9/11
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Welcome to the first episode of Conflicted, a new podcast from Message Heard. My name is Thomas Small, and I'll be your host. So, the Middle East, the Muslim world, it's a place of conflict, endless conflict. Sometimes people think they know more than they do about these conflicts. Sometimes they know that they don't know anything about them, but they wish to know.

What we're going to do is try to unpick these conflicts the best we can, expose the ideological underpinnings of the sides involved, contextualize them historically, add perspective from our personal experiences living in and studying the Middle East, so that hopefully at the end of each episode you'll come away thinking, "Aha, I understand. This is a hard thing to resolve. These conflicts exist for a reason."

It's not necessarily a question of good versus evil. It's a very nuanced problem. You're going to hear from my co-host, Eamon Dean, in just a minute. A man who at one point had decided to commit himself to Al-Qaeda. There were 10 minutes walk to Khaled's house. My plan was to say goodbye. By the time I knocked on his door, my plan has changed. I told him I'm going to go with you.

Let's get into it.

We'll start this series with an event that catapulted the conflicts of the Middle East into the global consciousness, the Twin Tower attacks on September 11th. We're happy. We're going.

Okay. Right, so we're just starting. Yeah, good. Amon Dean. How do I introduce Amon Dean? There is literally no one on planet Earth like Amon Dean. Saudi, born, but Bahraini nationality. Grew up in Kobar, an oil suburb of the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. From a young age, was very pious, especially following the death of his father, I think that's right, and then his mother.

Became a jihadist, first in Bosnia, then in other theaters, ending up through the vagaries of personal history. In the arms of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, where following the East African embassy bombings of 1998...

he decided to get out. But unbeknownst to him, God or fate had a different idea, and he ended up in MI6 working for the Brits, the most important double agent deep inside al-Qaeda, informing against his former jihadist comrades for the British government, thwarting several important terrorist attacks in the process, until, sadly,

He was outed and ever since has worked in the private sector as a security analyst, working for corporations and banks, living with a fatwa over his head as his former al-Qaeda, the surviving former al-Qaeda jihadists and their followers want to kill him dead for stabbing them in the back. Eamon Dean. Well, that was a rather ominous introduction. Yeah.

Well, Thomas, how am I going to introduce you? Even after years of knowing you, possibly five years now almost, you know, you're still a mystery to me. All I know is basically that you're an American, which I won't hold against you.

that you are, or you were in the past, you know, on your path to become a monk, a Greek Orthodox monk. And I won't hold that against you either. And, you know, the fact that somehow you ended up studying Arabic and Islamic studies. And then when I met you, I was struck by how amazing your Arabic language skills were.

and your understanding of Islam and Islamic theology. And I was thinking, how could a Californian know so much about the theology that influenced my upbringing so much?

And not only know it well, but also understand the language, the nuances, understand the Bedouin culture. You know, if I want to describe Thomas Small in a few words, I would say that he is not small at all. Well, here's the thing, Eamon. I met you and I felt weirdly like I had met some kind of spiritual brother.

Though on the surface, it may seem unlikely. If you think about it, it's not so unlikely. We both come from coastal regions. In some ways, we come from boonies.

boom regions on the fringes of the civilizational heartlands of our various cultures, California on one end, the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, which until oil was a nothing. Absolutely. It was a wild, it was the wild west of the Middle East. We both grew up in, you know, what detractors would call fundamentalist religion. Me, a Christian, you, a Muslim. We

We both, from a young age, felt that turn towards perhaps problematically deep practice of the faith. And then we both decided to take the most extreme path. I can tell you, growing up in California,

As an evangelical Christian in the Reagan '80s, Muslims were very much the enemy, no question. They were Satan worshippers on the one hand, and they were blowing up planes and killing Americans. And, you know, they seemed to me to be a pretty bloodthirsty people. That's how it was being portrayed. Now, I can remember very clearly

9/11. Everyone, of course, remembers where they were on 9/11. It's the watershed moment of our lives, certainly, when we're both about the same age, both born at the end of the '70s. I was in London already. I had been invited to the Travelers Club on Pall Mall. Can you imagine this sort of young suburban brat being initiated into this wonderful gentlemanly world of the Travelers Club? But my friend, who was a member, he needed to get me a suit. So we walked into Moss Brothers on Regent Street to

to rent me a suit to hire me a suit and there was a big flat screen tv on the wall and everyone was crowded around it and i looked and i could see smoke coming out of the world trade center in new york of course my first thought was this is a hollywood movie or i thought maybe is this a retrospective of the 1992 world trade center attack or 94 93 world trade center attack and then i was standing and immediately the towers began to fall and i i realized what was going on

And in my total shock, I just fell onto my knees. I just couldn't believe it. And from that point onward, everything changed. And these Muslims, who I had been raised to vaguely think were a malicious people,

were revealed to be very malicious, or so it seemed to those of us who didn't know anything back then. Now, my where were you on 9-11 story is pretty ordinary, I think. But where were you on 9-11? You said you were on Regent Street, yeah? Well, I wasn't far away from you. I was on Oxford Street.

That day, basically, I had my regular meeting with one of my handlers from MI6 and the other handler from MI5. So we had a meeting. And of course, there were in the three months preceding that many, many different, you know, red flags and things.

warnings and hints something big is about to happen and we will come to that later. And I was walking down Oxford Street and there there were lots of people congregating around the screen in one of the shops that were selling TVs. So I just looked at it and I saw the smoke coming out of the North Tower and I was looking at it and I was thinking

Maybe that's one. That's it. This is the one. This is the one that we were warned about, that something big is about to happen. But how did they get the bomb way up there? I thought it was actually not a plane, but a bomb exploding in the higher floors. And then within minutes, the other plane struck the South Tower. And then I started to realize that, no, these are planes being used

as guided weapons against high structures. And it was a World Trade Center, which itself basically was a target just eight years prior. And somehow I knew even then who most likely culprit was.

And within 30 minutes, my MI6 handler called me and told me that if you're still in London, because I was supposed to go to another city, stay, book a hotel. It's going to be a long week ahead. When you say, I knew who the culprit was, ultimately the culprit was your friends, your former comrades in al-Qaeda. But why didn't you know about it? I mean, surely they would have told you.

