The Age Of Terror
During its assault on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972, a member of the Black September terrorist squad looks out from a balcony
Photograph by Kurt Strumpf
the world trade center attack
september 11, 2001 | Photograph by Lyle Owerko
As early as 1977, TIME referred to the phrase “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” as an “old political maxim.” Terrorism has always been in the eye of the beholder, which has made covering it, let alone defining it, one of the most difficult and politically fraught challenges of the past 90 years. There are few words in the English language so ubiquitous yet contentious, so imprecise yet universally undesirable. No one consents to being called a terrorist. Revolutionaries, anarchists and jihadists are happy to be called by by those names. But a terrorist will turn the dictionary definition—one who wields violence against civilians in pursuit of a political aim—back on the accuser, saying he or the government or the system is the real terrorist.
It wasn’t always this way. The first terrorists, the Jacobins of the French Revolution, were proud of the word and the concept it embodied: reshaping society and human nature through the ruthless exercise of violence—a reign of terror—by the state. When Robespierre’s excesses made terrorist a dirty word, terrorism devolved into the work of rebels and subversives, like those who assassinated Russia’s Alexander II in 1881 and Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, sparking World War I. TIME first used the word just 21 weeks after the magazine’s founding, in July 1923, to refer to a violent imposition of state power, possibly by the troublesome National Socialist Adolf Hitler, who was a few months away from his failed Beer Hall Putsch and 10 years from elections that swept him and the Nazis to power.
After World War II, the word terrorism was applied once again to revolutionaries, primarily among Asian, African and Middle Eastern groups rebelling against colonialism. In locales as diverse as Cyprus, Kenya, Algeria, Vietnam and what would become Israel (where the Jewish-Zionist Stern Gang waged terrorist campaigns against British rule in the 1940s), independence groups started exercising extreme violence and intimidation against civilians as much to break the resolve of their colonial overlords as to intimidate rival indigenous groups. In 1957, for example, TIME said, “Algerian nationalists staged a wave of terrorism to prove that France was far from having the situation in hand.”
By the 1960s and ’70s, the word terrorism had become an irredeemably intolerable insult, yet notions of what terrorism was and who practiced it began to splinter and multiply. It was no longer the domain of freedom fighters whose grievances and goals were easy to understand; more radical, nihilistic and baffling organizations—often headquartered in countries of relative plenty—began to use kidnapping, assassinations and bomb plots to spectacular yet unclear and inconclusive ends. The Red Army in Japan, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Red Brigade in Italy and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the U.S. all figured out that modern technology and mass media could be exploited to bring disproportionate attention to their hopelessly muddled causes. Exploiting lax security that would take decades to tighten, most of these groups and many others like them made skyjacking their métier, commandeering planes at rates that seem incomprehensible today.
While this strain of terrorism has largely died off, a near contemporaneous one has come to dominate what many Westerners believe to be terrorism: the all-out strategy pursued by a disaffected, Muslim ideology in a clash of civilizations with the West. While Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization employed similar tactics since the mid-1960s in their struggle against what they saw as Israeli occupation and oppression, the Palestinian group Black September’s massacre of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich Games was a watershed—for the savagery of the attacks and for the group’s disregard for its own safety. The trend only intensified. Groups such as Hamas and Hizballah became even more confrontational and lethal as religious extremism radicalized notions of confronting the enemy.
As the final quarter of the 20th century wore on and the last colonial powers drifted from the stage, America saw itself increasingly the target. Iranian revolutionaries overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, Islamic Jihad bombed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and Hizballah hijacked TWA Flight 847 in 1985, the same year that members of the Palestinian Liberation Front commandeered the cruise ship Achille Lauro. In 1986, Libyan operatives bombed a Berlin disco frequented by U.S. troops.
These and other attacks throughout the 1990s dismayed Americans. Why didn’t everyone believe they were as good and just and benevolent as Americans believed themselves to be? Still, nothing prepared them for how the Saudi Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda would take the battle to the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2011. As TIME wrote in the issue that it produced two days after hijacked planes struck New York City and Washington, “If you want to humble an empire, it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can’t be safe.”
George W. Bush declared not just a war on al-Qaeda but a “global war on terror.” In 2009, TIME described Bush’s vision as “a global, generation-defining struggle against an enemy of vast military and ideological power that would transform whole chunks of the world.” The direct and proximate effects of that broadly and badly circumscribed war, in money and the lives of Afghans, Iraqis and Americans, are impossible to estimate.
The Arab Guerrillas
September 28, 1970
Illustration from a poster by Ismail Shammout for the PLO
A 1970 showdown between King Hussein of Jordan and Yasser Arafat’s PLO guerrillas ended in Hussein’s favor, but the conflict marked the PLO’s arrival as a regional force for decades to come.
Savage street battles raged in Amman between Hussein’s army and the fedayeen (“men of sacrifice”) of the Palestine guerrilla organizations ... Casualties were heavy. In the Six-Day War with Israel three years ago, Jordan suffered only 162 dead and wounded.
Last week, after three days of intensive fighting, reports put the casualties at more than 5,000 in a nation of 2,200,000 ... The outbursts proved what Arab leaders have increasingly feared as the fedayeen grew from a handful to an army of 25,000 full-time fighters in Jordan alone: the movement is a greater threat to established Arab governments than it is to Israel. The guerrillas were also proving once again that they must be reckoned with in any Middle East peace settlement ... Since 1968, Hussein’s successive Cabinets and the eleven guerrilla organizations that make up the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) have rubbed each other like two jagged pieces of Jordanian limestone. The government resented the fact that the guerrillas had become so strong that they were practically the joint rulers of Jordan ... The guerrillas resented the fact that Hussein’s government did not show sufficient regard for the Palestinians, who make up 65% of Jordan’s population.
In the Shadow of the Gunmen
Photograph by Sylvain Julian
In the early 1970s, terrorism flourished in Northern Ireland, where the Catholic, independence-minded IRA clashed frequently with the British army. All too often, innocents were caught in the crossfire.
Sections of Londonderry and Belfast are as desolated as London during the blitz, and the scarred faces of empty, bombed-out buildings are pockmarked from gunfire ... On the red brick walls surrounding vacant lots, the children of Belfast—perhaps the most tragic victims of the war—have scrawled afresh the old slogans of idealism and hatred: “Up the I.R.A.” and “Informers Beware” in the Catholic sections, “No Popery Here” in the Protestant areas. If nothing else, the signs are additional proof of the old saying that Ireland is a land with too much religion and not enough Christianity ... On New Year’s Eve, Belfast was rocked by eight explosions. Gunmen fired on a police precinct house, while soldiers had to break up a riot between Catholic and Protestant youths. Earlier in the week, a sniper in Londonderry killed a patrolling soldier. The trooper, 20-year-old Richard Ham, was the 43rd British soldier killed during 1971, and the 206th person since the major riots of 1969. As if to emphasize the sense of despair that pervades the province, the British command announced that children playing with toy guns run the risk of being shot. The reason for the statement was that children in Ulster these days sometimes carry real guns.
The Hearst Nightmare
April 29, 1974
Portrait by Marilyn Conover
The surreal saga of how newspaper heiress Patty Hearst went from Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapping victim to true-believing terrorist-organization member and bank robber electrified the nation.
Only three months ago, Patty Hearst was a quiet, comely heiress to a famed publishing fortune who spent much of her time preparing for her intended marriage to Steven Andrew Weed, 26, a graduate philosophy student. Kidnapped on Feb. 4 by the obscure revolutionary band that grandiosely calls itself an army but is more of a ragtag platoon, she seemed close to release two weeks ago, after her family started a free-food program for the Bay Area’s needy and aged that the S.L.A. had demanded. Then she stunned her family and friends by announcing that she had renounced them, joined her abductors, and adopted the name Tania, after the German-Argentine mistress of Latin American Revolutionary Che Guevara. Whether through conversion or coercion, she materialized last week in the role of a foul-mouthed bank robber. In the bewilderment shared by all who have followed the case, her anguished father Randolph A. Hearst exclaimed: “It’s terrible! Sixty days ago, she was a lovely child. Now there’s a picture of her in a bank with a gun in her hand.” It was still not known whether Patty had actually been won over to the band’s vague philosophy, with its Maoist cant and its dedication to deadly terrorism.
