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Afghanistan, "Terrorism"
and Blowback: A Chronology
(this is the printer-friendly version) 1747 Ahmad Shah Durrani becomes the chief of the Afghan Pashtun tribes. [He freed the Pashtun areas of what is now Afghanistan from Iranian rule, and then went on to acquire territory from the deteriorating empires to the west and east--- the Safavi dynasty in Iran and the Mughals in India. At the height of his conquests in 1762 his empire included all of present-day Pakistan, parts of northern India and the area around Meshed in Iran. The southern boundary was the Arabian Sea and included the port of Karachi. Nyrop, Richard F. and Donald M. Seekins, Afghanistan, a country study (1986), pp. 13-19.] 1839-1842 The First Afghan War is one of the first acts in the "Great Game," so named by the British (and romanticized by Rudyard Kipling) to describe the spy games played by the British and Russian intelligence agencies as the spheres of influence of the two empires moved closer and closer to an ultimate clash in Afghanistan. [Ahmad Shah's domain had started disintegrating even before his death in 1772. The British took advantage of the continuing wars of succession to install a puppet government in Kabul with ex-shah Shuya replacing Dost Mohammed (who had proved reluctant to expel the lone Russian agent from Kabul and give up all claims to Peshawar (which the Sikhs now controlled.) The British excuse was that India's welfare required a trustworthy and stable ally on its border. Shuja was unable to gain the support of the other Afghan chiefs who rose up against him and the British. The garrison of 15,000 men was forced to make a humiliating retreat to India from Kabul with Afghan tribesmen picking them off at every pass. Most died, one man survived the march unscathed, and a few were taken prisoner. Meyer, Karl E. and Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament of Shadows (1999), pp. 82-110; Nyrop, pp. 22-29.] 1878-1881 The Second Anglo-Afghan War starts when the imperious Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, delivers an ultimatum to Emir Sher Ali to accept a British mission in Kabul. [The proponents of the Forward Policy were in power in Britain with the ascension of Disraeli as Prime Minister in 1874. They believed that Afghanistan must be taken over as a buffer state against the encroaching Russian expansion into Central Asia. (The Russians had taken Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868 and a year later were at the banks of the Amu Darya River, the northern boundary of present-day Afghanistan. British Liberals, on the other hand, felt that the natural boundary of India should be the Indus River in western India, now Pakistan.) The British invaded in November, 1878 and quickly occupied half the country. Sher Ali's regent signed the Treaty of Gandamak to prevent British occupation of the remaining provinces. The British agreed to pay annual subsidies, Afghanistan relinquished control of its foreign affairs and accepted the presence of the Residency. The British believed all was well, but in September, 1879 the bewildered Resident refused to pay some 2000 Herati mercenaries who then stormed the Residency, killing all the British. Lord Lytton sent an army to avenge the massacre; hundreds of Afghans were executed on little or no evidence. These reprisals spurred an army of 10,000 tribesmen to march on Kabul. The British were saved by recognizing Abdul Rahman Khan as Emir--- a claimant who ironically had been living in Russia and was sponsored by Russia! Back in Britain, Gladstone won the1880 election by turning it into a sort of plebiscite on Disraeli's imperial wars: "The sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own." This sentiment didn't appeal to Her Majesty, but middle-class Britons approved. Britain's gains from the war (and the expenditure of £12 million) were the Khyber Pass, the Kurram Valley, and the control of Afghanistan's foreign relations. In both Afghan wars the British were able to defeat the poorly-equipped Afghan army, but were ultimately forced out by tribal uprisings. Nyrop, pp. 30-34, 291; Meyer and Brysac, pp. 177-201.] 1893 Abdul Rahman Khan is forced by the British Indian government to agree to the "Durand Line" as the boundary between Afghanistan and India. [This placed more than half of the Pashtuns in India, a decision that was protested then and by succeeding generations. Nyrog, pp. 37-38.] 1907 The "Great Game" ends with the Anglo-Russian Convention. [The former competitors, now united against the rising influence of Germany, divided Iran into two spheres of influence. Russia could occupy the north and Britain the south and east should Iran be threatened by a third party. Both countries pledged not to occupy Afghanistan nor interfere with its internal affairs. Nyrog, p.40.] May, 1919 The new king of Afghanistan, Amanullah, starts the Third Anglo-Afghan War when the British refuse to acknowledge the complete independence of Afghanistan. [After a month the parties went to the negotiating table. The British were unwilling to engage in another land war after the slaughter of 1914-1918, and the Afghans were suffering from the British air bombardments of Kabul and Jalalabad. Afghanistan got control of its foreign affairs and quickly established relations with the Soviet Union, Iran, Britain, Turkey, Italy and France. The question of the control of the Pashtun tribes living in India was not resolved. Amanullah traveled far more extensively than any king before him. He was particularly intrigued with the reforms that Kemal Ataturk had instituted in Turkey and tried to copy them. Western dress was required in Kabul, and secular education was begun (for girls also.) The veiling and seclusion of women was discouraged, and slavery and forced labor were abolished. A constitution, civil rights, a legislative assembly and a court system were established. He probably tried to do too much too fast, as some tribal chiefs, the religious leaders, and elements of the army rose up against him. He abdicated in 1929, went into exile with his family and, out of anger and sorrow, forbade any of them to ever set foot again in Afghanistan. Nyrop, pp. 41-46.] 1933 King Nadir Shah of Afghanistan is assassinated. His son, Zahir Shah, born 1914, ascends to the throne for a reign that will last forty years. [However, the country was basically governed for the first twenty years by Zahir Shah's two uncles and for the next ten by his cousin, Mohammed Daoud Khan. The uncles, wishing to avoid dependency on either Britain or the Soviet Union, turned to Germany for the needed aid and expertise to build factories, roads, hydroelectric plants, and communication facilities. By the beginning of World War II Germany was Afghanistan's most important foreign country. Yet Afghanistan declared neutrality during the war. It acquiesced to a British-Soviet demand to expel non-diplomatic Axis personnel from the country by expelling non-diplomatic personnel from all the belligerent nations. After the war Prime Minister Shah Mahmud relaxed the strict press censorship and a "liberal parliament" was elected in 1949. Kabul University started a student union which fostered political debate and produced plays that criticized both Islam and the monarchy. The government then cracked down, closed the opposition newspapers, outlawed the student Union, and arrested many opposition leaders. Nyrog, pp. 48-57; Griffin, Michael, Reaping the Whirlwind (2001), p. 88; Cooley, John K., Unholy Wars (1999), pp. 10-11.] 1934 Afghanistan joins the League of Nations. The United States recognizes Afghanistan. Nyrog, p. 50. 1947 The British withdraw from India. As a result, the Afghani government revives its old claims to land now in Pakistan and extending as far as the Arabian Sea. [Pakistan rejected all "Pashtunistan" and "Baluchistan" claims. Afghanistan responded by casting the sole negative vote against Pakistan's admission to the United Nations, and continued funding the rebel Pashtun warlords on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line. Pakistan would retaliate with border closings and other interference with the transit of goods from landlocked Afghanistan to India. The conflict escalated after Daoud Khan became prime minister in 1953 and emphasized the Pashtunistan issue. Nyrog, pp. 51-56; Cooley, p. 10.] August 19, 1953 A CIA coup in Iran overthrows the government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and re-installs Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran. Over 300 people are killed and many hundreds are wounded in the nine hours of fighting. [Plans had been brewing to oust the nationalist Mossadegh ever since he and his party had passed a bill in 1951 to nationalize the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The coup, however, was increasingly proclaimed in the years following as essential to prevent "the obvious threat of Russian takeover." Its cost to the US taxpayers was about $19 million. The future cost to the people of Iran was incalculable. Thousands were executed during the next twenty-five years of the Shah's reign. SAVAK, the secret police created and trained by the CIA, was described by Amnesty International in 1976 as having a "history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran." Matchbox, Fall, 1976. The United States got many military installations in Iran, bases for surveillance flights over Russia, and radar and electronic listening posts that completed the encirclement of the USSR. American oil firms gained a 40% interest in the new international consortium for Iranian oil. The US would spend over a billion dollars to support the Shah's regime and the military in Iran. (The CIA distributed about $400 million a year to placate the ayatollahs and the mullahs from 1953 until President Carter ordered a stop in 1977, a move that undoubtedly contributed to the 1978 revolution.) Blum, William, The CIA: A Forgotten History (1986), pp. 67-76.] September, 1953 Mohammed Daoud Khan becomes prime minister in an intra-family transfer of power that involves no violence. [His ten-year tenure was noted for the foreign policy turn to the Soviet Union, the completion of the Helmand Valley project which radically improved living conditions in southwestern Afghanistan, and tentative steps towards the emancipation of women. (He required his wives and those of his cabinet members to appear in public unveiled.) His obsession with Pashtunistan and his hostility to Pakistan proved disastrous to the economy. (The grape and pomegranate harvests had to be air-lifted to markets in India in 1961 and 1962, thanks to Daoud's severance of diplomatic relations with Pakistan.) Nyrog, p. 58-62.] 