azcentral.com
Bin Laden relies on wealth
His personal
fortune is
financing holy
war against U.S.,
other foes
Judith Miller
New York Times
Sep. 16, 2001
With his gentle eyes,
skeletal frame, long
black beard and
habitual Kalashnikov,
Osama bin Laden has
become the world's
most reviled symbol of terror.
Although his connection to last week's devastating attacks in New York
and Washington has yet to be definitively established, his image has
evolved in the past decade from that of financier of terror to its most
prominent promoter, catalyst and mastermind.
His goal has been consistent for a decade: victory in a self-proclaimed
jihad, or Islamic holy war, against the United States and its allies. Now
he is suspected of having added thousands of new deaths to an already
grim terrorist toll.
As he has done before, bin Laden summoned Arab reporters on
Wednesday to a compound in Afghanistan to deny responsibility for the
stunning strikes while praising those who conducted them.
U.S. intelligence officials now dismiss such denials. While they once
hotly debated bin Laden's specific connection to the terrorism his
networks have spawned, they now acknowledge that this frail,
squeaky-voiced Saudi has mobilized hundreds of Muslims in far-flung
countries to fight and die for his embittered vision of Islam, if not for him.
But although government experts no longer dispute his influence, they
do take issue with many of the myths that bin Laden and his associates
have carefully cultivated about him.
Although he styles himself as a humble man of the Muslim people, he
is, in fact, an unlikely spokesman for the oppressed and dispossessed.
Born in the mid-1950s, the youngest of 20 sons of a Yemeni-born Saudi
construction magnate, bin Laden enjoyed a youth of wealth and
privilege. While many Saudis of his era sweltered in the desert sun,
Osama bin Laden had air-conditioned houses and private stables and
was pampered by servants. His father's close ties to King Faisal won
the family business rich contracts to rebuild mosques in Mecca and
Medina. After his father's death in 1968, bin Laden inherited about
$300 million.
Bin Laden, who graduated from King Abdul Aziz University in Jidda in
1979 with a degree in civil engineering, was not always interested in
religious politics. Associates portrayed him as a frequent visitor with
Saudi royalty to Beirut, where he drank heavily at nightclubs and wound
up in bar brawls.
Bin Laden has said he was galvanized by three events in the late 1970s:
the American-brokered Camp David peace accords between Egypt and
Israel, the overthrow of the shah of Iran in a radical Islamic revolution,
and the Soviet incursion in Afghanistan.
"I was enraged," he told Al Quds al Arabi, an Arabic-language
newspaper long sympathetic to him, "and I went there at once."
He actually spent the first years of the war between Soviet forces and
Afghan guerrillas traveling throughout the Persian Gulf raising money for
the jihad against the Soviets. He did not move to the Pakistani border
town of Peshawar until 1984, by which time Soviet forces were
encountering fierce opposition from the Afghans.
Bin Laden's money earned him instant access and popularity. Abdullah
Anas, a former Algerian ally who later fell out with him, said that
although he was not "very sophisticated politically or organizationally,"
he was an activist with "great imagination.
"He ate very little," Anas said. "He slept very little." And above all, he
was very generous, he said. "He'd give you his clothes."
Anas said that while in Afghanistan, bin Laden fell under the influence of
Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group of seasoned Egyptian militants who had
helped assassinate President Anwar Sadat in 1981. They eventually
convinced bin Laden that the jihad against the Soviet Union had to be
expanded to other Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere who were
living under autocratic "infidel" regimes.
In 1986, bin Laden established the first of more than a dozen training
camps he would eventually sponsor in Afghanistan, Anas and
intelligence officials said. About a year later with the tide turning against
the Russians, bin Laden and the Egyptians founded Al Qaeda, the base
from which they hoped to stage their global Islamic crusade.
Euphoric about their victory over the Soviets, bin Laden and his
extremist allies concluded that no secular state could defeat holy
warriors. He opened more camps and spent more of his personal
fortune, much of which the United States and its allies have now frozen,
to help finance training and indoctrination to produce militants for the
new borderless jihad.
Although the United States had worked alongside him to help oust the
Russians, bin Laden turned violently anti-American in 1990 after King
Fahd invited the United States and its allies to station forces in Saudi
Arabia to help defend the oil-producing kingdom against an invasion by
Iraq. The presence of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace
of the Prophet Mohammed and the home of the two most holy Muslim
shrines, enraged bin Laden and other Arab militants. Over time, they
came to blame the United States for Muslim woes, among them, the
oppression of Palestinians by Israel.
After Saudi intelligence officials caught bin Laden smuggling weapons
from Yemen, his father's homeland, they withdrew his passport and
pressured him into leaving the country. Bin Laden made his way to
Sudan, where, once again, his money earned him a warm welcome.
After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by Muslim militants,
some of whom had ties to bin Laden's network, U.S. intelligence began
focusing more intently on the renegade Saudi financier.
Increasingly worried about bin Laden's money and growing influence, the
Saudis rescinded his citizenship in 1994. Bin Laden intensified his
anti-Saudi invective and anti-American activities.
With the militant Taliban coming to power in Afghanistan, bin Laden
once again found fertile ground for his jihad. Three months later, he and
his entourage landed in Afghanistan in a C-130 military transport plane.
In May 1996, he declared war on the United States.
Two years later, his Al Qaeda and half a dozen other militant Muslim
movements formed an international militant Muslim coalition that
formally declared it was "the duty" of Muslims everywhere to kill
Americans.
KJC |
