Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

This was not, therefore, a country known for its justice or civil rights or liberty. True, delegates to the Islamic summit were encouraged to speak their minds. Mustafa Cerić, the Imam of Bosnia whose people were enduring a genocide at the hands of their Serb neighbours, was eloquent in his condemnation of the UN’s peacekeeping intervention in his country. I had met him in Sarajevo a year earlier when he had accused the West of imposing an arms embargo on Bosnian forces ‘solely because we are Muslims’, and his cynicism retained all its integrity in Khartoum. ‘You sent your English troops and we thank you for that,’ he told me. ‘But now you will not give us arms to defend ourselves against the Chetniks [Serbs] because you say this will spread the war and endanger the soldiers you sent to help us.’ Cerić was a man who could make others feel the need for humility.

Thus even Sudan’s summit had become a symbol of the humiliation of Muslims, of Arabs, of all the revolutionary Islamists and nationalists and generals who dominated the ‘modern’ Middle East. The Hizballah delegates from Lebanon took me aside one night to reveal the fragility of the regime. ‘We were invited to dinner on a boat on the Nile with Turabi,’ one of them told me. ‘We cruised up and down the river for a while and I noticed the government guards on both banks watching us. Then suddenly there was a burst of gunfire from a wedding party. We could hear the music of the wedding. But Turabi was so frightened that he hurled himself from the table onto the floor and stayed there for several minutes. This is not a stable place.’ Nor was the façade of free speech going to lift the blanket of isolation which the United States and its allies had thrown over Sudan, or protect its more notorious guests.

Two months after I met bin Laden, gunmen burst into his Khartoum home and tried to assassinate him. The Sudanese government suspected the potential killers were paid by the CIA. Clearly, this was no place for a latterday Mahdi. Saudi Arabia stripped him of his citizenship later the same year. The Saudis and then the Americans demanded bin Laden’s extradition. Sudan meekly handed its other well-known fugitive, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez – ‘Carlos the Jackal’, who had seized eleven oil ministers at the Opec conference in Vienna in 1975 and organised an assault on the French embassy in The Hague – to the French. But ‘Carlos’ was a revolutionary gone to seed, a plump alcoholic now rotten enough to be betrayed. Bin Laden was in a different category. His followers were blamed for bomb explosions in Riyadh in November of 1995 and then at a US barracks at al-Khobar the following year which in all killed twenty-four Americans and two Indians. In early 1996, he was permitted to leave for the country of his choice – and that was bound to be the one refuge in which he had discovered so much about his own faith.

And so it was that one hot evening in late June 1996, the telephone on my desk in Beirut rang with one of the more extraordinary messages I was to receive as a foreign correspondent. ‘Mr Robert, a friend you met in Sudan wants to see you,’ said a voice in English but with an Arabic accent. I thought at first he meant Kashoggi, though I had first met Jamal in 1990, long before going to Khartoum. ‘No, no, Mr Robert, I mean the man you interviewed. Do you understand?’ Yes, I understood. And where could I meet this man? ‘The place where he is now,’ came the reply. I knew that bin Laden was rumoured to have returned to Afghanistan but there was no confirmation of this. So how do I reach him, I asked? ‘Go to Jalalabad – you will be contacted.’ I took the man’s number. He was in London.

So was the only Afghan embassy that would give me a visa. I was not in a hurry. It seemed to me that if the bin Ladens of this world wished to be interviewed, the Independent should not allow itself to be summoned to their presence. It was a journalistic risk. There were a thousand reporters who wanted to interview Osama bin Laden. But I thought he would hold more respect for a journalist who did not rush cravenly to him within hours of his request. I also had a more pressing concern. Although the secret services of the Middle East and Pakistan had acted for the CIA in helping the Afghan mujahedin against the Russians, many of them were now at war with bin Laden’s organisation, which they blamed for Islamist insurgencies in their own countries. Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia all now suspected bin Laden’s hand in their respective insurrections. What if the invitation was a trick, a set-up in which I would unwittingly lead the Egyptian police – or the infinitely corrupt Pakistani ISI, the ubiquitously named Interservices Intelligence organisation – to bin Laden? Even worse from my point of view, what if this was an attempt to lure a reporter who knew bin Laden to his death – and then blame the killing on Islamists? How many reporters would set off to interview bin Laden after that? So I called back the contact in London. Would he meet me at my hotel?

The receptionist at the Sheraton Belgravia called my room in the early evening. ‘There is a gentleman waiting for you in the lobby,’ he said. The Belgravia is the smallest Sheraton in the world, and if its prices don’t match that diminutive title, its wood-panelled, marble-floored lobby was as usual that evening the preserve of elderly tea-sipping ladies, waistcoated businessmen with silver hair slightly over the collar and elegantly dressed young women in black stockings. But when I reached the lobby, I noticed a man standing by the door. He was trying to look insignificant but he wore a huge beard, a long white Arab robe and plastic sandals over naked feet. Could this, perhaps, be bin Laden’s man?

He was. The man ran the London end of the ‘Committee of Advice and Reform’, a Saudi opposition group inspired by bin Laden which regularly issued long and tiresome tracts against the corruption of the Saudi royal family, and he dutifully sat down in the Belgravia lobby – to the astonishment of the elderly ladies – to explain the iniquitous behaviour of the House of Saud and the honourable nature of Osama bin Laden. I did not believe the man I was talking to was a violent personality. Indeed, within two years he would personally express to me his distress – and rupture – with bin Laden when the latter declared war on ‘Americans, “Crusaders” and Jews’. But in 1996, the Saudi hero of the Afghan war could do no wrong. ‘He is a sincere man, Mr Robert. He wants to talk to you. There is nothing to fear.’ This was the line I wanted to hear; whether I believed it was another matter. I told the man I would check into the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad.

The most convenient flight into eastern Afghanistan was from India, but Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight FG315 from New Delhi to Jalalabad was not the kind that carries an in-flight magazine. The female passengers were shrouded in the all-enveloping burqa, the cabin crew were mostly bearded and the cardboard packet of litchee juice was stained with mud. The chief steward walked to my seat, crouched in the aisle beside me and – as if revealing a long-held military secret – whispered into my ear that ‘We will be flying at 31,000 feet.’ If only we had. Approaching the old Soviet military airstrip at Jalalabad, the pilot made an almost 180-degree turn that sent the blood pumping into our feet, and touched down on the first inch of narrow tarmac – giving him just enough braking power to stop the jet a foot from the end of the runway. Given the rusting Soviet radar dishes and the wrecked, upended Antonov off the apron, I could understand why Jalalabad Arrivals lacked the amenities of Heathrow or JFK.

When I trudged through the heat with my bags, I found that the bullet-scarred terminal building was empty. No Immigration. No Customs. Not a single man with a rubber stamp. Just six young and bearded Afghans, four of them holding rifles, who stared at me with a mixture of tiredness and suspicion. No amount of cheery Salaam aleikums would elicit more than a muttering in Pushtu from the six men. After all, what was this alien, hatless creature doing here in Afghanistan with his brand-new camera-bag and his canvas hold-all of shirts and newspaper clippings? ‘Taxi?’ I asked them. And they looked away from me, back at the big blue and white aircraft which had jetted so dangerously into town as if it held the secret of my presence.