The house is primitive, constructed of baked mud and stone. The
landscape is sparse and mountainous, with snow cover in the winter. The terrain
is rugged and challenging for the long walks the owner liked to take with his
sons.
Photographs
quietly introduced as evidence in the latest major terrorism trial in Manhattan
federal court offer a rare look inside Osama
bin Laden's lair -- years before al Qaeda flew hijacked planes into buildings
or bombed U.S. embassies in Africa and even before the FBI placed bin Laden on
its Most Wanted List.
Still, bin Laden
was preparing, hiding out in a remote, mountainous area of Afghanistan known as
Tora Bora.
A remarkable set of photos -- the first showing bin Laden in the
hideout where he would seek refuge after 9/11 -- came to light only last month
in the terrorism conspiracy trial of bin Laden lieutenant Khaled al-Fawwaz,
a communications conduit for al Qaeda in London in the mid-1990s. Al-Fawwaz
would arrange bin Laden's first television interview for CNN's Peter Arnett and
Peter Bergen in 1997 and a sit-down for ABC News' John Miller a year later. But
before then, al-Fawwaz called on a Palestinian print journalist, whose 1996
journey to Afghanistan yielded these photos.
Visiting bin Laden
Bin Laden had declared war on the United
States and wanted more people to know it, especially in the Arab world. He
reached out to Abdel Barri Atwan, the founder and then-editor-in-chief of
Al-Quds Al-Arabi, an independent Arabic weekly published in London that had
been critical of certain Arab regimes and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Atwan had broken the story about bin Laden's first fatwa, or
religious decree, stating his grievances against the United States, such as the
presence of U.S troops in Saudi Arabia. He published the entire screed in
August 1996. The next month, al-Fawwaz went to Atwan's office to offer him the
first print interview with the emerging jihadist leader in Afghanistan.
"I was told
that Osama bin Laden was fond of my writing, he liked my style, and he wanted
to meet me personally," Atwan recalled in an interview for Bergen's 2006
book, "The Osama bin Laden
I Know." "I was hesitant, because it was very
dangerous."
Danger aside, in
November 1996, Atwan was airborne to Afghanistan. The date-stamped photographs
from his trip -- which Scotland Yard detectives discovered two years later in a
search of al-Fawwaz's London home -- show a healthy, relaxed, sometimes smiling
bin Laden, not yet 40, conversing, hiking, videotaping pronouncements,
surrounded by children.
The photos also
show rare images of another man who has become an influential ideologue in the
global jihadist movement -- Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, better known as Abu Musab
al-Suri, a Syrian now in his mid-50s who has not been seen in public or heard
from in a decade. Still, al-Suri is arguably the most influential strategic
thinker in Islamist militant circles today.
"A
generation of jihadis were influenced by his teachings," said Paul
Cruickshank, a CNN terrorism
analyst who has written about al-Suri. "He wanted a global
jihadist intifada, where people rose up and fought as individuals.
"His
teachings have deeply influenced jihadis in Syria -- how to build up an
organization, how to win support for it," he said.
The mountain hideout
Bin Laden, from Saudi Arabia, first went
to Afghanistan in the 1980s to participate in the armed resistance to Soviet
invaders, one of thousands of Arab fighters defending a Muslim nation. As the
anti-Soviet jihad wound down, bin Laden began organizing al Qaeda, meaning
"the base," around the border city of Peshawar, Pakistan. By 1992,
Pakistan forced him and his fighters to leave.
Bin Laden
relocated to Khartoum, Sudan, welcomed by a new Islamist regime. But after four
years headquartered there, in 1996, under pressure from the United States,
Sudan made bin Laden go. By then, the ideologically in sync Taliban had taken
control of Afghanistan, and bin Laden decided to move there.
In May 1996, bin
Laden settled in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. His mountain fortress in
Tora Bora was a long drive up a dirt road he had built. Atwan was driven there
in a red Toyota pickup in a twisting seven-hour drive through the mountains. As
a photo of him shows, Atwan donned Afghan-style baggy trousers and a turban to
get past security checkpoints and fit in.
Atwan met bin Laden in his cave. It was small, 13 by 20 feet in
Atwan's estimation, and as the new photos show, it was lined with shelves of
books about the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed. Bin Laden liked to use the
bookshelves as a backdrop for his videotaped edicts and interviews. The cave
not only offered bin Laden a hiding place but also street credibility in the
Muslim world, as the prophet is believed to have received the revelations of
the Koran while camped in his own mountain cave.
After hours of
conversation and an inedible dinner featuring salty cheese and sandy bread,
Atwan ended up bunking in the cave on a mattress that rested on boxes of
grenades.
"He wanted
media exposure," Atwan recalled in the interview for Bergen's 2006 book.
