3 October 1993

Posted on October 3, 2020October 7, 2020 by William Arkin

In two days of fighting in urban Mogadishu, Somalia, 18 U.S. Army special operations personnel (Rangers and Delta Force operators) die and over 70 are wounded in a failed raid to capture warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. Some 500 Somalis also die in two days of fighting, and three Black Hawk helicopters are lost.

Many would later say that the Pentagon, under Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, was responsible for the incident, denying earlier military requests for additional equipment and then failing to provide backup as the disaster unfolded. Though the Clinton administration inherited the failed Somalia “peacekeeping” operation from the George H.W. Bush administration, Aspin would later admit that he made a mistake in not providing more support for U.S. forces there, and he offered his resignation in December as a result of his decision-making here, after less than a year as secretary.

It was only much later that al Qaeda’s involvement in Somalia was understood. It is now generally agreed that al Qaeda operatives “trained” Somali militia (though what substantive aid they provided is unclear). Osama bin Laden later takes credit for the American deaths and though that is an exaggeration, there is no question that the subsequent U.S. withdrawal influenced al Qaeda views of American weakness.

Mark Bowden’s account of the raid, Black Hawk Down, was a bestselling book and 2001 movie

2 October 1999

Posted on October 3, 2020October 3, 2020 by William Arkin

The CIA readies an operation to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, secretly training and equipping approximately 60 military commandos supplied by the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) establishment.

The covert action, approved by President Clinton, includes a quid pro quo, that Pakistan would train and prepare the commandos and conduct the operation, in return for the lifting of economic sanctions imposed with Pakistan’s nuclear testing.

The plan is briefed and supposedly ready to go, but it is then aborted because on October 12, Pakistan Army General Pervez Musharraf takes control of the country in a military coup. Most would later say that no ISI-sponsored operation would have been successful given that the organization was filled with Taliban and al Qaeda sympathizers.

29 September 2000

Posted on September 29, 2020September 30, 2020 by William Arkin

Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Rifa’i Ahmed Taha appear on Al Jazeera with the son of Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian “the blind Sheikh,” calling for his release from American prison. The Blind Sheikh’s 1995 trial involved a group of New York-based terrorists in the so-called “Landmarks” case (or the “Days of Terror”), plans to blow up the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and other New York landmarks. The Egyptian was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison under the rarely used Sedition Act of 1918.

The Al Jazeera video, aired numerous times starting on September 21, is believed to have been filmed sometime in the spring of 2000. It includes a direct warning by Zawahiri. “Enough of words,” he says, “it is time to take action against the iniquitous and faithless force which has spread troops through Egypt, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.”

By 2000, the al Qaeda leader and the two leaders of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ)—Zawahiri and Taha—are practically joined as one, and the leadership of al Qaeda is dominated by Egyptians. But bin Laden’s influence should not be underestimated. By all accounts, he was successful in getting Zawahiri and the EIJ to focus away from attacks on the Cairo regime and more on international (that is, American) targets. Two weeks after Al Jazeera airs this video, the Navy destroyer USS Cole is attacked in Yemen.

Zawahiri would go on to lead the last remnants of al Qaeda with the killing of bin Laden in 2011. Taha was reported killed in a US drone strike in Syria in 2016.

28 September 2000

Posted on September 28, 2020September 28, 2020 by William Arkin

A mythical pre-9/11 event gains traction, after the first two missions of an unarmed Predator reconnaissance drone are flown over Afghanistan on September 7 and 8. In review of the videos of the flights, the CIA comes to believe that Predator drones captured images of Osama bin Laden, “a tall man dressed in white robes,” during the overflights.

The 9/11 commission says that the conclusion was made after-the-fact. The drone imaged Tarnak Farms in Kandahar, a former Soviet agricultural collective taken over by al Qaeda. “A group of 10 people gathered around him [the tall man] were apparently paying their respects for a minute or two,” the report says.

CIA director George Tenet sends the video to the White House. White House terrorism specialist Richard Clarke wrote to national security advisor Sandy Berger that there was a “very high probability” bin Laden had been located. President Clinton is then shown the video. It is a mythical event, and not provable one way or another; bin Laden is never to be sighted again in Afghanistan, not before or after 9/11. The lore associated with locating bin Laden fed acceleration of an armed version of the Predator drone and a year of covert action to come up with various schemes to capture or assassinate him while at his Tarnak Farms residence east of the city.

27 September 1996

Posted on September 27, 2020September 28, 2020 by William Arkin

At Hurghada, a Red Sea resort in Egypt, two German tourists and two Egyptian nationals are killed as part of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s campaign against tourism.

On September 30, 1992, almost four years earlier, the Egyptian Islamic Group warned tourists not to enter Qena province, the location of some of Egypt’s most famous Pharaonic temples. The following day, terrorists opened fire on a Nile boat carrying over 100 German tourists, injuring three of the Egyptian crew. Between October 1, 1992 and the Hurghada attack, there were 18 additional attacks on tourism, most claimed by Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ).