Well, it comes down to the fact that I began spying against Al-Qaeda in late 1998 after the East Africa bombings. And

When I returned to Afghanistan to resume, you know, at least on the surface, my Al-Qaeda duties in early 1999, my duties were confined to two areas. One was operational, which was the WMD program for Al-Qaeda. So I was part of the research and development for explosives, poisons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, etc.

The second duty, which was also a cover story for me, was being part of the called the business clan. We used to call it this way, business clan.

My duty then as someone with a valid passport, a young face, and someone basically with relatives in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, is to help senior Al-Qaeda members with families in Afghanistan to export items to the Gulf. Now, many people say, well, you were in Al-Qaeda, how couldn't you have seen it coming? And the answer was because it was so tightly controlled.

The entire process, the planning, the 9-11 hijackers, all of them were trained in separate camps. That's the first thing. So we never saw them. I only knew three of them, three of the hijackers, you know, Abdulaziz al-Omari, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mahdar. What about the mastermind of 9-11 is very famous Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. You knew him. You met him in Bosnia, didn't you? I was one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's friends.

You know, first recruits into Afghanistan. Did he seem like the kind of person that would put together and successfully launch a terrorist operation killing 3,000 people? Well, he's a highly gifted engineer. Well, sure. There are many engineers in the world who don't blow up planes. The fact that he's an engineer, you know, fine. But what I'm talking about, clearly a very pious Muslim. He must have been. One, a pious Muslim. But two, someone with exceptionally deep hatred towards America.

Why do you think you hated America so much? What does America symbolize for these people? What's wrong with us Americans? We're such nice guys. Okay. So if we are going to talk about what they thought was wrong with America, they believed that in the classic 1960s, 70s, and 80s, they believed that America –

was, you know, the epitome of colonialism and imperialism because of their support for one, Israel, two, for Arab dictators as far as they are concerned. They saw America as the force that is holding back the Muslim world from one, uniting, and two, progressing and advancing.

So that is why, in their mind, if America is no longer there, or at least if America would leave the Middle East alone, then progress could happen. Unity could happen. As if America is the only source of our ills. Well, in fact, basically 90% of our problems are self-inflicted. But then tell them that in 1995, and they will be basically telling you, you know what, you are in the wrong place. Pack your bags and leave. Right.

It's interesting because about 18 months before 9-11, I was in New York City. I had left home with very little money. I was 19, 20 years old. I was on my way to Greece to become a monk. That's what I told myself.

And I was really full of a sense of hatred for what I saw as America's materialist, consumerist society that was turning hearts away from God. I didn't even have a place to stay and I was tramping around lower Manhattan and I arrived at the World Trade Center. It was the middle of the night. It had rained and I looked up at the towers and I shook my fist and I said –

One day I hope someone brings you down. Because for me, they just symbolized what, in fact, I imagine they symbolized to some extent for Al-Qaeda, the epitome of American consumerist finance capitalism, neocolonial hegemony, which I, as a kind of

at that time aspiring Christian monk, also very much hated. You know what? You talk about American consumerism, and actually you are not far off the mark as far as what motivated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, because they saw American consumerism as part of the capitalist evil,

Because for them, the entire global economic system and banking system is run, according to them and their conspiracy theories, run by the Jews, the Zionists. And it's all done in a manner of usury in an imperial way. Usury, meaning charging extravagant interest. Indeed, yes. The interest-based banking.

And for them, basically, interest-based banking and the entire financial system of the world was controlled by a cabal of elite Zionist and Anglo-Saxon bankers in order to have hegemony over the world.

So that is how they saw it. And remember that Khalid Sheikh actually came from an area in Pakistan called Balochistan, famous for its deeply socialist leanings, but also almost communist. In fact, in the 1960s and 70s, they used to call Balochistan the Red Balochistan. That's interesting because at the same time that I was pursuing this sort of spiritual journey, which landed me in the monastery,

and shaking my fist at the World Trade Center for being opposed, as I saw it, to spirituality, you know, materialism as opposed to spirituality. I was also reading Noam Chomsky at the time and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. And that was very much influencing my antipathy to the West and to America, which...

again, I think, actually harmonizes quite cleanly with the worldview of Al-Qaeda and other such extremist Muslim jihadists, whatever you want to call them, terrorists. Indeed. So when the World Trade Center fell down and I collapsed on my knees in shock, I wouldn't say that my reaction was anger and I had no desire for revenge. It was more like sadness and

And or so I thought, a sense that I understand why this is happening, almost like justice had been done. I am ashamed to say now.

I wandered the streets of London the next day sad that for justice to be done, such a thing was required. I utterly repent of this perspective now, I must say. But as a young man infused with religion, infused with Chomsky-style paranoid left-wing anti-colonialism, that's how I felt. Now, how did you feel about the attacks? Apart from operational, I mean, obviously in MI6, you're immediately called upon to do a lot of hard work to find out who did it and stop them. But...

How did you feel? Was there the glimmer in your heart still of a sense of justice has been done? Oh, no. My feeling at the time was more like regret.

you know, did I miss something? I mean, that was the moment when I realized that there were other signs that I could have interpreted or I could have picked up. And then I was just thinking, how could they have compartmentalized the entire operation in a way that no one else was able to see it coming? I was told by other members of Al-Qaeda in later years that the 15 hijackers

Most of them did not know they were in a suicide mission. And most of them did not know until just a week before that they were going to hijack planes. But that's it. They were not told that the planes actually are going to be used as suicidal weapons. Only the pilots and the maybe two or three of the leaders of the hijackers who were told that it's going to be a suicide mission.

Someone actually, you know, commented. They said that until the day more than two thirds of Al-Qaeda's Shura council, which is the council that of 20 top men, two thirds of them, we're talking about 12 people within a 20 men circle, did not know about it. So if, you know, some of bin Laden's advisors, close advisors never knew about it, how would I have known about it?

However, there were signs in the run-up to that fateful day. I remember the last day I was in Afghanistan before 9-11 was in the first week of June of 2001, so three months before the events. And by that time, I have stayed about seven weeks in Afghanistan.

And I was going to the camps, you know, one in Kabul, one to the north of Kabul in Murad Beg. And then I also went to Logar to say my farewells to one of my old friends from Saudi Arabia who was with us in Bosnia. And then I made my way to Kandahar to the Tarnak Farms, which is just close to the Kandahar airport. And that's the headquarters of Al-Qaeda where Osama bin Laden resided.