Carnage in Lebanon
October 31, 1983
Photograph by Hussein Ammar
The attack on U.S. Marine peacekeepers in Lebanon was the worst disaster faced by the Pentagon since the end of the Vietnam War. And it was a foreign policy debacle for Washington.
Only the cooks were up and about in the reinforced-concrete Aviation Safety Building on the edge of the Beirut International Airport, used as headquarters by the Eighth Marine Battalion of the U.S. part of the peace-keeping force. Built around a courtyard, the headquarters contained a gymnasium, a reading room, the administrative offices and the communications center for the battalion. It was also sleeping quarters for some 200 Marines; most were still in their cots, enjoying the luxury of Sunday, the one day of the week when they were free from reveille. Suddenly a truck, laden with dynamite, on a fanatical suicide mission crashed into the building’s lobby and exploded with such force that the structure collapsed in seconds, killing or wounding most of the Marines inside. By evening the toll, still incomplete as rescuers picked through the rubble, stood at 147 dead, 60 wounded.
Supporters of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini display a poster at a French airport as he prepares to fly back to Iran in January 1979
Photograph by Marcel Binh
Hijacking
July 1, 1985
Illustration by Burt Silverman
Modern technology, mass media and lax airline security all collided with the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 by Lebanese extremists to produce an ongoing real-life TV drama.
It was like a nightmarish rerun of the Iranian hostage drama, with a surreal twist. Once again American hostages were paraded before the cameras by their terrorist captors. Only this time they were not blindfolded, as the American embassy officials had been in Tehran, or made to grovel by bug-eyed radicals shouting “Death to America!” Rather, the prisoners, some unshaven, all uneasy, but combed and neat, were graciously ushered out to meet the press. Acting as a kind of terrorist talk-show host was Ali Hamdan, a well-groomed representative of the Lebanese Amal, the mainstream Shi‘ite faction that had in effect hijacked the hostages from their original hijackers, the two brutal gunmen who had seized TWA’s Flight 847 ... The five hostages returned and pronounced themselves healthy and well cared for ... It was as if terrorism had been refined, spruced up, made almost civilized for TV. The effect was strangely serene, almost lulling, at least until [hostage Allyn] Conwell warned in his calm drawl, “If negotiations fail, we will be returned back to the original hijackers. Let me say, based on experience, that is something that I would find most unappealing.” Lest reporters miss the point, a shadowy figure stalked in the background, hoisting an AK-47.
The Nuclear Black Market
August 29, 1994
Photo-illustration by Matt Mahurin
When Carlos the Jackal, Europe’s most prolific and wily—yet overhyped—terrorist was finally brought to heel, time recapped his career and assessed new threats on the horizon.
The first symptoms of the nuclear plague are spreading into Europe ... The emergence of a black market for the essential material of mass destruction is a historic and nightmarish challenge for the world. It makes the threat of nuclear proliferation far more urgent and increases the number of characters who could do it themselves. “We’ve crossed a threshold. You smuggle small amounts of the stuff often enough, and you’ve got a bomb,” says Leonard Spector, director of the nonproliferation project at Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Such fears have a foundation: the world has seen terrorism continuously evolve to new heights of ingenuity and depravity. This week Carlos the Jackal is in jail in France, and North Korea is using the threat of nuclear weapons to try to extort billions from its neighbors. Their juxtaposition in the news, linking the worst of 1970s-style terrorism with the brazen threat of irresponsible nuclear ambitions, shouts a warning of a different sort of terror, still indefinable but extremely frightening. The combination of brutality and fanaticism with nuclear weapons could bring about disasters almost too chilling to contemplate.
Rescue workers survey the ruins of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City after the April 19, 1995, attack that killed 168 people.
Photograph by Paul K. Buck
Oklahoma City Bombing
May 1, 1995
Photograph by Ralf-Finn Hestoft
Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building led time to ask, “How many citizens feel so passionately that their government is the Great Satan that they would resort to such evil?”
