IN 1995 THE ISLAMISTS showed their hand to friends and foes alike with a series of audacious operations that constituted the dramatic beginning of a continuing, relentless campaign against the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The Islamists also delivered a pointed reminder to Pakistan of the expediency of Pakistan’s continued, wholehearted support of Islamist terrorism. The spectacular operations of 1995 had a direct impact on the policies of three key governments in the Hub of Islam: Cairo, Riyadh, and Islamabad. The Islamists’ gambit constituted terrorism par excellence—brief acts of extreme violence that affected government policies at the highest levels. During this series of operations in 1995 Osama bin Laden consolidated his place as a prominent radical Islamist leader.
As 1995 began, Osama bin Laden was operating in Khartoum as a member of Turabi’s high command controlling the Armed Islamist Movement. He had become one of Turabi’s coterie of confidants, and his advice and opinion were sought in making decisions. As one of Turabi’s inner circle bin Laden played a part in formulating the strategic campaign against the main U.S. allies in the Arab world—Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It was during this time, while in Turabi’s shadow, that bin Laden became fully established at the center of power in the Islamist international terrorist movement.
Other key players were also rising in the ranks of Islamist terrorism. The most important were Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Egyptian senior terrorist commanders under him. The spectacular terrorist operations they commanded consolidated this Egyptian team as the most effective terrorist command cell of the Islamist movement. Zawahiri worked closely with the support system run by bin Laden, from the training camps in Sudan to logistical and financial support overseas, and in the process the two grew even closer. In late 1998 Zawahiri and the Egyptian command cell operated under bin Laden as bin Laden’s primary terrorist commanders.
THE ISLAMIST DECISION to launch a strategic campaign against Egypt and Saudi Arabia—to which bin Laden was a vital contributor—was reached because events unfolding in Saudi Arabia in 1994 convinced the Islamist leadership that the country was vulnerable to an Islamist surge. The Islamists also knew that unless Egypt were otherwise preoccupied, it would intervene to ensure the stability of Saudi Arabia or any other conservative Arab regime challenged by Islamist subversion and terrorism.
The escalation of terrorism in Saudi Arabia was a direct result of the relatively nonviolent crisis that had been developing inside Saudi Arabia. This internal crisis over succession and legitimacy reached a turning point when the Islamists declared the launch of an armed struggle. As part of a movement driven by ideology and theology, the Islamists felt compelled to elucidate their reasons for undertaking drastic acts even before they acted. The crisis began with the arrest in mid-September 1994 of Sheikh Salman bin Fahd al-Udah, a charismatic Islamist preacher. Sheikh Udah was one of the young, populist leaders who rose to prominence from the grassroots of Bedouin society by reaching out to the average Saudi and gaining his trust and support.
This younger generation of populist Islamists grew up on the legacy of bin Laden’s generation, the heroic young Islamists who participated in the Afghan jihad. Their movement is unstructured but strong and cohesive. At the grassroots level the leaders are eloquent, charismatic preachers who begin by building a following within the local mosques. These young preachers rely on the endorsement of the local “Afghans” or other veteran Islamists of comparable stature. The local Islamist cells gain their inspiration from clandestine Islamist texts, both printed and on cassettes, which they receive from regional and national networks; these networks also provide clandestine funding if needed. The networks are run by veteran “Afghans” and militant Islamists at the organizational level, while older preachers, who have usually become popular beyond their first mosque, provide Islamist guidance. By 1994 these Saudi “Afghans” and like-minded Islamist militants, including veterans of other Arab/Palestinian terrorist organizations, had established a loose network of terrorist and militant cells for their own security against the ever present threat of the Saudi secret police and in preparation for the jihad they hoped to one day launch against the House of al-Saud and the American forces bolstering it. This largely amorphous structure looked up to senior leaders as a source of inspiration and support.
Osama bin Laden was such a leader of the grassroots Islamist movement in Saudi Arabia. A mujahideen leader with an unparalleled record in Afghanistan, his exploits were known to all. He was a charismatic and eloquent speaker whose speeches, both written and recorded, were widely circulated by the Islamist underground throughout Saudi Arabia. The heavy personal price he paid for pursuing what he was convinced to be a just Islamist policy—loss of riches and ultimately exile—added to his stature. From his exile in Sudan, bin Laden did not abandon the Saudi Islamists. He arranged and sustained much of the support system for the Islamist movement from Sudan, the Gulf States, and, more recently, London. Although he acted from genuine benevolence, his efforts kept his name at the forefront as a leader and source of inspiration for the ranks of Saudi Islamists. The more they looked up to him, the more committed he became to them.
The arrest of grassroots leader Sheikh Udah led to the first initiative taken by the Saudi Islamist system. A few days after Udah’s arrest came the first threat of violence against the House of al-Saud—the release of the first overt communiqué of an Islamist terrorist organization inside Saudi Arabia. An organization calling itself the Brigades/Battalions of Faith issued an ultimatum to the Saudi authorities to release Sheikh Udah within five days or the organization would begin a campaign of terrorism against Saudis and Americans. The communiqué concluded that “all the Arabian Peninsula is an open theater for our Jihad operations.” The Brigades/Battalions of Faith never carried out their threats. Their ultimatum was carefully phrased so that it didn’t suggest that Sheikh Udah or the Islamist leadership were actually involved in or even endorsed the call for armed struggle, leaving a convenient gap of deniability between the Islamist leadership and the Saudi mujahideen.
But Sheikh Udah himself authorized and legitimized an armed jihad. Although still in prison, in early 1995 he began smuggling out taped sermons calling for an intensification of the Islamist protests against the rulers of the House of al-Saud. On April 9–10, 1995, the followers of Sheikh Udah issued the text of a taped lecture recently smuggled from jail. The lecture, titled “Death Workmanship,” covered the whole logic of the relationship between Islamist and Western civilization and amounted to a declaration of an armed jihad against the House of al-Saud. It provided justification for perpetual confrontation.
Sheikh Udah argued that the prevailing conditions throughout the Muslim Nation, primarily in Saudi Arabia, necessitated resumption of a comprehensive armed struggle: “The world today is pushing Muslims and compelling them … to Death Workmanship, the profession of Death, and is making of them strong fighters.” Sheikh Udah warned that the Muslim Nation was suffering “from political underdevelopment, economic dependence, and military weakness” so that it could not “race and compete in the big theater of life.” Although the present plight of the Muslim Nation might seem irreversible, “this religion proved its eternity and historical extension and its survival. Many nations attacked it, but these nations went and Islam stayed.” Nevertheless, it was imperative for the believers to strive to reverse the trend and save the Muslim Nation. Udah emphasized that conventional spiritual methods, such as widespread teaching of Islam and knowledge of its laws, “will not be enough” to resolve the current crisis. Nor would the adoption of Western ways—“importing technology, manufacturing and graduating experts and specialists”—be enough to reverse the trend. Sheikh Udah acknowledged that the work of preachers and teachers like himself “may contribute, but it will not do what is required; even the efforts of guides and preachers, however great it is, it can only affect a small piece of the [Muslim] Nation.”
Sheikh Udah stressed that only an intense jihad could cleanse and rejuvenate the Muslim Nation so that it could prevail in the modern world: “It is death that gives life, yes it is Jihad in the sake of Allah, the obliged fate [of] this Nation. Otherwise it is extinction. If the [Muslim] Nation abandoned Jihad and ignored it, then Allah [would] hit it and punish it by making it low among the nations; [as] the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said: ‘If you abandon Jihad, and become satisfied with growing plants, then Allah will direct at you being low among the nations, and you will not be able to come out of it until you return to your religion and declare Jihad in the sake of Allah.’ ”
Sheikh Udah warned that the rejection of jihad in its original meaning—an uncompromising armed struggle—in favor of interpretations of modernity—namely, other forms of nonviolent activities—was also dangerous to the very survival of Islam: “The abolishing of Jihad in the sake of Allah and its rejection and the refusal to believe in it as part of our Islamic creed is an apostasy from Islam, and makes the person outside the people of Islam. [This is] because Allah the Almighty has ordered us to do Jihad clearly in the Koran without any ambiguity, and it was mentioned in the noble authenticated Hadith, and Islam can never be established and sustained without Jihad.”
“Death Workmanship” amounted to a fatwa, that is, a religious decree, ordering the launch of jihad against the Saudi royal family. Sheikh Udah decreed that any rejection of jihad in favor of another form of resistance was apostasy, a capital offense according to Muslim law, which left the believer with no alternative but to fight—anybody who considered himself Muslim had to commit himself to the waging of jihad. Thousands of illegal audio-cassettes and text copies of Sheikh Udah’s lecture were distributed clandestinely throughout Saudi Arabia, and Saudi opposition organizations in the West were flooded with requests from individuals in Saudi Arabia for copies of the lecture.
Although Sheikh Udah did not specifically mention the House of al-Saud or the United States as the primary objectives of the jihad, his followers filled in the blanks. “Death Workmanship” was distributed in the United States with the comment: “Sheikh Salman al-Udah is still in prison with hundreds of other scholars in the Arabian Peninsula. He was jailed by the cowardly oppressive regime of Al-Saud family fat] what some believe [was] the urging of the U.S. government.”
Soon after the publication of Sheikh Udah’s fatwa, other Islamist circles began to act on it, mostly by preparing their supporters for the transformation of the Islamist resistance in Saudi Arabia. A key change took place in the position of the London-based Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR). In the early 1990s the CDLR was a “modernistic” Islamist movement making a concentrated effort to create an image of a “moderate” Islamist movement in the West. The CDLR stressed its commitment to nonviolent populist opposition to the Saudi government. Committee activists organized a host of sit-ins and other forms of public protest in Saudi Arabia and Western capitals to appeal to the Western media and embarrass the Saudi government by demonstrating Riyadh’s inability to deal with or even conceal widespread opposition to its regime. At the time the CDLR was the primary group speaking for the Saudi Islamists in the West.
