Osama Bin Laden “was a soft person, and Abdullah Azzam was empowering him to become a symbol of the Saudi wing of the cause,” recalled Khalil A. Khalil. “Azzam saw Osama as a bridge to Saudi Arabia.”16
Sheltered Saudi teenagers and college students drilled in Islamic ideology but living far from any battlefield embraced the Afghan war as a romantic cause, a weekends-and-holidays rite of youthful passage. Religious students flew on direct Saudia Airlines flights to Peshawar to spend the last ten days of the holy month of Ramadan doing volunteer work or shooting off guns in the hills. Their commitment to the Afghans resembled that of American students who spend a few days a year hammering houses together for the poor. They might be moved by altruism, but they also sought a touch of cool. “When we used to look at the Afghan suits that the mujaheddin who returned from Afghanistan wore as they walked the streets of Jeddah, Mecca, or Medina, we used to feel we were living with the generation of the triumphant companions of the Prophet,” Al-Bahri remembered.17 For young Saudis during the early 1980s, the Afghan war was fashion, ideology, a fundraising opportunity, a touchstone of religious revival, a bonding experience—everything but the brutal combat known by the Afghans who actually fought it.
The Saudi religious establishment viewed Azzam as its bridge to Pakistan, which held one of the world’s largest Muslim populations and had long been a target of Wahhabi proselytizing. In late 1981, King Abdulaziz University dispatched Azzam to oversee the curriculum at the Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital; the campus had been founded recently with $35 million in Saudi funds.18 Azzam also consulted for the Muslim World League, an arm of official Saudi charity. Peshawar, the frontier city that served as the principal base for the Afghan mujaheddin, lay less than two or three hours away by road. Azzam’s move to Islamabad created an Arabic-speaking, Jeddah-connected wing of the Muslim Brotherhood through which Osama could channel donations.
THE AFGHAN COMMANDER with the deepest connections in Saudi Arabia was Sayyaf, a white-bearded Arabic speaker schooled in Islamic law who embodied the religious romanticism many Saudis saw in the war. Sayyaf toured Saudi mosques in royal limousines during his periodic fundraising tours in the kingdom; the Saudi government permitted him to open permanent offices to raise money. Badeeb cultivated him on behalf of Saudi intelligence. Increasingly, however, commanders like Sayyaf had to weigh the lure of Saudi money against the headache of hosting teenaged Saudi volunteers on their Ramadan holidays. It was a hassle to provide them guns, light training, and a tour of the battlefield about which they could boast when they went home, but Sayyaf and a few other commanders came to accept their roles as jihad camp counselors—it was a necessary cost of their fundraising operations. In 1984, with Badeeb’s support, Sayyaf opened the first formal training camp for Arab volunteers, called Sada, or “Echo.” It was an appropriate name—it was a reverberation from the real war. The camp was near the Pakistan border, an easy day trip for Saudi and other wealthy Gulf Arab visitors. “They would watch some militant-inspired plays that would end with the guests donating all the money they had in their pockets,” according to one Arab history of the camps. “They would also write down lists of items that must be purchased urgently in order to enable Sayyaf to conquer Kabul.”19
In 1984 Osama entered Afghanistan for the first time, essentially as a tourist. He may have visited Sada. He witnessed some fighting around Jaji, near the new Arab camp. It was the first time in his life that he had heard the concussive thump of shells or felt the blood-quickening pulse of exposure to war. The experience seemed to thrill him but also infuse him with guilt over the length of time it had taken him to put himself at physical risk in the cause he had espoused with such conspicuous pride. “I feel so guilty for listening to my friends and those that I love not to come here, and stay home for reasons of safety,” he told a Syrian journalist. “I feel that this delay of four years requires my own martyrdom in the name of God.”20
It was a refrain he would repeat for many years, while managing, nonetheless, to persistently avoid what he claimed to welcome. Certainly Azzam wished to keep him in one piece. Osama’s fundraising prowess had reached new heights.
Azzam moved to Peshawar in October 1984 to establish the Makhtab Al-Khadamat, or “Services Office,” to support Afghan fighters and serve Arab volunteers who traveled to the war. His vision for the office blended Islamic charity and marketing. His projects included Al-Jihad magazine, whose first issue, published in December, concentrated mainly on fundraising. The start-up money came from Osama, who provided initial cash infusions at an annual rate of between $200,000 and $300,000. For the first time, too, the Bin Laden family also provided engineering and construction personnel to support the war effort—an Arab volunteer who arrived in Peshawar in 1984 recalled meeting a construction engineer assigned from the Bin Laden organization. During the Hajj pilgrimage of the Islamic year 1405, which took place in June 1985, Azzam lodged for days at a Bin Laden home in Mecca. “The entire Bin Laden family were hosting people. And they had food and busses to take people,” recalled Abdullah Anas, Azzam’s future son-in-law. A document about Osama’s work from that same year describes contributions provided by the Bin Laden family foundation.21
Osama associated himself with Azzam’s radical voice, yet he remained an entirely orthodox Saudi figure, a minor emissary of its establishment. His volunteerism remained inseparable from his family’s identity and its business strategy.
IT WAS AZZAM who first introduced Osama to the concept of transnational jihad. “When the Sheikh started out,” Bin Laden said years later, “the atmosphere among the Islamists and sheikhs was limited, location-specific and regional, each dealing with their own particular locale, but he inspired the Islamic movement and motivated Muslims to the broader jihad. At that point we were both in the same boat.” As an exiled Palestinian, Azzam spoke passionately about his homeland but encouraged his followers to regard the conflict with Israel as part of a larger war waged by unbelievers against Muslims—a millenarian conflict, leading inevitably to Judgment Day, as forecasted in the Koran. Azzam’s speeches and books dwelled on the suffering of Muslim innocents. He deified Afghan and Palestinian civilians as victims of aggression and cried for revenge. The women and children dying in Afghanistan under Soviet guns and in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982 were united by their identity as Muslims. These incursions into Muslim lands gave rise to fard ayn, a compulsory duty upon all Muslims to repel them. Azzam’s ideas traced to the writings of the thirteenth-century jihadi theorist Ibn Taymiyya, which Bin Laden himself would later quote: “As for repelling the enemy aggressor who corrupts religion and the world, there is no greater duty after faith than uncompromising struggle against him.” Azzam argued that Afghanistan was the most pressing theater for such jihad, and that it would strengthen the ummah, or “community of believers,” for a later war to liberate Palestine. Here the ideological and opportunistic sides of Azzam merged in argument; as a practical matter, in Afghanistan, he could raise money and influence events, whereas in Palestine, at least for the time being, he was a powerless and not particularly influential exile.22
The 1982 Israeli campaign in Lebanon lit up the Arab world; it was a televised war filled with infuriating news and images. Osama watched at a time when he was absorbed by Azzam’s lectures about jihad and mesmerized by his mentor’s stature as an unyielding Islamic activist and an exiled Palestinian. In later years it would become common to describe Osama’s overheated rhetoric about Palestinians as little more than media-savvy lip service from a Saudi who pandered to his Arab following. That interpretation overlooks Osama’s self-conscious pride about his father’s work in Jerusalem, however, as well as his close relationship with Azzam. It also ignores his recollections, which may be suspect in their emphases but are not likely invented. “The events that made a direct impression on me were during and after 1982, when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon,” scene of his boyhood schooling, Osama wrote years later: