The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [65]
As they talked, their voices began to rise. In the ten years that they had known each other, they had never had an argument. “This is jihad!” bin Laden cried. “This the way we want to go to heaven!”
Khalifa warned him that the lives of these men were his responsibility. “God will ask you about every drop of their blood. And since I am your friend, I cannot accept that you stay. You have to leave, or else I will leave you.”
Bin Laden coldly refused. Khalifa left the camp. They would never be close again.
ALTHOUGH HE REJECTED the entreaties of Khalifa and others, bin Laden was concerned about the repeated failures of the Arab brigade and the dangers his men faced in the Lion’s Den. “I began thinking about new strategies, such as digging caves and tunnels,” he said. He borrowed an array of bulldozers, loaders, dump trucks, and trenching machines from the Saudi Binladin Group, along with skilled engineers, to craft seven man-made caverns, well disguised and perched above the main supply line from Pakistan. Some of the caves would be more than a hundred yards long and twenty feet high, serving as air-raid shelters, dormitories, hospitals, and arms dumps.
Bin Laden’s men were impatient with construction work and continually pestered him for new opportunities to attack the Russians. The most vehement among them was an obese, forty-five-year-old Palestinian, Sheikh Tameem al-Adnani, a former English teacher who had become the imam at the air force base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, until he was expelled because of his radical views. A pale, fleshy man with a patchy fringe of beard that was turning gray at the temples, Sheikh Tameem turned to the lecture circuit, raising millions of dollars for the mujahideen. His scholarship and worldliness, plus his ardent longing for martyrdom, gave him an authority that rivaled that of bin Laden. Abdullah Azzam, who doted on him, called him “the Lofty Mountain.”
Sheikh Tameem weighed nearly four hundred pounds. His corpulence was a source of amusement to the young Arab fighters, most of whom were not over eighteen years old. They would sometimes have to tow him up the steep mountain paths with ropes, joking that the horses had memorized his face and refused to carry him any longer. But Sheikh Tameem’s commitment to jihad inspired them. He trained with the others despite his age and his poor physical condition. He was constantly pushing bin Laden to throw the men into battle, giving voice to the bold and heedless elements in the camp who were lusting for death. Bin Laden managed to put him off, citing the men’s lack of training and the pressing need to finish construction, but Tameem never let up.
At the end of March 1987, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia, and Sheikh Tameem took advantage of the moment. He cajoled Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, whom bin Laden had left in charge of the Lion’s Den, to attack a small Soviet outpost nearby. Abu Hajer protested that he didn’t have the authority to make such a decision, but Sheikh Tameem’s persistence wore him down, and Abu Hajer reluctantly gave his assent. The sheikh quickly assembled fourteen to sixteen young men, who piled their heavy weapons onto a horse and began trekking down the mountain. The weapons kept sliding off the horse’s back into the snow. Tameem had no plan other than to attack the Soviets and immediately retreat, nor was he entirely sure where he was going. If the Arabs actually engaged in a firefight with the enemy, Sheikh Tameem would be unable to run back up the mountain with the lithe young fighters who accompanied him. But, as usual, caution was not a feature of his scheme.
Suddenly, Abu Hajer’s voice crackled on the walkie-talkie. Bin Laden had returned and he was alarmed. He ordered the men back to camp immediately.
“Tell him that I will not return,” Sheikh Tameem responded.
Bin Laden took the radio. “Sheikh Tameem, return at once!” he commanded. “If you do not, then you will be sinful, for I am your