Immediately following the release of Sheikh Udah’s lecture, the CDLR changed its policy line, stressing that such popular protests were no longer sufficient to cause the overthrow of the government in Riyadh. These popular activities would be conducted in support of a struggle carried out by a small core of activists who were willing to sacrifice everything, including their lives, for the Islamist cause. In its mid-April 1995 communiqué the CDLR stressed the need for an all-sacrificing elite—mujahideen—at the forefront of the struggle against the Saudi regime:
No one can doubt the unity and agreement of the Nation in support of the legitimate leaders and that the reform process has the sympathy of all levels of society. This, however, was not the real test. The test in question was regarding “who is prepared to sacrifice.” Those hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, of supporters and sympathizers are unable to present any real opposition unless they are led at the forefront by a committed group of people who are readily prepared to sacrifice their all for the cause. Indeed, sacrifices such as detention, torture, and even death must be prepared for and accepted. Unless this leading group is solidly steadfast, then the rest of the support will collapse. The leading group does not necessarily need to be large, as it was a small group that Allah gave victory to in the story of David and Goliath.
To ensure its audience understood that this general statement was an endorsement of Sheikh Udah’s call for jihad, the CDLR used the protests in Sheikh Udah’s stronghold in Buraydah, Saudi Arabia, after his arrest in September 1994 as an example of able leadership and sacrifice. The CDLR explained that the loyal and devoted followers of Sheikh Udah, who were the most likely to implement his call for the jihad, already constituted part of the committed group of people required to bring about success: “The method the Government adopts now is of no real significance because the main obstacle has been overcome and the leading group has been formed. If tyranny and oppression were in any way effective, or served any purpose, this would have been evident after the first Buraydah uprising.”
On April 10, 1995, an Islamist organization calling itself the Islamic Change Movement—the Jihad Wing in Arabian Peninsula warned of impending armed attacks against American and British forces throughout the Arabian Peninsula and against the House of al-Saud. The communiqué gave the Western forces until June 28, 1995, to evacuate the Arabian Peninsula. If they did not, starting on that date the U.S. and British forces would become a legitimate target for the jihad. The communiqué accused the Saudi royal family of turning against Islam in the service of the “Crusade forces,” as demonstrated in their purges and persecution of notable Islamic preachers and teachers. The communiqué of the Islamic Change Movement was issued in support of the jailed Islamist leaders.
Sheikh Udah’s “Death Workmanship,” the CDLR’s endorsement, and the communiqué from the Islamic Change Movement reflected the decision by the Saudi Islamist leadership to begin jihad as the only viable approach for overthrowing the Saudi regime. This was not an idle threat. For several years a large cadre of Saudi Islamists, from 15,000 to 25,000 fighters strong and spearheaded by over 5,000 Saudi “Afghans,” had been being trained, prepared, and equipped in camps in Iran, Sudan, Yemen, and Pakistan-Afghanistan. A large Islamist underground network inside Saudi Arabia claimed to be ready to support these Saudi mujahideen.
BUT THE SAUDI ISLAMISTS had to postpone their plans. By late June 1995 the entire Islamist elite was preoccupied with a far more important operation against Turabi’s other archenemy, Egypt, although for security reasons the Saudi Islamists did not know about this operation. An underground movement constantly under the threat of exposure, arrests, torture, and betrayal would not be informed about a key operation planned by another terrorist group. The Saudis were merely notified by Khartoum and Tehran to wait for the go-ahead, and because of the tight discipline of the state-sponsored terrorist system, the Saudi Islamists obeyed the order.
The attempt on President Hosni Mubarak’s life in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on June 26, 1995, was a milestone in the evolution of the Islamist struggle for control over the Arab world and the Hub of Islam. Operations of such magnitude, even if ultimately claimed by or attributed to obscure terrorist organizations, are actually instruments of state policy and are carried out on behalf of the highest echelons of the terrorism-sponsoring states. The assassination attempt, a strategic gambit sponsored by Sudan and Iran, had regional and long-term effects. Although President Mubarak survived and the Islamist popular uprising envisaged by the conspirators failed to materialize in Egypt, the mere attempt gave a major boost to the Islamist surge throughout the region.
This audacious operation was initiated for two reasons: (1) to rejuvenate Islamist armed struggles in the Middle East, in particular on the Arabian Peninsula, with the collapse or neutralization of Egypt seen as a prerequisite to any tangible success, and (2) to squelch the emerging schism in the Egyptian Islamist leadership—honor and turf battles among exiled leaders—before it spread to the ranks inside Egypt.
Both the Egyptian Islamists and their sponsoring states were determined to kill Mubarak, whose regime is a constant reminder of the Islamists’ failure to overthrow a U.S.-supported government. Following the 1981 assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, by Islamist terrorists, Mubarak not only stabilized the government but launched a violent crackdown on Egypt’s Islamists. Under his leadership Egypt retained its peace agreement with Israel and was the leading force in consolidating the Arab communities in support of the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq during the Gulf War. Mubarak has repeatedly reiterated his determination to support any conservative Arab government against Islamist challenges, even if it requires the use of Egyptian expeditionary forces. Mubarak epitomizes a Western-supported Arab leader, and the Islamists believed his assassination would shatter the entire concept of such a thing. Given the prevailing dynamics in the Islamist Middle East, a harsh reaction from Cairo after even a failed Islamist operation could still serve the Islamists’ purposes. The Egyptian Islamists would be united in their response to success or in a sense of martyrdom from retribution by state security organs. Meanwhile, the Islamist leadership reasoned, Cairo would be too preoccupied with the ramifications of the terrorist operations, whether successful or not to protect the conservative regimes on the Arabian Peninsula.
The Addis Ababa operation was the outcome of lengthy deliberations at the highest levels of the sponsoring states and the Islamist terrorist movement. Osama bin Laden was part of these deliberations. Although the operation was claimed by the al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah—Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman’s organization—in the name of Egyptian domestic issues, the operation was actually an international undertaking.
This time it was Turabi’s Sudan, rather than Iran, that moved to the forefront of the assault on pro-Western regimes, especially Egypt. Sudan had been directly involved in the overall expansion of the Islamist armed struggle throughout Egypt. Sudanese officials, including Hassan al-Turabi, had maintained tight control over covert Islamist operations at both strategic and operational levels.
Starting in fall 1994, Tehran, Khartoum, and the AIM leadership had repeatedly authorized the formulation of plans to assassinate Mubarak. For example, Islamist networks in Italy and Bosnia-Herzegovina were activated for Mubarak’s planned November 1994 visit to Italy to attempt his assassination. Islamist networks in Italy were already under close scrutiny by Western security forces, however, and the plot was exposed and neutralized. Next, one of the best Islamist networks in Egypt itself was activated and, in effect, sacrificed on orders from Khartoum to kill Mubarak and incite an Islamist popular uprising. This network lived up to expectations as in the first three weeks of January 1995 its members launched three determined attempts to kill Mubarak. But by then the core of the network was exhausted and its key operatives on the run. Fearing that revelation of such relentless efforts to kill the president would damage the stability of the regime, Cairo decided to conceal them. Meanwhile the key leaders of the terrorist group fled safely to Sudan, traveling via other Arab countries. Other Islamist networks in Egypt that had nothing to do with the assassination attempts were hurt by the ruthless dragnet operations of Egyptian security forces.
With the arrival of these Egyptian terrorists in Khartoum, senior intelligence officials working with AIM, in particular Iranian counterintelligence experts, demanded a thorough after-action analysis of both the advisability of further assassination attempts and the peculiarities of the January operations. This thorough intelligence study concluded that in principle, when the overall dynamics in the Middle East and especially the course of the Islamist struggle in early 1995 were taken into account, the assassination of President Mubarak was imperative.
But the analysts left two major issues unresolved pending subsequent studies. The first issue was the ability of the Islamist network throughout Egypt to withstand the massive retribution that any future attempt on Mubarak’s life, even if it failed, would inevitably cause. The second issue was the belief of Iranian intelligence experts that some of the Islamist networks in Egypt had been penetrated by the security services, so that any future plans were bound to be betrayed. The Iranian experts recommended using only networks of the highest quality for any future operation of strategic importance. This precluded operations inside Egypt because locally based support networks could no longer be fully trusted.
After evaluating these conclusions, Turabi decided to raise the issues with the prominent leaders of the Egyptian Islamist jihad forces before any strategy was formulated. In March 1995 Turabi convened an emergency conference in Khartoum with the three leading Egyptian commanders: Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Geneva-based leader of the al-Jihad organization then in charge of a special headquarters for key operations in the United States and on the American continent as a whole; Mustafa Hamzah, a Khartoum-based senior commander of al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah, who was responsible for the training and preparation of Islamist cadres for operations inside Egypt; and Rifai Ahmad Taha, a Peshawar-based senior commander of al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah who was responsible for the training and preparation of Islamist cadres in camps in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Despite the tension among these commanders, all three showed up for Turabi’s emergency meeting. Opening the meeting, Turabi stated that the only issue on the table was the Islamist revolution in Egypt. All future operations, such as the subversion of Saudi Arabia, should be examined against the criterion of the impact they might have on the revolution in Egypt. All outstanding disputes among Egyptian commanders would also have to be eliminated before their schism affected the networks inside Egypt. Turabi believed that the modus operandi of the Islamist networks had to change drastically to reverse the effect of recent clashes with the security services, which had paralyzed the movement in parts of Egypt.
Turabi and the three Egyptian commanders concluded that a long-term Islamist revolutionary strategy would be determined by the three commanders present. The Egyptians were also told to prepare a comprehensive proposal stating their needs in terms of weapons and money for the next stage of the Islamist armed struggle and to have it ready for the forthcoming PAIC assembly, scheduled to open in Khartoum in late March 1995.
At Turabi’s meeting with the three commanders the question of a major operation to assassinate President Mubarak using high-quality assets from all over the world was first brought up. The Egyptian commanders agreed that if the assassination resulted in a large-scale popular Islamist uprising in Egypt and the operation bolstered other Islamist operations throughout the Middle East, it would be worth the extraordinary effort and risk entailed. Although Turabi endorsed these conclusions, the Egyptian commanders could not decide on the operation themselves—the ultimate decision was up to the sponsoring states.
