Inside the Kingdom by Robert Lacey

Author:Robert Lacey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: History - General History, Politics and government, Saudi Arabia, 1982-, Contemporary Politics - Middle East, 1932-, MiddleEast, General, Middle East - Saudi Arabia, History: World, Middle East, Social History, Social conditions, Middle East - General, History
ISBN: 9780670021185
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 2009-10-15T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

Infinite Reach

By the spring of 1997 Osama Bin Laden had been living in Afghanistan for nearly a year. He had been working with the Taliban to set up a new generation of multinational jihadi training camps, and the recruits were flowing in—including a young electrical engineer from Jeddah, Khaled Al-Hubayshi.

“Go to Afghanistan,” Al-Hubayshi had been told by all the veterans he consulted. “That is the only place you can learn the real jihad.” The twenty-year-old had already tried the Philippines. In 1996 he had sold his car to finance a trip to the southern island of Mindanao, where he spent several months with Muslim separatists who were training at “Camp Vietnam.”

But the Filipino rebels were too casual, in Khaled’s opinion. They did not practice with live ammunition. Having studied electricity, he wanted to develop his expertise in the field of bombs and explosive circuits—and he found all he hoped for when he made his way the next year to Khost, in southern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. It was May 1997.

Bin Laden had been a hero of Khaled’s since his Afghan exploits were reported in the Saudi press in the late 1980s, which got the boy thinking that he might follow in the great man’s footsteps. While studying at technical college, Khaled had been enraged by videocassettes that showed Muslims suffering at the hands of the Serbian army in Bosnia.

“Women were being raped and children killed just because they were Muslims,” he remembers. “I had that young man’s feeling that I had to do something myself. It was genocide. I could not sleep for the thought. Our religion tells us that Muslims must help each other, and the idea of jihad lifted my feeling of helplessness. When I finally got to camp and started training I slept well for the first time in months.”

Khaled Al-Hubayshi’s Guantánamo interrogation sheet sets out the formidable list of terrorist skills that he acquired from 1997 onward under the patronage of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: “The detainee attended three courses at the Kaldan Camp; the Basic, the Gunnery and the Tactics. . . . The detainee’s Basic Course consisted of training on the AK-47 Kalashnikov 7.62 assault rifle, the Seminov SKS/Type-56 7.62 mm semiautomatic rifle, the RPD 7.62 light machine gun, the PK 7.62 mm medium machine gun, the Dushka Dshk-38 12.7 mm heavy machine gun, the RPG-7 (antitank rocket propelled grenade), and the Grenov (RPG-18).”

The mind-boggling array of Russian weaponry is a reminder of the very practical ways in which Al-Qaeda’s war on the West was built on the West’s secret war against the Soviets ten years earlier. It also showed how comprehensively the late-twentieth-century jihadists went about their training.

“We woke before sunrise for Fajr [the dawn prayer],” remembers Khaled. “Then we paraded, all in lines—there must have been 150 of us at Kaldan. We did a warm-up, some physical training, before we went off for two hours running in the mountains, carrying our weapons. Every so often we would stop to do press-ups.

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