HAZY OUTLINES OF AN ISLAMIST INTERNATIONAL

On the fringe of the UN General Assembly, the representatives of the United States and Russia have been meeting those of Afghanistan's six neighbours to discuss the crisis caused by the Taliban offensive, the assassination of Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif and the massacres of Afghan Shiites. With Iranian troops massing on the border, joint manoeuvres by the Russians and Tajiks, and the rumoured deployment of Russian soldiers in Uzbekistan, a regional war is on the cards. The increasingly isolated Taliban regime is still not in control of the whole country. At the UN, Iranian President Mohamad Khatami has accused the Taliban of genocide and turning Afghanistan into a base for terrorism and drug trafficking. But a war in the region could cost Iran dear and strengthen its hardliners.

A new pattern of regional alliances is emerging. The Taliban are supported only by Pakistan and, according to several sources, by the Israeli government, which is obsessed by the "Iranian threat". Their links with Saudi Arabia have become strained and their once close relationship with the United States has deteriorated, as shown by the American bombing of Osama bin Laden's Afghan bases in August. On the other side, a grand alliance is taking shape, comprising Iran, Russia and the members of the Community of Independent States, apparently supported by India and even China, which is worried by the spread of Islamist propaganda within its own borders. The days of the "great game", when Moscow and London vied for control of Central Asia, are over. The new game which is developing is fraught with danger, both for Afghanistan and the whole region. - A. G.

The West first felt the blast of Islamist radicalism in 1983, when hundreds of French paratroopers and US marines died in the Beirut barracks bombing. Iran raged against America, the "Great Satan". Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan's "evil empire", was raining bombs on Muslim Afghanistan, with the apparent connivance of radical Islamists. Washington conceived a plan to make Moscow pay the maximum price for its occupation of Afghanistan while turning Islamic radicalism against the communists and, as a spin-off, against the Iranian Shia. The idea was to encourage a specifically Sunni radicalism aiming at full application of the sharia but avoiding any hint of Islamic "revolution". This suited Saudi Arabia perfectly, since it was anxious to strengthen its Islamic credentials in opposition to Iran. As for the Pakistani intelligence services, they had (and still have) the wider aim of playing the Sunni Islamist card to gain control of Afghanistan and achieve a breakthrough in Central Asia (1).

The operation was mounted jointly by the CIA, the director of the Saudi Intelligence Department, Prince Turki bin Feisal (who is still in office), and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). However, only the Pakistanis were prepared to put men on the ground. The CIA had got its fingers badly burnt in Vietnam and Laos, and the Saudis were used to paying others to do any work, from national defence to driving their expensive limousines. So the job was given to the Arab Muslim Brothers and the Pakistani Islamist Party, Jamaat-i Islami, from which General Zia ul Haqq, Pakistan's head of state from 1977 to 1988, drew many of his advisors.

Starting in late 1984, thousands of the Middle East's most militant Islamist activists made their way to Afghanistan. Their recruitment was coordinated by Osama bin Laden, a rich Saudi Arabian. In Peshawar they were taken in hand by the Mektab ul Khedamat, an office led by Abdallah Azzam, a Jordanian Muslim Brother of Palestinian origin who was assassinated in September 1989 in mysterious circumstances. Most of these volunteers, subsequently known as "Afghans", were members of opposition groups from all over the Middle East. The only non-dissidents among them were the Sudanese, who had been very active in Islamic welfare organisations. None of them, of course, were Shiites (2). Most were sent to the Hezb-i-Islami camps of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but some were assigned to local commanders like Jellaluddin Haqqani, today a staunch supporter of the Taliban.

The situation changed radically with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan (February 1989), the Gulf war (1990-91) and the fall of the Soviet Union (1991). The "Afghans" ceased to be of any use to Washington. Turning against the United States, they accused it of waging war on the Muslim world. Pakistan abandoned its protégé Hekmatyar, who had incurred the wrath of Saudi Arabia by supporting Saddam Hussein. In August 1994 it switched its support to the Taliban, who were just as Islamist but more conservative. Washington indulged the Taliban from 1994 to 1996 (3), but the situation changed once again when they gave refuge to Osama bin Laden, got involved in poppy cultivation and stepped up the repression of women. The State Department, in the person of Madeleine Albright, clearly distanced itself from them in the autumn of 1997.

But the camps that had been set up in Afghan tribal areas to train anti-Soviet mujaheddin were never closed down. The international networks have continued to recruit for one jihad after another: an Islamic state in Afghanistan, Yemen up to 1994, Kashmir, Bosnia, and now the United States itself. A two-way traffic developed. While hunted militants took refuge in the camps, the fighters trained there returned to their home countries and are now to be found in all the most militant movements. These movements, of course, have histories of their own and are not simply creations of the "Afghans". A possible exception is Algeria, where the founding leaders of the GIA (Armed Islamic Group), Tayyeb al-Afghani (killed in November 1992), Jaffar al-Afghani (killed in March 1994) and Sherif Gousmi (killed in September 1994), were all Afghan returnees. They were also to be found in the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) with figures such as Said Mekhloufi, Kamareddin Kherbane and Abdallah Anas (real name Boudjema Bunnua, who arrived in Afghanistan in 1984 and married Abdallah Azzam's daughter). But in Algeria they figured most prominently in the GIA: Abu Messaab, a Syrian, and Abu Hazma al-Misri (Mustafa Kamel) from Egypt are the main ideologists of Al Ansar, the GIA newsletter published in London. Both men have lived in Peshawar.

On the Egyptian front, Muhammad al-Islambuli, brother of President Sadat's assassin, has been living in Afghanistan for ten years or so. Fuad Qassim and Ahmad Taha, the leaders of the Egyptian Islamist group Gamaat Islamiyya, are both former "Afghans", as is Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of the Egyptian Jihad, who co-signs Osama bin Laden's communiqués. The Kashmiri movement Harakat al Ansar has its training camp in the Afghan province of Khost. This camp was the main target of the American bombing raid on 21 August.

Nevertheless, many Afghan returnees have difficulty in finding a place in current struggles. Uprooted, they tend to gravitate between Peshawar and, surprisingly, New Jersey, the latest Muslim "ghetto". Investigation of the explosion that almost destroyed New York's World Trade Centre in February 1993 led to a strange band of activists. The main suspect, the Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, had spent time in Peshawar, and both his sons fought in Afghanistan, where they are still to be found on the side of the Taliban. The sheikh, who is known to have approved the assassination of President Sadat, is one of the founders of the radical Egyptian Islamist movement Gamaat Islamiyya. Despite this, he was given a visa by the American consulate in Khartoum in May 1990 and got a green card on arrival in New Jersey. The other suspects, Ramzi Yousef, a Pakistani brought up in Kuwait, Muhammad Salameh and Ahmad Ajjaj (both Palestinians) had also spent time in the Afghan camps.

