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By Root 670 0

official party that would better represent Saudi interests. Ittihad-e-Islami (Islamic Union) was privately funded through bin Laden and others and headed by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. An imposing and dashing Afghan warlord, six feet three inches tall, who draped himself in colorful blankets, Sayyaf spoke excellent classical Arabic from his years studying at al-Azhar University in Cairo. His devout Wahhabi beliefs were out of step with the Sufi traditions that predominated in Afghanistan before the war, but they were very much attuned to the interests of the Saudi Arabian government and its religious establishment. These seven mujahideen leaders came to be known, by the CIA and other intelligence agencies that were their principal means of support, as the Seven Dwarves.

Turki saw trouble ahead with the greedy and contentious Dwarves, and he repeatedly urged these competing groups to unify under a single command. In 1980 he brought the mujahideen leaders to Mecca. Ahmed Badeeb, Turki’s assistant, escorted them. Badeeb discovered that the most expedient way of silencing the discord among the resistance leaders was to lock them up in a jail in Taif until they agreed to pick Sayyaf—Turki’s man—as their leader. But as soon as they left the Kingdom, the jailhouse agreement fell apart. “They went back to their old ways,” Turki complained.

“FEAR OF BODILY PARTICIPATION” kept bin Laden well away from the battlefield in the early years of the war, a fact that later caused him great shame. He limited his trips in Pakistan to Lahore and Islamabad, not even venturing as far as Peshawar, then shuttling back home to Jeddah. These frequent excursions eventually cost him his job. By walking away from the Saudi Binladin Group’s reconstruction of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, he forfeited his share of the profit—an amount that Abdullah Azzam calculated was 8 million riyals, about $2.5 million.

In 1984 Azzam persuaded him to cross the frontier into Jaji, where Sayyaf had a camp high in the mountains above a major Soviet outpost. “I was surprised by the sad state of the equipment and everything else—weapons, roads, and trenches,” bin Laden recalled. “I asked forgiveness from God Almighty, feeling that I had sinned because I listened to those who advised me not to go…. I felt that this-four-year delay could not be pardoned unless I became a martyr.”

At seven in the morning on June 26, 1984, during the month of Ramadan, most of the mujahideen in the Jaji camp were still sleeping, since they had been praying and eating late into the night after fasting during the day. The sound of a Soviet jet rudely brought them back to consciousness. The men dove for the shallow trenches. “The mountains were shaking from the bombardment,” bin Laden noted. He was shocked by how low the planes flew as they attacked. “The missiles that landed outside the camp were making a huge noise that covered the sound of the mujahideen cannon as if they did not exist. Bear in mind that if you heard these sounds alone, you might say that there could not be anything louder! As to the missiles that landed inside the camp, thanks to God, they did not explode. They landed as iron lumps on the land. I felt closer to God than ever.”

Bin Laden recorded that the mujahideen shot down four Soviet aircraft that morning. “I saw with my own eyes the remains of [one of] the pilots,” he marveled. “Three fingers, a part of a nerve, the skin of one cheek, an ear, the neck, and the skin of the back. Some Afghan brothers came and took a photo of him as if he were a slaughtered sheep! We cheered.” He also noted admiringly that the Afghans had not bothered to jump into the trenches with the frightened Arabs when the attack began. “Not one of our brothers had been injured, thank God. This battle gave me in fact a big push to continue in this matter. I become more convinced of the fact that no one could be injured except by God’s will.”

Bin Laden immediately returned to Saudi Arabia, and before the end of Ramadan he raised a fortune for the mujahideen—“between five and ten million dollars,” Abdullah