1956 Having been rebuffed by the US for both sales of arms and loans, Afghanistan turns to the Soviet Union for aid to equip and train the army and air force as a defense against provocations by the Pakistanis. [Within a few months the USSR had sent jet airplanes, tanks, heavy and light artillery for a heavily discounted price tag of $25 million. By 1973 the Soviet Union had invested a billion dollars in the army and infrastructure of Afghanistan. They built a modern highway from Kabul to Soviet Tajikistan, a giant air base at Bagram, and pipelines for natural gas. Afghan officers received training in the USSR and Eastern Europe, and Russian became the military language of the country. Nyrop, p. 293; Cooley, pp. 10-11.] September 27, 1962 President Kennedy meets with Afghanistan's Foreign Minister, Prince Naim, and tells him "the United States is a long way off [from Afghanistan] and even though it is very anxious to help it can at best play a limited role." Anshutz, J. Bruce, Afghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation (1986), p. 28. March, 1963 King Zahir Shah ousts Daoud as prime minister, as his anti-Pakistan policies have ruined the economy and the family agrees that Daoud must go. Zahir Shah takes control of the government himself and institutes a parliamentary democracy. [The Afghan constitution of 1964 gave women equal rights, including the right to vote and the right to an education. Wearing of the veil was discretionary. (The Loya Jirgah that approved the constitution included six women.) There was partial freedom of the press, and the country's infrastructure was transformed thanks to the influx of foreign aid. Family-planning clinics for women were opened in 1968. The constitution also mandated that all inhabitants of Afghanistan of whatever ethnic origin were "Afghans." Before that only Pashtuns were known as "Afghans." Nyorg, pp. 62-65; Griffin, pp. 64, 88; Goodwin, Jan, Price of Honor, p. 89; Richter, "Revolutionary Afghan Women", zmag.org; Cooley, p. 11.] January 1, 1965 Twenty-seven Afghans, mostly university lecturers and civil servants who have been meeting clandestinely for some time, take advantage of the more liberal atmosphere to form the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). A nine-man central committee is elected with Nur Mohammad Taraki as Secretary General and Babrak Karmal as his deputy. The platform and suggested reforms are very similar to those of King Amanullah. [In the autumn elections half of the PDPA candidates standing for election were elected. All four were from what would become the Parcham faction; one was a woman, Dr. Anahita Ratebzad, the close companion of Babrak Karmal. Only twenty progressive candidates were chosen for the 218-seat parliament unlike the "liberal parliament" of 1949. The tribal warlords, two-thirds of them illiterate, had recognized the political advantage of a parliamentary seat and had campaigned vigorously. Edward Girardet, Afghanistan, The Soviet War (1985), p.96] 1972 Drought and famine cause the deaths of over 100,000 Afghanis. Relief funds from abroad are mishandled by the king's son-in-law, General Abdul Wali. Cooley, p. 11. July 17, 1973 While King Zahir Shah is abroad in Italy in one of his many absences (this one for medical treatment), he is deposed by a coup, a relatively peaceful one with only eight fatalities. Daoud Khan, the former prime minister, is installed as leader of the country. [Junior officers of the Afghan army who had been trained in the Soviet Union carried out the coup, with some assistance from the Parcham (the flag) wing of the Afghan communist party, but Daoud was in the background pulling the strings. King Zahir Shah was not unhappy to be able to remain in Rome where he became a pensioner of some unnamed Arab state. Daoud immediately abolished the monarchy and named himself the president of a one-party republic. Reneging on his promise to make progressive reforms, he ran a repressive regime with hundreds of arrests and political executions of leftists (including members of the Parcham who had helped him gain power) and Islamists (religious extremists.) He lessened the country's dependence on the Soviet Union and went to India, Saudi Arabia and newly-oil-rich Iran for aid. Surprisingly, he did not renew the Pashtunistan issue; relations with Pakistan improved thanks to interventions from the US and Iran. His administration and the army squelched a growing Islamic fundamentalist movement whose leaders fled to Pakistan. There they were supported by Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and encouraged to continue the fight against Daoud. These men --- Gulbuddin Hekmetyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Ahmad Shah Massoud --- would later be major leaders of the mujaheddin. Nyorg, pp. 67-72; Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2000), pp. 12-13; Griffin, pp. 17, 88; Cooley, pp. 11-12.] Late 1977 As part of a worldwide review of Embassy categories, the United States downgrades its embassy in Kabul to the lowest category of mission, Class 4. [Obviously the State Department felt that Afghanistan was a country of little relevance to US interests. Amstutz, p. 29.] April 19, 1978 The funeral of Mir Akbar Khyber, a key leader of the Parcham party who had been assassinated two days before, turns into a rally with close to 30,000 communists from both factions of the PDPA (Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan) attending and listening to stirring speeches by Nur Muhammed Taraki (Khalq) and Babrak Karmal (Parcham). [This was the third political assassination in nine months. Daoud, concerned both by the size of the crowd and the reconciliation of the two formerly warring factions of the PDPA, ordered wholesale arrests of the leadership of both factions. Nyorg, p.72. Girardet suggests that Khyber was murdered by the Khalqis to provoke revolt and also get rid of a prominent Parchami. Girardet, p. 103.] April 27-28, 1978 Afghan soldiers sympathetic to the Khalq (the masses) faction of the Afghani communist party overthrow the government and release the arrested PDPA members. Daoud and most of his family are killed resisting the coup; several thousand people die in the fighting. Nur Muhammad Taraki is installed as president; his two principal deputies are the Columbia University-educated politician, Hafizullah Amin (Khalq), and Babrak Karmal. This ends the control of the country by the Durrani clan who had been in power (with one very brief interruption) since 1747. [Daoud's police had been so slow in making the arrests that Amin, by using his children as couriers, had been able to arrange this coup which had already been planned for a later date. (Historians differ on whether the Soviet Union was taken by surprise or whether the USSR was aware of the plot and did nothing to stop it.) The PDPA quickly instituted a number of reforms: The mortgage debts of the peasants were canceled. (A third of them were were tenant farmers who were obliged to turn over half of the year's crop to the landowner.) A major literacy program was begun in Dari, Pashtu, Uzbek, Turkic and Baluchi. (The illiteracy rate for rural inhabitants was 90.5%; for women, 96.3%, meaning that a woman was four times less likely to be able to read than a man.) Bride-price was prohibited and women were given freedom of choice in marriage. There was universal free education and schooling for girls became compulsory. Many hospitals were built (an 80% increase by 1985) and health services were provided to the peasants for the first time. Daoud's 1977 constitution was annulled and a series of decrees were substituted. One called for "revolutionary military courts," another declared the equality of all Afghan ethnic groups and took away citizenship for all surviving members of the royal family. Nyorg, pp. 213- 234; Girardet, pp. 103-104; Cooley, p. 12; Rashid, p. 13; Workers World, October 10, 1996.] Summer-Autumn, 1978 There are violent protests over some of the reforms which challenge Afghan cultural patterns, especially land reform and the emancipation of women. The Khalq faction takes over all the important government posts; the Parcham cabinet members are sent abroad as ambassadors. (Babrak Karmal goes to Prague.) Nyorg, pp. 231- 234. February 14, 1979 US Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs is kidnapped by several armed members of a Maoist group and held hostage for the release of several of their imprisoned