And I was just in the prayer room of that complex when...

Someone just came to me. He's a Yemeni. And he told me, you know, my alias at the time was Abul Abbas. And so basically he told me Abul Abbas. Someone from the leadership is looking for someone who is actually going to be in the UK very soon. And I just thought of you. Are you going to be in the UK very soon? And I said, yes. And he said, OK, just wait. And then he came back later and he said, Abu Hafiz al-Masri.

the deputy of Osama bin Laden wants to see you. So I didn't understand. I hardly ever been summoned by Abu Hafiz, someone as senior as him. And so I went to see him. And it was in a very small study, if you can call it a study, actually. There is no desk. There is no chair. There is nothing. There's only mattresses on the floor and bookshelves. So I sat down and he asked me, he said,

"When are you going to be in London exactly?" So I told him my dates and then he said to me, "Then I have a task for you. When you get to London, I want you to deliver a message. It's a verbal message." Which was highly unusual. I always used to take letters

sealed and take them and deliver them so I don't know the content although in my six at the time we're so expert they used to open them copy them then seal them and give them back to me without telling me the content so I do not betray the information you know so so he told me I have a message and this message is very simple there are four individuals in the UK you must tell them that they need to sort out their affairs

bring their families to Afghanistan before the end of August. So end of August is the deadline. If the end of August comes and they are still in the UK and haven't left to come to join us here, tell them then to stay there. So I, you know, I was listening to this and I was thinking, you know, this is highly unusual. It's a verbal message. Then he told me something big is about to happen.

Insha'Allah, which means God willing. And if it happens, stay where you are. Stay in the UK. Do not be tempted to come to Afghanistan and join the jihad with us here if the Americans were to come to Afghanistan and invade us here.

Do not be tempted. Stay where you are. Well, you must have known then that something big was being planned. Absolutely. This is when I started to put two and two together and realized that the activities I witnessed in the week before where they were, you know, evacuating many camps, taking away documents, taking away laptops, you know, desktops, you know, taking heavy weapons and munitions that were transporting them to unknown locations. So,

So when I was on the plane back from Pakistan back to the UK, and of course, basically, my handlers were waiting for me at Heathrow. And, you know, I was basically carrying with me grim news that, hey, big attack is about to happen, but I have no idea what it is. I remember something that Abu Hafiz said almost a year and a half prior to that in November of 1999.

As it is customary, when one of Al-Qaeda members, when they are blessed with a boy or a girl, they slaughter lambs and they invite people for this feast.

So in this feast, which I was part of, and sitting next to me was Abu Mus'ab al-Suri, who's one of the greatest strategic minds of the jihadist movement. His works continue to inspire jihadists today. Absolutely. He's the one basically who pioneered the lone wolf attack, the lone wolf jihad, the individual jihad. So he's at this party with you. Exactly. And Abu Hafiz al-Masri was, you know, the one who was basically the guest of honor there.

And I remember he actually took from his pocket a paper and he said, this is a translation of a letter written by a think tank in America addressed to Bill Clinton. And that letter was written a year prior also. So it's a bit of an old news. But nonetheless, you know, he and Al-Qaeda leadership knew what to do then.

He opened the letter. He said, this is a think tank. It's called the Project for the New American Century. And in this letter addressed to Bill Clinton, the signatories who are members of this think tank urged President Bill Clinton at the time to invade Iraq.

and to start the process of democratizing the entire Middle East in order to make it a beacon of stability, of hope, and to make the Middle East a more stable region in the long run. And the only way they can do that is by toppling Saddam Hussein, using Iraq then as an example of democracy in the Middle East.

Now, who were the signatories, the 18 signatories? I mean, there are many names. We can't go through all of them. Donald Rumsfeld. Yes. Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney, of course. Volfovitz. Yes, the deputy, Rumsfeld deputy. Condoleezza Rice was one of them. And in fact, Jeb Bush, you know, George Bush's brother was one of the signatories. All the usual suspects. Kenneth Edelman, Richard Pell, William Crystal. I.e., the neocon, the leading lights of the neocon movement.

All the engineers and the architects of the Iraq War, which will happen basically in almost five years later, signed that letter. So Abu Hafiz is reading a translation of this letter to you Al-Qaeda people. And what does he say? And he said basically that there was one columnist in America who responded to this letter, almost as if it was on behalf of Bill Clinton, saying that, you know, this will never happen because, you know, the American people...

will never ever accept such an undertaking unless if there was an event in the magnitude of Pearl Harbor.

But Abu Hafs doesn't want America to invade Iraq and bring democracy to the Middle East. Oh, he does. Why? He does. It wasn't about bringing democracy because they knew the region more than the Americans knew. You see, that's a difference between the project for the new American century and Al-Qaeda, which was the project for the new Islamic century.

They knew their own region and their own people better than the Americans. They knew that democracy would never just come at the end of a bayonet. Absolutely. And you see, that is the genius of Al-Qaeda, at least up to that point. You see, Al-Qaeda have two programs. First, destroy and then rebuild. They were good at destroy. They are never good at rebuilding. Creative destruction. Exactly. They should just move to Silicon Valley. Exactly.

Creative disruption or creative destruction. In fact, they called it creative chaos. Ah. So they knew what they were doing. They're not idiots. No, no, they were not. They knew exactly what they were doing. In fact, you know, Mustafa Abu Yazid, who later became the operational leader of Al-Qaeda and who was killed, I think, in 2009. But Mustafa Abu Yazid, who was a member of the Shura Council of Al-Qaeda, he said something very interesting. He said...

that, you know, and that was in later years, and justifying why 9-11 was important. He said that, imagine that you have a house. It's dilapidated. You know, you want to destroy it. You want to bulldoze it. But there is a problem. You're broke and you don't have a bulldozer.

So what do you do then? Well, in the village, there is, you know, someone who owns a bulldozer and he's an idiot and someone who is short tempered and easily provoked. So what do you do then? You know, you don't have even the money to hire a bulldozer. You can't pay for his services. So what do you do? You write a lot of, you know, rude graffiti on the house, insulting him and his wife and his mother and his daughter and everything. And then basically he will come and destroy it for you for free. Yeah.

