Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East by Gwynne Dyer Read Free Book Online

signed by himself,his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri, and three other Islamist leaders and faxed to the newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi in London. It purportedly came from the World Islamic Front for Combat Against the Jews and Crusaders, and took the form of a fatwa—although none of the signatories possessed the qualifications required to issue such a religious decree binding on all Muslims:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the holy mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.” 7
    This bizarre concern among men about to commit mass murder with obtaining a religious authorization for their intended actions, even if they had to manufacture it themselves, is actually quite understandable in view of Islam’s strong emphasis on the legality (under Shari’ah law) of one’s actions. They genuinely felt that they had to produce a legal justification for mass-casualty attacks on Americancivilians and others before they launched the first of those atrocities, the truck-bomb attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in August of 1998.
    The attacks certainly did produce mass casualties (more than two hundred killed and an estimated four thousand wounded), but only twelve of the fatal casualties were Americans, and the Clinton administration’s response was correspondingly modest: merely some cruise missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan. To elicit the huge American response that al Qaeda wanted would require a much bigger death toll, and probably a shift of venue to the United States homeland as well, but was that a conclusion that bin Laden reached only after the East African attacks? It’s quite likely, as he would have been feeling his way forward in relatively unknown territory. The two years that separate those East African attacks from the vastly more ambitious operation in September 2001 are just about right, in terms of the time he would have needed to draw his conclusions and plan the 9/11 attacks.
    One other intriguing question arises about this period, in view of the fact that bin Laden spent the whole time in the camp in southern Afghanistan that his old friend Mullah Mohammed Omar Mansoor (“Mullah Omar”), then the leader of the Taliban, had made available to him. Did he keep Omar informed of his plans? He could have kept him in the dark if he had wished, as the actual preparations for the attacks were all done by bin Laden’s al Qaeda colleagues in Europe and the United States, and he controlled his owncommunications. We will probably never know the answer for certain, but a consideration of the two men’s relative positions suggests that bin Laden would have been unwise to tell Omar what he was planning to do.
    From bin Laden’s point of view, the 9/11 attacks made good sense. He was a homeless revolutionary with big ideas but little in the way of accomplishments, and the revolution he sought might never get off the ground if he could not somehow provoke the United States into invading a Muslim country. The country in question would certainly be Afghanistan, since the U.S. would quickly work out who had ordered the attack and Afghanistan was his base. Bin Laden had nothing to lose, and a great deal to gain, if the United States invaded Afghanistan.
    Now consider the position of Mullah Omar in 2001. He no longer sought a revolution; he was already in power, and he was engaged in putting the full Islamist programme into effect in Afghanistan. An American invasion might