colleagues. [Afghan security forces attacked the hotel room where Dubs was being held. Both he and his captors were killed in the crossfire. President Jimmy Carter, who had been demanding that the situation be negotiated, was indignant, slashed the aid progam from $27 million to $5 million, and further reduced the diplomatic representation to chargé d'affaires. Prior to this Amin had been trying to increase US participation in the country as a counter-balance to the Soviet influence. Girardet, p. 114; Nyrog, p. 237.] March 28, 1979 There is a major revolt in the province of Herat against the Taraki regime possibly fomented by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, capitalizing on the resistance to the enforced participation of women in the government literacy programs. (Herat is predominantly Shi'ite Moslem; the rest of Afghanistan is mostly Sunni.) [The Soviet military advisors were major targets of the outraged mobs; 50-100 Soviets were killed, some tortured exquisitely. The government recaptured the city, killing nearly 5000 Afghans. Most of the air force had defected by this time. When Taraki called out the air force, only a few pilots were willing to bomb the people of Herat. Those who refused were executed. Taraki and Amin asked the Soviet Union for "two or three battalions" to protect communication lines and the Bagram airfield. The USSR attempted to tamper the Khalqis' radicalism, urging attendance at mosques, inclusion of Parchamis and non-communists in the government, and a halt to the unpopular land reform movement. Most of this advice was ignored; the insurrections and the political executions continued. There were all the trimmings of a police state— curfew, foreigners restricted to a radius of 35 miles around Kabul, and a secret police, AGSA, trained by the East German SSD. As a result, fewer and fewer UN technicians and other internationals were willing to remain in Afghanistan. In March, 1979 Amin took over as prime minister, but Taraki remained in the government as president. Nyrog, p. 234-238; Girardet, pp. 115-121; Amstutz, p. 39; Cooley, p. 12.] April 4, 1979 In Pakistan the somewhat populist president, Zulfilcar Ali Bhutto, is overthrown and hung on the orders of General Zia al-Haq. [Zia initially canceled elections indefinitely, but was soon forced to allow local elections of individuals but without party labels. Ali Bhutto's western-educated daughter, Benazir, took over the leadership of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and was able to get many of the party faithful elected. She traveled abroad and promoted international aversion to Zia. The discovery that Pakistan was secretly constructing a facility to enrich uranium (in violation of the 1976 Symington Amendment) caused President Carter to stop military aid and impose economic sanctions in April. Zia, thus isolated, was ripe to find a "good war" to regain American support. He and the chief of ISI, his secret service, General Akhtar Rahman Khan, would find that opportunity with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Cooley, pp. 52-54.] Friday, April 20, 1979 Afghan armored troops accompanied by 20 Soviet advisors move into the small farming community of Kerala in eastern Afghanistan. They call the men, all unarmed, to assemble in a field for a jirga to discuss the recent mujaheddin attacks on a military garrison. The women and children are sent into the mosque. When the men refuse to shout pro-communist slogans, the shooting begins. Bulldozers appear and proceed to plow the bodies into the soft earth; some are still alive and visibly moving. All the while a photographer is taking pictures that will be shown to demonstrate what happens to peasants who collaborate with the mujaheddin. (The people of Kerala are suspected, correctly, of furnishing food, shelter and ammunition to the rebels.) Next the soldiers enter the mosque and rip the chadors off those men who had thought to disguise themselves as women. [An estimated 1170 unarmed males were massacred— a larger number than the massacres at Lidice or My Lai. All the women and children plus the 100 men who managed to avoid the massacre, left within hours for Pakistan, across a river and over some mountains. The community of Kerala, once numbering 5000, was deserted. Girardet, pp. 107-110.] July 3, 1979 President Carter, at the urging of his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, signs a secret directive for clandestine assistance to enemies of the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan. Cooley, pp. 13, 19-22. [This, of course, was six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Brzezinski admitted this in 1998 to a rather shocked French interviewer: "We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we consciously increased the probability that they would .... Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap. You want me to regret that?" When the interviewer asked if he regretted having supported the Islamic fundamentalists and given arms and advice to future terrorists, Brzezinski replied: "What is more important to the history of the world... the Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" Interview with Vincent Javert in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, January 15-21, 1998, p. 76, translated from the French by Bill Blum.] September 9, 1979 An Amnesty International report claims there is widespread torture of prisoners in Afghanistan and that 12,000 political prisoners have been held without trial since the April, 1978 coup. Amin denies these charges. Nyrog, p. 241. September 14, 1979 After a second failed attempt by Taraki and the Soviets to assassinate him, Amin enters Taraki's office with a band of soldiers and has him arrested. [Two days later it was announced that Taraki had resigned his posts for "health reasons." A small newspaper notice on October 10th indicated that he had died of a "serious illness." According to Arnold, he was strangled and suffocated by three members of the presidential guards service. Nyrog, pp.238-239; Arnold, Anthony, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Perspective (1981); Cooley, p. 17.] September 26, 1979 A secret report prepared for President Carter describes the deteriorating political situation in Pakistan and questions whether the rule of General Zia al-Haq will last out the year. Much of Pakistan's GNP is going to their nuclear development program, yet the country is asking for a rescheduling of their huge international debt. "Another problem in the US-Pakistani relationship is in the unchecked expansion of opium poppy cultivation in the tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghan border." [Despite this negative assessment the Carter government continued the covert funneling of arms and supplies to Pakistan's ISI (secret service) which then sent about 50% to the seven principal Islamic fundamentalist guerrilla groups in Afghanistan which they were training and equipping. Cooley, pp. 58-59.] November 4, 1979 Blowback in Iran: Islamic militant students invade the US Embassy in Tehran and hold 52 personnel hostage in retaliation for the US extension of hospitality to the deposed Shah Reza Pahlevi. [It would be 444 days before they were released.] December 12, 1979 At a secret meeting in the Kremlin the decision is made to invade Afghanistan at Christmas despite the strenuous objections of the three key generals. [The leaders believed that Taraki, before his overthrow and murder, had been undermined by Amin's "personal dictatorship," that Amin was in cahoots with the US Embassy, and that Pakistan and the CIA were encouraging and equipping the ultra-right Muslim opposition. They were afraid that the Americans would try to destabilize their Muslim republics of Central Asia and that they wanted Pakistan and Afghanistan as anti-Soviet bases to replace those in Iran (lost earlier that year with the overthrow of the Shah.) Cooley, pp. 13-19.] December 24, 1979 The Soviet Army enters Kabul and installs a puppet government. Babrak Karmal, the leader of the Parcham faction, is made president. Rashid, p. 13. December 27, 1979 The Soviets assassinate Amin, as planned at the Kremlin meeting. (They first reported that he had been "accidentally killed.") Cooley, pp. 17-18 January 4, 1980 President Carter announces some measures to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan— a partial embargo on US grain sales to the Soviet Union, a major cutback on fishing rights in US waters, and no more licensing of American technology. He tells the Senate to shelve consideration of the SALT II arms reduction treaty. He hints that the US may boycott the Olympic games to take place that summer in Moscow. The next day Brzezinski leaves for Cairo and Islamabad to secure agreements:
September 22, 1980 President Saddam Hussein of Iraq resurrects some old boundary differences as an excuse to go to war with Iran. [Iraq had been nervous about its Shi'ite neighbor ever since their Islamic revolution the preceding year. Two-thirds or more of Iraqis were Shi'ites, although most of the government heads were Sunnis (and usually from Hussein's home town of Takrit.) The agreement made with the shah in Algiers in 1975 for both sides to refrain from fomenting the Kurds against the other nation was no longer in force under the new regime. Hussein anticipated a brief war that would result in Iraq's hegemony in the Persian Gulf. Initially Iraq was successful, but Iran was able to regroup its forces and the war became a stalemate with fearful numbers of casualties on both sides. Unwilling to see the Shi'ite state become the victor, both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia gave huge sums of money to support secular (but Sunni-dominated) Iraq. Toward the end the United States supplied weapons and the intelligence that served to defeat their enemy, Iran. Additionally, the US signed a five-year economic and technical agreement and granted Iraq $1 billion in food aid. In July, 1988 Ayatollah Khomeini was forced to accept the UN terms for a cease-fire without conditions. Farouk-Sluggett, Marion and Peter Sluggett, "Iraq and the New World Order" in Ismael, Gulf War and the New World Order (1994), pp. 278-279.] January 20, 1981 Ronald Reagan is inaugurated as the 40th president. (Television gives the American public the split-screen spectacle of the inauguration ceremony plus the arrival of the Embassy captives just released by Iran.) William Casey, the new head of the CIA, enthusiastically adopts the covert operation in Afghanistan started by Brzezinski, Carter, and Carter's DCI, Stansfield Turner. [The Black Budget cost of the first year under Carter had been $100 million. Rep. Charles Wilson (D-TX) of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee called this "peanuts" and, with several other anti-communist hawks, saw to it that Black Budget funds for the covert operation in Afghanistan quickly quadrupled. More weapons and better weapons were procured. Under a super-secret SOVMAT program (probably unknown to Pakistan's Zia) phony corporations bought huge quantities of weapons from Eastern European governments, including latest-model Soviet tanks and radar systems for fighter planes. The New York Times has estimated that the US and Saudi Arabia supplied nearly $6 billion worth of weapons to the Afghani "freedom fighters." (Other countries supplying funds or arms were Egypt, France, Israel, Great Britain, Iran, China and Japan.) Large sums went to the recruitment, training and maintenance of Muslim zealots from many countries including Algeria, Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Great Britain, Morocco, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, and the United States. An early and enthusiastic recruit was the wealthy Saudi national, Osama bin Laden, who had been suggested to the CIA by the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki Ibn Faisal Ibn Abdelaziz. Bin Laden's organization, Al Qaeda, set up recruitment centers in the major Arab countries. He paid for the transportation of these recruits to training centers in Pakistan and Afghanistan and subsidized their support. His construction and engineering skills were utilized to build roads, tunnels, hospitals, storage depots and secure bases hollowed into the mountains. Most of the training was done by Pakistan's ISI in camps built by the CIA in Pakistan and border areas of Afghanistan. The trainers were trained at the CIA "farm" in Virginia where they learned the latest techniques of arson, demolition, and assassination.] Cooley, pp. 60, 106-119; New York Times, 24 August 1998; Reeve, Simon, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism. June 30, 1981 General Maxwell Taylor, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, refutes the notion that the Soviet Union is planning to go to war against the United States: "They have conventional forces in close proximity to virtually all their national interests that may require defense. From their World War II experience, their leaders know how devastating conventional war can be. They also know that nuclear war would be many more times destructive, that they would lose in a few hours more than they lost in four years fighting the Germans. They could not afford to fight or even win a strategic war with the United States. In so doing they would so paralyze the nation as to make it easy prey to nearby neighbors-- wolves ready to take advantage of a stricken bear. Such enemies would include Chinese, Afghans, Turks, Germans and Poles beyond Soviet borders and non-Russians within." September 23, 1981 The Afghani covert operation is blown to the American public when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat brags on the Today show about Egypt's contribution. When asked why he was doing this, he replies "because they are our Muslim brothers and are in trouble." Cooley, p. 38. October 6, 1981 Blowback in Egypt: Despite the presence of his CIA-trained bodyguards President Sadat is assassinated while watching the annual military parade in Cairo. [An ambiguous fatwa had been issued against the Egyptian president earlier in the year by blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. Islamists were angry with Sadat for signing a peace treaty with "the Zionist project" and for the lavish life style of the administration. Tensions had been heightened when, on September 2, Sadat arrested 1536 individuals, the key leaders in all the opposition groups— al-Gihad, Islamic Group, Coptic priests, communists and Nasserites. A plot was formed by army members of al-Gihad and the execution was carried out by young Lieutenant Khaled al-Islambuli who shouted, "I killed the Pharaoh!" The group's 54-page document, "The Neglected Duty," contained an extensive theological justification for their actions. It is, they said, a holy duty to rebel against one's rulers if the rulers are not following the true Islam. Beattie, Egypt during the Sadat Years (2000), pp. 272-277; Cooley, pp. 38-41; New York Times, October 13, 2001.] February 11, 1982 In a secret memorandum Attorney General William French Smith exempts the CIA from its legal requirement to report on drug smuggling by any of its assets or clients. [Canny CIA Director William Casey, remembering the lucrative heroin tie-in with the Vietnam War, had fought a secret battle to secure this exemption. Almost from the beginning of the covert op in Afghanistan it had been "arms in, drugs out" despite the Carter administration's efforts to run a drug-free war. With Reagan that changed. The FBI, instead of the DEA, was put in charge of the anti-drug program in the United States, so any previous DEA-CIA information-sharing ended. A blind eye was turned to the Afghani warlords who controlled the Khyber Pass and other transit routes to Pakistan through which military supplies and newly-trained mujaheddin must pass. Western supplies of heroin from Central Asia increased ten-fold in the decade of the war, soon surpassing Southeast Asia as the principal source. And the drug was no longer coming out as raw opium or blocks of morphine; heroin-processing laboratories sprang up in both Pakistan and Afghanistan displacing Marseilles and Hong Kong as the principal refining centers. (Casey also needed the exemption for the covert operation against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas to protect the CIA officials working with cocaine-dealing contras. In 1995 the Clinton administration rescinded the exemption with no fanfare; this action did not become public knowledge until 1998.) The war took a recess each year at poppy harvesting time when the indigenous soldiers on both sides would go home to help harvest their crops. Soviet soldiers, frustrated with fighting a guerrilla war for which they had not been trained, quickly became addicted to the easily available drug, just as American GIs had in Vietnam. It can't be proven, but possibly that was part of the CIA scheme (as had been suggested to Casey and Reagan by the head of the French CIA and even given a label--- "Operation Mosquito.") Cooley, pp. 126-139, The Consortium, June 1, 1998, pp. 2-4.] June 6, 1982 Israel invades Lebanon in "Operation Peace for Galilee." [The immediate goal of Menachem Begin's government was to destroy the infrastructure of the PLO terrorists in southern Lebanon who had been killing and harassing citizens of northern Israel. Begin's ultimate aim, however, was to force the Palestinians out of their refugee camps and into Jordan where he hoped they would overthrow the monarchy and take over that country as "Palestine." Then with Palestinian ambitions for statehood satisfied, Israel could annex the West Bank captured in the 1967 War. Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1996, B7.] September 16, 1982 Massacre in Lebanon: Militiamen from the Lebanese Christian Phalanque— allies of Israel— storm two Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatilla, slaughtering around 800 civilians as Israeli troops, commanded by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, stand by. [The invasion of South Lebanon, "Operation Peace for Galilee," had escalated. Israeli troops laid siege to the capital, Beirut, to widespread international condemnation. After the massacre in the refugee camps, 400,000 Israeli citizens demonstrated to protest the protracted campaign and the many Israeli casualties and demanded an inquiry into the degree of Israel's culpability at Sabra and Shatilla. Protesters gathered daily outside the windows of Prime Minister Menachem Begin, shouting "Murderer" in a manner reminiscent of the American doves who hurled similar epithets at LBJ. Like President Johnson, Begin resigned office in August, 1983 saying, "I cannot go on." The Kahan Commission concluded that Sharon was "personally responsible" for the massacres and forced him to resign as Defense Minister. Karpin and Friedman, Murder in the Name of God (1998), pp. 66-67. In June, 2001 a suit was filed in a Belgian court by 28 survivors of the massacre charging Sharon with crimes against humanity. The case was buttressed by some Israeli documents sent anonymously to the attorneys that indicated that Sharon actively encouraged the Lebanese Forces. (The documents are believed to be a secret appendix to the final report of the Kahan Commission.) Israeli Defense Forces also oversaw and assisted in the interrogation of nearly 1000 Palestinian men after the massacre who were never seen or heard from again. www.ccmep.org/hotnews/belgian113001.html] For more on the suit, see the entry for January 24, 2002. November 10,