The attack on the World Trade Centre was not an isolated incident. In 1993 a Pakistani, Mir Aimal Kansi, opened fire on staff entering the CIA's headquarters in Langley. Both Yousef and Kansi were picked up by the FBI in Pakistan, Yousef in 1995 and Kansi in 1997. Ex-ISI Chief Hamid Gul was furious at the extraditions and called for the Pakistani officials responsible to be court-martialled. On 11 November 1997 four American employees of an oil company were assassinated in Karachi in reprisal for the sentence passed on Kansi in the United States. The assassination was claimed by Harakat al Ansar, a group which had its origins in the "Afghan" camps. Mehat Muhammad Abdel Rahman, suspected to be the leader of the group responsible for the massacre of European tourists in Luxor in September 1997, was also an "Afghan". And so is Said Sayyed Salama, whose extradition from Egypt in June of this year provoked a communiqué from Osama bin Laden threatening revenge.

The two attacks against Americans on Saudi territory are a little more obscure. The first was the bombing of a National Guard training centre in Riyadh in November 1995. The accused, Hassan Abdel Rab Al Sarihi, was a 35-year-old Saudi Arabian living in Pakistan, who was alleged to have spent time in Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's training camps. To Washington's chagrin, the Saudis executed him without giving the Americans a chance to debrief him. The bombing of the Khobar Towers military housing complex in Dhahran in June 1996 is still the subject of intense controversy. For a year the American press pointed the finger at Iran and accused the Saudis of covering up the Iranian connection so as not to jeopardise their rapprochement with Tehran. However, it was the Iranians, not the Saudis, who had been seeking a rapprochement, with a view to the Islamic summit in Tehran in December 1997. And it is rather strange that there has been no more talk of an Iranian lead since the only suspect (Hani al-Sayegh, a Saudi Shiite who had spent some time in Qom) was extradited to the United States.

This brief survey shows that most of the attacks on Western interests can be traced to a network of radical Sunni movements based in the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands. What is striking about these new movements, of which the Taliban are the prototype, is the contrast between their political radicalism and their ideological conservatism. It is this which distinguishes them from large Islamist movements like Khomeinism. The mudslinging of the Western media should not blind us to the fact that the Taliban arouse a sympathetic response in a sector of Muslim public opinion (4). Their sole point of reference is the sharia, and their outlook is uncompromisingly conservative and profoundly Sunni in character. The social content of the Islamic revolution is foreign to them. In Egypt, for example, the Gamaat Islamiyya approved the agrarian counter-reform carried out by Mubarak last autumn. The goal of the radical Sunni movements is the sharia, the whole sharia, and nothing but the sharia. What is more, the sharia itself is very narrowly defined, with the term "sharia emirate" preferred to "Islamic state".

This outlook is partly explained by the militants' social base. They stem mostly from the private religious schools (madrasas) that have mushroomed in certain Muslim countries, particularly those like Pakistan where state schooling is blatantly inadequate. The private madrasas have received funding from Saudi Arabia and are exposed to the propaganda of conservative governments that are pushing the sharia in an attempt to cut the ground from under the radicals' feet. They are flooding an already saturated market with thousands of preachers who have no skills other than a vague knowledge of the sharia and for whom the Islamisation of society offers the only hope of social advancement.

Against this background, Osama bin Laden does not appear as the "mastermind" behind radical Islamist movements throughout the world. He should rather be seen as a trainer of militants who subsequently choose their own fields of action or mount spectacular symbolic operations within the framework of his organisation Al Qaida. These militants are connected by networks of personal relations and supported, in Pakistan, by a group of parties that have been in existence for a long time and include the traditionalist, conservative Jamiat Ulema-i Islami, which, like the Afghan Taliban, follows the teachings of the Deoband School (5), and the Islamist movement Jamaat-i-Islami. Both of these organisations have sprouted more violent splinter groups. In the first case, the Sipah-i-Saheban (Army of the Companions of the Prophet), whose mission is war against the Shiites. In the second case, the Dawat-ul-Irshad, set up in 1987, which is very active in Kashmir. Private madrasas, like the one in Akora Khattak, near Peshawar, which is run by Pakistani Senator Sami ul Haqq (a member of Jamiat Ulema-i-Islami), have sent thousands of students to Afghanistan to join the ranks of the Taliban.

While the new movements brandish the traditional banner of "anti-imperialism", the American flag is now being burnt in the name of the sharia. What is "radical" about these movements is their choice of violence and their visceral hatred of "Crusaders", Jews and Shiites, a hatred fed by all the frustrations of the last ten years (notably the Gulf war and America's indulgence of Binyamin Netanyahu). The tone is exemplified by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri's announcement, earlier this year, of the creation of a World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders. The Shiites are regarded as heretics (6). The exacerbation of inter-communal strife in Pakistan and the blockade of Shiite areas by the Taliban in Afghanistan are symptomatic. This is a considerable setback for Iran, which posed throughout the 1980s as the leader of a world Islamic revolution transcending the Sunni-Shia divide. The murder of Iranian diplomats by the Taliban and the assassination of Iranian cadets and diplomats in Pakistan last winter show that Iran is now as much of target as America. Tehran did not join the Arab League in protesting against the American bomb attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan, and is now on the verge of war with the Taliban.

The new situation is also a setback for the United States and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi model of alliance between conservative Islamic fundamentalism and the West has failed. The problem for Washington is that it has no alternative political strategy vis-à-vis the Muslim world. On the Saudi side, the double talk of Prince Turki, a convinced pro-American who has always supported the radical Sunni movements and was still with the Taliban in the spring of this year, is reaching its limits (7). Riyadh is spending large sums of money to fund Islamist networks that actually feel nothing but contempt for the emirs and their petrodollars and think the Islamic State of Saudi Arabia would be even more Islamic without the Saud dynasty.

In Pakistan, however, the radical Sunni movements enjoy solid support within the state apparatus. They are an integral part of the country's regional strategy of guerrilla warfare in Kashmir, control of Afghanistan, and Islamic agitation in Central Asia. The former head of the ISI, General Hamid Gul, spoke out fiercely against the United States after the bomb attack on 20 August. One of his successors, General Javed Nasir, was sacked in 1994 for Islamist sympathies. The new president is himself an Islamist sympathiser. In September this year, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced full Islamisation of the legal system. While handing over from time to time the people most directly implicated in anti-American attacks (Yousef, Kansi and Odeh for the Nairobi bombing), Pakistan is still playing the Taliban card to the full.