According to the complaint filed by the FBI on Friday night, McVeigh was known by a co-worker to hold “extreme right-wing views ... and was particularly agitated about the conduct of the Federal Government at Waco, Texas, in 1993”—so agitated, in fact, that he had visited the site. Indeed, as more details emerge, April 19—the date of last week’s bombing and the anniversary of the apocalyptic fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco—has only gained in infamy, intricately bound as it is to the mythologies of homegrown zealots like McVeigh ... A sense of guilty introspection swept the country when the FBI released sketches of the suspects, distinctly Caucasian John Does 1 and 2. Immediately after the Oklahoma blast, some politicians and commentators had fingered Islamic terrorists as the most likely culprits, fueling anti-Muslim sentiment and triggering calls for tougher anti-immigration measures. The feds suggested that the Does, as McVeigh seems to bear out, were members of a right-wing citizen militia targeting government agencies housed in the Alfred P. Murrah Building. Although Oklahoma police authorities were schooled in the hate groups blooming like some deadly nightshade on the fringes of society, they had always had a hard time seeing these loose organizations as a danger.
The Unabomber
April 15, 1996
Photograph by Michael Gallacher
With the arrest of Theodore Kaczynski a year after Timothy McVeigh, time wondered why the U.S. seemed to spawn a particular kind of political criminal.
American paranoias come in waves, and the past year or two have seen a surge in the dark dynamic: Waco and Ruby Ridge, then Oklahoma City, a commemoration of April 19, which has become a savage Guy Fawkes Day. Five days after Oklahoma City, the Unabomber struck in Sacramento, California, as if envious and eager to reclaim the attention. The paranoid screams self-importance; insignificance transforms itself into destructive power. The air filled with rhetoric about “angry white males,” with middle-aged militiamen in weekend camouflage promising armed struggle against Washington. The National Rifle Association complained about the government’s “jackbooted thugs.” The assault-rifle fringe could hear black helicopters descending, as if to deliver Boutros Boutros-Ghali, dark men in blue helmets and World Government ... By last week it was clear the American psychology has changed, much for the better. Certain menacing uncertainties have resolved themselves. The man who seems to be the Unabomber was arrested—another example of the way in which a demon, hitherto concealed, may shrivel when brought into sunlight. The suspect’s family turned him in because they recognized his writings—a killer betrayed by his own prose style.
A U.S. flag was raised amid the ruins of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center, destroyed by al-Qaeda on Sept. 11, 2001
Photograph by James Nachtwey
Mourning in America
September 24, 2001
Photograph by Doug Mills
Sept. 11 would drive much of U.S. foreign policy over the next decade, but in the week after the al-Qaeda attacks, America was still trying to make sense of what had happened.
Our enemies had turned the most familiar objects against us, turned shaving kits into holsters and airplanes into missiles and soccer coaches and newlyweds into involuntary suicide bombers. So while it was up to the President and his generals to plot the response, for the rest of us who are not soldiers and have no cruise missiles, we had candles, and we lit them on Friday night in an act of mourning, and an act of war ... If we falter, they win, even if they never plant another bomb. So after the early helplessness—What can I do? I’ve already given blood—people started to realize that what they could do was exactly, as precisely as possible, whatever they would have done if all this hadn’t happened ... It will take us months, years, to understand what has been changed by this, and how. Irony is no longer safe for comics; comedy itself is in tears. Three decades of popular culture have turned into period pieces: Working Girl ... and Sex and the City and The Sopranos and every opening shot of the tip of the island that was designed to say, “We’re in Manhattan right now.” Now we will see those shots and know they came Before.
Manhunt
December 17, 2001
In a campaign that lasted just weeks, the U.S. and its allies overthrew the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but Osama bin Laden remained elusive.
Last week the hush was shattered by the blasts of hundreds of American bombs, the rattle of Kalashnikovs and the roar of tanks and pickup trucks carrying about 1,000 anti-Taliban soldiers into the Tora Bora cave complex to deliver a final reckoning to Osama bin Laden ... But things did not proceed quite as planned. On Thursday, 60 fighters ventured past a front line near the village of Melawa and took up positions on a hill that offered a clear line of fire. Moments later al-Qaeda snipers protecting bin Laden began firing from a crest above. Six men were gravely wounded ...
For the Taliban, for Osama bin Laden and his dwindling legion of lieutenants, Tora Bora is the last sanctuary. The Taliban’s barbaric and medieval rule unraveled for good last week as the regime’s soldiers fled from Kandahar, their last stronghold. Some skulked back to their home villages with the idea of starting new lives. Others, like Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, went missing. As a fresh power struggle raged in Kandahar and a new Afghan government prepared to take over in Kabul, the black turbans and medieval strictures of Taliban rule began to seem like a bad dream.