Considering the magnitude of the required investment in operatives and funds, Turabi decided to raise the issue at the PAIC conference in Khartoum at the end of March 1995. The Friendship Hall sessions resulted in the formulation of a strategy for an Islamist revolutionary and terrorist surge around the world. Turabi brought with him Osama bin Laden and Mustafa Ismail Uthman of Sudanese intelligence. Mohammad Said Naamani of Iranian intelligence, an expert on Algeria and North Africa, represented Tehran. The other leaders and commanders consulted were Imad Mughniyah and Nairn Qassim (HizbAllah), Fathi Shkaki (Palestinian Islamic Jihad), Mussa Abu Marzuk and Muhammad Nezzal (HAMAS), Adrian Saad-ad-Din (International Muslim Brotherhood), Abdul-Majid al-Zandani (Yemen), and a few North African Islamists.
The participants in the Friendship Hall sessions discussed all aspects of a possible assassination of Mubarak outside of Egypt. After lengthy deliberations they gave their blessing to an all-out effort to kill Mubarak and incite a widespread, popular Islamist uprising in Egypt in which the entire international Islamist movement would participate. They stressed that the Cairo regime would be toppled in the aftermath of a lengthy fight by highly trained mujahideen and not by popular violence. Once Cairo started fighting for its life, it would be unable to react to the subversion of Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf States. Hence the overthrow of the Saudi regime necessitated the collapse or at least the neutralization of Egypt.
Initial plans for the operation were made during April in consultations between the Egyptian commanders and numerous experts. Mustafa Hamzah was nominated as the senior commander in charge of the Egyptian uprising. He would personally supervise preparation of cadres and logistical support in Sudan and arrange to smuggle them into Egypt. But no decision was made on who would be the senior commander of the assassination operation.
From the very beginning Turabi preferred Zawahiri as the supreme commander even though the Egyptian doctor was preoccupied with preparations for a new wave of terrorist operations in the United States. A strong personal trust had grown up between Turabi and Zawahiri in Somalia in fall 1993, when Zawahiri, as senior on-site commander, oversaw the lethal clashes with the U.S. forces. The Islamists did not have many leaders with capabilities comparable to Zawahiri’s. In addition, his excellent headquarters in Geneva, with auxiliary installations throughout Western Europe and Bosnia-Herzegovina, was considered secure from hostile penetration. Zawahiri had good contacts with other Islamist networks, in particular numerous Arab “Afghans.” Because diverting Zawahiri’s attention to Mubarak would adversely affect the highly important operations in the United States, Turabi decided to examine the issue in one-on-one consultations with the Egyptian.
In the last week of May, Turabi traveled to Paris, allegedly for medical treatment. From there he made a brief secret visit to Geneva to meet with Zawahiri. After lengthy discussions both agreed that Zawahiri had to command the operation to assassinate Mubarak. The two decided that the assassination attempt would take place in Addis Ababa in late June during the African summit. In order to stress the importance of the operation, Turabi met with Zawahiri’s closest aides and promised to provide them with all the assistance they needed in their endeavor. Zawahiri moved quickly to begin preparations. He would run the operation under the banner of the Vanguard of Conquest Organization, the cover name for the organization he used in Somalia, which would identify him to the Egyptian government.
In the last days of May, Zawahiri convened a summit of terrorist experts in Ferney-Voltaire, a small village on the French-Swiss border. The site was selected so that the conspirators could flee to France on the spot if anything went wrong. The list of participants reflected the importance and magnitude of the undertaking. The meeting was chaired by Zawahiri and Mustafa Hamzah. Hamzah arrived in Geneva for this summit using a Sudanese passport with a false name. Zawahiri’s deputy—Fuad Talat Qassim, then based in Copenhagen—sent his operations commander. The Peshawar-based Ahmad Shawqi al-Islambuli also sent a senior representative. The son of Said Ramadan, spiritual leader of Zawahiri’s terrorist campaign, then living in Germany but acting as the imam of a small mosque in Switzerland, attended. Ramadan’s mosque was being used as a center for clandestine communications for Egyptian and North African Islamist groups. Subsequent sessions also included senior representatives of Arab “Afghan” networks and commanders in Western Europe, mostly Algerians, and other senior commanders from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Europe.
In their first meeting the Egyptian terrorist commanders decided on the basic tactics to be employed in Addis Ababa and on the assets to be used for this all-important operation. They decided that a team of highly professional “Afghans,” including senior officers (either still serving or recently retired) from numerous countries, would form a special planning cell under Islambuli and his representative then present in Switzerland.
In the second set of meetings, which included members of other groups as well, the participants determined the role and contributions of all other networks and their regional assets. Zawahiri expressed concern that his preoccupation with the assassination attempt could delay the launching of the terrorist campaign in the West, especially the United States. He asked the Algerian “Afghan” commanders to consider expediting their own plans for operations in Europe to ensure an overall continuity of Islamist terrorist strikes. The Algerians must have agreed, as was demonstrated by the bombing of the Paris Métro on July 26, 1995. Hamzah returned immediately to Sudan to select operatives and refine the training program for the Egyptian strike. Two weeks later he reported that the system was essentially ready. Meanwhile Islambuli’s planning teams in Peshawar and Khartoum worked out a detailed, sophisticated operational plan.
Once the initial preparations were completed, Zawahiri made an all-important inspection visit to Sudan and Ethiopia between June 12 and 19, 1995. Zawahiri and Hamzah studied in great detail the preparations for both the Addis Ababa operation and the Islamist uprising in Egypt. The sense of unity that the attempt on Mubarak’s life brought to the Islamists in Egypt soon became apparent. Colonel Muhammad Makkawi, who had broken away from the Vanguards of Conquest in August 1993 over disagreements with Zawahiri concerning strategy for the Islamist revolution in Egypt, now met with Zawahiri and Hamzah, swore allegiance, and put the networks of his al-Jihad Movement at Hamzah’s disposal.
Using forged documents and with help from Turabi’s loyalists in the ranks of the Ethiopian Islamic Jihad, Zawahiri made a brief, clandestine visit to Addis Ababa to see the sites of the planned attacks with his own eyes. He then returned to Khartoum to go over the fine details of the operational plan. Satisfied, Zawahiri met with the terrorists training for the operation. He delivered a fiery speech, stressing the importance of the operation and of martyrdom. He dwelt on the need for professionalism for the operation to succeed.
Zawahiri returned to Switzerland, convinced that the operation would succeed. For final approval he called his closest Egyptian friends, Mustafa Hamzah and Fuad Talat Qassim, to meet in Geneva on June 23. The three repeatedly went over all the details of the operations, carefully studying all the good and bad possible ramifications, and then decided to issue the final go-ahead to their networks in both Addis Ababa and southern Egypt. By this point there was no turning back. The success of the operation now depended greatly on the quality of the operatives.
To increase the likelihood of success, Hamzah and the other organizers of the hit teams had selected the operatives from the ranks of highly trained fighters already vetted by Iranian intelligence. In summer 1995 all the candidates were being trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guard experts in camps of al-Quds Forces north of Khartoum. The organizers decided to tap the assets of the IRGC’s internationalist Islamist battalion because Iranian intelligence had repeatedly checked their reliability. To further enhance the success of the operation, the teams were selected and organized from troops of special forces units comprising Egyptian, Sudanese, Algerian, and Ethiopian “Afghans.” In this way, it would be more difficult for Western intelligence services to penetrate their ranks or guess the intended objective of their operation as they began deploying abroad.
The operational plan called for the possible use of a suicide bomber. The candidate selected was an Arab who had just graduated from a suicide school in Afghanistan run under the banner of the Vanguards of Conquest. This individual had originally volunteered for an operation connected with the Palestinian cause. While on hold in Sudan, he was being trained by Palestinian Islamic Jihad specialists under the close supervision of Iranian experts. Only a week or so before the operation the candidate was primed to participate in the assassination attempt on Mubarak.
Meanwhile, in mid-June, Hamzah oversaw the selection of the operatives for the strike-force teams. By this time Islambuli’s operational plan had been adopted in principle, and the selection of operatives and their specific training programs had been organized accordingly. Once selected for the operation, the terrorists were moved to another camp near the village of Kango, some forty miles south of Khartoum. It was there that the final, specific training of the assassination squads took place and the participants were provided with details of their assignments.
The operational plan was based on the coordinated work of three separate teams. The first team would be a diversionary force. Using small arms, it would attack Mubarak’s convoy from the roofs of buildings overlooking the road from the airport to the convention center. It was assumed that once under fire, the entire convoy would slow down for a moment, perhaps even stop. Taking advantage of this confusion, the second team would approach the center of the convoy and blast the president’s car with RPG rockets, completely destroying it. If they could not hit the president’s car, the second team was ordered to blast instead any official Egyptian vehicle it could. Excellent sources in the Egyptian security forces, including Mubarak’s bodyguards, had provided material for the third team’s assignment. The planners had been told that in case of emergency, Mubarak’s driver was instructed to “storm the roadblocks and proceed at full speed regardless of the cost.” The third team would be ready to intervene in case the first two teams failed and Mubarak’s driver was able to move the car forward. Islambuli’s planners assumed that once safely out of the fiery gauntlet, Mubarak’s driver would inevitably relax a bit and perhaps even slow down. At this stage a massive car bomb driven by a martyr-to-be would close in on the presidential car and either ram it or blow himself up near it. Either way, Islambuli’s bomb experts assured him that no car in the world, no matter how well armored, would be able to survive an explosion at such close proximity.
Just how committed Turabi and the Egyptian Islamist leadership were to assassinating Mubarak could be seen from the preliminary actions they took. By late April, in the aftermath of the initial planning in Sudan but a month before a commitment had been reached in Geneva in late May, the Islamists had already started preparing a support and intelligence system in Addis Ababa.
At first a small team made up of Sudanese intelligence officers and members of the Ethiopian Islamic Jihad, including highly experienced “Afghans,” inspected possibilities for the main on-site base. In late April they rented the villa that would become the forward headquarters and weapons cache for the operation.