The question for the Americans is whether Pakistan itself has become a rogue state, and a nuclear one to boot. It would appear that the United States was fighting the wrong enemy in 1995 when it introduced sanctions against Iran through the D'Amato bill, just as Tehran was ceasing to be involved in anti-Western violence. Given the weakness of the Executive and the incompetence of Congress in matters of foreign policy, the United States is drifting like a ship without a captain, loosing Tomahawk missiles at random (8).

The Sunni fundamentalist movements are capable of spectacular attacks and portray themselves as the vanguard of struggle against the United States. But in fact they are largely disconnected from the real strategic issues of the Muslim world (except in Pakistan and Afghanistan). Their distinctive feature is their internationalism and lack of territorial base. Their activists wander from jihad to jihad, generally on the fringes of the Middle East (Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bosnia). They are indifferent to their own nationalities. Some have several. Ramzi Yousef calls himself a Pakistani by birth and a Palestinian by choice (9), and Muhammad Sadiq Odeh is said to be a Palestinian born in Jordan and married to a Kenyan. Others, like Osama bin Laden, whose Saudi nationality has been revoked, have none. They all define themselves as Muslim internationalists and link their militancy to no particular national cause. Their "centres" are located in the no-man's-land of the Afghan-Pakistani tribal areas.

They are thus disconnected not only from existing states (especially Iran), but also from the large Islamist movements, which have disowned their offspring. The whole of the FIS, for example, including the tendency led by Abdallah Anas, has condemned the GIA. The large Islamist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the FIS, Refah in Turkey and Hamas in Palestine, place their struggles in a national framework and claim full recognition as protagonists in the political process. This approach, which is shared by Iran, might appropriately be described as Islamic nationalism. It is a far cry from the imaginary umma which Osama bin Laden and his associates invoke. These are more like the urban guerrillas of Sunni fundamentalism which, without a genuine political project, recruit on the social and geographical fringes of the Middle East, where tensions are exacerbated by the political deadlock (10).

(1) The Pakistani army has always seen the Afghan affair as an opportunity to achieve strategic depth with respect to India and to open a corridor to Central Asia. As a corollary of this policy, Pakistan expects its support for the Afghan mujaheddin to result in a virtual Pakistani protectorate in liberated Afghanistan, to be established in the name of Islam and, more subtly, by means of Pashtun ethnic connections on both sides of the border. An interesting testimony, though heavily slanted and highly tendentious, is the book by ISI General Mohammed Yousaf, The Bear Trap, Jang, Lahore, 1992.

(2) Iran did send a few pasdaran (revolutionary guards) as advisors to the Afghan Shia, but nothing on the scale of the "Afghan" phenomenon. The Iranian activists of the 1980s learnt the art of war in Lebanon, not in Afghanistan, one of the reasons being to avoid antagonising the Soviets.

(3) See Olivier Roy, "Avec les Taliban : la charia plus le gazoduc", Le Monde diplomatique, November 1996.

(4) See, inter alia, http://www.taliban.com, a pro-Taliban Website run by the newspaper Dharb ul Mumin.

(5) A traditional religious school founded in the 19th century to combat the influence of Hinduism on Islam on the Indian sub-continent.

(6) The current obsession with Iran as the mastermind behind all Islamic terrorism obscures the violently anti-Shia aspect of Sunni radicalism. There is whole body of anti-Shia literature on the Pakistani market which is little known outside the country. See for example Khomeyni, Iranian revolution and the Shia faith, by Maulana Nomani, a follower of the Deoband School, with an introduction by Sayyed Nadwi. On 2 August 1998 Dharb ul Mumin, a newspaper closely associated with the Taliban, published on the Taliban Website some khutba (sermons) by Sheikh Hudaybi, imam of the Masjid-e Nabavi mosque, in which, after an attack on Christians and Jews, he describes the Shia as kuffar (ungodly), rafawiz (heretics) and monafiqin (hypocrites).

(7) The Saud dynasty is obliged to make concessions to the anti-Western current that is gaining strength not only in certain parts of the country but also at the very heart of the Wahhabite religious establishment, which has up to now been a pillar of the monarchy.

(8) The theory behind the US Congress' outlook has put formulated by an "expert", Ken Timmerman, who endeavours to demonstrate that Iran is behind all terrorist action. In a article in The Wall Street Journal on 11 August 1998, he states categorically, without any attempt at proof, that Iran was responsible for the attacks on the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

(10) See Olivier Roy, The failure of Political Islam, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994.

Here is another deep background article which I found very helpful in understanding the Pakistani-Saudi-Bin Laden connection.

Special Report
Osama Bin Laden: How the U.S.
Helped Midwife a Terrorist

Ahmed Rashid of Pakistan is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center for Public Integrity. He is the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Daily Telegraph of London. This is an excerpt from his book "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" (Yale University Press).

By Ahmed Rashid In 1986, CIA chief William Casey had stepped up the war against the Soviet Union by taking three significant, but at that time highly secret, measures.

He had persuaded the US Congress to provide the Mujaheddin with American-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down Soviet planes and provide US advisers to train the guerrillas. Until then, no US-made weapons or personnel had been used directly in the war effort.

The CIA, Britain's MI6 and the ISI [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence] also agreed on a provocative plan to launch guerrilla attacks into the Soviet Socialist Republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the soft Muslim underbelly of the Soviet state from where Soviet troops in Afghanistan received their supplies. The task was given to the ISI's favourite Mujaheddin leader, Gulbuddin Hikmetyar. In March 1987, small units crossed the Amu Darya river from bases in northern Afghanistan and launched their first rocket attacks against villages in Tajikistan. Casey was delighted with the news, and on his next secret trip to Pakistan he crossed the border into Afghanistan with [the late Pakistani] President Zia [ul-Haq] to review the Mujaheddin groups.

Thirdly, Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin. The ISI had encouraged this since 1982, and by now all the other players had their reasons for supporting the idea.

