Guarding bin Laden: My Life in Al-Qaeda

Introduction

In 2010, Osama bin Laden’s former chief bodyguard, Nasser al-Bahri, was persuaded by French journalist, Georges Malbrunot, to tell the story of the four years he spent in al-Qaeda; mostly in its secret Afghan headquarters, Tarnak Farm.

Al-Bahri is the only verified senior al-Qaeda member at liberty to talk about his experiences. Captured and imprisoned in a Sana’a jail in 2001, he was released two years later by the Yemeni authorities who considered him ‘repentant’. He is still wanted in 70 countries.

Al-Bahri’s dramatic, vivid and detailed account of life at Tarnak Farm, reveals the characters and relationships of the al-Qaeda leaders and their families; the day to day functioning of the organization; the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban; the incredible involvement of as the Pakistani Army and intelligence services; the personal life of Osama bin Laden and his four wives; and the build-up to 9/11.

Al-Bahri’s description of how he was first drawn to extremism provides a unique insight into what motivates young men to surrender all chances of a ‘normal’ life for the deathly cult of ‘martyrdom’.

Now working as a taxi driver in Sana’a, al-Bahri describes himself as a ‘witness to History’ and hopes his revelations about his own life as a jihadi will deter other young men from following a similar path.

The FBI described Bahri’s testimony as a ‘gold mine of highly important information’. Information he greatly enlarges on and seasons with his personal emotions and observations in this book.

Georges Malbrunot is a chief reporter and Middle East specialist at Le Figaro. He was held hostage by the Islamic Army of Iraq for 124 days in 2004.

Here is the Gun to Kill Me With!

Just before sundown, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Hafs al-Masri went to the garden to recite verses from the Koran and say their evening prayers. Sheikh Osama had stayed alone in his office, on the first floor of the safe house in Kabul that the al-Qaeda leadership moved into after the 1998 attacks on the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salam. He saw me passing and beckoned me in, smiling, ‘Abu Jandal, come in! I want to tell you a secret.’

I went up to him, and he brought a hand gun out of his thawb [traditional tunic].

‘I hope that God never wills this, but if one day the enemy traps us, and we are certain to be arrested, I want to be shot twice in the head rather than be taken prisoner. I must never, ever, be taken alive by the Americans. I want to die a martyr and above all, never end up in prison.’

‘Oh Sheikh, may God never give me a reason to kill you! May God protect you!’

Then Sheikh Osama placed two bullets in my hand and said, ‘From now on, this is your mission. You must use them to kill me if ever we are surrounded.’

As I was leaving, I felt the weight of responsibility that would stay with me from now on. Eliminate Osama bin laden in order to spare him the humiliation of being caught alive – either scenario would be a real catastrophe. Nor had he given any further details – it would be up to me to assess the level of danger he was in and decide when to kill him. From then on I was full of dread every time the alarm was raised – and that was usually several times a month!

Soon afterwards, I gave my old gun (the kind that every member of the Sheikh’s security details carries) to a colleague, and began to carry the one bin Laden gave me; I took it everywhere, along with my Kalshnikov. I never trusted anybody else with that gun. Every evening I checked that the two bullets were in the chamber. And every time I cleaned it I said to myself, ‘May God never give me a reason to carry out this terrible duty!’.

I was the only one in bin Laden’s entourage entrusted to eliminate the most wanted man in the world, on whose head the Americans had placed a $25 million bounty.

A while later, I went to the Sheikh to give him my bayat [oath of allegiance]. He seemed surprised; ‘But Abu Jandal, there’s no need for that now!’

I had the power of life or death over him. This privilege gave me reason to think long and hard about my responsibilities, especially as Osama bin Laden was always saying, ‘When I can’t hear Abu Jandal’s voice, I never feel totally safe.’

A few months earlier, I had made an impression on bin laden and his Egyptian guards when I protected the Sheikh from an over-enthusiastic jihadi. This was Abu Ashatha, a Sudanese Takfiri who had been in the Afghan Mujaheddin (brigade of Holy warriors) in the 1980s and had now returned to Afghanistan. He was known for his aggressive behaviour and his hostility to anyone he thought impious. One day, Abu Ashatha came to see Sheikh Osama. I was opposed to these face to face meetings without any security present and said, ‘Shall I sit next to you, Sheikh?’

‘No,’ bin Laden replied. ‘You wait outside.’