In May, as the training and planning were becoming specific, on-site preparations in Addis Ababa accelerated. A team of ten operatives was dispatched from Khartoum to Addis Ababa. Their first task, completed in the second half of May, was to survey the possible strike site and identify possible deployment positions. They drew detailed maps of the entire area. With the cooperation of Ethiopian Islamists, the Sudanese were able to activate sources within the Ethiopian security command. These Ethiopian officers provided the team with detailed advance information on the summit schedule as well as on the movements of and security procedures for all the leaders expected to attend.
In early June, with the operation now approved for implementation, the ten-operative network in Addis Ababa shifted its priorities to arranging for the smuggling of weapons and explosives into their villa. The Sudanese operatives also worked with the Ethiopian security officers to facilitate the safe deployment of the three armed teams to their assault positions and to secure cover for their escape and exfiltration on completion of the operation. The contacts cemented with the Ethiopian security officers proved highly advantageous, for the attackers would have exact and timely intelligence about Mubarak’s arrival and route.
In mid-June, at the time of Zawahiri’s visit to Sudan and Ethiopia, the final phases of the preparations were launched. The Sudanese activated a vast network of Ethiopian Islamists to do the groundwork—smuggling the weapons and explosives to Ethiopia; leasing the vehicles to be used in the operation, including the car bomb; leasing numerous apartments and houses to be used as living quarters for the operatives; and filling them with food and other supplies. After Zawahiri’s visit, with these preparations completed, Sudanese intelligence evacuated some thirty Ethiopian Islamists from Addis Ababa to Khartoum. These individuals knew too much about the impending operation, and the Sudanese did not want to risk the ramifications of the capture and interrogation of any one of them.
The weapons delivered at this time left no doubt about the direct involvement of the Sudanese government in the operation. Virtually all the weapons seized with the terrorists in Addis Ababa belonged to the Sudanese army. The serial numbers on the seized RPG-7S confirmed that these were part of a Sudanese arms deal with China. The Russian-made small arms seized in Addis Ababa were identical to and from the same general production series as comparable weapons found by the Egyptian army on the Sudanese border—weapons that had been provided to Egyptian Islamists in training camps in Sudan.
In mid-June, Turabi personally took over the job of overseeing the operation in Addis Ababa. A senior Sudanese intelligence officer identified as Siraj Muhammad Hussein, also known as Muhammad Siraj, arrived in Addis Ababa and assumed operational command over the actual execution of the operation. Colonel Abdul-Aziz Jafar, an officer in Sudanese intelligence who defected to Egypt, identified Siraj as Major Muhammad Siraj-al-Din of Sudanese intelligence. According to an Egyptian security source, Muhammad Siraj is the same intelligence officer who, as the Sudanese consul working under a pseudonym in New York in 1993, actively participated in the World Trade Center bombing and the July 4 conspiracy to blow up the United Nations building.
It did not take long for Siraj to establish himself as the overall coordinator of the Islamist operation in Addis Ababa. He personally handled the acquisition and dissemination of intelligence information to ensure maximum secrecy. He oversaw the arrangements for renting the villa used as the main cache and for securing an alternative residence to shelter the perpetrators pending their exfiltration back to Khartoum. It was only around June 20, after Siraj was satisfied with the security and safety of the advance preparations, that the actual infiltration of the perpetrators began.
To reduce the risk of early exposure, the operatives received their weapons, including the road-blocking truck and car bomb, from a separate network of Sudanese intelligence on the eve of the strike. This network was run by Sheikh Darwish, a Sudanese national who was personally loyal to Turabi and who had carried out numerous special missions for him between Khartoum and Addis Ababa. The fact that Sheikh Darwish was personally involved in handling the weapons for the operation demonstrated just how important the operation was to Turabi himself. In late June, Darwish delivered two big suitcases full of small arms, RPG launchers, shells, ammunition, and explosives. The first team would carry the weapons on their bodies while the second team brought along travel bags so that they wouldn’t have to expose their RPGs until the very last minute. This decision would soon prove to be a fatal error.
The day of the attack, June 26, 1995, began perfectly. Siraj, who was constantly fed with up-to-the-minute data about Mubarak’s planned schedule by Ethiopian security officers, started to deploy his people. Throughout the assassination attempt intelligence on Mubarak’s arrival and route was both exact and timely; Siraj must have had very secure and efficient communications with both his Ethiopian sources and the assault teams.
What ultimately spoiled the operation were delays and confusion in the ranks of Mubarak’s entourage. President Mubarak was supposed to arrive at the airport just before 8:30 A.M. and immediately leave for the summit center, a little over half a mile away. As planned, Ethiopian and Egyptian security forces deployed along the route shortly after 8:15 A.M. Mubarak’s plane arrived on time, but his entourage was unable to organize his convoy in a timely fashion. With Mubarak’s convoy delayed, the bored Ethiopian policemen started wandering around. To avoid looking suspicious, the second assault team had to put their RPGs back in their travel bags and slightly withdraw from their firing positions.
Meanwhile Mubarak was getting impatient. Around 8:55 A.M. he suddenly ordered whatever elements of the convoy were available to immediately start heading for the summit center. Although the Ethiopian security officers were able to alert Siraj and his people on time, parts of the assault team were no longer in place.
As Mubarak’s convoy sped by, the first team opened up with small-arms fire as planned, but the blue Toyota truck that was supposed to block the road in front of the convoy didn’t move quickly enough. The vehicle blocking or slowing down Mubarak’s convoy had been a last-minute addition to the terrorists’ plan to slow down the convoy as it sped along this segment of the road. Because the members of the second assault team had been told to keep their RPGs inside their bags for security reasons, the team were now unable to unpack, take out, and fire their weapons on such short notice.
The third team with the car bomb and the martyr-driver was in place. But here the short delay of the blue Toyota truck proved decisive. The first team had been concentrating its fire on the main limousine—Ethiopia’s official car—where Mubarak was supposed to be. But Mubarak was actually traveling in a special Mercedes, supposedly not just bulletproof but also able to withstand RPG rockets, that he had brought with him from Cairo.
Into this confusion entered the blue Toyota truck. After the slight delay, the driver could no longer position himself in front of Mubarak’s convoy to block the road. Instead, with the convoy’s cars speeding just ahead of him, he almost slammed into the Ethiopian limousine.
With cars braking in all directions to avoid a crash, still under a hail of small-arms fire, Mubarak’s driver decided he could not break through the mess. Instead he drastically deviated from the security plans. He turned the Mercedes 180 degrees and sped immediately back to the airport. This split-second decision saved Mubarak’s life, for around 300 feet down the road from the ambush site, the car bomb was waiting.
Disappointed as they were, the principals of the operation immediately activated their exfiltration plan. Siraj and the operatives who knew the organizational and intelligence aspects of the operation disappeared within hours, making their way safely to Khartoum. The surviving operatives were left behind as bait for the security forces and so that they would not overload the exfiltration system. Some of them would soon die in gun battles with Ethiopian police and Egyptian commandos operating clandestinely in Addis Ababa.
But the excellence of the planning and preparations for the operation became apparent to everyone. As part of the plan Mustafa Hamzah had organized a series of bombings and other types of armed operations throughout Egypt to create the impression of a widespread popular uprising and to induce a general state of panic throughout Egypt in the wake of the shocking news of Mubarak’s assassination. Toward this end, Turabi had provided Hamzah with forward bases in Sudan with training camps and military instructors, as well as the weapons and explosives required for their operations. The operational plan called for the advance deployment of large numbers of teams of highly trained Egyptian operatives. Once given the green light, in the predawn hours of June 26, they would infiltrate Egypt, advance along specific routes, and link up with just activated networks of supporters in virtually all the cities and towns in Egypt. Together they were to launch an unprecedented wave of terrorism and violence.
Late on the morning of June 26, when news of the failed assassination attempt reached Khartoum, Turabi and Hamzah decided to call off the operation. Despite the now heightened alert inside Egypt, the Islamist command center in Khartoum was able to call back the vast majority of the teams that had already infiltrated Egypt even before they had been noticed by the Egyptian security authorities and well before they clashed with them. The Islamist command center was also able to alert its vast support networks all over Egypt to go back underground before the Egyptian dragnet was activated. As a result the majority of these Egyptian Islamist forces, both in Sudan and in Egypt, survived to strike another day.
The Egyptian Islamist leadership took a few days to assess what to do next. Finally on July 4 responsibility for the attempt on Mubarak’s life was claimed by al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah—Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman’s organization. The communiqué claimed that the operation was carried out by the Talat Yassin commando in honor of an Islamist commander killed by Egyptian police in 1994.
In its communiqué al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah explained that the assassination attempt was part of its relentless, escalating struggle to destroy the secular regime and establish an Islamic government in Egypt. The assassination was designed to “save the Egyptian people [who] presently [live] under conditions of plight and poverty.… Our Jihad will not cease for as long as Allah’s Sharia is not implemented in Egypt.” Al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah reminded the world that it had been involved in the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 and stressed that it would kill any Egyptian leader deviating from the right way, particularly Mubarak. “Al-Jamaah, which was honored with executing the promise of God against al-Sadat for his heresy and betrayal of Islam, had to execute the punishment of God on the Un-Mubarak because he has taken the same path.” (“Un-Mubarak” is a pun on the president’s name; it means the “un-blessed.”) Al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah also urged members of the army, the security forces, and all others who were cooperating with “the dictator and his aggressive methods against Islam and Muslims as a whole to repent their sins in front of Allah, and reject all the cursed actions of the dictator.” The only way to truly achieve repentance was to join the Islamist uprising, which, the communiqué stressed, would continue. The operation “proved that al-Jamaah can strike painful blows to the enemies of Allah no matter how long it takes.”
Like the attempt on Mubarak’s life, major terrorist operations are conducted by agencies of states in pursuit of the long-term, strategic interests of the controlling and sponsoring states. The names and profiles of the organizations issuing the communiqués and claims are an integral component of the state-sponsorship mechanism. These named entities serve a specific function—they state the identity and essence of the interests involved in the operation, and they outline the logic and objectives behind these operations without the sponsoring states assuming formal responsibility.
Given the marked escalation of international terrorism and the higher stakes involved, the importance of the front groups speaking for the sponsoring states—in particular Iran and the global Islamic Revolution it is running—is increasingly central to international terrorism. But despite the evolution in the role of the terrorist organizations, actual control over the operations remains under the sponsoring states.