Egyptian police cracked down on the Islamists and increased security around tourist sites. By the end of 1997, after a brutal terrorist attack in Luxor that killed 62 tourists, the campaign of terrorism directed at tourist sites ended. Zawahiri and the EIJ had by then begun to harmonize their attacks with al Qaeda’s global (and American) focus.

Terrorism directed at tourists was also nonexistent for seven years—until 2004, when Egyptian Red Sea villages where Israeli tourists dominated were attacked, killing 34 persons, mostly Israeli visitors. There has been a steady campaign of tourist attacks in Egypt since.

26 September 1996

Posted on September 26, 2020September 28, 2020 by William Arkin

Afghan military commander and politician Ahmad Shah Massoud abandons Kabul and flees to the Panjshir Valley in the face of overwhelming Taliban forces, which had entered the Afghan capital city from the south.

Massoud had been a powerful mujahedin commander during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and was a leader of the so-called “Northern Alliance,” the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan.

The Alliance formed after the southern-dominated Taliban took over control of most of the country. Massoud’s forces were mostly Tajiks but included other non-Pashtun ethnic groups by 2001. Two days before 9/11, on September 9, Massoud was assassinated by a pair of journalists who blew themselves up during an interview. They are presumed to have been al Qaeda operatives.

23 September 1995

Posted on September 23, 2020September 28, 2020 by William Arkin

Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the original “Hamburg four,” and the only one of four to be denied a visa for the United States, first arrives in Germany with a plea for political asylum, claiming illegal detention and torture in his native Sudan.

He is granted asylum in Germany, but in fact, Binalshibh was born in Yemen. That is the reason for his ultimately being denied a visa to the U.S. The poorer Yemenis, in contrast with Saudis and Gulf state nationals, were generally thought to be seeking to come to the United States to illegally emigrate. Denied a visa, from his German base Binalshibh would become the communications link between Mohammed Atta (the leader of the hijackers in the United States) and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the mastermind of the plot, located in Pakistan). Thus the German location would prove fortuitous, for communications between the U.S. and Germany were not routinely monitored and the German location helped the hijackers evade detection. Binalshibh would ultimately leave Germany on September 5, just days before the 9/11 attacks, traveling to Afghanistan before being captured a year later.

On September 11, 2002, two al Qaeda suspects were killed and five were captured after Pakistani police stormed an apartment in Karachi. Binalshibh is subsequently transported to “black sites” and tortured, eventually moved to Guantanamo Bay, where he is held today.

18 September 2000

Posted on September 12, 2020September 12, 2020 by William Arkin

USA Today reports that U.S. intelligence has obtained CD-ROM copies of a six-volume al Qaeda manual, believed to be used to train recruits in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The manual’s 18 chapters contain instructions on everything from basic religious indoctrination, al Qaeda membership criteria, communications and operational tradecraft, security, means of assassination, and evasion of capture and interrogation.

The manual was obtained in a search of the Manchester, U.K. home of Anas al-Libi. Al-Libi, whose real name was Nazih Abdul-Hamed Nabih al-Ruqai’i, was a Libyan indicted in the U.S. for his part in the 1998 African embassy bombings. (He died in January 2015.)

The al Qaeda manual was translated into English by the FBI and was subsequently introduced into evidence as part of the spring 2001 African embassy bombing trials in New York.

12 September 1994

Posted on August 29, 2020September 12, 2020 by William Arkin

Osama bin Laden, an obscure 37-year-old ideologue from Saudi Arabia, began to write a series of open letters as “The Committee for Advice and Reform” to then-King Fahd, to prominent princes and religious figures in the country, and to “the people of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula.”

The publicly-shared letters, written between 1994 and 1998, begin to express bin Laden’s worldview and radicalism, first in publicly speaking out about the situation in Saudi Arabia, and second, in laying out a set of grievances that prevent Arab fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan from returning to their home countries (with the end of the Soviet occupation).

Seven years before 9/11, bin Laden talks of the insults and “apostasy” of American military forces deployed to Saudi Arabia after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and even accuses King Fahd of “wearing a cross.” He addresses corruption in the country, the uneven application of Shariah law, what he claims are overtures and accommodations with Israel, and even the poor state of the Saudi armed forces, given how much money Saudi Arabia has spent on arms.

“The gulf crisis [the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait] revealed the lack of preparedness, the need for [foreign] troops, and the ineptitude of its leadership. All of these shortcomings exist in spite of the astronomical amounts that have been spent on the military,” bin Laden wrote—all accurate portrayals and a reality that persists to this day as demonstrated in the disastrous Saudi-run war in Yemen.

“The regime also imported Christian women to defend it, thereby placing the army in the highest degree of shame, disgrace, and frustration,” bin Laden wrote, references to his own brand of fundamental Islam—what would become central to al Qaeda ideology.

The letters are rhetorical, inflammatory, and inaccurate to the Western reader but also a clear indictment of the family Saud and other Arab rulers. The letters in many ways are as erroneous as they are prescient in laying out bin Laden’s and al Qaeda’s grievances, but they are also so obscure in their focus and references that they were hardly noticed in the West. They form a rich source, and yet were little known, even after al Qaeda’s early attacks on America, certainly a missed opportunity to understand what drove so many to take up arms in this new brand of international and anti-American terrorism.