1982 Leonid Brezhnev dies; he is replaced by Yuri Andropov
as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
[Andropov tried to arrange a negotiated peace in Afghanistan with
the United Nations. The Reagan administration was monumentally distrustful,
and pressured the Pakistanis to escalate the conflict. The Soviet
Union responded with more soldiers, more weapons, and more brutality
against the mujaheddin.] October 23, 1983 Blowback to USA for Sabra and Shatilla: A suicide truck loaded with explosives crashes into the US Marine barracks outside Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 United States Marines and severely injuring dozens more. This is the highest loss of Marines in a single day since Iwo Jima. September 20, 1984 Further Blowback: The Islamic Jihad sends another explosive-loaded truck to bomb the US Embassy in Beirut on a day when the US and British ambassadors are meeting there. This time guards kill the suicide bomber before he can slam into the Embassy; fourteen people die. November 1984 The US restores diplomatic relations with Iraq (broken since 1967) despite Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops. [President George H. W. Bush and others in the National Security Planning Group had been active in a project to help Iraq build an oil pipeline to the Jordanian port of Aqaba in reaction to the Iranian blockade of Iraq's Persian Gulf ports. The Reagan Administration had secretly allowed Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt to transfer howitzers, Huey helicopters, bombs and other weapons of US manufacture to Iraq. Waas, Murray and Craig Unger "In the Loop: Bush's Secret Mission, The New Yorker, November 2, 1992, p 70.] March 8, 1985 Retribution for Marine Barracks Massacre in Beirut: A car loaded with explosives plows into a Beirut slum area that includes the compound of Sheikh Mohammed Fadlallah, the head of Hizbollah, the Party of God. The Sheikh escapes injury, but a city block is destroyed with at least 90 people buried in the rubble. [William Casey, the head of Reagan's CIA, had contracted the job out to Saudi intelligence. Friedman, Robert I., "The CIA and the Sheik", The Village Voice, March 30, 1993.] March 11, 1985
Mikhail Gorbachev is elected General Secretary
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union following the death of
the geriatric Konstantin Chernenko. [In April the party agreed to
his program of perestroika, or restructuring of the soviet
system of government. Gorbachev again approached the UN to broker
a way for the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan without leaving
the nation in jeopardy. The United States refused to countenance
any of these proposals and further escalated the support for the
mujaheddin. Some of the bloodiest years of the Russo-Afghan war
followed.] July 1985 Stingers: The CIA begins supplying some of the closely-held Stingers to Pakistan's ISI, largely due to the lobbying efforts of Representative Charles Wilson (D-TX). [These highly effective heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles turned the tide of the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. With their kill rate of 75%, the skies were soon clear of Soviet and Afghan aircraft, enabling the guerrillas to trap the government forces inside a few cities and military camps. "We were handing them out like lollipops," a US intelligence official told the Washington Post. Many Stingers quickly reached the black market where a weapon that cost the US $35,000 fetched a price of $100,000 to $300,000. Some were bought by the Chechens for their war against Moscow; others went to the Azeris for the struggle for Nagorno-Karabakh. It is estimated that 30-70 Stingers were acquired by Osama bin Laden. Cooley, pp. 109, 172-174; Goodwin, Jan, Caught in the Crossfire (1987), pp. 48-49.] April 5, 1986 American Military Deaths in Germany: A bomb explodes in the La Belle Club, a West Berlin discotheque frequented by American service men. Three people are killed and 200 injured. [Libya and its leader, Colonel Muammar Qadhafi, were immediately blamed without evidence. A German documentary aired on August 25, 1998 (during the trial of five defendants for their alleged involvement in the attack on La Belle) declared that the lead defendant, Libyan Yasser Chraidi, was probably innocent and was being used as a scapegoat by the CIA and the German BND. Several of the suspects were shielded from court appearances by western intelligence agencies; one of these suspects was Mohammed Amairi, a Mossad agent. The documentary implied that the La Belle incident was a carefully prepared provocation designed to implicate Libya.] www.wsws.org/news/1998/aug/bomb1-a27.shmtl April 15, 1986 Retribution against Libya: President Ronald Reagan sends US planes to bomb the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi in retribution for the terrorist attack (by unknown perpetrators) on the La Belle Club, ten days earlier. Thirty-one people are killed, including Colonel Qaddafi's adopted baby girl. His home, the French Embassy and many homes in an affluent neighborhood of Benghazi are destroyed. [Qaddafi was not at home that night. There was no declaration of war and no prior approval of the US Congress for these air raids.] March 1987 Hekmatyar's mujaheddin cross the Amu Darya River and launch rocket attacks against villages in the USSR's republic of Tajikistan in an operation promoted by CIA chief William Casey. Casey also gives increased support to the ISI program to recruit radical Muslims, especially Arabs, to come to Pakistan to fight with the mujaheddin in Afghanistan. [General Zia wanted to make Pakistan the center of the Muslim world, the Reagan administration wanted to demonstrate that the entire Muslim world opposed the USSR, and the Saudis were happy to get rid of their dissidents. None of these principals foresaw the blowback that has resulted. Rashid, p. 129.] March 16, 1988 The Iraqi Air Force bombs the city of Jalaba in northen Iraq with poison gas, killing over 5000 civilians. [The day before the Iranian army with the help of the two major Kurdish opposition parties had captured the city. Slugett, p. 279.] April 1988 Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev announces that a phased withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan will begin May 15th, to be completed by 2-15-1989. July 3, 1988 US Shoots Down Iranian Commercial Plane: The USS Vincennes fires two missiles, shooting down the regularly scheduled Iran Air Flight 655 over Hangam Island in the Persian Gulf, killing 290 passengers and crew. Over 60 of the victims were children. Several US ships were in the area to protect tankers bringing oil to the west from Kuwait during the Iran-Iraq war. The gung-ho captain of the Vincennes, eager for an engagement with the Iranian gunboats that were routinely harassing the tankers, took his ship into the area against orders. He was actually within Iranian territorial waters when his $400 million Aegis computer system mistook the Iran Air plane for a much smaller F-14 fighter plane and fired two missiles. Iranian radio railed that the skies would "rain blood" on America in retribution. The Pentagon went into instant cover-up mode for this "tragic accident." They said the commercial plane was outside its air corridor, was descending onto the Vincennes, and failing to respond to the "Identify: Friend or Foe?" query. Captain Rogers denied that he had been within Iranian territorial waters and claimed that his ship was rushing to the defense of merchant ship Stovall which was under attack. It was proven, however, that the commercial plane was at the center of its corridor and climbing. There was no ship named Stovall; radio messages regarding it were part of a sting operation designed to lure out Iranian gunboats. The Pentagon was fully aware of the true facts by July 14 when Vice President Bush defended the US before the UN Security Council. Without acknowledging liability the United States later paid nearly $3 million to non-Iranian relatives of Flight 655's passengers. (Iranians were excluded because Iran had filed a claim against the United States in international court.) The Supreme Court upheld a lower court's dismissal of a law suit by the families, saying that neither the government nor the contractors of the Aegis system can be sued for negligence by the military in wartime: "There can be no doubt that during the 'tanker war' a 'time of war' existed." Newsweek, July 13, 1992; Liability Week, June 14, 1993.] August 17, 1988 The mysterious plane crash of a Pakistan Air Force C-130 kills General Zia, General Akhtar Abdel Rahman Khan (the former head of ISI and Zia's most probable successor), US Ambassador Arnold Raphel, US Brigadier General Herbert Wassom (defense attaché in Islamabad), eight Pakistani generals and the air crew. [The party had been viewing the test demonstration of a tank the Pentagon was hoping to sell to Pakistan. The plane dove and struck the ground shortly after takeoff. The Pakistani board of inquiry came to the (unpublished) conclusion that the pilot and crew had been knocked out by a chemical agent, such as a fast-working nerve gas, colorless and odorless, that had been