ON THE FACE OF IT, the assassination attempt on President Mubarak was clearly a failure because he survived and the amount of evidence unearthed was sufficient to implicate the sponsoring states. But a closer look at the operation and its aftermath suggests that both the sponsoring states and the Islamist movements extracted some gains from the attempt.
The grand design of Tehran and Khartoum reveals much about the ramifications of this operation. The Islamist leadership was convinced that the Middle East was increasingly vulnerable to Islamist subversion. They felt that escalation of the political Islamization process—from violent subversion of the population to a full-fledged political and military challenge to the regimes—was now possible in many countries.
The Islamists had correctly read the dominant regional trends from three major developments: (1) Islamism is the sole growing, developing, and truly popular populist ideology in the Middle East. It has already replaced nationalism and other Westernized ideologies. Most people genuinely believe that “Islam is the solution,” even though ideas vary about what this “Islam” is. (2) The pro-Western conservative regimes are near collapse, more from self-destruction than anything else, especially in Saudi Arabia. (3) The Westernization of the Middle East—consolidated under the heading of the so-called Arab-Israeli peace process—is at a historic turning point. The peace process itself has already proved a failure because the key demands of Israel and the Arabs cannot be reconciled, and the dominant historic trend in the region is adamant opposition to the mere existence of Israel, let alone peace with it.
Both Tehran and Khartoum were convinced that they could bring about the collapse of the conservative regimes of the Arabian Peninsula and take over the holy shrines rather quickly. The only impediment was Mubarak’s Egypt—a pro-Western nation, it was likely to protect the Saudi regime. The Islamists could only take over the Arabian Peninsula if Cairo were so preoccupied with a domestic crisis that it could not come to the assistance of the conservative regimes on the Arabian Peninsula.
But Egypt itself was on the verge of a popular Islamist uprising. The population had increasingly demonstrated a genuine desire for an Islamic regime of some sort. The Islamists intensified their penetration and takeover of society through what Egypt-born British journalist and Middle East expert Adel Darwish calls “Islamization by stealth”—a gradual domination of society while conditioning the population to an Islamic regime. The Egyptian population, who had lost faith in the ability of Mubarak’s Cairo to resolve its economic plight and reverse the overall deterioration of the sociopolitical situation in the nation, was ready for imposition of Sharia as a cure-all panacea.
This was not merely a theoretical development. Egyptian state institutions, most notably the court system, have increasingly and rigidly applied the Sharia instead of the civil law, even in cases where only Westernized and secular matters are involved. For example, in mid-July 1995 a Cairo court ruled that an Egyptian couple must divorce against their will because the works of the husband—Nasr Abu Zeid, a professor of Arabic literature—amounted to apostasy and so he could no longer be married to a Muslim woman. The higher courts and other state authorities adamantly refused to challenge the court’s Sharia-based decision.
At the same time the Islamist leadership, both the Egyptian Islamist leaders and their sponsors, were fully aware that the Mubarak regime would fight for survival. Achieving Islamization of the public at large was a far cry from acquiring the subversive and military capabilities needed to successfully take on a regime determined to defend itself by massive use of force. The Islamist leaders needed to instigate a major clash to paralyze if not neutralize Cairo on the eve of any Islamist assault on the Arabian Peninsula. The assassination attempt on President Mubarak would have served such a purpose.
Bin Laden, as part of Turabi’s inner circle and someone devoted to achieving an Islamist state in Saudi Arabia, played an integral part in formulating the plot against Mubarak. Bin Laden is still committed to the spread of the Islamist revolution throughout the hub of Islam, including Egypt, and knows that paralyzing Cairo would expedite the Islamist plan to impose an Islamist government on Riyadh.
Preferably, from the Islamist perspective, Mubarak would have been killed, expediting the Islamist popular uprising throughout Egypt and the entire region. But his survival and the subsequent implication of Sudan in the assassination plot still served a strategic purpose in the Middle East. By fall 1995 President Mubarak was leading Egypt toward a confrontation with Sudan, and at the same time he was preoccupied with a domestic cleanup. As a result Egypt was less likely to commit major military forces to save Riyadh, where the status quo was rapidly deteriorating.
Saudi Islamists did not take long to capitalize on the chaos created by the Addis Ababa operation. While the Islamist leadership was focused on the Addis Ababa operation, Osama bin Laden was patiently orchestrating his first, however belated, confrontation with the House of al-Saud.
ON NOVEMBER 13, 1995, dozens of Americans were eating lunch in the snack bar at the Military Cooperation Program building in Riyadh, a military training center run by the United States for the Saudi National Guard. At 11:40 A.M. a car bomb exploded in the parking lot in front of the three-story building. This blast blew off one side of the building, destroyed more than forty-five cars, and shattered windows more than a mile away. Within a few minutes a secondary antipersonnel bomb exploded in the parking lot, inflicting additional casualties among the people rushing to help those injured in the first explosion.
This car bombing in the middle of Riyadh was much more than a spectacular terrorist strike. This operation demonstrated the activation of a comprehensive, vibrant Islamist subversive infrastructure inside Saudi Arabia. The core of the Saudi Islamist armed movement consisted of expert cadres meticulously organized and now tightly controlled by Tehran and Khartoum. The network that struck in Riyadh epitomized the Saudi Sunni Islamist underground—a combination of Saudis from grassroots movements, cadres consisting primarily of Saudi “Afghans,” and Islamist supporters at the heart of the Saudi security establishment. The Saudi Islamist underground had evolved when the younger ulema gave up on the corrupt, collapsing House of al-Saud, and the explosions in Riyadh showed that the Saudi Islamist leadership, as well as the exceptionally well informed Islamist leadership in Tehran and Khartoum, had already concluded that an Islamist jihad might hasten the demise of the doomed House of al-Saud.
The anticipated regionwide escalation of Islamist violence began in fall 1995. As early as late October Islamist violence had escalated in Egypt, in particular as renewed attacks on police stations, trains, and tourist buses. As anticipated, Cairo was preoccupied with a new cycle of crackdowns on the increasingly effective, popular Islamist forces. By early November, Egypt was again on the verge of a popular Islamist uprising.
Both Tehran and Khartoum remained convinced that they could bring about the collapse of the conservative regimes of the Arabian Peninsula and take over the holy shrines fairly quickly. Their assumption that the only way the Islamists could take over the Arabian Peninsula was if Cairo were so preoccupied with a domestic crisis that it could not afford to come to the assistance of the conservative regimes remained valid. In early November the experts and leaders in Tehran and Khartoum concluded that the road was open to carrying out the Saudi part of the grand design.
The Islamist forces in Saudi Arabia were activated and received the green light in early November. The Islamist network operating in the Riyadh area consisted of a local support infrastructure and a small group of expert terrorists, most of whom were Saudi “Afghans.” The local network was bolstered on the eve of the operation by a few expert terrorists who arrived separately from Europe and Asia. Arab Islamist sources stressed that the heart of both the support network and the perpetrators was made up of “Saudi nationals.”
Islamist sources, as well as Saudi and opposition sources, are unanimous that the expert terrorists in command and at the center of the Riyadh operation were “disgruntled young Saudis trained in Afghanistan.” Saudi Islamist opposition sources specified that Saudi expert bomb makers “trained by the CIA and Pakistan’s military intelligence” were now providing expertise to the “Afghan” networks in the Middle East and Bosnia. The main concentrations of Saudi “Afghans” active in international Islamist terrorism were in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan.
Pakistani and Afghan sources in Peshawar also divided the network into a Saudi-based infrastructure and a quality core made up of “Afghans.” The Saudi-based cadres were motivated by home-grown considerations. These Pakistani and Afghan sources stressed, however, that Saudi foreign policy, rather than oppression by the House of al-Saud, was the primary reason for the confrontation. “The Saudi monarchy continues to play the murky game of inter-Arab politics with the unspoken and effective shield of American military support. At home, critics of the monarchy have shown some resilience despite ruthless repressive measures,” explained a knowledgeable Pakistani. The international Islamist character at the center of the Riyadh operation was stressed by all Pakistani and Afghan sources. “There are reasons to believe that these critics, mostly wedded to Islamic revivalism, have their contacts with similar movements across the Islamic world,” the Pakistani explained. He identified the key perpetrators as Saudi “Islamic radicals” frustrated by the fact that King Fahd “has sought, time and again, to impart an Islamic gloss to the unrepresentative character of his rule.”
THE TWO BOMBS that exploded on November 13 caused six fatalities, five of them Americans, and wounded more than sixty, more than half of them Americans, some critically. The main bomb, which had been installed in a white van, was constructed of between 200 and 225 pounds of high explosives, most likely the highly effective Czech-made plastic high explosive SEMTEX. The Mitsubishi 81 was professionally “cleaned,” with all serial and identification numbers thoroughly erased, even from the chassis. The bomb was activated by a sophisticated timing device with a possible remote-control backup system. The secondary antipersonnel bomb was also expertly constructed, placed, and timed to cause maximum casualties despite its small size. The bomb combination was quite sophisticated and required expertise to build and install.
The timing of the explosion proved that the operation was specifically anti-American. At this hour the Americans usually went to lunch in the snack bar at the forward part of the building while the Saudis and other Muslims were in the nearby mosque for noon prayers. The timing showed inside knowledge and lengthy monitoring of the site. The double-bomb arrangement of the operation also reflected expert preparations.
Saudi sources quietly acknowledged that “whatever quarter hatched and planned the explosion, it chose its target very carefully and displayed extraordinary professionalism in implementation. The danger lies not only in the explosion and its victims—and they are U.S. military experts—but also in the acquisition of advanced detonation technologies and the use of all kinds of advanced camouflage and security infiltration methods to reach the target.” Another well-informed Saudi source in London explained that “those who carried out the explosion have a very advanced security and political sense. They chose a U.S. target in the heart of Riyadh city in order to attract the biggest amount possible of world media attention and to cause a huge political furor.” He pointed out that the strike served as “a clear message to the Americans to the effect that the regime is not in control and [is] unstable.”