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(Sept. 21)

- Biological Weapons Lab Locked Down, 50 Miles From Pentagon
(Sept. 12)

President Zia aimed to cement Islamic unity, turn Pakistan into the leader of the Muslim world and foster an Islamic opposition in Central Asia. Washington wanted to demonstrate that the entire Muslim world was fighting the Soviet Union alongside the Afghans and their American benefactors. And the Saudis saw an opportunity both to promote Wahabbism [their strict and austere Wahabbi creed] and to get rid of its disgruntled radicals. None of the players reckoned on these volunteers having their own agendas, which would eventually turn their hatred against the Soviets on their own regimes and the Americans.

Thousands of radicals come to study

. . . Between 1982 and 1992, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan Mujaheddin. Tens of thousands more foreign Muslim radicals came to study in the hundreds of new madrassas that Zia's military government began to fund in Pakistan and along the Afghan border. Eventually more than 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan and be influenced by the jihad.

In camps near Peshawar and in Afghanistan, these radicals met each other for the first time and studied, trained and fought together. It was the first opportunity for most of them to learn about Islamic movements in other countries, and they forged tactical and ideological links that would serve them well in the future. The camps became virtual universities for future Islamic radicalism. None of the intelligence agencies involved wanted to consider the consequences of bringing together thousands of Islamic radicals from all over the world. "What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" said Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US National Security Adviser. American citizens woke up to the consequences only when Afghanistan-trained Islamic militants blew up the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, killing six people and injuring 1,000.

"The war," wrote Samuel Huntington, "left behind an uneasy coalition of Islamist organizations intent on promoting Islam against all non-Muslim forces. It also left a legacy of expert and experienced fighters, training camps and logistical facilities, elaborate trans-Islam networks of personal and organization relationships, a substantial amount of military equipment including 300 to 500 unaccounted-for Stinger missiles, and, most important, a heady sense of power and self-confidence over what had been achieved and a driving desire to move on to other victories."

A young Bin Laden

. . . Among these thousands of foreign recruits was a young Saudi student, Osama Bin Laden, the son of a Yemeni construction magnate, Mohammed Bin Laden, who was a close friend of the late King Faisal and whose company had become fabulously wealthy on the contracts to renovate and expand the Holy Mosques of Mecca and Medina. The ISI had long wanted Prince Turki Bin Faisal, the head of Istakhbarat, the Saudi Intelligence Service, to provide a Royal Prince to lead the Saudi contingent in order to show Muslims the commitment of the Royal Family to the jihad. Only poorer Saudis, students, taxi drivers and Bedouin tribesmen had so far arrived to fight. But no pampered Saudi prince was ready to rough it out in the Afghan mountains. Bin Laden, although not a royal, was close enough to the royals and certainly wealthy enough to lead the Saudi contingent. Bin Laden, Prince Turki and General Gut were to become firm friends and allies in a common cause.

The centre for the Arab-Afghans [Filipino Moros, Uzbeks from Soviet Central Asia, Arabs from Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and Uighurs from Xinjiang in China who had all come to fight with the Mujaheddin] was the offices of the World Muslim League and the Muslim Brotherhood in the northern Pakistan city of Peshawar. The center was run by Abdullah Azam, a Jordanian Palestinian whom Bin Laden had first met at university in Jeddah and revered as his leader. Azam and his two sons were assassinated by a bomb blast in Peshawar in 1989.

During the 1980s, Azam had forged close links with Hikmetyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the Afghan Islamic scholar, whom the Saudis had sent to Peshawar to promote Wahabbism. Saudi funds flowed to Azam and the Makhtab at Khidmat or Services Center, which he created in 1984 to service the new recruits and receive donations from Islamic charities. Donations from Saudi Intelligence, the Saudi Red Crescent, the World Muslim League and private donations from Saudi princes and mosques were channelled through the Makhtab. A decade later, the Makhtab would emerge at the center of a web of radical organizations that helped carry out the World Trade Center bombing and the bombings of US embassies in Africa in 1998.

Until he arrived in Afghanistan, Bin Laden's life had hardly been marked by anything extraordinary. He was born around 1957, the 17th of 57 children sired by his Yemeni father and a Saudi mother, one of Mohammed Bin Laden's many wives. Bin Laden studied for a master’s degree in business administration at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah but soon switched to Islamic studies. Thin and tall, he is 6 feet 5 inches, with long limbs and a flowing beard. He towered above his contemporaries, who remember him as a quiet and pious individual but hardly marked out for greater things.

His father backed the Afghan struggle and helped fund it, so when Bin Laden decided to join up, his family responded enthusiastically. He first traveled to Peshawar in 1980 and met the Mujaheddin leaders, returning frequently with Saudi donations for the cause until 1982, when he decided to settle in Peshawar. He brought in his company engineers and heavy construction equipment to help build roads and depots for the Mujaheddin. In 1986, he helped build the Khost tunnel complex, which the CIA was funding as a major arms storage depot, training facility and medical center for the Mujaheddin, deep under the mountains close to the Pakistan border. For the first time in Khost he set up his own training camp for Arab Afghans, who now increasingly saw this lanky, wealthy and charismatic Saudi as their leader.

. . . Bin Laden later claimed to have taken part in ambushes against Soviet troops, but he mainly used his wealth and Saudi donations to build Mujaheddin projects and spread Wahabbism among the Afghans. After the death of Azam in 1989, he took over Azam's organization and set up Al Qaeda or Military Base as a service center for Arab-Afghans and their families and to forge a broad-based alliance among them. With the help of Bin Laden, several thousand Arab militants had established bases in the provinces of Kunar, Nuristan and Badakhshan, but their extreme Wahabbi practices made them intensely disliked by the majority of Afghans. Moreover, by allying themselves with the most extreme pro-Wahabbi Pashtun MuMeddin, the Arab-Afghans alienated the non-Pashtuns and the Shia Muslims.

Upset by U.S. role in Gulf War

. . . By 1990, Bin Laden was disillusioned by the internal bickering of the Mujaheddin and he returned to Saudi Arabia to work in the family business. He founded a welfare organization for Arab-Afghan veterans. Some 4,000 of them had settled in Mecca and Medina alone, and Bin Laden gave money to the families of those killed. After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait he lobbied the Royal Family to organize a popular defense of the kingdom and raise a force from the Afghan war veterans to fight Iraq. Instead, King Fahd invited in the Americans. This came as an enormous shock to Bin Laden. As the 540,000 US troops began to arrive, Bin Laden openly criticized the Royal Family, lobbying the Saudi ulema to issue fatwas, religious rulings, against non-Muslims being based in the country.

