The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

‘Clack-clack-clack.’ It was as if someone was attacking my head with an ice-pick. ‘Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.’ Ever since I was a child, I had hated these moments; the violent tugging of sheets, the insistent knock on the bedroom door, the screeching voice of the prefect telling me to get up. But this was different. ‘CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.’ I sat up. Someone was banging a set of car keys against my bedroom window. ‘Misssster Robert,’ a voice whispered urgently. ‘Misssster Robert.’ He hissed the word ‘Mister’. Yes, yes, I’m here. ‘Please come downstairs, there is someone to see you.’ It registered only slowly that the man must have climbed the ancient fire escape to reach the window of my room. I dressed, grabbed a coat – I had a feeling we might travel in the night – and almost forgot my old Nikon. I walked as calmly as I could past the reception desk and out into the early afternoon heat.

The man wore a grubby, grey Afghan robe and a small round cotton hat but he was an Arab and he greeted me formally, holding my right hand in both of his. He smiled. He said his name was Mohamed, he was my guide. ‘To see the Sheikh?’ I asked. He smiled but said nothing. I was still worried about a trap. The guide’s name would be Mohamed, wouldn’t it? He would suggest an evening walk. I could hear the later eyewitness evidence. Yes, sir, we saw the English journalist. We saw him meet someone outside the hotel. There was no struggle. He left freely, of his own accord. He walked out of the hotel gates.

I did, too, and followed Mohamed all the way through the dust of Jalalabad’s main street until we arrived next to a group of gunmen in a pick-up truck in the ruins of an old Soviet army base, a place of broken armoured vehicles with a rusting red star on a shattered gateway. There were three men in Afghan hats in the back of the pick-up. One held a Kalashnikov rifle, another clutched a grenade-launcher along with six rockets tied together with Scotch tape. The third nursed a machine gun on his lap, complete with tripod and a belt of ammunition. ‘Mr Robert, these are our guards,’ the driver said quietly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to set off across the wilds of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province under a white-hot afternoon sun with three bearded guerrillas. A two-way radio hissed and crackled on the shoulder of the driver’s companion as another truckload of Afghan gunmen drove up behind us.

We were about to set off when Mohamed climbed back down from the pick-up along with the driver, walked to a shaded patch of grass and began to pray. For five minutes, the two men lay half-prostrate, facing the distant Kabul Gorge and, beyond that, a far more distant Mecca. We drove off along a broken highway and then turned onto a dirt track by an irrigation canal, the guns in the back of the truck bouncing on the floor, the guards’ eyes peering from behind their chequered scarves. We travelled like that for hours, past half-demolished mud villages and valleys and towering black rocks, a journey across the face of the moon.

Out of the grey heat, there loomed the ghosts of a terrible war, of communism’s last imperial gasp; the overgrown revetments of Soviet army firebases, artillery positions, upended, dust-covered guns and the carcass of a burned-out tank in which no one could have survived. Amid the furnace of the late afternoon, there emerged a whole blitzed town of ancient castellated mud fortresses, their walls shot through with machine-gun bullets and shells. Wild naked children were playing in the ruins. Just the other side of the phantom town, Mohamed’s driver took us off the track and began steering across shale and hard rock, the stones spitting beneath our wheels as we skirted kilometres of fields that were covered in yellow dust. ‘This is a gift from the Russians,’ Mohamed said. ‘You know why there are no people working this ground? Because the Russians sowed it with thousands of mines.’ And so we passed through the dead land.

Once, as the white sun was sliding into the mountains, we stopped for the gunmen on the back to pull watermelons from a field. They scampered back to the trucks and cut them up, the juice dripping through their fingers. By dusk, we had reached a series of cramped earthen villages, old men burning charcoal fires by the track, the shadow of women cowled in the Afghan burqa standing in the alleyways. There were more guerrillas, all bearded, grinning at Mohamed and the driver. It was night before we stopped, in an orchard where wooden sofas had been covered in army blankets piled with belts and webbing and where armed men emerged out of the darkness, all in Afghan clothes and soft woollen flat hats, some holding rifles, others machine guns. They were the Arab mujahedin, the Arab ‘Afghans’ denounced by the presidents and kings of half the Arab world and by the United States of America. Very soon, the world would know them as al-Qaeda.