So they attack the World Trade Center, in effect, by writing huge graffiti in the sky. Come attack us here in Afghanistan because they knew as well as everyone else that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Indeed. And they know this, of course, because they, in their own lives, have seen it be a graveyard of empires. Absolutely. With the other great 20th century empire, the Soviet Union. Absolutely. So they think...

Well, the Soviet Union reached its end in Afghanistan. We are going to entice the United States to reach its end in Afghanistan as well, which is interesting because when I was a kid, I knew about the Mujahideen, the famous noble Mujahideen fighting valiantly against the evil empire of communism to free and liberate Afghanistan.

Afghanistan. And I was convinced, primarily by Hollywood, that the Mujahideen were holy warriors riding their white stallions to defend themselves against the evil empire, as Ronald Reagan called it. For example, I remember, I loved James Bond movies. And in 1989, Timothy Dalton's classic

The Living Daylights, one of the great James Bond movies, came out. We watched it. At the end of that movie, James Bond becomes a mujahid. He becomes a jihadist, joins this ragtag group of Muslim warriors fighting this nefarious plot of

by a renegade Soviet general in line with a renegade American arms dealer to sell opium. It was very confused. But there you see James Bond riding into battle with the Mujahideen. I think the same year, if not the year before, Rambo 3 comes out. I saw that. Rambo becomes one of the Mujahideen as well.

And at that last shot, he's riding his Mujahideen horse up against a whole battalion of tanks, Soviet tanks, all by himself. The Mujahideen were the great heroes. And the film ends with the dedication to the brave men of the Mujahideen. And apparently, I'm told...

It's that dedication remains to this day. You can watch it on Netflix and you get to the end of the film, to the brave men of the Mujahideen. When you were growing up in Saudi Arabia, you must have thought that those men were brave. For all I know, you still think they're brave. Well, of course. I mean, after all, their cause was just to throw out the invaders. Any country would do that. Any people would do that.

I remember there are people from our neighborhood in Khubar who went to join the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, who thought it was a noble thing to do. And there were thousands of Arab volunteers from Saudi Arabia, North Africa, Egypt, Jordan, who went to fight there in Afghanistan. Except what happened in Afghanistan at the time is that many people who were imprisoned in Egypt, especially Egypt,

for attempting to overthrow the governments of Sadat first, and then Mubarak. Inspired by famous Muslim Brotherhood leaders.

Sayyid Qutb, the sort of grandfather of modern jihadism. Indeed, actually. I mean, you know, his writings inspired those who killed Sadat and then wanted to overthrow Mubarak. So they found in the Afghan jihad a space in which they can breathe, train, think. And it was these people, especially three people, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Hafiz al-Masri, and Abu Ubaid al-Banshiri,

They met Osama bin Laden there. He was just young, idealistic, rich, handsome, articulate, charismatic. He was there and all he wanted was just to help the Afghan jihad. But

what poisoned his mind were these three individuals who were released from prison or escaped from prison in Egypt, made it all the way to Afghanistan because they saw in it an ideal fertile land to not only recruit but also to train and to strategize the next phase of jihad. So they saw Osama bin Laden, they thought that's it, this is it, this is the symbol, this is the man who we could ride

as a horse towards the sunlit uplands of Islamic caliphate in Egypt. But surely they didn't introduce him to the ideas of Sayyid Qutb and stuff. I mean, people knew about Sayyid Qutb. I think you yourself, you drank deeply from the well of Sayyid Qutb following the death of your mother. You found in Sayyid Qutb tremendous consolation.

What about Sayyid Qutb and his now infamous writings? Well, these writings influenced Sambul Laden greatly. No, no, you. I'm talking about you. Okay. What? How did they, why did they, why did they give you so much consolation as a young Muslim growing up in Saudi Arabia? Well, I must remember, you know, how Sayyid Qutb wrote, you know, these books. I mean, there is a book called Fi Dhilal Al-Qur'an, which means In the Shades of the Qur'an.

And this book was written over nine years period because it covers the entire Quran. It's a commentary on the Quran, but not from a theological sense, but from a literary sense, from an inspirational sense. And he wrote that book, 4,000 pages, when he was in prison over nine years period. And Nasser's prisons in Egypt in the 1950s and 60s

were no picnic. I mean, they were exceptionally hard, harsh, dark prisons. And so, why would these words, these 4,000 words, have spoken to you? Because they were written through the prism of pain and

The pain wasn't just only about his own pain being inside prison in isolation and living sometime in a scary cell where he was doused with animal fat and let loose the dogs on him to bite him or sometime basically he would find snakes coming into his cell. So of course all of these dark, scary moments for him were reflected in his writings.

where he turned that suffering into something that was of immense literary beauty. So he spoke from the heart to the heart. And he spoke to your young heart. Indeed. Put me in your head at that time. What's going on in your head? There were so many things going on inside of my head because, you see, I grew up in Saudi Arabia.

My mother was Lebanese. So in the 1980s, she was worried about her family back home suffering the effects of the civil war in Lebanon. It was an ethnic and sectarian and religious civil war. It's sort of in microcosm what one can see is now embroiling the whole Middle East. Indeed. And I was living in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, where just across the water from us to the north, we have a raging famine.

brutal war between Iraq and Iran that was also both ethnic and sectarian. And then later, when I was only 12, just before my mother's death, I saw that my city, Khoobar, was swamped with the world's wealthiest refugees. Basically, refugees arriving in their Cadillacs and Mercedes-Benz and BMWs coming from Kuwait.

Because, you know, Saddam Hussein just invaded Kuwait. And of course, Kuwaitis had a fabulous, rich lifestyle. Suddenly they found themselves refugees, even though they were, you know, riding Mercedes-Benz and BMWs and Cadillacs.

And shortly thereafter, then your area is swarming with American troops. Oh, Humvees everywhere. And, you know, we used to have some American fast food chains. You know, basically, we have to stand in line way behind these, you know,

You know, a very hungry, you know, American soldiers basically who were ordering four burgers and ten fries, you know, apiece. It's amazing to think you over there in Kobar watching the Humvees arrive and these big American soldiers. Because in America, I was being told Saddam Hussein is going to come get us. He's probably got nukes. He's going to kill you all. And we would have on the radio.