. . . In 1992, Bin Laden left for Sudan to take part in the Islamic revolution under way there under the charismatic Sudanese leader Hassan Turabi. Bin Laden's continued criticism of the Saudi Royal Family eventually annoyed them so much that they took the unprecedented step of revoking his citizenship in 1994. It was in Sudan, with his wealth and contacts, that Bin Laden gathered around him more veterans of the Afghan war, who were all disgusted by the American victory over Iraq and the attitude of the Arab ruling elites who allowed the US military to remain in the Gulf. As US and Saudi pressure mounted against Sudan for harboring Bin Laden, the Sudanese authorities asked him to leave.

In May 1996, Bin Laden travelled back to Afghanistan, arriving in Jalalabad in a chartered jet with an entourage of dozens of Arab militants, bodyguards and family members, including three wives and 13 children. Here he lived under the protection of the Jalalabad Shura [an advisory body or assembly], until the conquest of Kabul and Jalalabad by the Taliban in September 1996. In August 1996, he had issued his first declaration of jihad against the Americans, whom he said were occupying Saudi Arabia.

"The walls of oppression and humiliation cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets," the declaration read. Striking up a friendship with Mullah Omar, in 1997 he moved to Kandahar, Afghanistan, and came under the protection of the Taliban.

By now, the CIA had set up a special cell to monitor his activities and his links with other Islamic militants. A US State Department report in August 1996 noted that Bin Laden was "one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world." The report said that Bin Laden was financing terrorist camps in Somalia, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Egypt and Afghanistan. In April 1996, President Clinton signed the Anti-Terrorism Act, which allowed the US to block assets of terrorist organizations. It was first used to block Bin Laden's access to his fortune of an estimated US$250-300 million. A few months later, Egyptian intelligence declared that Bin Laden was training 1,000 militants, a second generation of Arab-Afghans, to bring about an Islamic revolution in Arab countries.

CIA tries snatch operation

In early 1997, the CIA constituted a squad that arrived in Peshawar to try to carry out a snatch operation to get Bin Laden out of Afghanistan. The Americans enlisted Afghans and Pakistanis to help them but aborted the operation. The US activity in Peshawar helped persuade Bin Laden to move to the safer confines of Kandahar. On 23 February 1998, at a meeting in the original Khost camp, all the groups associated with Al Qaeda issued a manifesto under the aegis of "The International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders." The manifesto stated "for more than seven years the US has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian peninsular, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbours, and turning its bases in the peninsular into a spearhead through which to fight the neighbouring Muslim peoples."

The meeting issued a fatwa. "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to." Bin Laden had now formulated a policy that was not just aimed at the Saudi Royal Family or the Americans, but called for the liberation of the entire Muslim Middle East. As the American air war against Iraq escalated in 1998, Bin Laden called on all Muslims to "confront, fight and kill, Americans and Britons."

1998 U.S. Embassy bombings

However, it was the bombings in August 1998 of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 220 people which made Bin Laden a household name in the Muslim world and the West. Just 13 days later, after accusing Bin Laden of perpetrating the attack, the USA retaliated by firing 70 cruise missiles against Bin Laden's camps around Khost and Jalalabad. Several camps which had been handed over by the Taliban to the Arab-Afghans and Pakistani radical groups were hit. The Al Badr camp controlled by Bin Laden and the Khalid bin Walid and Muawia camps run by the Pakistani Harakat ul Ansar were the main targets. Harakat used their camps to train militants for fighting Indian troops in Kashmir. Seven outsiders were killed in the strike -- three Yemenis, two Egyptians, one Saudi and one Turk. Also killed were seven Pakistanis and 20 Afghans.

In November 1998 the USA offered a US$5-million reward for Bin Laden's capture. The Americans were further galvanized when Bin Laden claimed that it was his Islamic duty to acquire chemical and nuclear weapons to use against the USA. "It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims. Hostility toward America is a religious duty and we hope to be rewarded for it by God," he said.

. . . After the Africa bombings, the US launched a truly global operation. More than 80 Islamic militants were arrested in a dozen different countries. Militants were picked up in a crescent running from Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan and Yemen to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and the Phillipines."

In December 1998, Indian authorities detained Bangladeshi militants for plotting to bomb the US Consulate in Calcutta. Seven Afghan nationals using false Italian passports were arrested in Malaysia and accused of trying to start a bombing campaign." According to the FBI, militants in Yemen who kidnapped 16 Western tourists in December 1998 were funded by Bin Laden. In February 1999, Bangladeshi authorities said Bin Laden had sent US$l million to the Harkat-ul-Jihad (HJ) in Dhaka, Bangladesh, some of whose members had trained and fought in Afghanistan. HJ leaders said they wanted to turn Bangladesh into a Taliban-style Islamic state.

Thousands of miles away in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania in West Africa, several militants were arrested who had also trained under Bin Laden in Afghanistan and were suspected of plotting bomb explosions. Meanwhile, during the trial of 107 Al-Jihad members at a military court in Cairo, Egyptian intelligence officers testified that Bin Laden had bankrolled Al-Jihad. In February 1999, the CIA claimed that through monitoring Bin Laden's communication network by satellite, they had prevented his supporters from carrying out seven bomb attacks against US overseas facilities in Saudi Arabia, Albania, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Uganda, Uruguay and the Ivory Coast -- emphasizing the reach of the Afghan veterans.

. . . But it was Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the original sponsors of the Arab-Afghans, who suffered the most as their activities rebounded. In March 1997, three Arab and two Tajik militants [from Tajikistan] were shot dead after a 36-hour gun battle between them and the police in an Afghan refugee camp near Peshawar. Belonging to the Wahabbi radical Tafkir group, they were planning to bomb an Islamic heads of state meeting in Islamabad.

Fighting in Kashmir against India

With the encouragement of Pakistan, the Taliban and Bin Laden, Arab-Afghans had enlisted in the Pakistani party Harkat-ut-Ansar to fight in Kashmir against Indian troops. By inducting Arabs who introduced Wahabbi-style rules in the Kashmir valley, genuine Kashmiri militants felt insulted. The US government had declared Ansar a terrorist organization in 1996 and it had subsequently changed its name to Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin. All the Pakistani victims of the US missile strikes on Khost belonged to Ansar. In 1999, Ansar said it would impose a strict Wahabbi-style dress code in the Kashmir valley and banned jeans and jackets. On 15 February 1999, they shot and wounded three Kashmiri cable television operators for relaying Western satellite broadcasts. Ansar had previously respected the liberal traditions of Kashmiri Muslims, but the activities of the Arab-Afghans hurt the legitimacy of the Kashmiri movement and gave India a propaganda coup.