secreted on the plane in some small container such as a thermos or soft drink can. The exact agent was never determined since the authorities at the military hospital were ordered not to perform autopsies Zia had survived six previous attempts at assassination, including a missile fired at his plane. His enemies were myriad---- the Bhutto family, the USSR, India, KHAD (the Afghan KGB), and elements of the Pakistani military. Mohammed Yousaf points out that only the CIA and KGB had access to such a nerve poison. For geopolitical reasons at least, the United States engaged in a coverup of the deaths of two high ranking American officials. A US air force inquiry (and Raphel's divorced wife, Robin Raphel, later Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and Ambassador to Tunis) maintained that the plane had a faulty hydraulic system. The retired head of ISI's Afghanistan bureau believes that the US was not sorry to see Zia go. With the war winding down, the US was hoping to curb the power of the Afghan Islamists such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani and install a more moderate group of Afghanis (waiting in the wings in Peshawar) into any new government in Kabul. General Zia attempted to subvert this maneuvering. He and the ISI also opposed the attempts of the CIA to funnel arms and supplies to the mujaheddin directly, bypassing the ISI. (In 1990 the CIA did take over.) Cooley, pp. 225-226; Mohammed Youssaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap (1992), pp. 8-19.] December 21, 1988 Blowback over Scotland---- for Iran Air 655? for the bombing of Libya?: Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over Lockerbie, Scotland from Semtex that had been secreted in a cassette recorder. All 259 (or 260?) passengers and crew are killed as well as 11 victims on the ground. [Warning of a bomb threat had been posted in the snack bar of the US Embassy in Moscow, and it is alleged that the US Ambassador to Lebanon and the South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha changed their travel planes to avoid PA 103. US intelligence officers were on the scene within two hours, searching for particular pieces of debris and particular corpses. A local police surgeon has insisted that one body was moved after it had been tagged and another disappeared completely. John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, Cover-Up of Convenience: The Hidden Scandal of Lockerbie. (The traveling public in general was not warned of any possible travel danger.) Suspicion initially rested on Syria and the PLFP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.) The latter had already bombed two Israel-bound planes in 1970 and 1972. However, attention quickly shifted to Libya and in November 1991 two Libyan airline staff were indicted by the US State Department and the Scottish Crown Office. President Bush apologized to Syria for the "bum rap", Syria signed on as an ally in the war against Iraq, and the last of the western hostages held in Beirut were released. Qaddafi stonewalled for years before giving up the men for a trial at Camp Zeist" in Holland before three Scottish judges. After a prosecution replete with circumstantial inferences and no hard evidence, one man was acquitted and the other, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, was convicted. Ashton and Ferguson further allege that the bombers utilized a Lebanese drug smuggling route that was protected by the CIA in return for their help in freeing the remaining hostages in Beirut. In Frankfurt a suitcase containing the bomb was substituted for one containing heroin. The authors believe that the bombers were the PLFP-GC hired by Iran to avenge the shoot-down of Iran Air 655. February 15, 1989 The last Soviet soldier crosses the Amu Darya River bridge and leaves Afghanistan on the promised day. [Two million people died during the nine years of the Soviet occupation. One out of eight Afghans was left dead, and five million Afghans, or one out of three in the population, became refugees in Pakistan and Iran. The departure of the Soviet army left Najibullah's government weak and unprotected. The Mujaheddin, now under the command of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but still funded by the United States, started shelling all the major cities, killing many thousands of civilians.] July 25, 1990 Ambassador April Glaspie meets with President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. [According to a transcript released by Iraq in September, she told Hussein that the United States had "no opinion" about his quarrel with Kuwait over its alleged slant oil-drilling into an Iraqi oil reserve, and that it was a longstanding policy of the US not to take sides in Arab boundary disputes. At no time did she warn him not to invade Kuwait or to threaten US retaliation for such a venture. Shibley Telhami pooh-poohs the theory that with this conversation "the United States handed Iraq enough rope to hang itself..." Rather, he says, Hussein anticipated a "forceful" US response, but miscalculated on the reactions of the USSR and the Arab states. Telhami, "Explaining American Behavior in the Gulf Crisis" in Ismael, Gulf War and the New World Order, pp. 161-162.] August 2, 1990 Iraqi forces invade Kuwait in a ten-hour blitzkrieg and set up a provisional government. [Kuwait had been demanding immediate repayment of its wartime loans to Iraq (which Iraq regarded as an insult to Arab "unity.") Iraq accused Kuwait of stealing Iraqi oil by slant-drilling into a field that overlapped the two countries and conspiring with other oil-producing countries to keep prices low. Iraq had considered Kuwait historically to be a part of its Basra province ever since Britain had drawn the "line in the sand" in 1920 to form the Kingdom of Iraq (with a sheikh imported from Mecca.) Iraq now needed a deep-water port for ships that had been ordered from Italy. Sluggett, p. 284.] August 8, 1990 The first detachments of United States soldiers arrive in Saudi Arabia ostensibly to defend the country against a supposedly imminent invasion from Iraq. Critics point out that Saddam Hussein has no dispute with the Saudis and most of his troops are deployed along the border with Iran. [Ever since FDR's historic meeting in February, 1945 with King Ibn Saud there has been an unwritten agreement that the United States will have access to Saudi Arabia's oil in return for protection of the kingdom from its enemies, external and internal, an arrangement respected by all subsequent presidential administrations. Yergin, Daniel, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (1991) pp, 403-405; Klare, Michael T., "The Geopolitics of War", The Nation, November 5, 2001.] September 11, 1990 Addressing a joint session of Congress, President George Bush says: "In the early morning hours of August 2, following negotiations and promises by Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein not to use force, a powerful Iraqi army invaded its trusting and much weaker neighbor, Kuwait. Within three days, 120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks had poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia. It was then I decided to act to check that aggression." [Yet, according to a story researched by reporter Jean Heller, experts who examined satellite photos of the area taken on that same day were unable to find evidence of such troop concentration: no tent cities, no congregation of tanks, only a deserted air base and deep deposits of wind-blown sand on all roads leading from Kuwait to Saudi Arabia. In November Commander-in-Chief Bush doubled the number of US troops in Saudi Arabia. St. Petersburg [Fla.] Times, January 6, 1991.] November 5, 1990 Murder in Manhattan: Minutes after Rabbi Meir Kahane finishes his speech in a mid-Manhattan hotel, he is shot in the throat and killed by yarmulke-wearing El Sayyid Nosair before scores of eye witnesses. [Kahane was the founder of the Jewish extremist group, the Jewish Defense League, which in the 1980s headed the FBI list of domestic terrorist groups, outranking the Aryan Nation et al. Nosair was an Egyptian engineer, a devout Muslim, and a devotee of the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman of the El Salaam Mosque in Jersey City. Nosair escaped, but was wounded and captured. In his home the police found bombmaking materials, AK-47 cartridges, a stolen New York license plate and a "hit list" that named a US representative, a former assistant US attorney and two federal judges. Most alarming were some sensitive military documents stolen from Fort Bragg, North Carolina containing military training schedules, locations of Special Forces in the Middle East, a topographical map of Fort Bragg, and US intelligence estimates of Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Despite these finds and his association with Abdel Rahman (known for his rabble-rousing sermons and his terrorist past in Egypt), the New York City chief of detectives quickly declared Nosair to be a "lone gunman.... There was nothing found that would stir your imagination." Nosair was acquitted on the murder charge due to police bungling of the evidence. However, he was given a twenty-two year sentence on weapons charges and sent to Attica State Prison. At that time, the blind sheikh was an untouchable. Over the objections of the consular official in Khartoum, the Sheikh had been given a visa and a green card despite being listed on the Automated Visa Lookout System as a suspected terrorist. (He had been tried in absentia in Egypt for plotting to overthrow the government and for the 1989 murder of a police officer.) Reeve states that the CIA made the arrangement in hopes of having an informant in the event of an Islamist revolution in Egypt. Meanwhile, he had helped the CIA to funnel money, men and munitions to the mujaheddin in its program to knock out the fragile socialist Afghan state that remained after the Soviet departure. Reeve, p. 60; Village Voice , March 30, 1993.] November 29, 1990 The UN Security Council votes 12-2 on Resolution 678, authorizing the use of force against Iraq unless it withdraws from Kuwait by January 15th. January 12, 1991 Thousands of protesters march in European cities in protest against the portending war in the Persian Gulf: 100,000 in Paris, 100,000 in Rome, also London and 70 cities in Germany. January 12, 1991 War against Iraq: Congress, after an historic debate over whether to give sanctions time to work as opposed to authorizing the use of force, votes to go to war with Iraq, 250-183 (House) and 52-47 (Senate). [Never before has Congress been so divided over a vote for war or "authorization of force." 