They came from Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait. Two of them wore spectacles, one said he was a doctor. A few of them shook hands in a rather solemn way and greeted me in Arabic. I knew that these men would give their lives for bin Laden, that they thought themselves spiritually pure in a corrupt world, that they were inspired and influenced by dreams which they persuaded themselves came from heaven. Mohamed beckoned me to follow him and we skirted a small river and jumped across a stream until, in the insect-filled darkness ahead, we could see a sputtering paraffin lamp. Beside it sat a tall, bearded man in Saudi robes. Osama bin Laden stood up, his two teenage sons, Omar and Saad, beside him. ‘Welcome to Afghanistan,’ he said.

He was now forty but looked much older than at our last meeting in the Sudanese desert late in 1993. Walking towards me, he towered over his companions, tall, slim, with new wrinkles around those narrow eyes. Leaner, his beard longer but slightly flecked with grey, he had a black waistcoat over his white robe and a red-chequered kuffiah on his head, and he seemed tired. When he asked after my health, I told him I had come a long way for this meeting. ‘So have I,’ he muttered. There was also an isolation about him, a detachment I had not noticed before, as if he had been inspecting his anger, examining the nature of his resentment; when he smiled, his gaze would move towards his sixteen-year-old son Omar – round eyes with dark brows and his own kuffiah – and then off into the hot darkness where his armed men were patrolling the fields. Others were gathering to listen to our conversation. We sat down on a straw mat and a glass of tea was placed beside me.

Just ten days ago, a truck bomb had torn down part of the US Air Force housing complex at al-Khobar in Dhahran, and we were speaking in the shadow of the deaths of the nineteen American soldiers killed there. US Secretary of State Warren Christopher had visited the ruins and predictably promised that America would not be ‘swayed by violence’, that the perpetrators would be hunted down. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who had since lapsed into a state of dementia, had foreseen the possibility of violence when American military forces arrived to ‘defend’ his kingdom in 1990. It was for this very reason that he had, on 6 August that year, extracted a promise from then President George Bush that all US troops would leave his country when the Iraqi threat ended. But the Americans had stayed, claiming that the continued existence of Saddam’s regime – which Bush had chosen not to destroy – still constituted a danger to the Gulf.

Osama bin Laden knew what he wanted to say. ‘Not long ago, I gave advice to the Americans to withdraw their troops from Saudi Arabia. Now let us give some advice to the governments of Britain and France to take their troops out – because what happened in Riyadh and al-Khobar showed that the people who did this have a deep understanding in choosing their targets. They hit their main enemy, which is the Americans. They killed no secondary enemies, nor their brothers in the army or the police in Saudi Arabia … I give this advice to the government of Britain.’ The Americans must leave Saudi Arabia, must leave the Gulf. The ‘evils’ of the Middle East arose from America’s attempt to take over the region and from its support for Israel. Saudi Arabia had been turned into ‘an American colony’.

Bin Laden was speaking slowly and with precision, an Egyptian taking notes in a large exercise book by the lamplight like a Middle Ages scribe. ‘This doesn’t mean declaring war against the West and Western people – but against the American regime which is against every American.’ I interrupted bin Laden. Unlike Arab regimes, I said, the people of the United States elected their government. They would say that their government represents them. He disregarded my comment. I hope he did. For in the years to come, his war would embrace the deaths of thousands of American civilians. ‘The explosion in al-Khobar did not come as a direct reaction to the American occupation,’ he said, ‘but as a result of American behaviour against Muslims, its support of Jews in Palestine and of the massacres of Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon – of Sabra and Chatila and Qana – and of the Sharm el-Sheikh conference.’

Bin Laden had thought this through. The massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Lebanese Phalangist militia allies in 1982 and the slaughter by Israeli artillerymen of 106 Lebanese civilians in a UN camp at Qana less than three months before this meeting with bin Laden were proof to millions of Westerners, let alone Arabs, of Israeli brutality. President Clinton’s ‘anti-terrorism’ conference at the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh was regarded by Arabs as a humiliation. Clinton had condemned the ‘terrorism’ of Hamas and the Lebanese Hizballah, but not the violence of Israel. So the bombers had struck in al-Khobar for the Palestinians of Sabra and Chatila, for Qana, for Clinton’s hypocrisy; this was bin Laden’s message. Not only were the Americans to be driven from the Gulf, there were historic wrongs to be avenged. His ‘advice’ to the Americans was a fearful threat that would be fulfilled in the years to come.

