SALEM HAD BEEN responsible in many important respects for Osama’s rise along the Afghan frontier. He publicized Osama’s humanitarian work, contributed to his Peshawar treasury, supplied him with construction equipment, procured him weaponry, and cemented his strong relations with the Saudi royal family, which advanced Osama’s influence and credibility as a fund-raiser. With Salem’s abrupt disappearance, Osama lost an important sponsor. At the same time, he was also losing some of his sense of purpose. The cause that had drawn him to the Afghan frontier was ebbing. The Soviet Union signed the Geneva Accords in April 1988 and announced that all its forces would withdraw by early the following year. The war and the jihad would continue, since Moscow would leave behind an Afghan communist government regarded as apostate by the mujaheddin, but with blond Russians no longer pledged to serve in an enemy occupation force, the Afghan war had already drifted from righteous rebellion toward muddy civil conflict. This development had a parallel within the camps of the Arab volunteers: during the first months of 1988, the variety and intensity of disputes among the Arabs increased.
Osama’s personality and his habits of mind led him to hold himself above this fray. He followed his father’s example. He adapted his work and his attitude to please his mentors, even when they were in competition with one another; simultaneously, as a leader in his own right, he attracted a following that was strikingly diverse.
When Osama returned to the Afghan frontier from Salem’s funeral, he shuttled among several homes, offices, and camps. His wives and children lived in Peshawar, and he held meetings there with followers and comrades. He occasionally joined Abdullah Azzam at his Peshawar area preaching and charitable facilities, which still drew upon Osama’s financial and rhetorical support, even though differences had arisen between them about war tactics. Osama quarreled with Azzam, but they never broke; early in 1988, the pair formed a joint camp along the Afghan border to train and house Arab fighters. Azzam’s rivals, the radical Egyptian military and police exiles led by Ayman Al-Zawahiri, controlled Osama’s other camps. He gave this Egyptian faction $100,000.10 He spread his money around. This was an instinctive tactic of balancing, drawn from the leadership examples of his father and Arabian regents, but it also reflected Osama’s embryonic philosophy of jihad—a creed that was not particularly sophisticated but that had an inherent populist appeal. All were welcome. The compulsion of jihad was a matter of individual conscience, not a consequence of group initiation. Osama saw himself as an inspirer of jihad, not a cult leader or a dictator.
In this season of disputation, for example, one of the arguments between Osama and Azzam involved whether they should screen and select among applicants to their cause. “Abdullah Azzam wanted to choose—we do not welcome everybody,” recalled Jamal Khashoggi, who was in and out of Peshawar during this period. As an adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam sought to recruit elite and talented followers, and train them in the Brotherhood tradition. He felt this method produced more trustworthy and rational volunteers. By contrast, “Osama believed in opening up to everybody—everybody who comes under the banner of jihad is welcome.” This disagreement marked the beginning of his formal break with the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been his ideological point of entry to politically aware Islam as a young teenager at the Al-Thaghr Model School in Jeddah. As Osama put it later, he came to think that the true community of believers originates “from many different places and regions, representing a wide spectrum of the unity of Islam, which neither recognizes race nor color; nor does it pay any heed to borders and walls.” Here, too, he was emerging into his own, but as his father’s son; his camps of racially and nationally diverse volunteers along the Afghan border increasingly resembled the diverse desert camps of olive-skinned and African construction workers he had seen in Arabia as aboy.11
His inclusive outlook also compensated in part for his lack of standing as a scholar. He had long been proud and stubborn, and as he gathered confidence, he probably felt the sting of Azzam’s condescension. Azzam’s widow, reflecting her family’s sense of superiority, later noted pointedly that Osama was “not a very educated man. He holds a high school degree…It is true that he gave lectures to ulema and sheikhs, but he was easy to persuade.”12 Such attitudes had long hovered just below the surface of Azzam’s patronage. With equal subtlety, Osama now began to assert himself in reply, through his pronouncements about diversity and equality, and also by his decision to spread his financial contributions around, to include Azzam’s rivals among the Egyptians. These Egyptians had already broken with the Brotherhood, which they regarded as too cautious. In critiquing Azzam and his philosophy, they emphasized the doctrine of takfir, by which Muslims judged to be apostates could be ex-communicated or even exterminated.
Salem’s death coincided with these changes in Osama’s world on the Afghan frontier, and it added to the void created by the ebbing of Azzam’s mentorship. In Peshawar that summer, the Egyptians, in particular, saw an opportunity to ingratiate themselves by acting as his publicists. Osama “liked the media spotlight,” recalled a Saudi follower from this period, Hasan Al-Surayhi. “Bin Laden’s finances were not a secret to anyone and I think the Egyptians wanted to exploit this angle,” according to Al-Surayhi. They connected Osama with journalists in Peshawar. The Egyptian military chief at one of Osama’s camps, Abu Ubaidah Al-Banjshiri, who had fought with him at Jaji, explained the Egyptians’ thinking: Osama, he said, “has spent a lot of money to buy arms for the young mujaheddin as well as in training them and paying for their travel tickets. Now that the jihad has ended, we should not waste this. We should invest in these young men and we should mobilize them under his umbrella.”13
The meetings that gave birth to Al Qaeda occurred in Peshawar in August 1988, three months after Salem’s funeral. Notes taken at the sessions describe some of the tension Osama felt that summer: he wanted to break away from Azzam, but he did not want to expose himself by too openly adopting a leadership role. “I am one person,” he said. “We have not started an organization or an Islamic group.” The experiments in training and war that he had supported so far had constituted “a period of education, building energy, and testing brothers who came.” The most important accomplishments, Osama recognized, had come from marketing the jihad: “We took very huge gains from the people in Saudi Arabia. We were able to give political power to the mujaheddin, gathering donations in very large amounts.”14
At a second meeting, held at Osama’s house, a note taker recorded that in considering a new approach, Osama was motivated by “the complaints” about Azzam’s organization, which he had done so much to fund and shape, particularly its “mismanagement and bad treatment.” His emphasis now would be on training a separatist Arab militia, of the kind Azzam opposed, initially numbering about three hundred men. As Banjshiri had urged, Osama would use the arms he had acquired with Salem’s help before they went to waste. The camps where this training would take place would be called Al Qaeda Al-Askariya, or “The Military Base.” Al Qaeda would be “basically an organized Islamic faction” and would develop “statutes and instructions,” but it would also be a vehicle for more open-ended, nonhierarchical participation in jihad. “Its goal will be to lift the word of God, to make His religion victorious.” Recruits would swear by a pledge that made no reference to Osama Bin Laden. They would recite: