USAMA THE LION OF THE BATTLE OF TORA BORA. The Rise of Jihadism in the 20th century and beyond.

The destruction of the Twin Bamiyan Buddhas, encouraged by Osama bin Laden was the pivotal event that allowed for the unification of Abu Musab az Zarqawi's Jamaat al-Tawhid Wal-Jihad with al-Qaeda. In the online ISIS magazine Dabiq entitled al-Qaeda of Waziristan it was fully outlined.

‎Sunday, ‎22 ‎November ‎2015 2:24:52 PM.



Much has been written about Osama bin Laden, much of it outright lies, such as the stories fed by the CIA to certain "journalist's", about the wild cavorting of Osama in the nightlife of Beirut. And his so called 'pornography addiction", all this from strangers who knew absolutely nothing about bin Laden except what they read in the news. Interviews, book's and footage from family and intimates reveal a much more nuanced view into the life of a man, who was for all intents and purposes a recluse, a literal "Mountain Hermit", ensconced in his mountain redoubt high up in the Hindu Kush in Tora Bora. For centuries the same complex of caves, used by bin Laden and his battle-hardened al-Qaeda companions, were used by various tribal Afghan militias, those caves were also a safe-haven during the Soviet-Afghan war for the Mujahideen and their Afghan brethren during the same war. The American press had a field day during the Genesis of the war, with detailed reportage on the caves in Tora Bora as a "complex web of secret caves", that housed a hotel, hospital, sophisticated computer equipment and many more fabrications and hallucinations too numerous to mention. In reality Usama ibn Ladin is a hero to millions of Muslims globally, I will be examining him in light of Islamic history and modern day Islamism the theocratic ideology that helped shape Osama's worldview, some anecdotes from childhood acquaintances, family member's, al-Qaeda stalwarts and fellow veteran's of the Soviet-Afghan war. The impetus for Jihadism in the 20th century arguably evolved from the Iranian Revolution. The Shia's were on the global map, during the revolution with it's leader Seyyed Mousavi Khomeini as a potent figurehead and it's most able mouthpiece. Khomeini's title Seyyed implies direct descent from Islam's prophet Muhammed. Sunni scholar's, cleric's and other leader's within Sunni Islam,  seeing the success of the Shia revolution in Iran, began clamoring for a Sunni-led Islamist force, that would restore a Sunni global caliphate, "ruled by Sharia".  Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), a Sunni scholar was one such proponent for a restored Sunni theocratic caliphate. Qutb advocated jihad against  increasingly secularist, nationalistic governments, which were non-Islamic entities whose ideology flowed from European nations, who were either their former colonizers or were Communist regimes as in the case of Russia. Qutb a teacher by profession joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which was, in fact, the rule and not the exception, that pattern will reveal itself time and again, if one were to delve into a study of the most well known Islamist's of the 20th century, including Osama bin Laden, Hassan al-Banna, Abdullah Azzam, Zawahiri and a host of al-Qaeda luminaries and associates (see History of Terror). Qutb wrote several books under the tutelage of the "Guide", he labelled secular Arab government's illegitimate  (taghut) and pronounced takfir upon them meaning unbelievers, similarly today the Islamic State applies those same terms in the exact manner that Qutb did in his time to Arab governments today. The ideology that IS adheres to was forged by decades of scholarship, it is very Islamic and their rhetoric, language and dress is part and parcel of Islamic thought and culture. IS lay's claim to the mantle of being the force that will usher in the Mahdi who will restore "true" Islam and they are the foot-soldier;s in the countdown to the "End of Days". The ideology described previously was already in effect in the 6th century and frankly in the earliest day's of Islam it existed, described in full detail in Islam. Islam is a religion of sword and book, that is from the Quran, not violence for violence sake, but the establishment of a theocracy that spans the globe, which will either be erected by men willing to sacrifice their lives for such a cause, or will be the result of a miracle from Allah, it is the establishment of the theocratic kingdom of Islam that most "moderate", Muslim's disagree with what the west call's "radicalized" Muslim's, those words are the invention of western politician's, practising Muslim's are by dint of practicality fundamentalist's as they hold to the core tenet's and must follow the five pillars of Islam throughout their lives, a so-called moderate Muslim can be anyone even a person of Islamic heritage, who was born and grew up in the Wrest but does not attend a Mosque, enjoy's the nightlife, smokes drink's et al, such an individual is called a "moderate", in the West there is no such thing as a non-practising Muslim, the faith is a lifelong journey, not ending in death, but death is only a new phase in the life of a "true", believer and to die the death  of a shahada (martyr), is the highest honour indeed the pinnacle of serving Allah. The aforementioned is the belief system that Osama bin Laden and many like him today, believe in and live daily, as will be seen herein Osama and his contemporaries did not suddenly burst onto the scene as the western media would have their audience believe, these men were carefully nurtured and groomed by a variety of agencies, governments et al, Osama  was insightful enough to have seen he was a pawn in a greater plot, he rebelled against his handlers in the Saudi government and began upping the stakes in favour of global Islamic jihad to the detriment and chagrin of his former Saudi master's. Here is the retelling of that story, from a "third world" perspective if you will it will come out as the diametric opposite of any western retelling of the same mythos, epic, savage, theatrical, deeply religious, gallant, the myth of Osama bin Laden is all those and yet it is even more, it is a warning against colonialism, imperialism and interventionism all of which America is the chief 21st century propagator of and the most divisive, rancid mentor and architect of the phenomena of the failed state, with the majority of the public in the US being woefully unaware or willingly blind, to the fact that their government, whom they have put into power is the cause, of the suffering of literally billions of people around the world and the cause of the death's of thousand's of American's due to their so called "Foreign Policy". Osama's story then becomes not simply the tale of an Arabic madman hell bent on global destruction it is evolving into a cautionary tale, of a gentle soft-spoken man , humble, deeply religious, who may or may not have been destined to be called a "terrorist", since in his earlier day's he was called a 'hero" and the darling of everybody by both the Saudi's and some American's and European's. His is a tale of how swiftly the winds of politics can change in whatever direction they list, his epic will be recounted here.  For whatever it is worth, since because of him and other's that he inspired, like the Islamic State, who to this day refer to him as, "Shayk Osama", many Caribbean men and their families  are now in Syria and Iraq drawn there by the heroism, dashing, and above all steadfast faith in what they believed in, manifested by Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab az-Zarqawi and many others too numerous to name. Today the ideology has surpassed books and cassette tapes it has found new, more powerful wings, the wings of modern technology, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, downloadable pdf files of Inspire and Dabiq, if you've never heard of those online journal's published by al-Qaeda and IS you've been living under a rock, your children might have though and may be fan boy's and girl's of these movement's. Osama is now a spiritual force who is still being harnessed to inspire and incite, to the greater jihad, that of the establishment of a global Sunni caliphate, in what many believe will be an end of day's glorious fight for world domination, that is what the men and women going to Syria and Iraq are signing up for, and if they won't see it then their children will, as for them they are content to,"die in the land of the Khilafa and enter Jannah under the shade of swords".   Qutb wrote in the 1960's While he languished in an Egyptian prison the following: "We must wage total revolution against the sovereignty of human beings . . . we must provoke a total revolt throughout the world and drive out all usurpers . . . that means the destruction of the kingdom of man so that the kingdom of God can replace it on earth".  After al-Banna the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was assassinated, Qutb assumed a  leadership role as a scholar and key thinker within the movement. Under Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser, the Muslim Brotherhood saw  a period of great persecution and repression. Brotherhood member's were arrested and summarily executed of course without trial. Qutb kept writing while imprisoned and produced one of his most acclaimed works while imprisoned under, Nasser's regime. Qutb produced a revolutionary Islamic treatise wherein he laid down the following: " The Spoils (al-Anfal), he noted that "jihad is not a defensive war, as some Muslims believe; it is an offensive one".