But what bin Laden really wanted to talk about was Saudi Arabia. Since our last meeting in Sudan, he said, the situation in the kingdom had grown worse. The ulema, the religious leaders, had declared in the mosques that the presence of American troops was not acceptable and the government took action against these ulema ‘on the advice of the Americans’. For bin Laden, the betrayal of the Saudi people began twenty-four years before his birth, when Abdul Aziz al-Saud proclaimed his kingdom in 1932. ‘The regime started under the flag of applying Islamic law and under this banner all the people of Saudi Arabia came to help the Saudi family take power. But Abdul Aziz did not apply Islamic law; the country was set up for his family. Then after the discovery of petroleum, the Saudi regime found another support – the money to make people rich and to give them the services and life they wanted and to make them satisfied.’

Bin Laden was picking away at his teeth with that familiar twig of mishwak wood, but history – or his version of it – was the basis of almost all his remarks. The Saudi royal family had promised sharia laws while at the same time allowing the United States ‘to Westernise Saudi Arabia and drain the economy’. He blamed the Saudi regime for spending $25 billion in support of Saddam Hussein in the Iran – Iraq war and a further $60 billion in support of the Western armies in the 1991 war against Iraq, ‘buying military equipment which is not needed or useful for the country, buying aircraft by credit’ while at the same time creating unemployment, high taxes and a bankrupt economy. But for bin Laden, the pivotal date was 1990, the year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. ‘When the American troops entered Saudi Arabia, the land of the two Holy places, there was a strong protest from the ulema and from students of sharia law all over the country against the interference of American troops. This big mistake by the Saudi regime of inviting the American troops revealed their deception. They were giving their support to nations which were fighting against Muslims. They helped the Yemeni communists against the southern Yemeni Muslims and are helping Arafat’s regime fight Hamas. After it insulted and jailed the ulema eighteen months ago, the Saudi regime lost its legitimacy.’

The night wind moved through the darkened trees, ruffling the robes of the Arab fighters around us. Bin Laden spread his right hand and used his fingers to list the ‘mistakes’ of the Saudi monarchy. ‘At the same time, the financial crisis happened inside the kingdom and now all the people there suffer from this. Saudi merchants found their contracts were broken. The government owes them 340 billion Saudi rials, which is a very big amount; it represents 30 per cent of the national income inside the kingdom. Prices are going up and people have to pay more for electricity, water and fuel. Saudi farmers have not received money since 1992 – and those who get grants now receive them on government loans from banks. Education is deteriorating and people have to take their children from government schools and put them in private education, which is very expensive.’

Bin Laden paused to see if I had listened to his careful if frighteningly exclusive history lesson. ‘The Saudi people have remembered now what the ulema told them and they realise America is the main reason for their problems … the ordinary man knows that his country is the largest oil-producer in the world yet at the same time he is suffering from taxes and bad services. Now the people understand the speeches of the ulemas in the mosques – that our country has become an American colony. They act decisively with every action to kick the Americans out of Saudi Arabia. What happened in Riyadh and al-Khobar is clear evidence of the huge anger of Saudi people against America. The Saudis now know their real enemy is America.’ There was no doubting bin Laden’s argument. The overthrow of the Saudi regime and the eviction of US forces from the kingdom were one and the same for him. He was claiming that the real religious leadership of Saudi Arabia – among whom he clearly saw himself – was an inspiration to Saudis, that Saudis themselves would drive out the Americans, that Saudis – hitherto regarded as a rich and complacent people – might strike at the United States. Could this be true?