I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free. It was this big thing. We were all like, get Saddam, get Saddam. And there you are having to queue in line while the Americans get their burgers first.

Absolutely. And we thought basically this is unfair. But, you know, it shows basically how at the time Americans, American soldiers were leaving their weapons and their Humvees, parking in the normal street, going into a Saudi-based burger chains and mixing with us and having no fear of us whatsoever. Right.

I mean, basically, you cannot imagine this in this world anymore. And they were there because we saw them basically as some sort of guarantee that Saddam Hussein is not going to venture south and capture the oil fields of the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. So in general, you were pleased that they were there. You felt they were protecting you because, as we all know, in a way, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia's decision to invite the Americans in was the fateful decision that led to the

Indeed. You see, this is where my conflict began. You know, Osama bin Laden...

did not like one bit the presence of those troops inside Saudi Arabia. Not one bit. And he was trying to convince the Saudi royal family, please do not invite the Americans. Let us, the Mujahideen, sort this out. And he was able to get the ear of the Saudi royal family because as a Mujahid in the Afghanistan war, he had developed close contacts with the Saudi government at the highest level.

including the fact that as a member of the prominent bin Laden family, he was well known. Would Osama bin Laden's mujahideen been able to take care of this situation, expel the battle-hardened Iraqi army from Kuwait? Surely not. Well, come on, of course, basically, there was no way this would be sorted out by the mujahideen. It

It needed American firepower. Why not? The Mujahideen had sorted out the Soviet Union. Yeah, in a long, protracted 11 years war. In the mountains. Exactly. Not in the desert. And Saddam Hussein's army was already eight years veteran army of the Iraq-Iran war. And plus, at the same time, basically, they were a different cookie altogether. So...

Here, however, you know, this is where the conflict begins because basically I was already part of Islamic awareness circles. There were already religious clerics who I listened to, respected, adhered to. These clerics were giving lectures and talking about their displeasure with the presence of the Americans. So on one hand, I'm happy they are there. But on the other hand, I have a loyalty to my clerics and my clergy who basically were not very happy about these Americans being there.

So there you are, you're conflicted. On the one hand, the American troops are protecting you. On the other hand, all of these radical clerics are encouraging you to be very displeased about their presence. What is the through line from that place of conflict to three or four years later, you deciding to go to Bosnia as a young jihadist? Well, after the Gulf War ended and Saddam Hussein was expelled from Kuwait,

There was another event, basically, that really propelled me towards, you know, great to searching for a greater meaning, greater purpose, which was the passing of my mother. She was only 49 at that time. And it was a brain aneurysm that, you know, was so unforeseen.

And for me, that event led me to delve deeper into the world of theology from the perspective of politics. Well, I mean, first of all, you are looking for a spirituality, but a spirituality basically that has a place in the world, you know, that shapes history. But I still don't see the link between that and your mother's death.

Because remember, my mother was my moral compass. And basically, she's the one who actually, I would say, politicized me because of her worry about the Lebanese civil war. I see. You know, the effects of that on the sectarian and ethnic harmony of the Middle East, or lack of harmony, I would say. So my political educator is

Is gone. Do you think she would have supported your decision to go to Bosnia as a jihadist? Oh, I would say basically she would have confiscated my passport, locked me up in a room until basically I came back to my senses. And did you know that you would have been going against her wishes by doing it? Indeed. But I was interpreting that in my mind as it was her wishes as a mother, not her wishes as someone who have a duty towards fellow Muslims.

So you lost your moral compass and the ideology of the Mujahideen provides you with a replacement, which allows you both to get some sense of spiritual fulfillment and allows you to pursue a path with real political ramifications. Indeed. And what at that time in your mind, what political ramifications were you pursuing?

Well, of course the Bosnian conflict was raging. I remember one of my own teachers, our beloved math teacher, his name was Osama Mansouri, ironically another Osama, you know, died in Bosnia over the summer. And, you know, we were thinking, you know, first of all, Bosnia, why, you know, what is happening? You know, so suddenly the conflict in Bosnia that was raging for a few months already became a reality in our classroom, even though it was, you know, 3,000 kilometers away.

And I remember another fellow teacher of his, when he came to our classroom in order to give us or attempting to give us what he thought was counseling, he answered one of the questions as to why would a young man with a life

full life, wonderful life, you know, potentially rich life ahead of him would go and, you know, die somewhere else for people we hardly know. Why would he? And he said that because it is our duty to help those fellow Muslims who are in desperate need. And sometimes if you don't do it, then who will do it? And then he talked about the fact it doesn't matter if you come from a rich family or a poor family, from a middle class or from an upper class.

What matters in the end is your willingness to sacrifice. And in the case of our teacher, Osama Mansouri, his sacrifice would have tasted far sweeter because he had it all and gave it all away. So the words martyrdom, sacrifice, jihad, Bosnia, all of them started to resonate because it was in our own classroom. So that was the first trigger.

You know, for me, as far as I'm concerned, that Bosnia is a place where I could go because if my teacher who was standing in front of that blackboard was able to go there, fight and die there, then why couldn't I?

I remember when I turned 16, I was having a dinner with a friend of mine. And in fact, his brother was even a closer friend of mine. So I remember I was having a dinner with his brother and he was telling me, did you say goodbye to Khaled?

So I looked at him and I would say, "Why would I say goodbye to him?" So he just realized, "Oops, you know, I'm not supposed to have told you this." But then he told me that Khalid actually is leaving to Bosnia within a week. So, you know, he's sorting out his affairs. And so if you want to say goodbye to him, go and say goodbye. There were 10 minutes in a walk, you know, from that dinner place to Khalid's house. My plan was to say goodbye. By the time I knocked on his door,

My plan has changed. I told him I'm gonna go with you. And I still remember basically he's looking at me and thinking, "Come again what you say?" I said, "I'm going with you." He said, "No, you know for God's sake Ayman, do you know basically that jihad is not a picnic, it's a war.

People lose lives, limbs, get injured so badly. I mean, it's scary, you know, shells landing, bullets whizzing by. It's not going to be a picnic. So I said, yeah, I know. I mean, I know basically that it's not going to be something easy or, you know, but I really want to go. And he said to me, yes, but Ayman, you know, you're 16, bespectacled, bookish, nerdish, geekish boy. Like, I mean, why would you go? You know, do you think the jihad needs you? And I

I remember that my answer to him changed his mind and changed my life. I said to him, I know Khalid that the jihad doesn't need me, but I need it.