Pakistan faced a problem when Washington urged Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to help arrest Bin Laden. The ISI's close contacts with Bin Laden, and the fact that he was helping fund and train Kashmiri militants who were using the Khost camps, created a dilemma for Sharif when he visited Washington in December 1998. Sharif sidestepped the issue but other Pakistani officials were more brazen, reminding their American counterparts how they had both helped midwife Bin Laden in the 1980s and the Taliban in the 1990s. Bin Laden himself pointed to continued support from some elements in the Pakistani intelligence services in an interview. "As for Pakistan there are some governmental departments, which, by the Grace of God, respond to the Islamic sentiments of the masses in Pakistan. This is reflected in sympathy and co-operation. However, some other governmental departments fell into the trap of the infidels. We pray to God to return them to the right path," said Bin Laden.

Conundrums for Pakistan, Saudi Arabia

Support for Bin Laden by elements within the Pakistani establishment was another contradiction in Pakistan’s Afghan policy. . . . The US was Pakistan’s closest ally, with deep links to the military and the ISI. But both the Taliban and Bin Laden provided sanctuary and training facilities for Kashmiri militants who were backed by Pakistan, and Islamabad had little interest in drying up that support. Even though the Americans repeatedly tried to persuade the ISI to cooperate in delivering Bin Laden, the ISI declined, although it did help the US arrest several of Bin Laden's supporters. Without Pakistan’s support, the United States could not hope to launch a snatch by US commandos or more accurate bombing strikes, because it needed Pakistani territory to launch such raids. At the same time, the USA dared not expose Pakistan’s support for the Taliban, because it still hoped for ISI cooperation in catching Bin Laden.

The Saudi conundrum was even worse. In July 1998 Prince Turki had visited Kandahar and a few weeks later 400 new pick-up trucks arrived in Kandahar for the Taliban, still bearing their Dubai license plates. The Saudis also gave cash for the Taliban's cheque book conquest of the north in the autumn. Until the Africa bombings and despite US pressure to end their support for the Taliban, the Saudis continued funding the Taliban and were silent on the need to extradite Bin Laden.

The truth about the Saudi silence was even more complicated. The Saudis preferred to leave Bin Laden alone in Afghanistan because his arrest and trial by the Americans could expose the deep relationship that Bin Laden continued to have with sympathetic members of the Royal Family and elements within Saudi intelligence, which could prove deeply embarrassing. The Saudis wanted Bin Laden either dead or a captive of the Taliban -- they did not want him captured by the Americans.

. . . By now Bin Laden had developed considerable influence with the Taliban, but that had not always been the case. The Taliban's contact with the Arab-Afghans and their Pan-Islamic ideology was non-existent until the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996. Pakistan was closely involved in introducing Bin Laden to the Taliban leaders in Kandahar, because it wanted to retain the Khost training camps for Kashmiri militants, which were now in Taliban hands. Persuasion by Pakistan, the Taliban's better-educated cadres, who also had Pan-Islamic ideas, and the lure of financial benefits from Bin Laden, encouraged the Taliban leaders to meet with Bin Laden and hand him back the Khost camps.

A life with the Taliban in Kandahar

Partly for his own safety and partly to keep control over him, the Taliban shifted Bin Laden to Kandahar in 1997. At first he lived as a paying guest. He built a house for Mullah Omar's family and provided funds to other Taliban leaders. He promised to pave the road from Kandahar airport to the city and build mosques, schools and dams, but his civic works never got started as his funds were frozen. While Bin Laden lived in enormous style in a huge mansion in Kandahar with his family, servants and fellow militants, the arrogant behaviour of the Arab-Afghans who arrived with him and their failure to fulfill any of their civic projects antagonized the local population. The Kandaharis saw the Taliban leaders as beneficiaries of Arab largesse rather than the people.

Bin Laden endeared himself further to the leadership by sending several hundred Arab-Afghans to participate in the 1997 and 1998 Taliban offensives in the north. These Wahabbi fighters helped the Taliban carry out massacres of the Shia Hazaras in the north. Several hundred Arab-Afghans, based in the Rishkor army garrison outside Kabul, fought on the Kabul front against [the Mujaheddin leader Ahmad Shah] Masud. Increasingly, Bin Laden's world view appeared to dominate the thinking of senior Taliban leaders. All-night conversations between Bin Laden and the Taliban leaders paid off. Until his arrival, the Taliban leadership had not been particularly antagonistic to the USA or the West but demanded recognition for their government. However, after the Africa bombings the Taliban became increasingly vociferous against the Americans, the UN, the Saudis and Muslim regimes around the world. Their statements increasingly reflected the language of defiance Bin Laden had adopted and which was not an original Taliban trait.

As US pressure on the Taliban to expel Bin Laden intensified, the Taliban said he was a guest and it was against Afghan tradition to expel guests. When it appeared that Washington was planning another military strike against Bin Laden, the Taliban tried to cut a deal with Washington -- to allow him to leave the country in exchange for US recognition. Thus, until the winter of 1998 the Taliban saw Bin Laden as an asset, a bargaining chip over whom they could negotiate with the Americans.

The US State Department opened a satellite telephone connection to speak to Mullah Omar directly. The Afghanistan desk officers, helped by a Pushto translator, held lengthy conversations with Omar in which both sides explored various options, but to no avail. By early 1999 it began to dawn on the Taliban that no compromise with the US was possible and they began to see Bin Laden as a liability. A US deadline in February 1999 to the Tatiban to either hand over Bin Laden or face the consequences forced the Taliban to make him disappear discreetly from Kandahar. The move bought the Taliban some time, but the issue was still nowhere near being resolved.

The Arab-Afghans had come full circle. From being mere appendages to the Afghan jihad and the Cold War in the 1980s they had taken centre stage for the Afghans, neighbouring countries and the West in the 1990s. . . . Afghanistan was now truly a haven for Islamic internationalism and terrorism and the Americans and the West were at a loss as to how to handle it.

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http://www.public-i.org/excerpts_01_091301.htm

Here is some background snippets I've been collection on Bin Laden/Saudi Secret Service & Power transition in Saudi Arabia.