Even the House of al-Saud could not ignore or conceal an explosion of such magnitude in the heart of Riyadh. It was impossible to deny the terrorist aspect of the explosion and the security implications. The government-owned newspaper al-Yawm acknowledged that the bombing was “a desperate attempt to destabilize the security of this country.” In the United Arab Emirates the newspaper al-Fajr warned that the explosion in Riyadh indicated an expression of “ill-intentions being hatched for the region.”
Still, Riyadh insisted that the act of terrorism was aimed at a third party and not the Saudi regime. The daily al-Riyadh stressed the point. “Terrorism takes place where it is most unlikely,” because “terrorism sometimes takes place in one territory as a kind of vexation or the settling of accounts with another territory.” But Prince Nayif bin Abdul-Aziz, the interior minister, acknowledged to the newspaper al-Jazirah that the explosions were part of “this dangerous epidemic.”
Riyadh refused to confront the root causes for the emergence of Islamist terrorism on its soil. The highly authoritative al-Hayah, a mouthpiece of Prince Sultan and the Saudi defense establishment, stated: “No one believes that the blast has internal connotations, but it is true that the perpetrators have taken advantage of the atmosphere of security to carry it out.… The act is ‘alien,’ which simply means that it is foreign-made and serves a foreign purpose, regional to be precise.” Having examined possible motives of Iraq, Iran, and Israel to strike in Riyadh, al-Hayah concluded that the Saudi government could have done nothing to warrant such an act of terrorism. “That is why it is difficult to detect any genuine purpose in the Riyadh blast, except for those hostile and resentful elements whose interests reside in sabotage for sabotage’s sake.”
A closer examination of the Riyadh terrorist operation, however, leaves little doubt that it was the beginning of the long-advocated Islamist jihad against the House of al-Saud. The target selected—a U.S. military installation used to support the hated Royal Guard (known in the West as the National Guard)—fit to perfection the recent and still-building ultimatum campaign. The target matched the declared ultimatums so completely that even without any communiqué, the public would undoubtedly have associated the bombing with the Islamist opposition. The April 10 communiqué from the Islamic Change Movement had stated that the Royal [National] Guard and military police forces, as well as other forces that protected the regime, would be a target of operations. In July another communiqué clarified that although active preparations had been made since April, reaching the June 28 deadline did not mean that the operations would be carried out immediately. The actual launch of operations depended on the judgment of the Islamic Change Movement, and the deadline set for the foreign forces was an ultimatum, after which these forces would have become a legitimate target. Some of the logic in this communiqué, and particularly the reference to the American/Western forces as “Crusader forces”—that is, Christian occupiers of Muslim states ultimately to be defeated—would be repeated in the various decrees and fatwas bin Laden issued in the coming years.
In addition the style of the bombing—a major car bomb combined with a smaller antipersonnel bomb and the types of high explosives and fuses used—was identical to that taught in the Islamist elite terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Sudan. In these camps bin Laden’s small cadre of Saudi “Afghans” had been taught the art of sophisticated bomb making and techniques of bomb placement in order to launch a wave of spectacular terrorist operations starting in the summer of 1995.
These operational preparations, peaking in early spring 1995, closely coincided with the strategic and political activities at the highest levels of the international Islamist movement, activities in which bin Laden played a major role. As a member of Turabi’s inner circle, bin Laden took part in the primary decision making and policy formulation process. He was also responsible for the “public policy” aspect, helping to define the key messages of the operations and formulate the communiqués issued. Some of the key phrases that would characterize bin Laden’s “declarations of war” in 1996–98 first appeared in the 1995 communiqués.
In spring 1995 bin Laden and the Saudi Islamist leadership concurred with Turabi’s recommendations, based on thorough research done by Iranian intelligence and Arab experts operating in Khartoum, to escalate their struggle against the House of al-Saud into an armed jihad. Toward this end Iranian intelligence launched an audacious program of surveillance of a host of U.S.-related potential targets all over Saudi Arabia that would continue for at least the next eighteen to twenty-four months. Both the Riyadh building and the Khobar Towers, which were attacked in summer 1996, were included in this effort. Soon afterward Sheikh Udah smuggled from jail his lecture “Death Workmanship,” which sanctified the calls for an armed jihad against the House of al-Saud and was endorsed by the CDLR. The ensuing communiqué from the Islamic Change Movement reflected the decision by the Saudi Islamist leadership to begin the armed jihad as the only viable instrument to overthrow the Saudi regime. This was not an idle threat.
Final preparations for the November 13 operation had been so intense that there were leaks. Ranking Saudi officials later conceded that the authorities in Riyadh had been warned about an imminent terrorist action for nearly a week before the explosion. A week before the blast the Islamic Change Movement sent warning faxes to the U.S. and British embassies in Riyadh and other institutions. The Saudi and Western security authorities, however, did not take these warnings seriously. Riyadh placed the Saudi security forces on a low-level alert primarily as a pro forma response.
Highly knowledgeable Saudis in the Middle East and Western Europe speculated that Prince Salman bin Abdul-Aziz let the terrorist operation take place so that he could capitalize on it for his own personal gain. The governor of Riyadh and aspirant successor to King Fahd, Prince Salman planned to use the growing Islamist threat, the dread of the entire House of al-Saud, and his reputed ability to suppress Islamism as his ticket to power, acceptability, and ultimately the throne. According to both Saudi Islamist leaders and Arab insiders, in the fall of 1994 Prince Salman had already obtained “a personal mandate” from King Fahd “to administer the country’s affairs,” namely, internal security and stability.
Prince Salman was known to have maintained contacts with Islamists as recently as fall 1995. The CDLR’s Muhammad al-Massari insisted that Prince Salman “is more intelligent and more open than the others [in the House of al-Saud]. But he is also the most hypocritical: His overtures [to the Islamists] are only apparent and he aims really only to stay in the saddle.” Many Saudis spread the rumor that Prince Salman had allowed the explosion to happen to increase the fear of Islamist violence among the uppermost echelons in the House of al-Saud and thus his own power as the key to their suppression.
Those at the highest levels of the House of al-Saud were working feverishly to suppress a real investigation into the bombing because it would expose a colossal failure of Saudi intelligence. The main issue was the secret Saudi-Pakistani deal reached by Prince Turki back in March 1995. By fall 1995 Riyadh had begun to realize that the ISI had been taking Saudi money and Islamabad had been building on Saudi influence in Washington while Saudi “Afghans” were being trained and supported in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Iran for operations in Saudi Arabia. The car bomb that exploded on November 13, 1995, shocked the entire Saudi establishment, causing more damage to the innermost corridors of power in the Saudi government than to the buildings in Riyadh.
The various organizations’ claims of responsibility that followed the November 13 explosions served mainly to clarify and substantiate their position in the beginning of the Islamist jihad in Saudi Arabia.
The first claim was issued by a previously unknown organization, the Tigers of the Gulf. This was a bogus name for a nonexistent organization used to disassociate any legitimate Islamist organization from the bombing. The claim was important only because it had been issued by phone from inside Saudi Arabia, proving the existence of locally active Islamist cells. “The attacks will continue until the departure of the last American soldier” from Saudi Arabia, the caller said in two successive calls from Saudi Arabia. The Tigers’ use of the standard Islamist phraseology identified them as components of the larger Islamist umbrella.
Only after the viability of a communicating network inside Saudi Arabia had been established did the primary front organization responsible for the operation, the Islamic Change Movement, issue its own statement through regular Islamist channels. The primary objective of this communiqué was to legitimize the Islamic Change Movement as a component of AIM while confirming its ability to live up to warnings and ultimatums.
In its communiqué the Islamic Change Movement repeated the Tigers’ position that it was opposed to Saudi Arabia’s “total surrender to the USA and its Western allies” and its commitment to “exert all available means to evict these forces.” The communiqué repeated all the well-established objectives of the Islamist movement—its intention to overthrow the House of al-Saud, have the “invaders” leave the country, and make the nation regain its pride and dignity. To ensure that the objective of the bombing was not lost, the communiqué also vented rage at the Saudi leaders because they had become “infidel agents” who had “opened the land of the Two Holy Shrines and the peninsula of the Arabs to invading colonialist, Crusader forces.” The communiqué stressed that the Islamic Change Movement would continue to target foreign troops, the Saudi royal family, and the Saudi security forces.
The CDLR’s endorsement of both the Islamic Change Movement and the bombing in Riyadh was critical. The London-based CDLR is the largest and best-organized Saudi Islamic opposition group, and it enjoys access to the Saudi elite at home and in the West. “We found that the group, The Movement for Islamic Change, is a legitimate group and might be behind the blast,” declared Said al-Faqih, the CDLR’s London director.
The international- and state-sponsored aspect of the Riyadh operation was not neglected either. The Armed Islamic Movement, especially its Pakistan-based Islamist “Afghan” forces, moved to take credit for the Riyadh operation only after the Saudi entities had had ample time to advocate their justification.
The Armed Islamic Movement claimed credit on the next day by disseminating through AIM-affiliated venues a communiqué in the name of a previously unknown group calling itself The Militant Partisans of God Organization. The AIM communiqué also stressed that the Riyadh operation was “the first of our jihad operations.” However, AIM stressed the universal and anti-American character of its jihad. The communiqué first demanded that “the U.S. occupying forces leave the territory of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf States, and that His Eminence Dr. Omar Abdul Rahman, Dr. Musa Abu-Marzuq, and Ramzi Youssuf and his comrades be released from U.S. jails immediately.” (Abdul Rahman and Youssuf were in jail for their role in the bombing of the World Trade Center, and Marzuk was held as a HAMAS commander pending an extradition request by Israel. The request was later withdrawn because of the “peace process.”) The AIM communiqué agreed with the demands of previous groups, urging that the “Saudi authorities lift all the restrictions imposed on Muslim ulema and preachers, immediately release all detainees from Saudi jails, and apply all the rules of the Islamic Sharia.”