A Nation on Edge
February 24, 2003
Photograph by Gregory Heisler
As the U.S. prepared for war against Iraq (even though its ties to 9/11 and al-Qaeda were nonexistent), Americans seemed to see terrorist threats everywhere.
On Sept. 11, a disaster brought us together, but anticipating the next one seems to be doing the reverse. All around the country, people see the same facts and run in opposite directions. You can find panic in a small Tennessee town and insouciance in midtown Manhattan, and vice versa. Some view taking precautions as a patriotic duty; others see it as complicity in a fearful campaign they want no part of. For some, the prospect of war with Iraq makes everything more frightening—why take action that might cause our enemies to multiply? For others, it seems only more necessary as the threat feels more real and the enemy more cunning. Some fear that the government is not doing enough to equip the police or seal the borders; others believe that it is doing too much, shredding civil liberty in pursuit of security. Some people are relieved that at least the intelligence agencies seem to be sharing some of what they know; others suspect that they are just trying to cover themselves because of how much they don’t.
Shock and Awe
March 31, 2003
Photograph by Ramzi Haidar
The Bush Administration pushed the U.S. to war with Iraq on the basis of an argument that Saddam Hussein was pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
F--- Saddam. We’re taking him out.” Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America’s Middle East allies. Bush wasn’t interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase ... The U.S. has launched a war unlike any it has fought in the past. This one is being waged not to defend against an enemy that has attacked the U.S. or its interests but to pre-empt the possibility that one day it might do so. The war has turned much of the world against America ... The hope is that the Middle East, a cockpit of instability for decades, will eventually settle into habits of democracy, prosperity and peace. The risks are that Washington’s rupture with some of its closest allies will deepen and that the war will become a cause for which a new generation of terrorists can be recruited.
Saddam Hussein Ousted
April 21, 2003
Illustration by Roberto Prada
After only 21 days, U.S. and allied forces toppled Saddam’s regime, but it was already becoming clear that winning the peace was going to be much harder than winning the war.
But the rebirth of a nation is messy and humbling, especially when it was brought about through battle. Many Iraqis were celebrating, but some were still shooting; some were pausing to rejoice on their way toward revenge. Baghdad was free for exactly one day before the first suicide bomber appeared; a few days later, 40 more bomb-stuffed vests were found in an elementary school. The Red Cross had to suspend operations after one worker was killed in cross fire, and there was little use rushing medicine into hospitals that had been stripped by looters to their last light bulb. Even as the other cities toppled—first Kirkuk, then Mosul—there were still people in Iraq who had nothing to do but fight and look for a chance to ambush a soldier with his guard down. From the comfort of their living rooms, Americans watched NBC broadcast a fire fight outside Baghdad so fierce that one wounded soldier was still firing from his stretcher, and the chaplain had to grab a rifle. Some of the biggest air strikes of the entire war came the night after Baghdad fell.
What Went Wrong?
October 6, 2003
Photograph by Brooks Kraft
Five months after the President declared victory, time looked at the mess Iraq had become and the Bush Administration’s reluctant realization that the nation was in danger of failing utterly.
The reconstruction of Iraq has proved far more difficult than any official assumed it would be. Since May 1, 170 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, as sporadic guerrilla attacks have continued. Two potential leaders of the new Iraq—Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim and Akila al-Hashimi, a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council in Iraq—have been assassinated ... Over the long, hot Iraqi summer, frequent power cuts made life unbearable for millions, while the flow of oil, which the Administration had hoped would fund Iraq’s reconstruction, was, on some days, less than half what it had been before the war. And despite five months of searching, the weapons of mass destruction (WMD), whose possession by Saddam Hussein had been the principal reason advanced by Bush for the war, are still nowhere to be found ... In the latest Gallup poll, Bush’s approval ratings dropped to 50%, the lowest since right before Sept. 11, 2001. Some critics of the Administration’s hard-liners pull no punches. “It reminds me of Vietnam,” says retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who headed the U.S. Central Command from 1997 to 2000.
The Abu Ghraib Scandal
May 17, 2004
Illustration by Matt Mahurin
News that the U.S. military was abusing Iraqi prisoners at the same notorious prison that Saddam Hussein had made a center of torture shocked the world.
