Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda
-
How the tentacles spread
Prospect, 19 June 2017
Osama bin Laden in flight – the mawkish subtitle may make you pause. One look at the book’s 65 pages of notes should overcome that. The range of people interviewed by the authors is stunning – presidents, generals and diplomats, spies and counter-spies, leaders of Al Qaeda and of Pakistan’s ISI, CIA officers and torturers, and many of Osama Bin Laden’s five wives and 21 children. The results have been combined with the commission reports, scoops and leaks which have emerged over the past decade. The result is a family tale. Far more, it is an insight into the dynamics of jihadism – and the roles of Iran and Pakistan.
In 2001, Iran had provided targeting details on Al Qaeda and the Taliban to the U.S., had helped Washington’s candidate, Hamid Karzai, become President of Afghanistan, and was negotiating to transfer Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to Afghan government control. Then President George W. Bush denounced the country as part of his Axis of Evil. The hard-liners in Tehran decided that Al Qaeda should be treated as a potential asset and started acting as a haven for senior members of the group. The Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the body handling Iran’s covert foreign policy interests, interned them, and also gave refuge to members of Osama bin Laden’s family. In 2003, modernizers decided to offer their guests to Washington, and were curtly rejected. The Exile describes how the reclusive Major General Qassem Suleimani, head of the Quds Force, waited a decade before loosing four Al Qaeda’s military council to counter the Islamic State in Syria. The authors say that Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took over command of Al Qaeda after Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbotabad in 2011, still operates from Iran.*
Major General Qassem Suleimani of Iran’s Quds Force
- internet
The Exile makes clear the strength of Iran’s state within a state. By contrast, the authors’ description of Pakistan makes one hesitate before describing it as a state. Islamabad has lost control of large parts of the country to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, “a leathery coalition of Islamists, warlords, robber barons, and cutthroats that would become known as the Pakistan Taliban and sought Islamabad’s submission through suicide bombs, IEDs, kidnappings and beheadings”. Al Qaeda regarded this as an affiliate. The book also describes the faltering control which the authorities have over the country’s institutions. Even a military dictator – General Pervez Musharraf was President from 2001-2008 – faced limits in dealing with his army chiefs and they had less control over ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, which in turn seems to have had no control over the ISI’s S-Wing. This is the Islamist section of the ISI that, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, had channeled U.S. and Saudi funds to the Taliban and continues to run fundamentalist factions on behalf of the deep state. These factions include Lashkar-e-Taiba (responsible for the Mumbai siege of November 2008); the Haqqani network (which attacked the US Embassy in Kabul); the 313 Brigade staffed by former ISI agents and mujahideen allied to Al Qaeda – and, the authors argue, probably behind the attempt to assassinate Musharraf in December 2003; and Jaish-e-Mohammed whose attack on the parliament buildings in New Delhi in December 2001 distracted attention from Tora Bora, easing Osama bin Laden’s escape to Pakistan.
General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, Director of Pakistan’s ISI,
2008-2012
- internet
While the U.S. applied sanctions against Iran, its aid to a far-from-unsullied Pakistan averaged $3.6 bn per year during the first decade of this century. This munificence did not win it friends. The drone-directed killings in the Tribal Areas caused widespread resentment. The visits to Washington of General Pasha, director of the ISI from 2008 to 2012, were normally confrontational, and became particularly so after the Abbottabad raid. That said, the authors do not appear to have found any evidence that ISI provided cover for Osama bin Laden. According to the official U.S. story, the CIA had picked up the courier of Osama bin Laden nine months before the US Navy SEALS went in, following him to the compound he had built for bin Laden. It did not share this information with the ISI.
From Abbotabad – according to the hand-picked selection of its “million” documents which has been released – bin Laden sought to rein in his old lieutenant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as he launched what became the Islamic State in Iraq. The authors describe how Iranian officials also tried to do the same. In a meeting with the Mauritanian, Sheikh Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed in Nouakchott, he told them how the Quds Force had given “special” passports, weapons and money to al-Zarqawi to facilitate his return to Iraq. In his view, both Al Qaeda and Tehran had both been wrong about the man who had started slaughtering Shias. As ISI morphed into ISIS in Syria, the gulf with Al Qaeda grew. The Exile describes a $1 million offer by al-Zarqawi’s successor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to each of Abu Qatada (who had long resisted Theresa May’s attempts to deport him) and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, the intellectual godfather of Al Qaeda and former mentor of al-Zarqawi, to bring them on side. They were seeking to save some of the hostages held by ISIS. They ended up denounced as western stooges. Maqdisi received an e-mail describing him as “the pimp, the sole of the tyrant’s shoe, son of the English whore”.
For now, it is ISIS which has the headlines, claiming the recent attacks in Manchester, London Bridge and against two of Tehran’s proudest symbols, the Mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini and the country’s parliament. But, with ISIS now apparently on the retreat in Syria and Iraq, the once-faltering brand of Al Qaeda can only gain. The Exile helps explain how that has happened, and how grim a prospect that represents.
The Exile: The Stunning Inside Story of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Flight, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, Bloomsbury, May 2017.
*Further details of this relationship were set out in Cathy Scott-Clark & Adrian Levy’s article for Prospect on June 14: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/trumps-iran-policy-is-allowing-terrorists-to-flourish