42% of the House and 47% of the Senate were opposed; whereas for World War II there was one dissenting vote and in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Gulf of Tonkin, 8 and 2 dissenting votes respectively.] January 15, 1991 24-hour vigils are held in cities throughout the United States to protest against the US attack on Iraq. January 16, 1991 Operation Desert Storm begins as the US-led allied forces start the Persian Gulf War with an air offensive against Iraqi installations in Iraq and Kuwait. January 26, 1991 I00,000 march in Washington demanding an end to the war against Iraq, a protest that is ignored by most of the media. February 24, 1991 The US-led alliance begins the ground war to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. February 26, 1991 Its forces virtually surrounded by General Schwartzkopf's "Hail Mary" surprise maneuver, Iraq announces it is withdrawing from Kuwait. Washington says it will continue the war. [Thousands of Iraqi soldiers are buried alive as the US First Mechanized Infantry Division, using plows mounted on tanks and combat earthmovers, seals over the men and equipment in 70 miles of trenches. Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1991. In the final hours of the "Hundred Hour War" American pilots bombed and strafed the lines of defeated Iraqis straggling toward Baghdad. They made comments for reporters such as: "a turkey shoot," "like shooting fish in a barrel" and "they were sitting ducks." These callous remarks made the rounds in the Middle East. American "doves" were horrified by the slaughter; the "hawks" were enraged that the troops had not been allowed to roll on to Bagdad and capture Saddam Hussein. Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1991. A1.] February 27, 1991 After an even 100 hours of ground war, Bush declares victory over Iraq, says Kuwait is liberated and orders allied combat to cease at midnight. A permanent cease-fire will depend on Iraq's release of all prisoners and Kuwaitis detained in Iraq and compliance with all the UN resolutions on Kuwait including acceptance of responsibility to pay compensation for war damages. [[Three hundred American lives were lost. 25% of the deaths and 15% of the injuries in Operation Desert Storm were due to "friendly fire" ---a rather cynical oxymoron--- which is the highest figure for any US war and is attributed to the inability to identify friendly vehicles in the haze and smoke of the desert. .Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1991. The number of Iraqi casualties will probably never be known, thanks to the unreliability of the Iraqi media and the massive number of desertions. The most-quoted estimate of 100,000 killed in action and 300,000 wounded in action (forced from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency in May, 1991 by an FOIA inquiry) is disputed by military analyst John G. Heidenrich who, extrapolating from the number of wounded who were captured, postulates a much lower number of less than 10, 000 killed in action and fewer than 1000 civilian deaths. Foreign Policy, Number 90, Spring 1993, pp. 108-125. As of 1996, the US was spending $50 billion a year to maintain a military presence in the Persian Gulf (including the newly-created Fifth Fleet) and to enforce the blockade of Iraq.] March 16, 1991 The much-quoted story of the 312 premature Kuwaiti babies who died because their incubators were taken away by Iraqi soldiers is declared to be "untrue" and "propaganda" by the director of the Kuwaiti maternity hospital. Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1991, A8. April, 1991 Osama bin Laden and several of his faithful lieutenants move the operation of Al Qaeda to Khartoum, Sudan. He increases his fortune with shrewd investments in agriculture and banking. Bin Laden directs operations aimed at de-stabilizing the not-sufficiently-Islamic governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria. He is particularly incensed that the "infidels" (American soldiers) continue to occupy the "land of the two holy places" (Saudi Arabia). Cooley, pp. 120-121. May 17, 1991 A Harvard University study estimates that 170,000 Iraqi children will die from disease and malnutrition due to Allied bombing and destruction of the infrastruct— electricity, sewage treatment plants, water, etc. [A much later study estimated that more than half a million Iraqi children had already died as a result of the sanctions against Iraq.] December 17, 1991 The Soviet Union is dissolved; many of the republics, led by Russia, join together in the CIS. Many others, especially in Central Asia, become independent nations. January 13, 1992 OIL: Bridas, an Argentinian oil and gas company, is awarded exploration rights in the Yashlar block in eastern Turkmenistan for a 50-50 split of production profits. This energy-rich but landlocked country is happy that a western country is willing to help them capitalize on their new independence from the USSR. [Bridas obtained a lease on the Keimir block in western Turkmenistan the following year, and the company spent US$ 400 million in exploration. Oil was exported from Keimir at the rate of 16,800 barrels a day by 1994, and massive gas reserves were discovered at Yashlar that were more than double the size of Pakistan's gas reserves. On March 16, 1995 Bridas signed an agreement with President Saparmurad Niyazov of Turkmenistan and Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan for a feasibility study of a pipeline through Afghanistan to supply energy-starved Pakistan. (Two years earlier Niyazov and his consultant, former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig, had tried unsuccessfully to soften Washington's prohibition of a much shorter and more practical pipeline route through Iran.) Rashid, pp. 157-162.] March 1992 General Abdul Rashid Dostum defects from Najibullah's government, taking his Uzbek militia with him to join forces with Hekmatyar's mujaheddin. (Vijay Prashad dates this as the beginning of the Northern Alliance.) "Forward into the Past", zmag.org. April 1992 The Mujaheddin enter Kabul. A cease-fire is achieved with Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani of the Jamait-i-Islami recognized as the head of the guerrilla coalition and of the country. Prashad, "Forward into the Past". For the first time in 300 years (with one brief exception) the Pashtuns are not the country's rulers. (Rabbani and his commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, are Tajiks.) The mujaheddin close schools and health clinics. They stop women from working. (Up to this time women constituted 40% of the doctors in Kabul, 70% of the schoolteachers, 60% of Kabul University professors, and 50% of the university students.) Armed groups beat, rape and murder women. Richter, "Revolutionary Afghan Women", zmag.org. August 1992 The civil war resumes as Hekmatyar and his Hezb-i-Islami fight the Rabbani regime with more civilian casualties. Prashad. December 29, 1992 First Blowback in Yemen: Bombs explode outside the Mohur and Mövenpick hotels in Aden. An Austrian tourist, a hotel worker and several terrorists are killed in the blasts, but no Americans. [The hotels had been chosen as targets with the intent of killing US soldiers who had been staying there on their way to Somalia. (In this same period some Al Qaeda terrorists were apprehended as they were preparing to launch rockets at US planes at the Aden airport; within days the Pentagon eliminated Yemen as a support base for the Somalia operation. Osama gloated about this in his interview with CNN in 1997.) Several suspects were
arrested, but escaped from jail. The army sent a brigade to attempt
to arrest the plot's leader, Tariq al-Fadhli, but his mountain fortress
proved to be impregnable. Tariq was a sheik from one of the most
prominent families of South Yemen whose properties and prosperous
cotton business were confiscated when the Marxists came to power
in 1967. Raised thereafter in Saudi Arabia, he went to Afghanistan
to fight the Soviets, returning to Yemen with funds from bin Laden
and instructions to overthrow the socialist government of South
Yemen. During the civil war of 1994 he fou ght on the side of the
victorious President Salih, had the family properties restored to
him, and was given a seat on the consultative council of the new
national unification government. His lieutenant in the bombings,
another Afghan Arab, was Jamal al-Nahdi who is today a prosperous
businessman and a high official in the country's ruling party.