The AIM communiqué included an ultimatum, warning that “if these just demands are not met, the Militant Partisans of God Organization will declare its pledge to die for Allah’s cause, targeting US interests on the territory of the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf States,” a warning that would be realized in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers. The communiqué went beyond previous ones and warned of an escalation of its anti-American war beyond the region. The Militant Partisans of God concluded with this warning: “O Americans, our blessed operations will not be halted until all our demands are met, otherwise you are imposing on yourselves a relentless war … a real war that makes you know your real worth … a war to break your false arrogance.”
The CDLR stressed that the explosion in Riyadh was the beginning of an armed struggle devised to overthrow the regime. The CDLR’s Muhammad al-Massari predicted that “there will be more acts similar to this incident because the [al-Saud] regime is known for its enmity toward its citizens.” He pointed out that the bombing was carried out by “disgruntled young people who oppose the Saudi leadership,” including “some trained in military tactics in Afghanistan or elsewhere.” Al-Massari suggested that the Islamists decided to act when they did “because all important and vocal reformers and activists and preachers have been detained since September 1994 without any end in sight.” At the same time he noted that although Americans were the intended victims of the attack, the ultimate target was the House of al-Saud. Al-Massari stressed that “the question is to whom the war declaration is directed and that’s to the Saudi regime.”
A well-informed Saudi source in London explained that the audacity of the Riyadh operation was also “designed to draw attention to the fact that the arrival in Saudi Arabia of the technology of booby-trapped cars is a serious turning point which could have repercussions.” He stressed that this did not mean that future operations would be car bombs: “oil installations could become potential targets in the future to ensure the largest possible amount of world publicity.”
The most important legacy of the November 13 explosions in Riyadh was that Osama bin Laden and the Saudi Islamists, along with Iran, Sudan, and other states sponsoring them, finally crossed the line to launch their armed jihad inside Saudi Arabia. There could be no turning back. The growing popularity of the Islamists in virtually all segments of society, from the widespread popular following of Sheikh Udah to the attention paid to the CDLR in the higher strata of society, would put pressure on the militant Islamists to continue to escalate their armed struggle and terrorism until they overthrew the House of al-Saud.
Shortly after the explosion there were reports of an escalation in the terrorism campaign inside Saudi Arabia. According to highly reliable Egyptian sources, at least two major sabotage operations were narrowly averted around November 20–25. One car bomb was defused near the Defense Ministry building, and another car bomb was defused at the parking lot of the Petromin Oil Company. These bombs were similar to but not identical to the November 13 bomb, suggesting that there was more than one highly trained bomb maker in Riyadh and that these bomb makers had graduated from the same training program. In the first week of December, Western diplomatic and commercial entities were warned again of impending strikes. This time the United States and other embassies issued formal warnings. With the Saudi investigation of the November 13 bombing largely at a dead end, more Islamist terrorist strikes could be expected.
With active support and sponsorship from Tehran and Khartoum, the Islamist forces, of impressive size and capabilities, were ready for such an escalation. Ultimately, however, the primary threat of these Islamist forces was that they were providing the coup de grace in the rapidly accelerating self-destruction of the House of al-Saud.
WITH THE RIYADH succession crisis still in full swing and the initial shock of the November 13 bombing not yet over, the Egyptian “Afghans” settled scores and delivered a warning. On the morning of November 19, 1995, at 9:50 A.M. a small car, apparently a taxi, crashed through the gates of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. Soon afterward there was a small explosion in a forward reception area where a crowd of visa seekers and other individuals waiting to do business in the embassy had gathered. According to some reports, this explosion was caused by a hand grenade tossed from the small car. According to the Islamic Jihad, a martyr-operative left the passenger seat and carried a briefcase full of explosives through the gates of the Egyptian Embassy and into the visa section, where he blew himself up. Pakistani interior minister Nasirullah Babar added that the small bomb was actually carried into the embassy “by individuals known to the embassy who were allowed into the premises because the blast occurred inside the compound.” The objective of the smaller explosion was to divert attention and cause the crowd to move in the direction of the embassy’s main entrances, where they would be hit by another explosion.
Exploiting the commotion and confusion caused by the smaller explosion, a double-cabin pickup van—a blue Mazda—surged through the broken gates. It was loaded with high explosives, likely around 900 pounds’ worth. The van accelerated until it got inside the yard, slammed into the front of the main building, and exploded. The explosion created a crater twenty feet wide and ten feet deep, killing an additional nineteen, including the van’s driver, and wounding more than sixty.
Soon afterward the main Egyptian Islamist organizations—al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah, al-Jihad al-Islami, and the International Justice Group—claimed responsibility for the attack.
The first communiqué issued by al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah was a general statement of opposition to the Mubarak government, designed to stress the overall responsibility of the Islamist organizations affiliated with AIM. A few days later, as the main reason for the operation was clarified, al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah withdrew its claim for the blast. Officially the disclaimer was issued because the organization “does not believe in suicide operations.”
The second communiqué, issued by the Islamic Jihad, highlighted the operational responsibility. “The Jihad group claims responsibility for the event. The squad of the martyr Issam al-Qamari and the martyr Ibrahim Salamah are responsible.” Islamic Jihad later clarified that the two names referred to the suicide bombers who actually perpetrated the explosions in Islamabad. This initial brief announcement by Islamic Jihad was designed primarily to establish the organization as the main outlet for authoritative clarifications about the motives behind the terrorist strike.
Another communiqué, issued by the International Justice Group, pointed to continuity with the assassination of President Sadat. “The squad of the martyr Khalid Islambouli carried out today’s operation,” it said. The International Justice Group was a cover name used by the Iranian-trained security and intelligence operatives of Ayman al-Zawahiri. On November 15 in Geneva they assassinated Alaa al-Din Nazmi, Egypt’s number-two diplomat in Switzerland—actually an intelligence officer who was investigating near Zawahiri’s lair. The bomb communiqué reiterated that the International Justice Group would continue to pursue “all those involved in actions against the sons of the Islamic movement.”
Like the assassination attempt on President Mubarak, the Islamabad bombing operation was conducted under the tight control of and financed by the higher Islamist headquarters in Western Europe—Ayman al-Zawahiri in Geneva and his new second-in-command, Yassir Tawfiq Sirri in London. There can be no doubt that the explosions at the Egyptian Embassy were carried out by Egyptian Islamists as part of their rapidly escalating struggle against the Mubarak government. But the choice of Islamabad was more than one of obvious expediency. The Egyptian Islamists did have a solid network of headquarters and training bases in Pakistan, in particular in the Peshawar area and just across the border in Afghanistan. In addition, many senior Egyptian terrorists were in the camps of the Kashmiri mujahideen, as well as in facilities of the International Islamist organizations, such as Harakat ul-Ansar, and their key headquarters, mainly in the Karachi area. In principle, it would not have been difficult for the Egyptians to carry out the Islamabad operation from any of these facilities.
But the Islamists were guests in Pakistan—hosted and sponsored by the local intelligence service. Initially it did not make sense that they struck out at the capital of a state that had been so hospitable to them and supportive of their cause. The facilities and camps of the Egyptians, just like those of all other international Islamist groups, were tightly controlled and supervised by Pakistani intelligence, the ISI. Very little could escape the notice of the ISI. The senior Egyptian commanders, many in Peshawar, Islamabad, and Karachi for more than a decade now, had always had very close relations with the senior echelons of the ISI. It did seem unreasonable for the Egyptians to risk this relationship for a single bomb. And in fact, they did not risk it. The relationship of the Egyptians with the ISI dictated the selection of Islamabad as the site for a spectacular act of terrorism.
Because of the ISI’s close relations with and tight control over the Islamists, it was virtually impossible for the Islamists to plan much less carry out such an operation without the ISI’s knowledge. With Pakistan under international pressure to close down the Islamist terrorist infrastructure, the Egyptian Islamists would not have made the lives of their friends and benefactors in the ISI, who fought for their survival and sought permission for them to remain in Pakistan, more difficult by embarrassing them. The explosion in Islamabad served to confirm at least tacit support from individuals within the ISI. So although the Egyptian Islamists had many good reasons to strike at Egypt, it was the interests of the ISI—based on the internal power struggles in Pakistan—that determined Pakistan and not a third country as the site for the bombings.
The roots of the explosion in Islamabad can be found in the “legend of the coup” against Benazir Bhutto. According to the official version, an Islamist military coup was narrowly averted in late September 1995. On September 26 a routine customs check of an official car in Kohat, on the Afghan border, caught Brigadier Mustansir Billah and a colonel in civilian clothes trying to drive a car full of AK-type assault rifles and RPGs into Pakistan. When stopped, Billah tried to call another colonel in Lahore to confirm that the weapons shipment was authorized official business. The officers were all arrested anyway. The investigation led to Major General Zaheer ul-Islam Abbasi, a former senior ISI officer recently nominated commander of the Infantry Training Center in Rawalpindi. According to the official version, these two generals, along with Colonels Kiyalu, Zahid, and Amjad, were planning a coup for September 30. Using the weapons Billah was trying to smuggle, these senior officers would have tried to eliminate the high command and declare an Islamist state. More than thirty officers were arrested in connection with the alleged coup attempt.
In reality the “coup” was a setup, a purge of current or former ISI elements who had actively sponsored terrorism against the United States. Both Billah and Abbasi had cooperated with and supervised Harakat ul-Ansar, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, and other Islamist terrorist organizations. They were deeply and directly involved in Kashmiri operations. If they had wanted to, they could have acquired all the weapons they needed from stockpiles of the Kashmiri terrorists on Pakistani soil rather than trying to smuggle them in from Afghanistan. Billah was arrested delivering weapons from the Taliban to be used in deniable international operations. All the weapons and explosives in Billah’s possession could be traced to U.S.-financed supplies from the war in Afghanistan or to Soviet supplies to the DRA and not to purchases of the Pakistani government. If any of these items had been captured in the course of a terrorist operation, the Afghans would have been blamed, not Pakistan.
In early September, Islamabad had concluded that as a result of the interrogation of Ramzi Ahmad Youssuf in the United States and Fuad Talat Qassim in Cairo, Washington was likely to learn how extensively these individuals, in particular the senior ISI officers, were involved in Islamist terrorism. In fall 1995 the United States was conducting investigations in Pakistan of Islamist subversive activities. In late September and early October Pakistani politicians made repeated queries to the government about what they called the “obtrusive presence” of FBI agents in Pakistan and especially their “interference in local affairs” in Islamabad.
