Tag: Kuwait

22 December 1989

Posted on by William Arkin
South Yemen

 

Osama bin Laden approaches Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, head of the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, with a plan to use Arab mujahedin from Afghanistan to overthrow the Marxist government in South Yemen.

Turki rejects his proposal, but bin Laden reportedly organizes fighters anyhow under the al Qaeda flag, and then (working with tribal leaders) makes a series of attacks in South Yemen. The attacks are so damaging and threatening that Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh travels to Saudi Arabia to ask King Fahd to get bin Laden under control. The King then himself instructs bin Laden to stay out of Yemeni affairs, and Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz al Saud (then the minister of the interior) demands bin Laden’s passport.

Less than a year later, Iraq invades Kuwait and bin Laden’s views of Saudi Arabia are forever transformed, with King Fahd inviting U.S. military forces to deploy to Saudi soil—a sacrilege to bin Laden that represents a new set of “crusaders” entering the lands of Islam.

18 December 1986

Posted on by William Arkin
McNair Hall at North Carolina A&T State University

 

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) graduates with an engineering degree from North Carolina A&T University, Jesse Jackson’s alma mater.

KSM had entered the United States four years earlier, first attending Chowan College in Murfreesboro to improve his English language proficiency. During his time in America, KSM mostly hung out with other Middle Eastern students. But he also attended lectures at East Coast mosques promoting the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which had invaded the country at the end of 1979. Those lectures are now thought to have included fundraising trips by Aymen al-Zawahiri and Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, who were free to travel in the U.S. (Azzam was Osama bin Laden’s intellectual mentor.)

With a Pakistani passport, but having grown up in Kuwait (as the son of an oil industry guest worker), KSM was already a man of the world. And after he graduated, he went from Kuwait to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he joined his brother, Zahed, who ran one of many NGOs providing aid and relief for fighters and refugees from Afghanistan.

10 October 1990

Posted on by William Arkin
Nayirah testifies before Congress in 1990

 

The era of modern media manipulation begins with the appearance of 15-year-old Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ, a Kuwaiti refugee who told the Congressional Human Rights Caucus a harrowing story about Iraqi atrocities in occupied Kuwait. Nayirah speaks of witnessing Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, stealing the incubators and leaving the babies to die. Amnesty International corroborates the story. It is a front page sensation, with others repeating similar tales.

It turn out that her testimony, representing Citizens for a Free Kuwait, was paid for by the Kuwait government in exile through a contract with Hill & Knowlton, to create an information campaign that would solidify any flagging support for a U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Rick MacArthur revealed in 1992 that  Nayirah was really the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and that while there were abundant examples of Iraqi war crimes in Kuwait, the incident likely never happened.