I went out but watched the conversation through the keyhole. Osama kept his hand on his gun and was obviously suspicious. Abu Ashatha started shouting, throwing his arms about and at one point he was so agitated that it looked to me as though he was going to grab for bin Laden’s beard. I rushed in and neutralized Abu Ashatha, throwing him to the ground, my knee in his solar plexus.

‘What are you doing? You’re going to kill him! Let him go!’ bin Laden ordered. Afterwards he gave the man a fistful of dollars by way of compensation for the thrashing I’d given him.

My adolescent dream of devoting myself to the cause of Jihad, conceived ten years earlier in Jeddah, where I grew up and first found God, had come true. But never in my wildest reveries did I ever imagine that I would one day become Bin Laden’s personal bodyguard.

CHAPTER 1 – MY PATHWAY TO JIHAD

Conflict with myfather

I was born in 1972, in the Red Sea port of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. My father, Ahmed, had left Yemen at the beginning of the 1960s as did many other families, including bin Laden’s.

Originally from the province of Shabwa, my father had taken part in the armed uprising against the British Colonialists. To avoid arrest he first fled to the North of Yemen before crossing the border into Saudi Arabia. He was an Arab nationalist who admired Egypt’s General Nasser to the extent that he even wore his hair swept back the same way as him. He had married his cousin, as is the local tradition; my mother was from an important family of Sheiks. Their tribe belonged to the warrior class, the class that fought the Colonialists.

At the time, Yemeni society was structured in different layers: the sayyed (Lords), were descendants of the Prophet and took up governmental posts; the qabili (tribesmen) were the warriors; then there were the fellaheen (peasants) and finally the akhdam (servants).

I was brought up in a middle-class family. At first my father worked as a mechanic for the British, then for a Danish multinational company, and finally for the Bin laden construction company which was very well known in Saudi Arabia. My mother was a housewife and brought up ten children. Being the eldest, I was expected to look after my brothers and sisters from a very early age. When I was young, my father was always saying to me, ‘You are my son, but you are your own responsibility.’

We were quite well off. My father and uncles owned some land and some livestock in Kismayo, in southern Somalia. These assets had originally been my grandfather’s; he had moved there in the 1920s.

My father, who had been to Europe, was a practising Moslem and often told us, ‘I can tolerate most things, but not someone forgetting to pray!’

I saw him praying five times a day, waking before dawn, his prayer beads in his hand. But he didn’t look religious: he didn’t have a beard and hated the thawb, that long robe that you see everywhere in Saudi Arabia. From the age of ten, I prayed regularly. In any case, it was impossible to get out of it. At school, all the pupils had to pray. In the street, all the shops lowered their blinds at the hour of prayer, and the old people never stopped telling us to go to the mosque.

My first political memory is of the Mecca riots of 1979. It was during the school holidays, a little before Ramadan. We were playing in the street when suddenly some armoured vehicles full of National Guard appeared. When we went back to school, the teachers told us that the rioters were misguided. At home, my father seemed ambivalent on the subject of these events which shook the Saudi regime. On the one hand he supported Mohammad Abdullah al-Qahtani and Juhayman al-Otaibi, because he thought the royal family were unjust and, moreover, hostile to Arab nationalism. But on the other hand, he condemned violence in the Holy Places of Mecca. For him, this was not the place for bloodshed.

In general, my father detested the way the Islamic fundamentalists behaved towards the general population. They used to hit people to make them go to prayers, they forced them to close their shops and go to the Mosque. My father thought the fundamentalists gave Islam a bad name. As for the Saudi rulers, he blamed them for exploiting Islam, claiming to be the only true believers when their private lives showed a lack of piety. The only one that he approved of was King Faisal.

My father’s rage against the Saudi royal family had been inflamed by a fatwa against Nasser in the 1960s. In general my father supported his Arab nationalist friends who were opposed, at the time, to the Moslem Brotherhood.

My father and I started to fall out over politics and religion. When I was in the sixth grade, my history books described the decadence of the Ottoman Empire and praised the ‘benevolent dynasty of the house of Saud’; they heavily criticised Arab nationalists who ‘drank alcohol’. My father – who had never drunk a single drop of alcohol, nor wanted any woman other than my mother – reproached me for unthinkingly repeating everything I read in these books or heard at the mosque.

‘What do you know about life? Nothing, for the moment. And what do these children of the house of Saud know about solidarity and Arab nationalism? It’s we who have been to war, not them.’

Looking back, I have to admit that he wasn’t completely wrong.

As the years went by, my relationship with him became a mixture of admiration and protest; I respected his strong personality but was terrified of his punishments. You had to be strong to deal with him!