In his most famous work "Milestones", he laid out his jihadist ideology in stark detail, as described previously, calling for a revolution on human sovereignty and the destruction of man-made kingdom's, the total abnegation of man-made law and the establishments of a theocratic global order under Islam.

Sayyid Qutb was hanged in August 1966 after he was accused of conspiring against the state.
The Muslim Brotherhood employed and still employ today, a strategy of proselytization and jihad. In contemporary times, the Brotherhood's influence can be felt, throughout the Muslim world and extends even into: "the lands of the infidels".
The single modern galvanizing event, that moved modern Islamism from the realm of ideology and scholarship, was the Soviet-Afghan war.

The December 24 seizure by Russian Special Forces (Spetsnaz), of the Afghan airport in Kabul, cleared the way for the Russian army to conquer and occupy territory in Afghanistan. Tribal leaders put their ethnic and tribal interest's aside, all for the greater good of Afghanistan or so they claimed. The Muslim Umma rallied around their Muslim brethren in Afghanistan and a global, jihadist movement started, with ten's of thousand's of young Muslim men, making hijra to Afghanistan, willing to become a martyr in the cause of Islam, as they saw it. For most of the mujahideen, the war was about driving the godless, infidel Russian's out of a Muslim country, for the Afghan's the war, was literally about the preservation of kith and kin. Whereas the mujahideen wanted to become martyr's in the war, Afghan's wanted to rid their land of the Russian's.

Arab volunteers went to Afghanistan in droves often assisted by their governments. The following is from History of Terror: The Roots of Radical Islam pg 293. "During the 1980s, more than 20,000 Muslims from the Middle East and the Maghreb were involved in jihad. Most of them were recruited by transnational Islamic networks, headed up by radical ulama with ties to the World Islamic League and to Wahabi foundations, who secured the necessary fatwas to ensure support for the anti-Soviet jihad from recognized theologians.The largest battalions came from the Middle East. Their numbers likely included approximately 6,000 Saudis, 4,000 Egyptians, and 1,000 Yemenis,
as well as several hundred Syrians and the same number of Jordanians of Palestinian origin. A smaller number came from the Maghreb—maybe 2,000 Algerians and a few hundred Tunisians, Moroccans and Libyans. Some hailed from farther afield, including a few Westerners and
a handful of Indonesians, Malaysians, Filipinos, and Sudanese".