So you need it for for my own betterment, for my own spiritual betterment, for my own place in history, for me not being a spectator on the sideline, just watching the caravan passing by. And later years regretting that I never hopped on that caravan and went with them into that place.

not just only to explore, you know, what is there at the very end, but beyond it, which means the afterlife. Well, certainly your journey took you in places you never foresaw. But also, I think the journey of the jihadist movement went in places that no one could foresee. So, you know, you joined...

the mujahideen in Bosnia for, let's face it, noble aims. Bosnian Muslims were being slaughtered by Serbs and Croats, and you went to defend them. But how do you go from that? How does a movement go from that to the morning of September 11th when men fly airplanes into a building in America and kill civilians? Who are they defending? When did jihadism change from the

characters at the end of Rambo 3 and The Living Daylights to the 9-11 hijackers and Osama bin Laden. What happened? This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot.

Shopify helps you do your thing, however you cha-ching. From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the we just hit a million orders stage. No matter what stage you're in, Shopify's there to help you grow. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash special offer, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash special offer. What happened, Thomas, was Bosnia. Bosnia happened.

You see, many people don't understand that Bosnia was the fork in the road that separated now the jihadists from the West, where the interests diverged, where the ideological alliance that happened during the jihad against the Soviets completely disappeared. And basically the West went in one direction and the jihadists went into the other.

What happened in Bosnia is that the war was ugly. It was genocidal and it was over identity, a Muslim identity that was attacked with the intention of annihilating it.

And what was shocking for us is that the Muslims of Bosnia looked nothing like the Muslims in the rest of the Muslim world. They were blue and green-eyed. They were blonde-haired. They were fair-skinned, except that they didn't look any different from their Serbian neighbors. In fact, genetically even, they are the same. South Slavs, they all speak the same language. Exactly. They spoke the same language.

They intermarried actually before the war. You know, they looked like each other, but except the difference were in the names only. You know, because even Muslims lived under communism in Yugoslavia for 70 years. They almost became indistinguishable. It was a very secular state. Absolutely. There was not much religiosity going on. Absolutely. Only that their names were Ahmed and Mehmed and Mersadur. You know, so they had these Muslim names and names.

And basically, slaughter was happening based on your name. If your name is Muslim, that's it, you're done. And that is what shook us to the core that if Muslims who had only just their names, the remnants, and, you know, mosques which served more like ornaments, you know, rather than an actual place of worship. But what does that have to do with flying planes into the World Trade Center?

For the jihadists there, they believed that the war was taking on a Christian symbology against Islam. This is a new crusade. So the language in which the jihadists were framing this conflict and the narrative they were putting together was that this is a new crusade.

So this is the Christian world. It's not just only the Serbs with their nationalism masquerading as Christianity, you know, slaughtering Muslims. No, no, no, no. This is a Western American, British, French enabled genocide against Muslims, which was, of course, far from the truth. But that's total nonsense. They must have known it was nonsense. That's a cynical way of describing what was going on in Bosnia because they were already convinced that.

that the Americans were an evil empire that needed to be destroyed. Exactly. But of course, when I went there to Bosnia, how would I have known that our leaders will be Jama'at Islamiyah, Egyptian Jama'at Islamiyah, who actually killed Sadat in 1981 because of the fact that he signed the peace treaty with Israel. So of course they were the enemies of peace, but I did not know that. I was only 16.

I went there thinking I was going to do something noble. And this is the problem, is that you have a noble cause, but then it's led by the wrong leaders who basically use it in order to manufacture a narrative that there is a greater conflict. For me personally,

Now, with hindsight, years, years later, I realized that the Serbs were fighting a nationalist war. Yes, they cloaked their nationalistic cause with Christian symbology, but it was enough to fool the naive young men from the Arab world who came to fight in Bosnia that it is a crusade.

And they then turned their hatred against America because they believed by the end of the war that the Americans rewarded the Serbs with half of the Bosnian territory, even though they were only one third of the population. You know, they rewarded their genocide by having this in a half baked peace treaty between the two, the three sides, the Bosnians, the Serbs and the Croats.

So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we come back again to him, the architect of 9-11, when he arrived in Bosnia, just only several weeks before the Dayton Agreement was signed, he was telling us that the conflict is about to end because already the negotiations are taking place. There is a truce. There is a ceasefire.

And remember, brothers, I remember his words. He said, remember, brothers, why do we allow the Americans and other world powers to dictate where we fight? Why are we running from one fringe conflict on the fringes of the Muslim world

from a Bosnia to a Chechnya to a Kashmir and we keep fighting in these conflicts and we leave the center. It's the center of the Muslim world that is so weak that actually allowed the fringes of the Muslim world to suffer so greatly in these conflicts. So we need...

to reclaim the center, reshape the center, remake the center, and recreate the glories of the Muslim caliphate. That gets us to the question, the important question of what Al-Qaeda really wanted.

to happen following 9/11? What did they think was going to happen? So they fly two planes into the World Trade Center. They elicit this massive response from the great global hegemon, the United States, which they hope will get bogged down in Afghanistan, will become bankrupt, will upset the local population in America to turn against the government so that America would withdraw from the Middle East,

leaving it open for the Mujahideen to topple governments like the Saudi government, relay claim to the heartlands of the Muslim world from which they could then spread out and conquer the Muslim world in order to return it to the glories of the past. That's basically the narrative? No. I would say basically you are half right. But it's not about...

forcing the Americans to leave the Middle East. Actually, it is inviting the Americans to come to the Middle East. Again, we come back to the bulldozer analogy. You know, they saw the Americans not as a stability factor, but instability factor. Bringing the Americans to be the bulldozer that will bulldoze Iraq. Why Iraq was important and why it needed to be bulldozed? Because Saddam Hussein was the last standing pillar of Arab nationalism. And Arab nationalism was the last pillar

in front of Islamism as an ideology. The last secular ideology in the Middle East. The last hurdle in front of an Islamist takeover. So, do 9-11 entice the Americans to go into Iraq? Because already, as we talked about before, Abu Hafiz al-Masri saw that the American administration might be actually tempted to go into Iraq if there was a massive attack on American soil. And bin Laden particularly chose Iraq

deliberately all the hijackers, not the pilots, the hijackers to be from Saudi Arabia. Because what is the biggest target for Osama bin Laden? Always Saudi Arabia. From 1995, I think his first fatwa against the House of Saud. Exactly. And, you know, in 1996, when he landed back from Sudan into Afghanistan, we went to meet him. You know, we were in a camp not far away from where he was, 45 minutes drive. And