At school I was a good student. I took my baccalaureate in Jeddah and then went to a private college where I got a diploma in administration. At that time, foreigners couldn’t go to state-funded universities. In the 1980s, private colleges were rare. Most of the education sector consisted of religious establishments, where one learned the Koran by heart, or government schools which were only slightly better.

I passed my baccalaureate in 1990, but the Saudis refused to give me my diploma, under the pretext that my resident’s permit had run out. My father was away, attending to family business in Somalia.

1990 was a significant year in that North and South Yemen re-united, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, precipitating the first Gulf War. These events produced a distinctly hostile attitude towards us.

While many other Yemenis fled, my family had to go into hiding with some neighbours for nearly two years. With no work and no residents’ permits, we went through some tough times. Only my mother could leave the house: as she was a woman, no-one bothered her. We spent the whole time indoors except for going to the mosque. Thankfully, when my father came back from Somalia, after the Iraqi troops had left Kuwait, he was able to put an end to our tribulations. But after these difficult experiences, I found myself coming round to the idea that the Saudis were deeply unfair. The only people who had shown us any sympathy were the ulemas (religious scholars) and charities.

By bribing somebody close to him, I managed to get ID cards from Nayef Ben Mamdouh Ben Abdelaziz (the nephew of King Abdullah, who had fought with the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan) which meant we could move around freely. But we were very aware that we no longer had the same rights. From then on I didn’t have the same regard for Saudi Arabia, the country which had once welcomed and educated us.

The appeal of the first Afghan Jihad (1979 – 1989)

By the time I was sixteen years old, my religious commitment was firmly established. I intended to die a martyr. ‘I have to achieve this dream’, I was always telling friends. I wanted to take up arms against the enemies occupying the lands of Islam or the Moslems. Fighting jihad had become, for me, another pillar of Islam, as important as prayer or Ramadan.

Naturally my thoughts were leading me in the direction of Afghanistan. In fact the Saudi authorities at the time were officially encouraging young men to join the holy war against the Soviet troops which had invaded Afghanistan. Donations were being collected in schools, market places and mosques; in the latter, everyone prayed that God would bless the Mujaheddin with victory. There was no shortage of financial backers either: well-off individuals, charitable organizations, Princes…there were even more of them some years later when the Bosnian Moslems needed help. Half of the young men from my quarter went to Afghanistan. I went to the airport with every neighbour who was leaving. I said goodbye and then, when I got back home, wept.

When a mujahid (holy warrior) came back, he would be feted. ‘Afghan Arabs’ were heroes and everyone wanted to hear about their exploits. It was almost as if you were meeting one of the Prophet’s followers in person. Holy War became a national cause and there were airlifts to Peshawar. An airline ticket had a 75% reduction and the rest was paid for by grants. Even clothes were provided by charities. In short, there was almost a general mobilisation to support the Afghan jihad.

At sixteen, I could have gone there, but my father was dead against it. His nationalist sympathies still kept him close to the Soviets. He viewed the Afghan Arabs in the same light as the Saudi Islamists and didn’t trust them; especially since he considered them to be in cahoots with the Americans. I argued passionately with him about that, but he used to beat me to shut me up. He was convinced that the Mujaheddin were no more than stooges for Saudi intelligence and their American allies. For me it was inconceivable that men of faith, who were prepared to sacrifice their lives, were no more than the puppets of the West. One day my father caught me just about to set off: I had my passport and all the other documents I needed. For once he didn’t thump me. He must have thought about my age and reckoned it was better to negotiate.

‘I agree with your wish to join the jihad, but I have one little question for you: why aren’t the leaders of this holy war prepared to go to the front line themselves? Why do those who call for jihad in the mosques stay comfortably at home?’ he tossed my passport at me and said I could leave if I could answer his question. I couldn’t think what to say. I stayed put.

Even if the American enemy brought us together on this occasion, my father and I still argued a lot. But in retrospect, I must admit that he was right in saying that the Americans were using bin Laden and the Mujaheddin against the Soviets. I was naive, obviously, and this was before I saw the other side of the cards.

Around the same time, I started to hear a lot of talk about Osama bin Laden, who had just returned from Afghanistan. I even attended two courses run by him, devoted to the Islamic revival among the young; but I had no direct contact with the Sheikh at that point. His activities in the Afghan jihad were well known, but he hadn’t yet started to criticize the Saudi regime. His main concern was collecting donations.

I had previously attended courses with Adballah Azzam, which were designed to mobilize for the Afghan