The air was clouding with insects. I was writing in my notebook with my right hand and swatting them away from my face and clothes with my left, big insects with wide wings and buglike creatures that would slap against my shirt and the pages of my notebook. I noticed that they were colliding with bin Laden’s white robe, even his face, as if they had somehow been alerted by the anger emanating from this man. He sometimes stopped speaking for all of sixty seconds – he was the first Arab figure I noticed doing this – in order to reflect upon his words. Most Arabs, faced with a reporter’s question, would say the first thing that came into their heads for fear that they would appear ignorant if they did not. Bin Laden was different. He was alarming because he was possessed of that quality which leads men to war: total self-conviction. In the years to come, I would see others manifest this dangerous characteristic – President George W. Bush and Tony Blair come to mind – but never the fatal self-resolve of Osama bin Laden.

There was a dark quality to his calculations. ‘If one kilogram of TNT exploded in a country in which nobody had heard an explosion in a hundred years,’ he said, ‘surely the exploding of 2,500 kilos of TNT at al-Khobar is clear evidence of the scale of the people’s anger against the Americans and of their ability to continue that resistance against the American occupation.’ Had I been a prophet, might I have thought more deeply about that fearful metaphor which bin Laden used, the one about the TNT? Was there not a country – a nation which knew no war within its borders for well over a hundred years – which could be struck with ‘evidence’ of a people’s anger, 2,500 times beyond anything it might imagine? But I was calculating more prosaic equations.

Bin Laden had asked me – a routine of every Palestinian under occupation – if Europeans did not resist occupation during the Second World War. I told him no Europeans would accept this argument over Saudi Arabia – because the Nazis killed millions of Europeans yet the Americans had never murdered a single Saudi. Such a parallel was historically and morally wrong. Bin Laden did not agree. ‘We as Muslims have a strong feeling that binds us together … We feel for our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon … When sixty Jews are killed inside Palestine’ – he was talking about Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel – ‘all the world gathers within seven days to criticise this action, while the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children did not receive the same reaction.’ It was bin Laden’s first reference to Iraq and to the UN sanctions which were to result, according to UN officials themselves, in the death of more than half a million children. ‘Killing those Iraqi children is a crusade against Islam,’ bin Laden said. ‘We as Muslims do not like the Iraqi regime but we think that the Iraqi people and their children are our brothers and we care about their future.’ It was the first time I heard him use the word ‘crusade’.

But it was neither the first – nor the last – time that bin Laden would distance himself from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Much good would it do him. Five years later, the United States would launch an invasion of Iraq that would be partly justified by the regime’s ‘support’ for a man who so detested it. But these were not the only words which bin Laden uttered that night to which I should have paid greater attention. For at one point, he placed his right hand on his chest. ‘I believe that sooner or later the Americans will leave Saudi Arabia and that the war declared by America against the Saudi people means war against all Muslims everywhere,’ he said. ‘Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, the ulema, have given us a fatwa that we must drive out the Americans.’

For some time, there had been a steadily growing thunderstorm to the east of bin Laden’s camp and we could see the bright orange flash of lightning over the mountains on the Pakistan border. But bin Laden thought this might be artillery fire, the continuation of the inter-mujahedin battles that had damaged his spirit after the anti-Soviet war. He was growing uneasy. He broke off his conversation to pray. Then on the straw mat, several young and armed men served dinner – plates of yoghurt and cheese and Afghan nan bread and more tea. Bin Laden sat between his sons, silent, eyes on his food. Occasionally he would ask me questions. What would be the reaction of the British Labour Party to his demand that British troops must leave Saudi Arabia? Was the Labour opposition leader Tony Blair important? I cannot, alas, remember my reply. Bin Laden said that three of his wives would soon arrive in Afghanistan to join him. I could see the tents where they would be living if I wished, just outside Jalalabad, ‘humble tents’ for his family. He told an Egyptian holding a rifle to take me to the encampment next day.

Then he pointed at me. ‘I am astonished at the British government,’ he said suddenly. ‘They sent a letter to me through their embassy in Khartoum before I left Sudan, saying I would not be welcome in the United Kingdom. But I did not ask to go to Britain. So why did they send me this letter? The letter said: “If you come to Britain, you will not be admitted.” The letter gave the Saudi press the opportunity of claiming that I had asked for political asylum in Britain – which is not true.’ I believed bin Laden. Afghanistan was the only country left to him after his five-and-a-half-year exile in Sudan. He agreed. ‘The safest place in the world for me is Afghanistan.’ It was the only place, I repeated, in which he could campaign against the Saudi government. Bin Laden and several of his Arab fighters burst into laughter. ‘There are other places,’ he replied. Did he mean Tajikistan? I asked. Or Uzbekistan? Kazakhstan? ‘There are several places where we have friends and close brothers – we can find refuge and safety in them.’