And I still remember when we met him at the first time when he arrived from Sudan, he looked disheveled. He looked like a refugee. Many people who saw Osama bin Laden for the first time, they see this neat turban, you know, nice robes, well, you know, ironed, no crease in them whatsoever. No, the Osama bin Laden I met for the first time in August of 1996.

looked like a refugee, along with his Al-Qaeda followers. He was a refugee. Exactly. He just lucky to be escaping with his life. And he was in a compound belonging to another Afghan warlord. It wasn't his. You know, all of their belongings are still basically in boxes and metal boxes. And it's all around, you know, in a disorganized way. So when we sat with him, there were 14 of us when we sat with him, because he was asking if there are any people from Saudi Arabia around. And of course, basically, that's why we went to see him.

So he was talking to us and he was telling us about how God brought him from Sudan into Afghanistan. And I was thinking, are you trying to comfort yourself here? I mean, isn't it the fact that you were stabbed in the back by President Bashir of Sudan and his ally at Turabi? And, you know, and then he started talking about prophecies.

And he started to weaponize eschatology, Islamic eschatology and the prophecies of old to justify that he is in Afghanistan because Afghanistan is going to be the launch place for the army of the black banners that will liberate Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. All of these three holy cities, you know. So, of course, if you want to liberate Mecca and Medina, then from who? Because who is actually ruling over Mecca and Medina? The Saudi royal family.

And for him, he was talking about how the Americans are occupying the two holy places, that the land of Muhammad is occupied by the American forces and their presence in Saudi Arabia is an affront to Islam. I was thinking, well, there are only 15,000 of them at that time, basically. I mean, the Saudi army is 300,000. So I don't think it was an occupation. It was just basically, you know, a form of, you know, protection and military cooperation. But, you know, don't tell this to them.

He then went on to say when he looked at our faces and Bin Laden was so good at reading faces. He can read your expression and see if you are happy or skeptical, if you are convinced or not. So he saw that bewildered looks in our faces because now he's telling us and still a foreign alien idea to us that we'll be fighting against Saudi Arabia, against our own people, against our own relatives who work in the security services. He said, remember,

When the Prophet Muhammad was escaping from Mecca, going on his dangerous migration trip to Medina, when he was escaping, Arab tribes put huge bounty on his head, trying to prevent him from reaching Medina and establishing his early political society there. And when finally one night caught up with him, the Prophet confronted that knight who was trying to get the bounty, he was trying to kill the Prophet. He confronted him and he said,

that I will be reaching Medina and my faith will reach the horizons from the east to the west and the Persian Empire will fall and I see you, he was talking to the Arab knight, his name was Suraqa, I see you Suraqa wearing the crown and the bracelets of the Persian Emperor.

So of course, you know, the knight was so skeptical. It's like, you know, you're a fugitive. You are a fugitive and you are threatening the might of Persia, you know, which no one have ever threatened this might before. It's a mighty empire. And he said, it's either you're crazy or you're truly telling the truth. So if you are telling the truth, then I want it in writing.

So the Prophet Muhammad instructed his companion to scribe for that night that he will be wearing the crown and the bracelet of the Persian Emperor.

16 years to that day, it came true that that knight was wearing the crown and the bracelets of the Persian emperor and the Persian empire collapsed under the weight of the Muslim armies. So, bin Laden was telling us this story to restore our faith, to tell us that we could be refugees now, but we could change history.

So if you, Thomas, if you see them as I saw them in 1996, and you can't believe that five years later, just only five years, these people, these bunch of profegees will change world history and will launch the most audacious and deadly terrorist attack in human history. And so much of what they calculated to happen did happen. The Americans went to Afghanistan where they remain bogged down. They did enter Iraq.

participating in destabilizing the political patchwork of the region. Of course, the jihadists assisted them in that. They did withdraw their troops from Saudi Arabia, moving them to Qatar. Indeed. And nothing has been the same. But nonetheless, still, Osama bin Laden, his goal ultimately was...

political power once the House of Saud was toppled, once the Americans had done their dirty work for them and destabilized the region and then withdrawn. So the region is now, you know, there's a tremendous power vacuum opening up. Osama bin Laden imagined himself with the crown of the Persian emperor on his head. Do you think that's what he wanted?

I think he wanted the restoration of the caliphate. He believed in eschatology. He believed that he was one of those foretold in the prophecies that would be paving the way for the Mahdi, you know, the Messiah. So basically 9-11 not only have, you know, eschatology behind it, messianic vision behind it and, you know, political vision behind it,

and an ideological vision behind it, but also what was ultimately the aim and the goal is creative chaos. That chaos that should reign over the entire region to allow the forces of Islamism to take over. Because he saw what happened in Afghanistan after the civil war between the Mujahideen and the collapse of law and order and the rise of the warlords. That chaos was what enabled the Taliban

to take over the entirety of Afghanistan except for a small pocket in the north. So he saw that chaos will make people yearn for law and order and the only people who can give law and order based on Sharia are who? The Mujahideen. When I was growing up in evangelical in California, it was absolutely an article of faith to us all that the world was coming to an end soon.

And that the prophecies in the book of Revelation at the end of the Bible were coming true through at that time the clash between the divine United States and the godless Soviet Union. And we were all told absolutely that there was no real need for us to dream about our future careers or our future lives because it was going to happen. The end of the world was nigh.

Nye, Ronald Reagan was acting as a vehicle for God's power by destroying the Soviet Union and the state of Israel was a sign that Christ was going to return. And I mean, that sort of thing that was populating my mind as a kid, was that also in the air of these jihadist camps? Did you think the end of the world was soon? Wow. I mean, you just mentioned the state of Israel and now I'm thinking, wow.

