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AL QAEDA HISTORY September 30, 2001
Al Qaeda Is a Sprawling, Hard-to-Spot
Web of Terrorists-in-Waiting
By BENJAMIN WEISER and TIM GOLDEN
In early 1995, at a remote camp in Afghanistan, a 21-year-old
Tanzanian man prepared to begin a new life as a soldier of Islam.
The young man, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, had just completed
training in weapons, explosives and religious studies. But rather
than being sent off on a mission by the radical group that had
prepared him, Al Qaeda, Mr. Mohamed was simply sent home
It was three more years before Mr. Mohamed got his call. Four
months after that, he helped bomb the United States Embassy in
Dar es Salaam, capital of Tanzania, one of two attacks in East
Africa that day that killed 224 people and were attributed squarely
to Al Qaeda and its founder, Osama bin Laden.
When Mr. Mohamed was captured in 1999, however, he told the
F.B.I. that he was not really sure what Al Qaeda was, and that he
had learned only through news reports who had sponsored his
bombing. "KKM stated that he had never met Osama bin Laden,
had not heard him speak, and that he did not know what Osama
bin Laden looked like," the agents who debriefed him wrote.
As the United States prepares now to unleash war against Al
Qaeda, its greatest challenge may be to find the front lines.
In little more than a decade, Mr. bin Laden has created a
sprawling, global network of of men like Mr. Mohamed,
terrorists-in-waiting whose skills and determination are often
more finely honed than their loyalties to Al Qaeda or any of the
groups to which it is allied.
The picture emerging from government documents, court
transcripts and interviews is of an underground army so scattered
and self- sustaining that even the elimination of Mr. bin Laden
and his closest deputies might not eradicate the threat they have
created.
"Bin Laden is the leader of a movement that doesn't necessarily
need a leader to function and be effective," said Juliette N.
Kayyem, a terrorism expert at the Harvard University Kennedy
School of Government and a former member of the National
Commission on Terrorism. "This is such a diffuse structure that it
can survive without him."
Like the suspected hijackers who attacked New York and the
Pentagon on Sept. 11, the militants of Al Qaeda's infantry may
remain invisible for months or even years. They may slip quietly
back into their homelands to await orders, or infiltrate into
European cities or American suburbs as "sleepers" before being
mobilized to wage what they see as jihad, or holy war.
Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. bin Laden's soldiers had
sometimes confounded investigators' efforts to fit them into a
coherent profile. They may be middle-aged veterans of the Afghan
war or younger men outraged by the spread of Western culture.
They may be well-educated or barely literate, from prosperous
families or poor villages. Some may have sworn an oath directly
to Mr. bin Laden; others, like Mr. Mohamed, may recognize only
a loose allegiance to Al Qaeda, Arabic for "the Base."
The government's understanding of the decentralized nature of Al
Qaeda dates at least to 1996, when Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a former
aide to Mr. bin Laden, began secretly to cooperate with the United
States. Mr. Fadl was among the first to join Mr. bin Laden in
1989, the year the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from
Afghanistan after a devastating 10- year war.
"Be ready for another step, because in Afghanistan, everything is
over," Mr. bin Laden exhorted his followers then, according to
Mr. Fadl's testimony in the New York trial of the 1998 embassy
bombers.
Over the succeeding years, Mr. bin Laden redrew the map of
infidels to include Israel, the United States and its sometime Arab
allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
According to Mr. Fadl's testimony, Al Qaeda sent trainers to
Somalia and Chechnya, where Muslim forces confronted
American and Russian troops respectively. It emerged after the
1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi that Al Qaeda
operatives had scouted out that target years earlier on orders from
their leader.
By the time of Mr. Fadl's defection, the terrorist conspiracy had
taken on something resembling a corporate structure. Beneath the
"emir," as he says Mr. bin Laden was called, sat a council of about
a dozen advisers called the shura. The council, based in
Afghanistan, included such bin Laden confederates as Muhammad
Atef, an Egyptian who served as military commander, and Ayman
al-Zawahiri, a surgeon who leads Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a
terrorist group held responsible for the 1981 assassination of
President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt.
The council, in turn, oversees committees responsible for crucial
areas: military operations, religious affairs, finances, and the
production of false travel and identity documents.
In his testimony, Mr. Fadl suggested that Al Qaeda had taken
great advantage of the protection of the Taliban in Afghanistan to
build up a steady supply of arms and camps to train recruits from
around the world.
Just how many soldiers have graduated from Mr. bin Laden's
camps is a matter of conjecture, with estimates in the thousands.
But both American intelligence officials and Mr. bin Laden's own
operatives have indicated that little more than a decade after its
founding, Al Qaeda now can draw on a wide and diverse network
of trained operatives.
Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, who was convicted this summer of
helping plan the bombing of the United States Embassy in
Nairobi, is a case in point.
