told me that, according to his sources, the two men met in 1985, which would have been in Jeddah. Others speculate that the first meeting of Zawahiri and bin Laden took place in Pakistan; for instance, Jamal Ismail told Peter Bergen that the first meeting of the two men was in Peshawar in 1986. Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know, 63.
“If our first parent”: Burton, Personal Narrative, 2:274.
bin Laden’s was buried here: interview with anonymous bin Laden family spokesperson.
death in an air crash in 1967: Othman Milyabaree and Abdullah Hassanein, “Al-Isamee al-Kabeer Alathee Faqadathoo al-Bilad” [The Big Self-Made Man the Country Has Lost], Okaz, September 7, 1967.
62 builders and architects: Eric Watkins, personal communication.
Ethiopia: interview with bin Laden family spokesperson.
boat to Jizan: interview with Saleh M. Binladin.
massacring thousands: Aburish, The Rise, Corruption, and Coming Fall, 24. According to Aburish, “No fewer than 400,000 people were killed and wounded, for the Ikhwan did not take prisoners, but mostly killed the vanquished. Well over a million inhabitants of the territories conquered by Ibn Saud fled to other countries.” The Saudi historian Madawi al-Rasheed notes that such