Why? Because, you know, in summer of 1997, when the head of bin Laden's bodyguard, Abu Hamza al-Ghamdi, he was trying to recruit me into Al-Qaeda. And, you know, he was walking with me and telling me about the age of prophecies and how these prophecies, which Osama bin Laden spoke about a year earlier and I heard him, you know, talk about them.

He was adamant that we are in the age of prophecies and if we don't fulfill them then who would do? Aliens from Mars coming down to do it for us? No, it will be us.

So I told him, you know, OK, how do you know that we are living in the age of prophecies? He said, because the age of prophecies have a trigger. And the trigger was the return of the Jews to the Holy Land. How fascinating. It's the same thing. Although, of course, as a Christian, we thought that that was a good thing because, you know, the Jews are still the chosen people and Israel is theirs. And, you know, of course, we didn't care about Muslim claims or Arab claims on Israel at all. They just seemed to be extraneous claims.

We didn't even think about them, to be perfectly honest. But you're on the other side of that story. You see it as a profoundly satanic sign that the end of the world is nigh. The Jews returning to Israel is a sign that the forces of darkness are gathering, which will...

incite the Mahdi to return and the end of the world to occur. Exactly, because, you know, the eschatology taught in Al-Qaeda camps is that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, and they don't date it from 1948, which is the establishment of the State of Israel. No, they date it from the 1967, because in the Six Days War in 1967, Israel captured Jerusalem. So for them, the Temple Mount, you know, the site where Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock stands,

The capture of that site is the trigger of the beginning of the end.

So that's how they see it. So they say basically that the Mahdi, who is the Muslim Messiah, will emerge because... Well, let's be specific about that. The Muslim Messiah is Jesus. Al-Masih is Jesus. Indeed. So what's the difference between the Mahdi and the Messiah? Well, the Mahdi means the guided one. He's a savior who would emerge, reunite the Muslim world. But the Muslim world reunification will trigger the return or the emergence of the Antichrist.

who will lead the Jews and the Zionist Christians in a battle against Muslims.

which will basically then lead to the descent of Jesus into this world in order to end this conflict on the side of Muslims. That's what we were taught in the camps. And you believed it? At the time, I believed it. Did it make you feel very excited? The end of the world, the age of prophecies. Well, it's not just only about the end of the world. You are doing God's work. You know, you are here as a God's agent.

doing God's work. And that included hacking people to death in Bosnia? That was included. The idea, basically, was that you are here on earth as a God's instrument. So when you tell people that you are here on earth as a God's instrument, what do you think they will do? Anything they do, basically, is sacrosanct, is basically something that is ordained by God. But why in the mentality of jihadists is being an instrument of God

a license to kill people. Why is it that God wants people to be killed all the time? I think it's one of the most difficult questions that I had to reconcile myself with. I mean, basically, how do we see this, a vengeful God who wants people to fight against other people?

And I remember I asked myself this question so many times. And I remember that in the Quran there is a verse which talks about war as a necessary evil, as war being the instrument of progress. If you look at the Quran or how scholars of the Quran interpreted that verse, they're talking about the fact that we are put here on this earth as a test. Some of us will do good, some of us will do evil.

And those who do good need to push against those who do evil or evil will reign. So it is almost what Edmund Burke said before, that evil triumph when good people do nothing.

So, in essence, war was ordained by God in order to ensure that the world will have peace, order, security, and stability, and progress. The Qur'an describes war as an instrument of progress. As a Christian, though I actually understand the logic of what you're saying and can see that on some level it is true, it is impossible for me to believe that

that that is something ordained by God, that God would actually wish young men to kill

civilians in order to further his own aims. I mean, even in the New Testament, Christ... But I don't believe that myself. No, I know you don't. I know you don't. But nonetheless, there's a sort of stark divide between the mentalities here. Indeed. That in Islam, God uses violence to further his aims.

And in Christianity, that idea that God would use violence anymore, at least, to further his aims, is very difficult to believe. Christ said, offenses must come, but woe unto him through whom those offenses come. This idea that God knows that there will be evil in the world, that there will be violence, war, etc. But the instruments through whom that violence occurs are never within his grace or whatever. It's very different. Indeed. But

But you see, from the Islamic point of view, we see ourselves not as an extension of the New Testament, but as an extension of the Old Testament. So the God of Islam is identical to the God of the Old Testament, of the Torah, of the Tanakh.

you know, of the Jewish Tanakh rather than, you know, of the Christian New Testament, the Christian Bible. Because, you see, in Islam, the relationship between the individual and the creator are far more complex, for example, than the relationship between the individual and the creator in Christianity. In Islam, it is based on love,

fear and hope, while in Christianity it's solely based on love. Well, I think that's a simplification, to be honest. I think there's a lot of fear in Christianity because God does send you to hell, after all, if you've been very bad. Well, it's the same in Islam, except, you know, in Islam, basically, the complexity of that relationship which governs why we sometimes have to go to war, not just only for defense, but for offense. And that's basically how, you know, Al-Qaeda, for example, usurped that. Because, you see, we come back to the issue here.

Al-Qaeda uses violence, but there is a great divide within Islam right now. Who has the prerogative to use violence? Is it individual or the state? Throughout 1300 years of Islam, we always understood that violence can only be deployed by the state.

whether in defensive or offensive measure, that's up to the state and up to the leaders of the state. But it cannot be wielded or be deployed by individuals or groups of individuals. The civil war within Islam right now raging over this very question between those who believe that jihad and violence can only be deployed by the state

And those who believe, no, not only can be deployed by individuals and groups of individuals, but it could also be deployed by them against the state. Well, certainly as a result of 9-11, all hell broke loose in the Middle East and a new chapter in the conflicts of the region opened. It's called the War on Terror. You played a role in that war. I certainly did not. I watched from the sidelines like the rest of humanity.

And that's what we're going to talk about in the next podcast, the war on terror and what it was like as a double agent working both in MI6 and Al Qaeda in that war. And what I look forward to hearing about really having you've described so well

the motivations and psychology of the jihadists, what they expected. It'd be interesting to hear as well next time what goes through the mind of a spy and whether those are actually quite similar maybe. I don't know. Well, I look forward to having this discussion. I enjoyed it so much.

This episode of Conflicted was produced by Jake Warren and Sandra Ferrari. Original music by Matt Huxley. If you want to hear more of Conflicted, make sure you search for us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download yours.