Read Online The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk - Free Book Online

steering across shale and hard rock, the stones spitting beneath our wheels as we skirted kilometres of fields that were covered in yellow dust. “This is a gift from the Russians,” Mohamed said. “You know why there are no people working this ground? Because the Russians sowed it with thousands of mines.” And so we passed through the dead land.
    Once, as the white sun was sliding into the mountains, we stopped for the gunmen on the back to pull watermelons from a field. They scampered back to the trucks and cut them up, the juice dripping through their fingers. By dusk, we had reached a series of cramped earthen villages, old men burning charcoal fires by the track, the shadow of women cowled in the Afghan burqa standing in the alleyways. There were more guerrillas, all bearded, grinning at Mohamed and the driver. It was night before we stopped, in an orchard where wooden sofas had been covered in army blankets piled with belts and webbing and where armed men emerged out of the darkness, all in Afghan clothes and soft woollen flat hats, some holding rifles, others machine guns. They were the Arab mujahedin, the Arab “Afghans” denounced by the presidents and kings of half the Arab world and by the United States of America. Very soon, the world would know them as al-Qaeda.
    They came from Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait. Two of them wore spectacles, one said he was a doctor. A few of them shook hands in a rather solemn way and greeted me in Arabic. I knew that these men would give their lives for bin Laden, that they thought themselves spiritually pure in a corrupt world, that they were inspired and influenced by dreams which they persuaded themselves came from heaven. Mohamed beckoned me to follow him and we skirted a small river and jumped across a stream until, in the insect-filled darkness ahead, we could see a sputtering paraffin lamp. Beside it sat a tall, bearded man in Saudi robes. Osama bin Laden stood up, his two teenage sons, Omar and Saad, beside him. “Welcome to Afghanistan,” he said.
    He was now forty but looked much older than at our last meeting in the Sudanese desert late in 1993. Walking towards me, he towered over his companions, tall, slim, with new wrinkles around those narrow eyes. Leaner, his beard longer but slightly flecked with grey, he had a black waistcoat over his white robe and a red-chequered kuffiah on his head, and he seemed tired. When he asked after my health, I told him I had come a long way for this meeting. “So have I,” he muttered. There was also an isolation about him, a detachment I had not noticed before, as if he had been inspecting his anger, examining the nature of his resentment; when he smiled, his gaze would move towards his sixteen-year-old son Omar—round eyes with dark brows and his own kuffiah
—
and then off into the hot darkness where his armed men were patrolling the fields. Others were gathering to listen to our conversation. We sat down on a straw mat and a glass of tea was placed beside me.
    Just ten days ago, a truck bomb had torn down part of the U.S. Air Force housing complex at al-Khobar in Dhahran, and we were speaking in the shadow of the deaths of the nineteen American soldiers killed there. U.S. secretary of state Warren Christopher had visited the ruins and predictably promised that America would not be swayed by violence, that the perpetrators would be hunted down. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who had since lapsed into a state of dementia, had foreseen the possibility of violence when American military forces arrived to “defend” his kingdom in 1990. It was for this very reason that he had, on 6 August that year, extracted a promise from then President George Bush that all U.S. troops would leave his country when the Iraqi threat ended. But the Americans had stayed, claiming that the continued existence of Saddam’s regime—which Bush had chosen not to destroy—still