"He wants to say, 'Now I am an international figure; I'm not just a Saudi.
I am aggrieved at Americans who are occupying Saudi Arabia who are desecrating
the Holy Land.' "
As seen in the
photographs, bin Laden always carried a Russian-made Kalashnikov rifle. His
comrades addressed him as "Abu Abdullah," for father of Abdullah, his
eldest son. Two younger sons, Saad and Ali, then in their early teens,
sometimes were at the compound. As one photo shows, Atwan and bin Laden took a
two-hour walk around Tora Bora.
"He loved
that nature there. He loved the mountain. They were trying to have their own
community, grow their foods," Atwan recalled. "It's like an oasis in
Afghanistan."
Bin Laden's
three wives and more than a dozen children did not share bin Laden's joy in
living the life of medieval peasants in the Tora Bora mountains, where the only
light at night was from the moon and gas lanterns, and the only heat in a place
where tremendous blizzards were common was a wood-burning metal stove. Hunger
was a frequent companion to the bin Laden children who lived on a subsistence
diet of rice, bread, eggs and that salty cheese.
In December 2001, with U.S. troops retaliating for 9/11 closing
in, bin Laden fled Tora Bora, eventually making his way to Pakistan, where U.S.
Navy SEALs ended a decade-long manhunt by killing him in his Abbottabad hideout, an hour north of
Islamabad.
Atwan stepped
down from the helm of Al-Quds in 2013 and recapped his journey in a deposition
for the al-Fawwaz trial. Al-Fawwaz was
convicted in Manhattan federal court on
February 26 and faces a possible life sentence.
Even in Tora
Bora, Atwan felt bin Laden was
vulnerable to intelligence agencies. "I thought this man would not
last," Atwan said Tuesday. "He
wasn't really well-protected. He was visible and moving freely."
In 1996, bin
Laden knew but certainly did not disclose the lethal plots he had set in motion
-- the embassy bombings, the planes plot that would become 9/11. Atwan said,
"He was very optimistic, and it never occurred to me that this would be
the most be dangerous man in the world."
The jihadist intellectual
With his pale skin, short red hair and
beard, and green wool hat, Abu Musab al-Suri could pass for Irish. But he is
Syrian, originally from the ancient city of Aleppo, fought in the anti-Soviet
Afghan war, and lived in London in the 1990s.
Al-Suri was close to bin Laden, which explains his comfortable
presence in the 1996 photos of Tora Bora, seated next to al Qaeda's leader in
his cave or hiking with him, carrying his own cameras. (Al-Suri also
accompanied Bergen and Arnett on their visit to bin Laden in 1997.)
The United
States has since accused al-Suri of training recruits at al Qaeda's pre-9/11
al-Ghuraba and Derunta camps in Afghanistan, where operatives such as Ahmed
Ressam, who planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in December 1999,
learned how to kill with poisons and chemicals.
Eventually,
al-Suri publicly criticized bin Laden for making al Qaeda so hierarchical, for
courting publicity and being so controlling, even calling him a
"Pharoah" for his imperial leadership style.
But al-Suri was
no less militant. He set up his own training camp in Afghanistan and advocated
a "leaderless jihad" featuring, as he put it, "spontaneous
operations performed by individuals and cells all over the whole world without
connection between them."
Al-Suri
summarized his philosophy in his 1,600-page treatise, "The Call for Global
Islamic Resistance," which he published on the Internet in 2004. He coined
the Arabic slogan nizam, la tanzim, meaning "a system, not an
organization," to describe his belief that there should be no
organizational bonds between "resistance fighters."
Al-Suri
advocated terrorist cells of no more than 10 men and envisioned more
"lone-wolf" attacks, such as the Fort Hood, Texas, massacre carried
out in 2009 by rogue U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik
Hasan, who was inspired by the radical Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, himself an al-Suri
disciple.
Strategically,
al-Suri argued, a less centralized jihadist network would make operatives who
were arrested less likely to expose fellow militants to intelligence or law
enforcement agencies, because the fighters would not know who else was part of
the movement. Al-Suri was forward thinking about al Qaeda evolving into an
international ideology more than a centrally controlled organization.
After 9/11,
al-Suri appeared on the U.S. Most Wanted Terrorists list with a $5 million reward
for information leading to his capture.
In 2005, al-Suri
was tracked down in Quetta, Pakistan, and sent to Syria, where he was
imprisoned. There were unconfirmed reports that he was released in 2012,
followed by al Qaeda statements by leader Ayman
al-Zawahiri and spokesman Adam
Gadahn in 2014 saying, "May
Allah release him."
A decade after
his arrest, al-Suri's whereabouts are a mystery.
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