I told bin Laden he was already a hunted man. ‘Danger is a part of our life,’ he snapped back. ‘Do you realise that we spent ten years fighting against the Russians and the KGB? … When we were fighting the Russians here in Afghanistan, 10,000 Saudis came here to fight over a period of ten years. There were three flights every week from Jeddah to Islamabad and every flight was filled with Saudis coming to fight …’ But, I suggested uncharitably, didn’t the Americans support the mujahedin against the Soviets? Bin Laden responded at once. ‘We were never at any time friends of the Americans. We knew that the Americans support the Jews in Palestine and that they are our enemies. Most of the weapons that came to Afghanistan were paid for by the Saudis on the orders of the Americans since Turki al-Faisal [the head of Saudi external intelligence] and the CIA were working together.’

Bin Laden was now alert, almost agitated. There was something he needed to say. ‘Let me tell you this. Last week, I received an envoy from the Saudi embassy in Islamabad. Yes, he came here to Afghanistan to see me. The government of Saudi Arabia, of course, they want to give the people here a different message, that I should be handed over. But in truth they wanted to speak directly to me. They wanted to ask me to go back to Saudi Arabia. I said I would speak to them only under one condition – that Sheikh Sulieman al-Owda, the ulema, is present. They have locked up Sheikh Sulieman for speaking out against the corrupt regime. Without his freedom, negotiation is not possible. I have had no reply from them till now.’

Was it this revelation that made bin Laden nervous? He began talking to his men about amniya, security, and repeatedly looked towards those flashes in the sky. Now the thunder did sound like gunfire. I tried to ask one more question. What kind of Islamic state would bin Laden wish to see? Would thieves and murderers still have their hands or heads cut off in his Islamic sharia state, just as they do in Saudi Arabia today? There came an unsatisfactory reply. ‘Islam is a complete religion for every detail of life. If a man is a real Muslim and commits a crime, he can only be happy if he is justly punished. This is not cruelty. The origin of these punishments comes from God through the Prophet Mohamed, peace be upon him.’

Dissident Osama bin Laden may be, but moderate never. I asked permission to take his photograph, and while he debated this with his companions I scribbled into my notebook the words I would use in the last paragraph of my report on our meeting: ‘Osama bin Laden believes he now represents the most formidable enemy of the Saudi regime and of the American presence in the Gulf. Both are probably right to regard him as such.’ I was underestimating the man.

Yes, he said, I could take his picture. I opened my camera and allowed his armed guards to watch me as I threaded a film into the spool. I told them I refused to use a flash because it flattened the image of a human face and asked them to bring the paraffin lamp closer. The Egyptian scribe held it a foot from bin Laden’s face. I told him to bring it closer still, to within three inches, and I physically had to guide his arm until the light brightened and shadowed bin Laden’s features. Then without warning, bin Laden moved his head back and the faintest smile moved over his face, along with that self-conviction and that ghost of vanity which I found so disturbing. He called his sons Omar and Saad and they sat beside him as I took more pictures and bin Laden turned into the proud father, the family man, the Arab at home.

Then his anxiety returned. The thunder was continuous now and it was mixed with the patter of rifle fire. I should go, he urged, and I realised that what he meant was that he must go, that it was time for him to return to the fastness of Afghanistan. When we shook hands, he was already looking for the guards who would take him away. Mohamed and my driver and just two of the armed men who had brought me to these damp, insect-hungry fields turned up to drive me back to the Spinghar Hotel, a journey that proved to be full of menace. Driving across river bridges and road intersections, we were repeatedly stopped by armed men from the Afghan factions that were fighting for control of Kabul. One would crouch on the roadway in front of our vehicle, screaming at us, pointing his rifle at the windscreen, his companion sidling out of the darkness to check our driver’s identity and wave us through. ‘Afghanistan very difficult place,’ Mohamed remarked.