Haider Sabbar Abed al-Abbadi kept his shame to himself until the world saw him stripped naked, his head in a hood, a nude fellow prisoner kneeling before him simulating oral sex. “That is me,” he claims to a TIME reporter ... “I felt a mouth close around my penis. It was only when they took the bag off my head that I saw it was my friend ...” On that awful November night, four months after his arrest, he thought he and six other prisoners were being punished for a petty scuffle.
They were herded into Cellblock 1A. The guards cut off their clothes, and then the degrading demands began. Through it all, al-Abbadi knew the Americans were taking photos ... He says he is the hooded man in the picture in which a petite, dark-haired woman in camouflage pants and an Army T shirt gives a thumbs-up as she points to a prisoner’s genitals. He says he was in the pileup of naked men ordered to lie on the backs of other detainees as a smiling soldier in glasses looks on. And al-Abbadi says he was told to masturbate, though he was too scared to do more than pretend, as a female soldier flaunted her bare breasts.
Guantánamo
June 20, 2005
Photograph by David Moore
To get Mohammed al-Qahtani—known as the 20th hijacker—to talk, the U.S. used a wide range of sometimes brutal tactics. A time report revealed how Gitmo interrogations really worked.
More than a year later, after al-Qahtani had been captured in Afghanistan and transferred to Gitmo’s Camp X-Ray, his interrogation was going nowhere. So in late November 2002, according to an 84-page secret interrogation log obtained by TIME, al-Qahtani’s questioners switched gears. They suggested to their captive that he had been spared by Allah in order to reveal the true meaning of the Koran and help bring down bin Laden. During a routine check of his medical condition, a sergeant approached al-Qahtani and whispered in his ear, “What is God telling you right now? Your 19 friends died in a fireball and you weren’t with them. Was that God’s choice? Is it God’s will that you stay alive to tell us about his message?” At that point, the log states, al-Qahtani threw his head back and butted the sergeant in the eye. Two MPs wrestled al-Qahtani to the ground. The sergeant crouched down next to the thrashing terrorist, who tried to spit on him. The sergeant’s response: “Go ahead and spit on me. It won’t change anything. You’re still here. I’m still talking to you and you won’t leave until you’ve given God’s message.”
The London Attacks
July 18, 2005
An al-Qaeda plot struck right at the heart of London. It was a sobering reminder that after four years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrorist ring still possessed the ability to hit back.
As George Psaradakis, 49, drove a No. 30 double-decker red bus through the streets of London last Thursday, there were signs that something was wrong ... Thousands of commuters had left Underground train stations and were milling about the streets looking for alternative ways to get to work. Few of them had any idea of the scale of the devastation below: moments before, three bombs had gone off in the space of a minute on London’s Underground railway. Psaradakis, whose bus was packed, had been forced to divert from the main roads into the leafy squares of Bloomsbury, home to the colleges of the University of London. At 9:47 he stopped his bus in Tavistock Square to get directions. Just then, Lou Stein, an American theater producer who has lived in London for 20 years, heard a tremendous thud from his apartment 100 yards away and ran outside ... The top of the bus was lifted off, like the top of a tin can that’s just been ripped open. There was smoke everywhere ...” Psaradakis survived, but at least 13 others died in the blast.
Baghdad: Life in Hell
August 14, 2006
Photograph by Franco Pagetti
In more than 20 trips to Baghdad, time’s Bobby Ghosh navigated countless perils. In 2006, his personal story brought a unique immediacy to the ruined nation’s dysfunction.
A knot begins to form in my stomach exactly at 8 a.m., when I step into the small Fokker F-28 jet that will take me and 50 other passengers from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad. I know what lies ahead: an hour’s uneventful flying over unchanging desert, followed by the world’s scariest landing—a steep, corkscrewing plunge into what used to be Saddam Hussein International Airport. Then an eight-mile drive into the city along what’s known as the Highway of Death. I’ve made this trip more than 20 times since Royal Jordanian’s civilian flights started three years ago, and you’d expect it would get easier. But the knot takes hold in my stomach every time ... The only thing worse than the view from the window is being seated next to someone who hasn’t taken the flight before ... In 2004, a retired American cop wouldn’t stop screaming “Oh, God! Oh, God!” I finally had to slap him on the face—on instructions from the flight attendant.