Although the Taliban became active in late 1994, it did not immediately attract Saudi assistance; the Saudi-Taliban relationship began only after Pakistan adopted the Taliban as proxies. Prince Turki al-Faisal Saud, head of the Saudi General Intelligence Agency, traveled to Pakistan in July 1996; shortly thereafter Saudi Arabia became the Taliban's main financial supporter.¹³⁸

Saudi assistance to the Taliban has at times extended beyond the strictly financial to encompass military and organizational assistance. Western journalists saw white-painted C-130 Hercules transport aircraft which they identified as Saudi Arabian at Qandahar airport in 1996 delivering artillery and small-arms ammunition to Taliban soldiers.¹³⁹ The Taliban security service, the Ministry of Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice, bears the same name as its sister service in Saudi Arabia and has been funded directly by Saudi Arabia; this relatively generous funding-as compared to the general poverty of other government organs in the Taliban administration-enabled it to become the most powerful agency within the Islamic Emirate.¹⁴⁰

Prince Turki reportedly met Taliban leader Mullah Omar in Qandahar on June 15, 1998 to discuss in detail the planning of the summer offensive that year, which was aimed principally at securing the surrender of Mazar-i Sharif. Turki allegedly pledged the funds necessary to buy off individual United Front commanders during the upcoming fighting.¹⁴¹

Private Contributions
Following the reported cut-off of official Saudi assistance in 1998, significant funds continued to flow to the Taliban from private Saudi sources. Some of this money has been raised by Saudi individuals dedicated to the Taliban cause; much of the rest comes in the form of charitable activity, some of which may be allocated to military purposes.¹⁴²

......

Since 1998 Bin Laden has sheltered from his pursuers in the Taliban-held sectors of Afghanistan. While the Taliban's decision not to extradite or expel Bin Laden has been presented as a function of Islamic codes of chivalry and courtesy, which require the protection of guests from harm, it is also a product of calculated self-interest. It is thought that Bin Laden has continued to serve as a source of funds for the Taliban, paying for their protection of him, even though much of his personal fortune-estimated to total U.S.$300 million-was frozen by Saudi authorities following the embassy bombings. He is also reported to maintain, at his own expense, a 400-man unit of non-Afghan fighters-the 055 Brigade-at the Rishikor base southwest of Kabul which serves as an assault force for the Taliban forces fighting north of the capital.¹⁴⁴

Saudi Secret Service Attempts to Kill or Capture Bin Laden

[Note the U.S. wanted him alive and refused to kill him but Saudis wanted him dead before the Americans got him.]

Helms has little regard for Osama bin Laden, whom she sneeringly refers to as a "tractor driver." She says he was inherited by the Taliban and is widely viewed as a "hang nail."

In 1999, Helms says, she got a message from the Taliban leadership that they were willing to turn over all of bin Laden's communications equipment, which they had seized, to the U.S. When she called the State Department with this offer, officials were at first interested, but later said, "No. We want him."

In the same year, Prince Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, reputedly came up with a scheme to capture bin Laden on his own; after consulting with the Taliban he flew his private plane to Kabul and drove out to see Mullah Omar at his HQ. The two men sat down, as Helms recounts the story, and the Saudi said, "There's just one little thing. Will you kill bin Laden before you put him on the plane?" Mullah Omar called for a bucket of cold water. As the Saudi delegation fidgeted, he took off his turban, splashed water on his head, and then washed his hands before sitting back down. "You know why I asked for the cold water?" he asked Turki. "What you just said made my blood boil."

Bin Laden was a guest of the Afghanis and there was no way they were going to kill him, though they might turn him over for a trial. At that the deal collapsed, and Turki flew home empty-handed.

Early this year, the Taliban's ambassador at large, Hashami, a young man speaking perfect English, met with CIA operations people and State Department reps, Helms says. At this final meeting, she says, Hashami proposed that the Taliban hold bin Laden in one location long enough for the U.S. to locate and destroy him. The U.S. refused, says Helms, who claims she was the go-between in this deal between the supreme leader and the feds.

A U.S. government source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, made clear that the U.S. is not trying to kill bin Laden but instead wants him expelled from Afghanistan so he can be brought to justice. Acknowledging that Laili Helms does a lot of lobbying on behalf of the Taliban, this source said Helms does not speak to the Taliban for the U.S.

-----------------

In Summer 1998, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan's Taliban militia reached a secret deal to send Osama bin Laden to a Saudi prison, nearly two months before deadly bombs devastated two American embassies and put the suspected terror mastermind on the FBI's 10 most wanted list. But the deal crumbled as the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed and was dead by the time U.S. forces retaliated two weeks later with missile attacks on camps linked to bin Laden.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi chief of intelligence, led a small Saudi delegation to Taliban headquarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in June 1998. They sought either bin Laden's ouster from Afghan territory or his custody for trial in Saudi Arabia for advocating the government's overthrow. During their three-hour meeting, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and his ruling council agreed to end the sanctuary bin Laden has enjoyed in Afghanistan since 1996. But the surrender would have to be carefully orchestrated so that it "would not reflect badly on the Taliban" and would not appear to be "mistreating a friend," according to Turki. The key to that initial deal, Turki said, was a Saudi pledge that bin Laden would be tried only in an Islamic court--a condition of surrender that would have precluded his extradition to face any U.S. prosecution. Final terms for the bin Laden hand-over were being hammered out between Taliban and Saudi envoys, according to Turki, during the same period that authorities now believe the embassy attacks were being plotted. Those negotiations ended amid a flurry of recriminations in the aftermath of the bombings. The embassy bombings were linked immediately to bin Laden by Western authorities, with the apparent side effect of rallying support for bin Laden within the Taliban. Subsequent retaliatory U.S. missile attacks on bin Laden's Afghan training camps only hardened that support.

In Summer 1999, a Taliban spokesman told that bin Laden will never be forced out of Afghanistan against his will. The spokesman specifically ruled out any future surrender deals with the U.S. or Saudi Arabia. However, the Taliban are willing to turn the matter over to a committee of Islamic scholars from Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region who would act as arbitrators. Moreover, they proposed asking international group of Islamic scholars to look into the case and perhaps find a way to meet the American request. But they have always stopped short of actually agreeing to place Osama in American custody.

