leader who was fluent in Arabic and had studied in Saudi Arabia’
(Bergen, 2001a: 54). In 1986, he established a base in the Jaji area
of Paktia, known as Maasadat Al-Ansar (Rubin, 1997a: 196), and
in 1989, he formed the Al-Qaidaorganisation. But shortly there-
after, in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and
the assassination of Abdullah Azzam, he returned to Saudi Arabia,
from which he was then not allowed to leave (Kepel, 2000: 313).
It was there, during the Gulf War and the deployment of US
forces in Saudi Arabia as part of Operations Desert Shield and
Desert Storm, that a rage seems to have gripped him. As early as
1988 he had reportedly described it as the duty of every Muslim
‘to prepare himself to defend Mecca and Madina from the “Jews”’
(Rubin, 1997a: 196). The Western deployment seems to have
struck him as the very violation he was called upon to resist. He
was finally permitted to leave Saudi Arabia in April 1991, but by
then he had developed an obsessive detestation of both the Saudi
regime, which had permitted non-Muslims to deploy on the soil of
the kingdom, and of the USA, which had supplied the bulk of
those troops. This obsession was mixed, however, with another
obsessive conviction, namely that the experience of the Soviets in
Afghanistan had proved the vulnerability even of superpowers
when confronted with true believers. With no direct experience of
the United States or indeed of Western countries, he was poorly
placed to detect the perils in assuming that the USA was a mirror
image of the USSR. After leaving Saudi Arabia, he revisited
Afghanistan and Pakistan, before making his way to Sudan, where
he settled in late 1991. In April 1994, he was deprived of Saudi
citizenship; in May 1996, he left Sudan for Afghanistan – in time
to aid the Taliban in their push to Kabul.
Bin Laden and the Taliban leaders
One wonders whether the Taliban appreciated just what they were
embracing when they decided to permit Bin Laden and his associ-
ates to remain on their territory. The obligation which Omar and
his key advisers manifestly felt towards Bin Laden could be inter-
254 The Afghanistan Wars