November 23, 2009
When Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim U.S. Army psychiatrist, shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, time reckoned with the likelihood that the military had a radical jihadist in its midst.
What a surprise it must have been when Major Nidal Malik Hasan woke up from his coma to find himself not in paradise but in Brooke Army Medical Center, deep in the heart of Texas, under security so tight that there were armed guards patrolling both the intensive-care unit and checkpoints at the nearest freeway off-ramp. This was not the finalé he had scripted when he gave away all his earthly goods—his desk lamp and air mattress, his frozen broccoli and spinach, his copies of the Koran. He had told his imam he was planning to visit his parents before deploying to Afghanistan. He did not mention that his parents had been dead for nearly 10 years ... And who denied him his martyrdom? That would be Kimberly Munley, the SWAT-team markswoman nicknamed Mighty Mouse, who with her partner ran toward the sound of gunshots at the Soldier Readiness Center, where men and women about to deploy gather for vaccinations and eye exams. It’s practically been a motto stitched on their sleeves—“Better to fight the terrorists there than here”—except now they were at home, and there was one of their own, a U.S. officer, jumping up, shouting “God is great” in a language he could barely speak and then opening fire.
The Plight of Afghan Women
August 9, 2010
Photograph by Jodi Bieber
The image of 18-year old Aisha, disfigured by her husband’s family, became an omen of what may befall Afghanistan’s women if the Taliban return to power.
As the war in Afghanistan enters its ninth year, the need for an exit strategy weighs on the minds of U.S. policymakers. The publication of some 90,000 documents on the war by the freedom-of-information activists at WikiLeaks ... has intensified international debate. Though the documents mainly consist of low-level intelligence reports, taken together they reveal a war in which a shadowy insurgency shows determined resilience; where fighting that enemy often claims the lives of innocent civilians; and where supposed allies, like Pakistan’s security services, are suspected of playing a deadly double game ... As frustrations mount over a war that even top U.S. commanders think is not susceptible to a purely military solution, demands intensify for a political way out of the quagmire. Such an outcome, it is assumed, would involve a reconciliation with the Taliban or, at the very least, some elements within its fold. But without safeguards, that would pose significant risks to the very women U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised in May not to abandon. “We will stand with you always,” she said to female members of Karzai’s delegation in Washington. Afghan women are not convinced. They fear that in the quest for a quick peace, their progress may be sidelined.
For Americans, one man became the face of terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001: Osama bin Laden. The son of a successful Saudi construction magnate, bin Laden founded a small, decentralized yet fanatical Islamic group called al-Qaeda in the waning days of the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan. It pursued the establishment of a caliphate with a ruthlessness and zealotry never before seen. Dedicated to resisting Western dominance, bin Laden and al-Qaeda claimed to have been incensed over the stationing of U.S. troops on the holy ground of Saudi Arabia. Even before 9/11, al-Qaeda waged its war of terrorism, bombing U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 while it was docked in Yemen. Bin Laden had been on TIME’s radar even earlier. In 1996, correspondent Scott Macleod interviewed him in Sudan, where the future mastermind of 9/11 waxed piously on the the mujahedin holy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. “In our religion, there is a special place in the hereafter for those who participate in jihad,” bin Laden said. “One day in Afghanistan was like 1,000 days of praying in an ordinary mosque.”
After 9/11, America both pursued and feared bin Laden, recycling tales of his hiding out in a cave attached to a dialysis machine or plotting new attacks on the U.S. and its allies. Expecting U.S. intelligence to hunt him down in Afghanistan sooner rather than later, TIME asked illustrator Tim O’Brien to prepare an X cover—the same iconic treatment it gave in World War II to the fall of Hitler and Japan. But it would be nearly a decade after the attacks for the U.S. to track down bin Laden, in Abbottabad, Pakistan. As TIME reported in the issue with the cover that had waited years to run, “Bin Laden was shot in the head and in the chest. One of bin Laden’s wives confirmed his identity even as a photograph of the dead man’s face was relayed for examination by a facial-recognition program.” On television on May 1, 2011, President Barack Obama declared, “We got him.”