--------------------

Saudi Intelligence Chief Says Taliban Had Agreed to Hand Over Bin Laden Last Year: Copyrights 1999, IANA Radionet.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, the chief of Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency, said in an interview with a British newspaper that was published this weekend, that he had reached a secret deal with the Taliban last summer to send Saudi opposition leader Usama bin Laden to a Saudi prison. But the deal fell apart after the bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The American assertion that bin Laden was behind the bombings and the subsequent American air and missile assault on bases in Afghanistan rallied support around Bin Laden in Afghan circles and made it politically impossible for the Taliban to turn him over. U.S. officials said they were not involved in the negotiations between the Saudis and the Taliban and did not learn about the secret talks until earlier this year. According to Turki's account, he led a small Saudi delegation to Taliban headquarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in June 1998. The prince said they sought either Bin Laden's ouster from Afghan territory or his custody for trial in Saudi Arabia for advocating the government's overthrow. During their three-hour meeting, he said, the Taliban's leader Mohammed Omar and his ruling council agreed to end the sanctuary Bin Laden has enjoyed in Afghanistan since 1996. But the surrender would have to be carefully orchestrated so that it "would not reflect badly on the Taliban" and would not appear to be "mistreating a friend," according to Turki. The key to that initial deal, Turki said, was a Saudi pledge that Bin Laden would be tried only in an Islamic court--a condition of surrender that would have precluded his extradition to face any U.S. prosecution. Turki recalled that, after what he called "very friendly" negotiations with Omar, the Taliban made a definitive promise to hand over Bin Laden. Suddenly after the bombings, Taliban officials said they had made no promise to give up Bin Laden, angering the Saudis. The Saudis which had previously provided the Taliban with substantial financial support and were one of only three countries that recognized their government, subsequently called home their envoy to Afghanistan and ordered the Taliban charged affairs in Riyadh to leave immediately.

--------------

Western intelligence sources have stated that Saudi Arabia offered as much as U.S.$400 million to the Taliban in exchange for Bin Laden, an offer which succeeded in causing some divisions within the Taliban leadership.¹⁴⁵

^......

Jason Burke, "Taliban split over Bin Laden," Independent (London), September 29, 1998. Human Rights Watch was told that this was in fact done in the city of Bamian, a stronghold of Hizb-i Wahdat that fell to the Taliban in September 1998. Reportedly, the chief Hizb-i Wahdat commander in Bamian was paid U.S.$800,000 to withdraw from the city with a minimum of fighting. Human Rights Watch interview, Islamabad, July 1999. Saudi sources subsequently indicated that Mullah Omar also promised to turn over Osama bin Laden to the Saudi intelligence service for questioning about the 1996 bombing of a U.S. military barracks in Khobar, Saudi Arabia), and reneged on the commitment during a subsequent visit by Prince Turki to Qandahar on September 17, 1998. Prince Turki then advised the Saudi government that ties with the Taliban should be broken off. "Prince Turki Taken In by Mullah Omar," Intelligence Newsletter (Paris), Indigo Publications, October 15, 1998, http://www.indigo-net.com. On Prince Turki's repeated visits to Qandahar, see Dilip Hiro, "Foreign Arms Sustain Afghan Civil War," Inter Press Service, October 20, 1998; "Saudis Turn Cool to Taliban Regime," Chicago Tribune, September 23, 1998; and Suzanne Goldenberg, "Heart of Darkness: A dusty backwater of Afghanistan is now the true seat of power for the religious extremists ruling that oppressed land," Guardian (London), October 13, 1998.

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The Saudi government, which was one of the Taliban's few foreign supporters, reportedly sought to reach a secret deal with the Taliban two months before the August 1998 embassy bombings. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the chief of Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency, met with Mullah Omar in June 1998 and believed that he had negotiated an agreement for bin Laden's surrender.⁴⁶ But after the embassy bombings, the Taliban denied that they had made such a promise and blamed the misunderstanding on translator problems. Saudi Arabia retaliated in September 1998 by recalling its Ambassador to Afghanistan and closing the Taliban embassy in Riyadh. Given that the Taliban rebuffed Saudi Arabia, formerly a supportive ally and one of only three countries that recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan's ruling government, it is unlikely to bow to American pressure.

Saudi Secret Service Chief Sacked August 2001 for Failing to Get Bin Laden

The boss of Saudi Arabia’s secret service prince Turki Al Faycal, was fired on Aug. 30 in what amounts to a political bombshell in Riyadh.

Osama bin Laden linked to sacked Saudi intelligence chief: expert

PARIS, Sept 12 (AFP) -

The prime suspect in the terrorist attacks against the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, Osama bin Laden, has close links with the former head of Saudi intelligence, experts said Wednesday.

Alexandre Del Valle, author of a book on Islam in the United States, told French radio that the multi-millionaire militant was in contact with Turki al-Faycal, the spy chief sacked last month by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.

Guillaume Dasquier, editor of the specialist magazine "La lettre du renseignement" (Intelligence Newsletter), said that Turki had been sacked after failing to deliver Bin laden for extradition to the United States.

"A few days ago something important happened in Saudi Arabia," Dasquier said, in an interview with the daily Le Parisien.

"That is that Prince Turki al-Faycal -- the shadowy figure at the heart of Saudi power for more than 25 years and the basis of all the ambiguous links between the Saudi secret services, the CIA, and Bin Laden -- was sacked amid much recrimination when it was realised that, despite his promises, he would never manage to achieve Bin Laden's extradition," he added.

"It was realised that the negotiations between Turki and Bin Laden were not working and that the United States and Saudi Arabia were being taken for a ride," Dasquier said.

German, British, French and Israeli intelligence services have linked Bin Laden, who has been blamed for previous attacks on US interests, to the kamikaze attacks by hijacked airliners on US targets Tuesday.

The radical leader has been stripped of his Saudi citizenship and is believed to be living in Afghanistan sheltered by the Taliban Islamic militia.

A Pakistani newspaper reported Wednesday that Bin Laden had denied involvement in the US attacks but had welcomed the strikes. He had previously declared a holy war against the United States.

Bin Laden, leader of the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda, has been indicted by US authorities for alleged involvement in the bombings of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998 which killed 224 people.

Thousands were presumed dead after hijacked planes crashed into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington and a fourth hijacked aircraft went down in western Pennsylvania.

Dasquier supported the view expressed by many terrorism experts that the attacks, which took place almost simultanously and involved four separate hijackings, were too complicated for one group to pull off alone.

"In recent months we have see a spectacular regrouping of Islamist groups," he said.

The expert said the largest armed fundamentalist group in Egypt -- Jamaa Islamiya -- had struck an alliance with Bin Laden's Al Qaeda and the smaller Egyptian group Al-Jihad.

"This Islamic international, which is based in Khost (Afghanistan) is a novelty, because up until now these terrorist groups worked apart," he said.

Al-Jihad, which claimed responsibility for the murder of 58 tourists in Luxor in 1997, had already in 1998 joined the Front for the Liberation of the Holy Sites of Islam, another Bin Laden front organisation based in Pakistan.

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Fundamentalists without a common cause

Osama bin Laden linked to sacked Saudi intelligence chief: expert