Born in Saudi Arabia to Palestinian parents who now live in
Jordan, Mr. Odeh went to study architecture and engineering in
the Philippines in 1986, where he fell in with Islamic radicals who
were proselytizing for the struggle of Afghan Muslims, the
mujahedeen, against the occupying Soviet Army.
With $1,000 that his father had given him to complete his studies,
Mr. Odeh flew instead to Afghanistan in 1990 to join the fight.
Although the Soviets had just withdrawn, Mr. Odeh found that Al
Qaeda was eagerly seeking recruits for a new jihad against the
West.
"It did not matter what nationality you were," Mr. Odeh later told
the F.B.I., according to a summary of his statement after his arrest
in the embassy bombing case. The F.B.I. statement adds, "Odeh
was not interested in joining any Palestinian groups, because its
members took orders from a chain of command and would often
do things that were not Islamically correct if ordered to do so."
After basic military training, Mr. Odeh went on to specialize in
explosives. He worked as a military instructor and a medic before
deciding to swear a formal oath, or "bayat," to Mr. bin Laden. But
even then, he was left mostly to his own devices for the next five
years, moving between Kenya and Somalia, training Muslim
fighters and finally settling in a small village in Kenya, where he
married and had a son. Eventually, Mr. Odeh joined the cell that
was later activated for the embassy bombing in Nairobi.
Mr. Odeh's concern for religious purity was not necessarily the
defining characteristic of Al Qaeda's recruits. Ahmed Ressam, an
Algerian drifter, joined up after spending years as a common thief.
Mr. Ressam began cooperating with the United States government
after he was convicted last April in a plot to blow up Los Angeles
International Airport during millennial celebrations. He had
worked in Algeria in a coffee shop owned by his father. He
sneaked into Corsica in 1992, and worked picking oranges and
grapes. Then, with a phony French passport, he moved to Canada
in 1994, he said, "to improve my life."
For the next four years, according to his testimony at the
Manhattan trial of a co-defendant this year, Mr. Ressam supported
himself on welfare checks and by stealing suitcases from tourists
in Montreal hotels ” selling the passports on the black market
and helping himself to the traveler's checks and credit cards.
After hearing stories about Afghanistan from friends, Mr. Ressam
decided in 1998 to go there himself. His goal, he said, was to join
a "jihad in Algeria."
He spent nearly six months training in an Afghan camp with
Muslims of every stripe ” Jordanians, Yemenis, Saudis, Swedes,
Germans, French, Turks and Chechens. He was then placed with
five other Algerians in a cell led by a contact who kept in touch
with Al Qaeda operatives in Europe.
"We were all to meet in Canada," Mr. Ressam testified, "and we
were all to carry out operations of bank robberies and then get the
money to carry out an operation in America." Mr. Ressam said he
ultimately chose the Los Angeles airport because he had flown
through it and knew his way around it a bit.
Long before American investigators began to link Al Qaeda to
suspected Sept. 11 hijackers like Mohamed Atta, the son of a
Cairo lawyer who was sent to study in Germany, the group had
also drawn children of privilege. One such recruit was Mohamed
Rashed Daoud al- 'Owhali, the son of a wealthy and prominent
Saudi family, not unlike Mr. bin Laden.
Mr. 'Owhali was born in England while his father was studying
there and began devouring stories about Islamic martyrs while still
in his early teens, he told the F.B.I. After two years in a religious
university in Riyadh, he, too, went to Afghanistan.
At the end of his initial training, he was granted an audience with
Mr. bin Laden, who advised him to get more. He then attended a
"jihad war camp," he said, where he learned about security,
intelligence, kidnapping and the hijacking of buses and planes.
Again he met with Mr. bin Laden, and again he was told to wait
his turn. "Take your time," he quoted Mr. bin Laden as saying.
"Your mission will come in time." Finally, Mr. 'Owhali was
assigned to help in the 1998 bombing of the embassy in Nairobi.
Mr. Odeh, the Jordanian who helped prepare that attack,
distinguished for the F.B.I. between two types of Al Qaeda
operatives. A more sophisticated group takes care of the planning
” gathering intelligence, picking targets, doing surveillance and
making bombs. Those who actually carry out the attack, he
suggested, are more expendable.
"These people are good Muslims, but they are not experts in
anything that would have a long-term benefit to the rest of the
group," he said.
Khalfan Mohamed appeared to be one of the throwaways. After
helping to bomb the American Embassy in his native Tanzania, he
ended up in Cape Town, South Africa, working at a fast-food joint
called Burger World.
Yet if Mr. Mohamed's development as an operative of Al Qaeda
was limited, there was also a powerful simplicity to his ideas.
"KKM stated that his views about America began when he went to
training in Afghanistan," the F.B.I. agent who debriefed him
wrote. "KKM stated that America is a superpower with the ability
to change the world. KKM stated that only bombings will make
America listen to them."
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