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A Gathering of Herds, p. 3 Years earlier, far to the east, another herd had been gathering. Disdaining the urban niceties of prideful America, they had closeted themselves in a mountain fastness, sucking arid air in caves and camps. They will bring true Islam to the globe. Dead or alive, their souls belong to Allah. Having flocked to the call, they will follow an antlered head of their own. With a vaguely bemused expression that rarely changes, set in a gaunt face, he peers into a visionary future. "Soft, humble, smooth, he speaks little." He is a self-contained man. Carefully maintaining his own personal security, he is ready to die. He is a living martyr. "Ever since I was a boy," he tells us in taped interviews and video broadcasts, "I felt hatred towards the Americans and felt that I was at war against them." Now, "Every American man is an enemy whether he is among the fighters who fight us directly or among those who pay taxes." The millionaire son of a billionaire father, he knows the value of money in recruiting followers. And so, in 1998 he declares a Holy War, a Fatwa against both the U.S. military and civilians. Not only Americans. There are other enemies as well. Invoking the glories of Saladin's conquests on behalf of the faith, the war will be waged between Muslims and "Zionist Crusaders." "Our goal," he announces, "is to liberate the land of Islam from the infidels and establish the law of Allah." He will defeat the "Crusader-Jewish wars" against Islam. "We cannot leave the house of God," he tells those who have joined with him, "to these malicious Jews and Christians." Not only Jews and Christians, but the United Nations itself is an "infidel regime." His jihad will drive Americans and all other infidels out of the "State of Islam," purify "Islamic lands" everywhere of their presence. He calls upon Muslims to "spend their money on jihad and especially on the movements that have devoted themselves to the killing of Jews and Crusaders." The devastation of the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya with their heavy African casualties, "was a grace from the Almighty, bringing delight to the Muslim world." He expresses "joy and delight" over the bombing of the U.S. Cole. "Their limbs were scattered everywhere," he emphasizes over video shots of the destruction. "The victory of Yemen will continue," he promises on a videotape circulated on September 9, 2001. Nuclear weapons will be employed: "It is the duty of Muslims to own [them]... Muslims have acquired such a weapon," Osama bin Laden assures us. The State of Islam, to which he pledges his energies, has already found a home. "There is now a Muslim state that enforces God's laws," he says of Taliban Afghanistan," which destroys falsehoods, and which does not succumb to the American Infidels - and it is led by a true believer, Mullah Mohammed Omar, the commander of the faithful." The Taliban version of God's laws leaves little room to maneuver. Notoriously less so for women. Not permitted to be treated by male doctors, neither can women practice medicine themselves. The efforts of midwives notwithstanding, deaths at birth in Afghanistan are 161 out of 1000, twenty-three times the rate in the U.S., itself not the best in the world. Women, of course, are not the only targets of Fundamentalist severity under the Taliban. On May 23, 2001 over 100 congressmen and women call on President Bush to intervene on behalf of Afghanistan's Hindu minority. Along with other religious minorities, the Taliban government, so it was said, was forcing them to wear labels on their clothes to differentiate them from Muslim citizens. "The action of the Taliban toward Afghanistan's Hindu minority," congresswoman Jan Schakowsky observed, "is disturbingly reminiscent of Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews." Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan surpasses Burma as the world's largest producer of opium. However this may be, bin Laden asserts, the Taliban have built an ideal, purified Islamic state that provides a perfect base for a world wide holy war against "infidels." He urges Muslims everywhere to come to Afghanistan to support the Taliban and bin Laden's own al Qaida as their duty to God. For fighting men he draws extensively on the Wahhabis. Founded around 1744 by Mohammed ibn Abd al Wahhab, as a puritanical, nationalistic, transcendentalist sect, al Wahhab allied himself with Mohammed ibn Saud, providing theological inspiration for the creation of the Saudi Arabian state. Over the years Wahhabism has devolved into a rabidly anti-Western religious movement, given to fanaticism and murder. A decade of wholesale massacres in Algeria, a bloodbath of German sightseers in Egypt, the beheading of captive tourists in the Philippines and Taliban tyranny in Afghanistan are among its works. Since the enemy after all is global, the holy war against it must be fought on all fronts. On October 6, 1981, President Anwar el Sadat is assassinated by the Egyptian Jihad Islami. The head of the Egyptian Jihad, Ayman al Zawahri, later becomes bin Laden's second in command. In Jordan, police foil a bin Laden plot to mount bombing attacks on pilgrims during millennium celebrations. In North Afghanistan, two days before the World Trade Center bombing, a pair of suicide bombers assassinate Ahmed Shah Massoud, head of the anti-Taliban Northern Coalition. In mid-July 2001, a some 200 Taliban fighters, members of bin Laden's al Qaida, are reported to have arrived in Iraq, to be given terrorist training in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Afterwards, 40 of the trainees transship to Kosovo, 60 to bin Laden's Central Asian Command in the Ferghana Valley of Uzbekistan. The remainder join bin Laden in Afghanistan, stopping briefly at Abu Khaban, an al Qaida research, development and manufacturing center for explosive material and chemical and biological weapons. The installation was under the direction of Midhat Mursi, Egyptian Islamic Jihad militant expert. The bin Laden-Jihad alliance counts upon as many as 7,500 fighting men in Bosnia, 15,000 in Kosovo, 15,000 in Albania, 5,000 in Macedonia. 3,000 Chechen rebels funded by bin Laden are reported dispersed into Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In addition to 3,500 in Afghanistan, bin Laden's al Qaida is thought to retain 6,400 "commanders" in North America, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Albania, Kosovo, Algeria, Chechnya, Tadjikistan and all the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, the Philippines, Egypt, Ethiopia and Somalia. Bin Laden maintains ties with the 20,000 man Moslem Liberation Army that holds a monopoly on the Arabian-East African arms trade. On September 9, bin Laden's runners fan out to the Islamic madrasas in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are schools of military training and indoctrination, where fighters are issued personal weapons from the central armories serving each cluster of madrases. Counting an estimated 40,000 militants in Afghanistan, 70,000 fighters in Pakistan and 100,000 elsewhere, bin Laden might be able to muster 200,000 fighting men. This may not seem much against the huge armies of America and Europe with their immensely greater fire power. In a war that is conducted on terrorist terms, however, win, lose or draw, an army of 200,000 suicidal soldiers, even a small fraction of that number, flying planes, driving trucks, equipped with explosive, chemical or biological substances, nuclear suitcase bombs, who knows, perhaps even E-bombs, is capable of shaking loose the entire world economy and social cohesion. Bin Laden's dream for Islam. The dream is shared by more than a few Muslims. A book of bin Laden's sayings is a sellout all over the Muslim world. Copies of the 2-hour tape that Bin Laden films after the bombing of the U.S. Cole proliferate on Islamic web sites and in mosques and bazaars across the Muslim world. Upon receiving news of the suicide bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon, crowds of Muslims leap up and down in the streets of Palestine, Beirut and Lebanon, clapping and cheering. Auto horns blare. The scenes are eerily reminiscent of Germans cheering on the Storm Troopers during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, many of them joining in to beat and spit upon Jews in the streets. Over and over again, as in a celebratory mantra, TV footage runs the scenes of the bombed and collapsing trade towers. Palestinian radio calls the bombing part of a "just war of resistance by the peoples against American hegemony." In Pakistan, in Palestine, elsewhere in Islam, giant portraits of bin Laden are paraded about. He's the man. |
