Robert Tanenbaum - Counterplay

After he’d hammered away at her body and finally spent himself, he liked to pontificate on subjects he’d learned from the great man himself, Osama bin Laden. Driving the United States out of the Middle East so that Israel could be destroyed was only the beginning of the jihad, he said-the beginning of the end of Western culture, and the reign of the one true faith.

After the Jews had been driven into the sea, the apostate regimes of Egypt, Turkey, and the most corrupt of them all, Saudi Arabia, would be toppled by revolution with the assistance of mujahideen from other countries. Then the entire Middle East would be melded into a single fundamentalist Islamic state governed by one man, the Caliph, who as the successor of the Prophet, would be the final word in all things spiritual, temporal, and military.

Once in control of the world’s most important oil supply and with nuclear capabilities already nearing completion in Iran, the Caliph would unleash the worldwide jihad in which all Muslims would be obligated to rise up and destroy the infidels wherever they lived. All those who survived but would not then bend to the teachings of the Prophet would be put to the sword. In sha’ Allah…God willing.

Although she’d hardly opened the family Quran growing up, Azzam now studied the book until she was hafiz -someone who knew the book by heart. She considered herself fortunate that whenever she ran into some troubling contradiction between the Quran and what she was being told by the leaders of al Qaeda, her mentor was there to explain. For instance, she’d noted that according to the book, jihad prohibited the harming of women and children, yet bombs detonated in civilian populations didn’t discriminate between gender and age.

“While the Quran does prohibit the killing of women and children in principle,” her mentor said, “it is also written that if their deaths are in retaliation for the killing of Muslim women and children, or to prevent such killing, then it is allowed. The Crusaders and Zionists have been murdering our women and children for hundreds of years; this is merely payback and to stop them.”

So she had accepted the deaths of noncombatants, combined with her more immediate goal of self-destruction. She begged for a suicide mission but kept getting told, “You are more valuable to us alive now. There will be plenty of time to die later.”

In the meantime, he said, the leaders of al Qaeda had a special mission for her. They were sending her to Chechnya in southern Russia. There she would meet Muslims yearning to break free from the yoke of their Russian oppressors. The Muslim population in Chechnya, he said, had a story similar to that of Palestinians. They, too, had their lands stolen and were victims of wars of aggression, first by tsars, then the Soviets, and now the army and secret police of the Russian Republic.

However, she was cautioned, the Russians were not the only enemy. Worse in some ways were Chechen nationalists who wanted to form an independent republic. These nationalists were Muslim in name only and intent on forming a democracy in which Islam would be the state religion but have little power.

Not only were these nationalists a disgrace to Islam, her mentor explained, but they represented a danger to the ultimate goal of a united Islamic state. Muslims who were lured into the evils of Western-style democracy-whether in Iraq or Chechnya-might be loath to give up their elected governments and submit to Islamic law. Therefore, any such attempts to install a democracy in the Middle East had to be stamped out.

Chechnya had been in a state of war off and on since the early 1990s. However, the secular nationalists were trying to negotiate a peace settlement with the Russians and establish their republic. It was therefore imperative that the Russians be forced to continue to fight Chechen independence. To accomplish this, the al Qaeda movement in Chechnya was planning a series of bombings and other violent acts in Russia to keep the Russian population angry and unwilling to deal with the nationalists.

However, al Qaeda had to be somewhat circumspect. It had to appear that al Qaeda was aligned with the nationalist movement; it was important that the Russians, and the Western governments, associate the independence movement with Islamic terrorism.

“Let the nationalists complain all they want to the Western press that they are being blamed for acts they do not condone,” her mentor said. “We will make sure to give them credit, along with ourselves, for every death. It is the way of these Crusader nations to lump all Muslims into the same pot anyway; they see no difference between any of us and will eventually drive even the moderate nationalists into our camp.”

So Azzam had been sent to Chechnya to work with local Islamic hard-liners to implement the strategy. She understood the importance of the assignment, but she couldn’t help but feel she’d been sent to a backwater in the struggle. However, it was also how she met Ajmaani, who claimed to be an orphan with no last name and was to serve as her liaison with the Chechens, so she thanked Allah for that small favor. It was difficult to say when professional respect had turned to lust and even, though Azzam had thought herself incapable, to love. Somewhere in the adrenaline rush of placing their lives on the line and the periods of inaction-a congratulatory touch had turned to a kiss that had turned to the wild, sometimes violent, meshing of their bodies. And then it had been easy to return to the cause, satiated for the moment, willing to die while still high on the scent of her lover.

Azzam had been nearly beside herself with both pride and envy when her brothers in al Qaeda flew the planes into the World Trade Center. More than twenty-seven hundred dead! Alhamdulillah…praise to God, she’d shouted with the others when word reached their camp in the Chechen mountains, and then more softly later in the arms of Ajmaani. She wished that she had been there, listening to the screaming of the jet engines and the passengers just before they struck the building. To be in the cockpit, shouting Allah akbar!..God is great! ” and see the frightened faces of the people in the offices and on the planes when they realized they were about to die.

Shortly after the glorious event, she’d returned for a visit to Afghanistan. She allowed her mentor to have his way with her body so that she could learn more about future plans and beg to be allowed to take on a mission of similar importance. She had actually wept-one of the few times since childhood-with frustration that others were getting the glory that should have been hers. But he’d only told her to be patient and that her time would come.

Azzam left Afghanistan before the Americans attacked in retaliation for the World Trade Center. She was disappointed that the mujahideen and the Taliban had hardly put up a fight. But she had not wept when she learned that her mentor had been vaporized by a cruise missile that had zeroed in on his cave in Tora Bora and caught him standing at the mouth enjoying the fresh air. There are casualties in every war. She shrugged and went back to planning attacks against the Russians with Ajmaani.

They had begun with bombings at Russian bus stations and marketplaces. The Russians, as they had for years only now more viciously, retaliated with their own brutality against the Chechen population, leveling whole towns, raping women, and murdering the men. When the Chechen nationalist complained to the Western press that the acts had been committed by Islamic hard-liners and outsiders, the Russians pointed out that they, too, were fighting the War on Terrorism against Islamic extremists, and the West turned their backs on the abuses.