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Bin Laden's Son, Mohamed -
The Grooming Of A Dynasty
By Jason Burke in Peshawar
The Observer
9-30-1

The men had gathered in the shade of the plane trees. Beyond were the fields - wheat and opium - and then the dry wastes of the desert stretching away to the horizon. They were gathered to celebrate a wedding. The bride, a young girl of 14, sat demurely with the women. The bridegroom sat with the men. He was Mohamed bin Laden, 19 years old and Osama bin Laden's second oldest son. He was marrying the daughter of Mohamed Atef, Osama bin Laden's military chief and second in command.
 
The service was short and afterwards the smiling father of the groom said a few words. He read out a poem he had composed for the occasion:
 
'She sails into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and false power. To her doom she moves slowly... Your brothers in the East readied themselves. And the war camels prepared to move.'
 
The reference was clear - as was the warning to the 'false power' of the US. A few months earlier the USS Cole had been attacked at harbour in the Yemen and 17 US servicemen had been killed. It was an odd speech at a wedding. But then this was no ordinary wedding.
 
Western intelligence watched the ceremony, in January this year, with interest. It took place two hours drive from Kandahar, the southern desert city that is the spiritual home of the Taliban and where bin Laden has a key base. It was the Saudi-born dissident's first public appearance for months and a clear demonstration that al-Qaeda - his organisation - had strength in depth.
 
Bin Laden's son is now emerging as a key figure. Though reputed to be shy and contemplative, he is being groomed by his father, who is now 44 and suffers from back and kidney problems, as a successor. By the age of 17 he had been entrusted with ensuring his father's security as he slept. One former associate remembered how, when bin Laden spent the night at the house of an ally near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, 'Mohamed spent the entire night at the door to his father's room with a Kalashnikov in his arms'.
 
Western intelligence agencies say Mohamed is a deeply devout young man utterly committed to the radical programme of his father, and could easily assume his crucial 'figurehead' role.
 
'Bin Laden's role is not as a military technician but as a broad strategist. He is an inspirational leader full of rhetoric and ideas,' said one security source. 'If bin Laden is killed his son will be the son of the martyred mujahid [freedom fighter] and can take on the leadership role.'
 
Mohamed, one of 13 children by four wives, will also be able to draw on powerful family connections. Though the wealthy bin Ladens are supposed entirely to have cut off Osama, the most wayward of their 50 children, two brothers and a sister were present at the January wedding. They flew into Kandahar from Mecca on a returning pilgrim flight, according to witnesses.
 
Taking out bin Laden junior will be hard. He may already have left Afghanistan. He has spent much of his life in Peshawar and knows it well. Last year a raid on the Spina Wari district in the city missed capturing him by a few hours, though two other al-Qaeda members were caught.
 
The Pakistani authorities are finding it impossible to seal the 1,200-mile mountainous border. There are also many in the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency who are long-term supporters of bin Laden. The ISI was the principal conduit for Western aid to the Afghan Mujahideen during the war against the Soviet Union. The then ruler of Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq, encouraged hardline Islamists in the army and the intelligence services as a counter to the more secular opposition to his dictatorship. Ten years later, they have risen to the senior ranks. Pakistani police sources told The Observer they believe they failed to capture Mohamed bin Laden last year after he was warned of their raid by ISI jihadi elements. Western security sources blame Osama bin Laden's sudden decision to leave a meeting of al-Qaeda commanders in the hours before it was hit by US cruise missiles in 1998, following the East African embassy bombings, on a tip-off from the same source.
 
But even if bin Laden and his son are killed or captured several other key men will also have to be put out of action for any assault on al-Qaeda to be effective. Evidence presented during the trial of four men who bombed the embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi reveals the key role of Mohamed Atef, a 6ft-plus Egyptian also known as Abu Hafs el Masri or Sheikh Taseer Abdullah. He is bin Laden's trusted lieutenant.
 
Atef was born in the Egyptian village of Quenna in 1958 and deserted from the police in the early Eighties to travel to Afghanistan to fight the Russians. He met bin Laden there and followed him first to Saudi Arabia and then into exile in Sudan. Atef had already conducted sensitive missions for al-Qaeda, travelling to Somalia several times during 1991 and, according to US court documents, in 1993 he returned to the war-racked East African state to train Somali militants. By 1995 he had established the East African network, including 'sleeping' operatives in Nairobi, who would later bomb the embassy there. In Peshawar in early 1997 he held a meeting with a key member of the Nairobi operation in which he passed on instructions to 'militarise'. Phone records show he was the 'manager' of the East African operation and he has also been named by defectors as the head of al-Qaeda's 'military committee' - charged with running terrorist attacks across the globe. At every public appearance of bin Laden Atef has been at his right hand. But Atef is not the only man powerful enough to run al-Qaeda if bin Laden falls.
 
At 9pm on 20 August 20 1998, the telephone rang in the cluttered Peshawar office of Rahimullah Yusufzai, a senior reporter on the Pakistani paper the News. Despite the late hour the bazaar beneath the office window was still noisy. Yusufzai could hardly hear the man at the other end of the phone.
 
It was Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, calling on a satellite phone from a secret location deep in Afghanistan - and sitting next to him was bin Laden. Ten days earlier 224 people had died in the bombing of the East African embassies.
 
Al-Zawahiri, a trained surgeon, read a statement in English. 'Osama bin Laden calls on all Muslims to continue jihad against Jews and Americans to liberate their holy places. He denies any involvement in the East African bombings.'
 
An hour later the first US missiles fired to avenge the embassy blasts struck the camps. Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and Atef were not there. The next morning al-Zawahiri rang Yusufzai again. 'The war has just started,' he said. 'Tell the Americans they should wait for our answer.'
 
Zawahiri, a founder of the Egyptian group al-Jihad, has been with bin Laden since 1995. He has fused his apocalyptic vision of war between Islam and the West with the experience of bin Laden and Afghanistan.
 
'At first bin Laden was just concerned with the US troops in Saudi Arabia. The global focus he has now is basically down to Zawahiri,' one Western security source said. 'He is a sophisticated thinker and understands the media and how it works.'
 
Zawahiri is believed to be behind bin Laden's bribery of Pakistani journalists and to have drafted a letter signed by bin Laden, seen by The Observer, asking associates in Pakistan to increase their efforts to cultivate key figures on newspapers. In one instance a Pakistani journalist received $10,000 from al-Qaeda.
 
Zawahiri also has access to a massive network of volunteers, particularly in Egypt. Many of the men involved in the hijacks in America two weeks ago were Egyptian, which has led security services to believe Zawahiri played a key role. He has also been involved in recruitment and financial dealings for bin Laden and is a key fundraiser in North Africa. Bin Laden, who contrary to popular myth never inherited much money, fills his coffers with donations from wealthy sympathisers in the Gulf. Zawahiri has his own sources of funds and no one doubts that, in bin Laden's absence, he would be a powerful player.
 
Zawahiri also played a key role in a recent arms buying programme that bin Laden organised. According to one arms dealer in Peshawar, bin Laden's associates made a concerted effort to obtain Stinger-type anti-aircraft missiles. 'I received offers of $200,000 if I could get one and they would take as many as I could provide,' he said.
 
Another dealer claimed he had supplied al-Qaeda with 'several' Chinese surface-to-air missiles. Several dealers confirmed that, from early last year until two months ago, bin Laden was spend ing around $800,000 a month on small arms and ammunition from stockpiles within the former Soviet Union. 'We were just crating up piles of Kalashnikovs and RPG7s [rocket launchers] and sending them across the border into Afghanistan to warehouses around Jalalabad. We don't know what happened after that,' said one.
 
Bin Laden may have secured other, more lethal, weapons. He has often expressed a wish to obtain a chemical, biological or nuclear capability and tried to buy uranium in 1993 but failed. Though it is not clear whether he has bought any, several batches of enriched uranium from the Soviet Union have been on sale in Peshawar in recent months.
 
Lateef Afridi, a tribal leader and former member of Pakistan's parliament, told The Observer he had been approached four weeks ago and offered uranium. 'I was shown a sample in a heavy lead canister from Kazakhstan by two Afghans and told that there were 26 more like it if I wanted,' Afridi said.
 
Three years ago police in the city seized 8kgs of uranium hidden in a refugee camp. A month earlier officers had stumbled across smugglers while on a drugs raid on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. The smugglers had pictures of cylinders of uranium which were to be shown to prospective buyers and other 'nuclear-related materials.'
 
So far, however, there is no clear information about bin Laden's capabilities. The conventional weapons he bought recently are almost certainly destined for the 055 brigade - a unit of 2,000 Arabs based in the old army barracks at Rishkor just outside Kabul, though currently deployed alongside the Taliban on the frontline 20 miles north of Kabul. According to witnesses in Kabul the 'Arab Legion' started digging bunkers and trenches around their camps at the beginning of this month.
 
There are other indications that bin Laden is preparing for a fight. Afghan opposition sources say the district of Nawar Saifalla, in the desert near Kandahar, has been turned into a giant military camp populated almost solely by Arabs loyal to bin Laden. It is centred on an old Soviet airstrip that has been restored and has been receiving regular flights at night. Many of the volunteers the large planes are bringing in are Palestinian. Many are funded by Gulf and West Bank backers who want to see all the Western aid agencies in Afghanistan replaced by Islamic organisations.
 
Abdullah is now a chubby, metals trader in Peshawar's old city. Once, though, he was a sinewy, half-starved fighter carrying his Kalashnikov hundreds of miles through the desert mountains of eastern Afghanistan. He is one of three former Mujahideen interviewed by The Observer last week who fought with bin Laden against the Russians.
 
In 1986 Abdullah met the young Saudi zealot in Peshawar. 'I first saw Osama in his office at the al-Qaeda centre in university town [a suburb of Peshawar],' Abdullah, now 33, said. 'He was organising food and lodging for all the Arab recruitsto the jihad against the Russians. He taught me Arabic and we became good friends.'
 
Abdullah next saw the Saudi during a battle near Jalalabad. He remembered how, unlike many Arab volunteers, bin Laden's men were disciplined and highly motivated. 'I took three Afghans and three Arabs and told them to hold a position. They fought all day then when I went to relieve them in the evening they were crying because they wanted to be martyred. I told them that if they wanted to stay in the trench and fight they could. The next day they were killed. Osama said later that he had told them the trench was their gate to heaven.'
 
A second Afghan fighter recalled how, following the Soviet withdrawal, bin Laden had been disgusted by the infighting among Mujahideen groups.
 
'He was very frustrated by it all. He is a very honest, very clean man and when he saw the Arabs arguing among themselves he was sickened by it,' Jammal Nazimuddin said. 'He used to tell them they had defeated the Soviet empire because they were united and Allah had blessed them. If they were not united, he said, they could not do Allah's will.'
 
But bin Laden's own men remained loyal to the end. 'I had come to Afghanistan to fight for my faith,' said one former fighter with the 'Arab Legion' who is now a businessman commuting between his native Algeria and Peshawar. 'I started off fighting around Kandahar for a different group. I spent weeks being shelled and shot at and saw that the Afghans were not Muslims like me. Then when I got back to Peshawar I went to see Osama because he had more faith than anybody and it was a quiet, strong, modest faith that I liked. We used to sit down as brothers to eat, all the fighters together. Everyone was equal. When I wanted to marry a Pakistani girl I had no money for the dowry so he gave me $1,500. Now I am 35 and an old man with a family. But I would still follow him anywhere if he asked me.'

A Global Machine
Al-Qaeda
Founded: 1998 by Osama bin Laden.
 
Aims:

Overthrow 'corrupt' Arab governments, rid Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem of non-Muslims, establish global Islamic law.
 
Members
 
A core of several hundred 'Afghan Arabs' - mainly Saudi, Algerian and Egyptian veterans of Afghan-Soviet war - remain in Afghanistan. Up to 10,000 active in terrorism across Arab world.
 
Funding
 
Construction, import/export, agriculture and banking interests. Also raises funds via front organisations in Europe and North America and illicitly siphons funds from donations to Muslim charities.
 
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