As I have indicated previously the term "radical Islam", is really superfluous, since people referred to as radical, were later demoted to "moderate" and vice versa as it suited the western or more accurately Anglo-American or Anglo-European creator's i.e. Caucasians when it suited their causes respectively, even Osama bin Laden was considered at one point to be a "moderate". A recent case in point is the "Free Syrian Army"(FSA), the FSA is said to be populated by "moderates", which are supposedly the opposite of "radical's", yet when the FSA want's in their own words "the best fighters", they often cooperate with the Jabhat al-Nusra a known al-Qaeda outfit in Syria. David Petraeus recently called for al-Qaeda to be used by the US in their "fight against ISIS", to use al-Qaeda, the US would have to use the term "moderates", in reference to al-Qaeda and remove it from their list of international terrorist outfits. The paradox and insanity in the previous is almost too much for words, suffice it to say that, the term moderate is a political term of expediency invented by western technocrats to suit their governments agendas per the Muslim community in the west and around the globe. To date, all western attempts to control, curb and curtail Islamism has been abysmal failures and have achieved the exact opposite of what they claimed to set out to achieve in the first place.

During the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, one organization stood head and shoulders above the rest, the Makhtab al-Khidmat, was a joint venture of both Azzam and his protege Osama bin Laden. What follows is excerpted from a History of Terror: "Considerable and predictable funding was required to accommodate and organize all of the volunteers and provide them with combat training.The necessary resources were provided by the Saudi authorities or by wealthy private donors. A number of Wahabi nongovernmental organizations—restructured or created for that very purpose—were used to collect such funds anonymously. Furthermore, the hundreds of millions of dollars that were circulating discreetly in circles populated by arms dealers and traffickers—an ideal situation for embezzlement to takeplace—had to be managed by men who could be trusted.The task was entrusted to a Jordanian of Palestinian origin AbdallahAzzam (1941–1979, Azzam, who had fought in the 1967 war, against Israel".

Osama bin Laden was "sent to Afghanistan as an envoy and emissary of the al-Saud royal family". The bin Laden name was a household in Saudi Arabia, no one else came equipped with the prestige of Osama, but he had something beyond his family name, he had charisma and from numerous accounts an abiding reverence for his Sunni beliefs and a steadfast faith in God of Muhammed, a trait which earned him respect from his contemporaries. A natural leader Osama was a good fit for the organization that Azzam was building at the time. Osama was also an understudy of Muhammed Qutb, the younger brother of the Qutb previously examined  herein. The organization that Azzam built along with Osama bin Laden was called, Maktab al-Khidmat ul-Mujahideen ul-Arab (MUKUB), or Bureau of Services for Arab Mujahideen.

MUKUB published an Arab-language magazine called Al-jihad, the magazine, of course, was a vehicle for Islamist ideology and also a platform for Azzam.
In what may have been a transcript from a sermon by him entitled, "Join the Caravan", which appeared in the aforementioned magazine, Azzam advocated the following:  He claimed that mujahideen combat in  Afghanistan was an individual obligation for all Muslims, who were duty-bound, if they could not actually participate, to provide financial support for it. He stated that:" when the enemy has penetrated into Islamic territory, jihad becomes an individual requirement.  No parental permission is necessary. Giving money does not exempt anyone from physical jihad, no matter how great the sum. Jihad is a lifelong obligation".

What follows is from a History of Terror: "He (Azzam), obtained religious backing from eight high-ranking ulama, including Sheikh Bin Baz, who would become Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, and Dr. Saleh Abu Ismail, a member of Egypt's Majlis al-Shura.  He regularly welcomed to Peshawar charismatic leaders of the jihadist movement such as Egypt's Omar Abdel Rahman (the Blind Sheik). This period marked the emergence in Azzam's' writings of the concept of a standing international jihad army That obligation will not end with victory in Afghanistan, and jihad will remain an individual obligation until we have reconquered all Muslim lands and reinstalled Islam:we still have ahead of us Palestine, Bukhara, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, Yemen, Tashkent, and Andalusia". The reader may have noted that most of the infamous names in global terrorism start appearing quite early in the Afghan conflict.

A new era unfolded on November 24, 1989, when a car bomb exploded ending  the lives of Abdullah Azzam and his two sons. Some pointed fingers in the direction of bin Laden, others at the Saudi intelligence agencies, who wanted to be rid of Azzam before he could bring his thousand's of jihadist's to wage war on them. Abdullah Azzam as a result of his violent end became a martyr in jihadist lore and served even in death as an example, of the type of leadership that was effective in waging a modern jihadist campaign.

WILL BE CONTINUED: Part Two The Battle of Tora Bora.