To maintain deniability for Bhutto, the ISI officials most likely to be implicated had to be sacrificed. Since Bhutto had insisted repeatedly, even while at the White House in April 1995, that Pakistan was not involved in sponsoring terrorism, the purge could not be related to the “discovery” of, say, “rogue elements” in ISI who were involved in international terrorism. Hence the arrest of the purged officers for plotting a coup.
Soon the real motives behind the purge surfaced. Already in early November authoritative sources in Pakistan reported that the plot had been masterminded by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) on Bhutto’s orders “to use this drama to create a ‘congenial’ atmosphere in the United States prior to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s [second] visit to that country.” It was reported that the “IB succeeded in staging this drama” at the expense of the army and the ISI, two institutions Bhutto hated and mistrusted. Evidence was presented to support this argument. For example, a Pushtun driver was discovered and punished by a tribal Jirgah (a council that acts as a court) after he admitted that in early September he had been involved in shipping weapons to and from the Taliban on behalf of Billah and the ISI. He acknowledged that he had coordinated the shipments he was to undertake, including the one intercepted on September 26, with the local authorities as official business.
The upper echelons of the ISI were reported to be “fuming.” They pointed to the previous purge carried out by Bhutto in May 1993 as a precedent. Then it had been the unceremonious “retirement” of ISI chief Lieutenant General Javed Nassir and the transfer or retirement of several senior officers because of U.S. pressure. At that time Washington demanded their removal because of Nassir’s active involvement in sponsoring Islamist international terrorism in and out of Pakistan, including the advance preparations that had been conducted in Peshawar for the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Pakistani sources connected to the ISI stressed that the September 1995 purge was little more than a continuation of the May 1993 purge. The ISI-affiliated sources also insisted that the current purge, just like that of 1993, was carried out on behalf of Washington.
Another reason for the growing agitation and fury in the ranks of the ISI and military high command was that the hypocrisy of the purge instigated by Bhutto was fully exposed. Pakistan’s continued commitment to sponsoring Islamist terrorism had been formally reaffirmed in the November 8 agreement with Iran reached during Bhutto’s visit to Tehran. In the aftermath of the visit Islamabad emphasized the importance of “the close brotherly relations existing between the two fraternal countries.” The agreement included two elements of key importance for the ISI. First, it ensured Iranian noninterference with the ISI’s Taliban operations in western Afghanistan. This understanding was immediately manifested in the launch of an all-out Taliban offensive on Kabul, which necessitated the transfer of forces from western Afghanistan, where they had been used to block Afghan forces crossing over from Iranian territory. Second, the agreement stipulated an increase in VEVAK (Iranian intelligence) involvement in, and support for, the jihad in Kashmir, greatly assisting the ISI. The flow of comprehensive, diverse assistance from Iran that would manifest itself in spring 1996 was about to begin. The agreement also provided for high-level reaffirmation of and support for the close cooperation between the ISI and VEVAK in Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Citing the recent agreement with Tehran, Bhutto’s Islamabad resumed a more defiant and anti-American line. For example, on instructions from Bhutto, the Pakistani foreign ministry announced that it would not brief the U.S. Embassy on the visit to Tehran. The statement emphasized that Pakistan “will not provide them [the Americans] any information.”
As tension built with the United States, the ISI and the military high command felt there was no longer any reason to placate Washington. They renewed their demand that the “coup” be put to rest and the purged officers released. Some of the arrested officers originally involved in Kashmiri operations were released and restored to their positions. On instructions from the highest levels in Islamabad, the ISI began active preparations to escalate the Kashmiri jihad, with the anticipated Iranian assistance, as well as to expand their own sponsorship of and support for a host of Islamist terrorist operations worldwide.
This commitment to the Islamist jihad did not resolve the “coup” issue. Not only did Bhutto refuse to discuss the “coup” issue with the high command, but Bhutto loyalists, in particular Defense Minister Aftab Shab Mi-rani, began a second wave of “coup revelations” in mid-November. This time it was reported that the plotters—now only thirteen officers—were actually planning to assassinate Bhutto, President Leghari, and other notables as well as the entire high command. Bhutto loyalists began talking in Islamabad about civilian courts and capital punishment for the “plotters.”
At the same time Islamist senior ISI and military officers provided high-level Islamist leaders in Pakistan with “conclusive evidence” that the arrests were the result of a U.S.-instigated plot. “America’s CIA provided the Benazir Government with a list of Islamist officers in the Pakistan Army four months ago. The arrests of the Pakistan Army officers [are] part of a U.S. conspiracy,” explained a highly placed Islamist official. According to several Pakistani sources connected to the ISI and the army, in mid-November numerous Islamist-leaning senior officers were genuinely convinced that the CIA had provided the “incriminating” evidence against their arrested colleagues and that Bhutto had ordered their arrest to please Washington. By late November high-level politicians would openly repeat these allegations. For example, Sahibzada Fazal Karim of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan (Niazi Group) stated, “I can say with full confidence that the arrests of the officers [are] a part of the same American conspiracy under which the CIA provided a list of Islamist officers in the Pakistan Army.”
According to Pakistani sources connected to the ISI, it was at this stage, in mid-November 1995, that senior elements within ISI decided it was imperative to demonstrate to Benazir Bhutto who was boss. They resolved to shock her and hint about “possibilities” without being implicated in coup plotting or conspiracy or even being accused of a political challenge. The best solution was to have friendly Arabs go after a target of their own interest and choosing, but in the heart of Islamabad. They believed their signal would be understood.
Circumstantial evidence supports advance ISI complicity. On the eve of the attack many Arab “Afghans” had been warned and moved from the Peshawar area, where they were dwelling in ISI-supported compounds, across the border into Afghanistan. They were now out of reach of a possible Pakistani dragnet, although in the aftermath of the bombing Pakistani authorities made only symbolic arrests of thirteen Egyptian scholars leaving Pakistan after religious conventions. Interior Minister Babar acknowledged that these Egyptians were “being questioned at the airports and will be allowed to leave after ‘screening.’ ” The only one held in the case was suspected of assisting in the transfer of funds to the terrorists. By late November, Egyptian intelligence confirmed that the key terrorists involved in the Egyptian Embassy bombing had safely escaped to Afghanistan, where they were under the protection of Gulbaddin Hekmatiyar’s Hizb-i Islami in the Samar Kheyl area near Jalalabad.
Meanwhile, the ISI used its Arab allies to ensure that the Islamists’ grievances against the overall policies of Bhutto were aired. On November 21 the Islamic Jihad released a major communiqué via Cairo clarifying that Bhutto’s Islamabad was as much a target of their wrath as Mubarak’s Cairo. The communiqué stressed that the operation was “a clear message to the secular Pakistani government that, by its agreement with the Egyptian government, which is fighting Islam in Egypt … and by supporting India over Kashmir, it will reap only failure. The Pakistani government should not think it is handing over weak and powerless individuals. These innocent people, despite their weakness, possess what America and all governments subservient to it do not possess—faith in Almighty Allah and love of death for His sake.” The communiqué bitterly criticized the betrayal of Islamists—Arabs, Afghans, and Pakistanis—by Islamabad after they had saved Pakistan from a Soviet invasion and ensured its Islamic character: “Their reward from the secular Pakistani government was ingratitude and extradition to their governments, so now they languish under torture, oppression, and maltreatment.” The Islamic Jihad concluded with a vow to continue to escalate the armed struggle against all enemies of the Islamist movement worldwide.
By late November 1995 Pakistani Islamists sensed a growing vulnerability in the Bhutto government and began raising the level of attacks. Nawaz Sharif claimed that Benazir Bhutto was “trying to convert Pakistan into a socialist state,” warning that “the Islam-loving people of the country would not let her fulfill her nefarious designs.” These threats were more than just verbal attacks. Pakistani security officials reported to Bhutto that “the impression is very widespread among the general public that their country is being turned into an American colony.” They also warned Bhutto that among wide segments of the mid- and upper-level officers and officials there was a growing apprehension about the “reported sell-out of our security and commercial interests” to the United States. These sentiments were already so widespread as to be considered cause for security concerns. There were growing signs of closer collaboration between Pakistani Islamists and their Arab “Afghan” colleagues in preparation for toppling the Bhutto government in an “Islamic Revolution.” Some of these preparations were shielded and supported by senior and mid-rank officers and officials, particularly in the security and defense apparatus, who were convinced that the Islamist wave was “on the march in Pakistan.”
The explosion at the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad was more than another stage in the escalation of the relentless Islamist jihad against the Mubarak government—a comprehensive campaign sponsored and guided by Tehran and Khartoum. The reverberations of the blast were felt through the corridors of power in Bhutto’s Islamabad, delivering a delicate “message” from the ISI and military high command. The aggregate impact of the continuation of the Islamist terrorist surge and the crackdown of Islamists within the Pakistani establishment and throughout the country would further erode both Bhutto’s already tenuous hold on power and Islamabad’s efforts to avoid sinking into Islamist radicalism. As for the ISI, they did not forget their Egyptian “Afghan” allies and the crucial services they provided. By early 1996 the ISI’s comprehensive support for Islamist terrorism would reach new heights.
The attempt on the life of President Mubarak in Addis Ababa in summer 1995 was the first major operation conducted by the Sunni Islamist terrorists on their own. Through this endeavor, followed by the strikes in Riyadh and Islamabad, the “Afghans” and their leaders came of age as a strategic force. Both bin Laden and Zawahiri now played central roles as senior commanders in a series of strategic operations of immense significance for Turabi and the entire Islamist movement. As events in 1996 would soon demonstrate, the strikes of November 1995—both in Riyadh and Islamabad—were just the beginning of the escalating Islamist jihad. Bin Laden’s performance and dedication were duly noted by Tehran, and in early 1996 Tehran would recognize bin Laden’s importance as a key leader and theological guide for the “Afghans” and other Sunni Islamist radicals. This recognition would pave the way for a new series of devastatingly effective spectacular terrorist operations later that year.