Bergen, Holy War, Inc., pp. 172-174; Reeve, The New Jackals,
p. 182; www.al-bab.com/yemen/data/incident94.htm; www.al-bab.com/yemen/data/laden.htm;
Brian Whitaker, "Hostage to fortune and Yemeni guns,"
Guardian (UK), December 30, 1998.] January 17, 1993 The Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq is struck by a missile as a conference of Islamic fundamentalist leaders from around the world is taking place. The Pentagon apologizes for the attack, saying it was an accident. [When the World Trade Center in New York was bombed a month later, a CIA analyst speculated that this could be an act of revenge for the Al Rashid attack and that the Vista Hotel (adjacent to the twin towers and heavily damaged in the bombing) could have been the real target. Simon Reeve, The New Jackals:Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden, and the Future of Terrorism (1999), p. 20.] February 26, 1993 Blowback in USA: On this second anniversary of the encirclement and destruction of the Iraqi army, a Ryder rental van containing a sophisticated segmented bomb (nitroglycerine, urea pellets, sulphuric acid, bottled hydrogen, magnesium and aluminum compounds and possibly sodium cyanide) explodes in the sub-basement of the World Trade Center in New York City. Six people are killed and more than a thousand injured. [Fortunately the bomb was detonated at 12:17 PM--- lunchtime--- so many workers had left the building. It still took five hours to evacuate the buildings, and hundreds of firefighters battled for two hours to extinguish the flames. The building was severely damaged, but, as an FBI explosives expert said, "It was a miracle it wasn't destroyed…. If they had found the exact Achilles' heel, or if the bomb had been a little bigger, not much more, 500 pounds more, I think it would have brought her down." Ramzi Yousef had designed the bomb to topple the north tower into its southern twin, causing it also to fall. He anticipated there could be as many as 250,000 fatalities. Only lack of money prevented him from building the bigger bomb that he wanted. (The cost of his bomb was $3000; it caused damage of half a billion dollars. Bergen, p. 104.) Initially the perpetrators were thought to be Serbian terrorists. Then an ATF inspector located the rubble of the van and on one fragment could read its VIN [vehicle identification number]. The van's renter, Mohammed Salameh, a not very bright 24-year-old Palestinian, was arrested on March 4th when he returned to the agency to collect the deposit on the van which Yousef had reported as stolen. (Salameh worshipped at the same El Salaam Mosque in Jersey City as El Sayyid Nosair where the blind sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman preached his inflammatory sermons.) Information gleaned from Salameh's pockets, his residence, and the storage facility where the bomb had been prepared led to the arrests of Ahmad Ajaj, Palestinian chemist Nidal Ayyad and Mahmud Abouhalima. (The latter was extradited from Egypt where he had been viciously tortured because of his connections with militants who were attacking Egyptian installations.) Their trial began in September and on May 24, 1994 the four were convicted of conspiracy to commit terrorism and sentenced to 240 years in prison and sent to the top-security US penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Missing from the courtroom were Abdul Yasin who had fled to Iraq and the plot's mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, who became the object of an intensive two-year manhunt until his capture in Islamabad. He was convicted on September 11, 1996 for bombings committed in Asia during the manhunt. In 1997 a second trial found him guilty for the World Trade Center attack. He currently resides in "Supermax", the Florence Correctional Institute in Colorado, where he enjoys the highest level security status in the entire American prison system and an occasional hour's recreation with Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.Yousef's terrorist motivations were not those of a militant Muslim fundamentalist, according to Reeve, who describes him as an "evil genius." He seems to have been a playboy, a sadist and someone with a mammoth ego (which proved to be his undoing, as he could have hidden out in the tribal areas of Pakistan undiscovered by the authorities.) Reeve alleges that individuals within Pakistan's ISI may have provided him with the documents that enabled him to enter the United States. Reeve, The New Jackals, pp. 6-70,101-106,112-154, 239-243, 253; Village Voice, March 30, 1993; National Post, March 4, 1994.] Early in their investigation the FBI had gone to Yasin's apartment in the same building in Jersey City as Yousef and taken him in for questioning. Since he seemed to be cooperating (and showed them the location of the apartment where the chemicals had been mixed), they let him go despite a chemical burn on his leg that suggested he could have been more than a nosy neighbor. Yasin then hopped onto a plane for Iraq. He was picked up by the Iraqi police a year later and has been held without a charge placed against him. On "60 Minutes" Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told Leslie Stahl that Iraq has twice offered to deliver him to the United States, but only upon written receipt that Iraq had given him up… "like a receipt for a FedEx package" but that the US had rejected the offer. Aziz said Iraq was fearful that the FBI had let Yasin go free in 1993 to set up a sting operation to implicate Iraq in the WTC attack. Their second offer (in October 2001) further required a statement that the US acknowledge that Yasin had been incarcerated in Iraq on September 11th. In Yasin's prison interview with Leslie Stahl he said Iraq was not involved in the 1993 attack, admitted his guilt in helping mix chemicals and in scouting possible bomb sites (including Hasidic-populated Crown Heights in Brooklyn) and expressed remorse. He has been on the FBI "most Wanted" list with a $25 million reward offered. CBS, Sixty Minutes, "The Man Who Got Away", June 3, 2002; New York Times-Reuters, "Report: Iraq Offered to Hand Over Terror Suspect", June 2, 2002. March 1993 In the Islamabad Accord Rabbani continues as president of Afghanistan; Hekmatyar will be prime minister. [However, the terror continued with Hekmatyar shifting allegiance between Dostum / Ahmed Shah Massoud and Rabbani. In the background was a growing coalition of mullahs and students from madrassas (religious schools) who were deeply appalled by the massive violence of the warring mujaheddin factions and their departure from the original religious purity of the jihad against the Russians. They became known as the Taliban (plural for talib, or student of Islam). Their leader was Mullah Mohammed Omar, described by Rashid as "a poor village mullah with no scholarly learning and no tribal pedigree," who had been chosen for his especial piety rather than any leadership ability. By the time the civil war ended, 45,000 civilians had been killed and 300,000 had sought refuge in Pakistan. So that initially the Taliban, when they entered Kabul in September 1996, were welcomed with relief by a devastated citizenry. Prashad; Rashid, pp. 19-26, 42, 199.] March 12-19, 1993 Blowback in India: A series of bombings in Calcutta and Bombay kill over 300 people and injure more than 1200. Targets include the Bombay Stock Exchange, Air India offices and other financial symbols selected to avenge the earlier destruction of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu extremists. [The perpetrators were Kashmiri fundamentalist Muslims who had fought in the Russo-Afghan war, using weapons diverted from the CIA-ISI pipeline. Many had been trained at the Afghani Zawar camp by Hekmatyar (who also was instrumental in smuggling the weapons into Kashmir.) The bombings were supported by the ISI and the bin Laden organization in what was described during the 1994 trial as a "proxy war, terrorism sponsored by a neighboring hostile country." Cooley, pp. 228-23. Ahmed Rashid notes that India came close to persuading the United States to declare Pakistan a "state sponsor of terrorism" for these and previous terrorist acts of the Kashmiri mujaheddin. Pakistan's response was to move their bases out of Pakistan and into eastern Afghanistan. The Jahalabad mullahs and the Taliban were reimbursed for the support and training of the militants; private Islamic parties such as Osama bin Laden were encouraged to contribute. Support of the Taliban was a big policy shift for Pakistan whose relations with the power structure in Kabul had been semi-hostile in earlier times. Relations had been severed in 1955 and again in 1962 over Afghanistan's push for a "Greater Pashtunistan." Rashid, p. 186. ] June 23, 1993 Terrorist Plot Aborted: The FBI surrounds a warehouse in Jamaica, Queens and arrests twelve men who are mixing chemicals for bombs to be used in a simultaneous bombing of seven New York City landmarks. The men belong to a terrorist cell headed by Sudanese Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali; all are worshippers at the mosque of Sheikh Omar. [The FBI had been tipped off by their informant, Emad Salem, a former lieutenant in the Egyptian army who had unsuccessfully attempted to warn the FBI of Yousef's forthcoming attack on the World Trade Center. Slated for destruction were the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the George Washington bridge, the UN building (with some help from the Sudanese delegation), the Statue of Liberty, the huge government building at 26 Federal Plaza, and the diamond district, workplace of many Hasidic Jews. On July 2nd Sheikh Omar was arrested following political pressure on Attorney General Janet Reno. In the 1999 trial Siddig
Ali pleaded guilty to all charges (including a plot to assassinate
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak), testified against the others,
and so received a sentence of only eleven years. The others were
sentenced to life imprisonment. (Sheikh Omar was already incarcerated
for his October, 1995 conviction in the World Trade Center bombing.
For that he had been sentenced in January, 1996 to life imprisonment
without parole.) Reeve, The New Jackals,
pp. 61-62; CNN News, January 17, 1996; www.state.gov/www/global/terrorism/1999/report/review.html.] Late July, 1993 Ramzi Yousef is injured when the detonator of a bomb that he is attempting to place opposite Benazir Bhutto's home explodes. [Yousef was by this time quite famous and much in demand in certain circles for his superior bomb-making skills, and thus had been commissioned to assassinate the secular candidate for Prime Minister before the October elections. A second attempt, this time with a rifle, also failed. Reeve, pp. 50-54.] October 3, 1993 American Deaths in Somalia: In the largest single firefight involving US troops since the Vietnam War, a gun battle between US "peacekeepers" and the forces of indicted General Muhammad Farah Aydid leaves 18 US soldiers and around 500 Somalis dead. A US helicopter pilot is captured alive. [There had been near-constant civil war in Somalia ever since independence from Britain and Italy in 1960. In 1991 drought and famine escalated the death toll with thousands dying every month. Food was sent by international food airlifts and then by ships to the four ports. In December 1992 President Bush offered to send in US ground troops (ultimately 28,000) ostensibly to protect the food shipments and the relief workers, an offer that was accepted by UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the invasion a "paid political advertisement" for the Pentagon. (At this time, right after the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon was resisting pressure to cut the $300 billion Pentagon budget in favor of expenditures for jobs, education, health care, etc.) The humanitarian food deliveries soon turned into bombing raids of heavily populated neighborhoods. Africa Rights described UNOSCOM as "an army of occupation" and reported that troops "have engaged in abuses of human rights, including killing of civilians, physical abuse, theft. Many UNOSCOM soldiers have also displayed unacceptable levels of racism toward Somalis." In June 1993 General Aydid's troops ambushed a group of UN Pakistani soldiers, killing 24. The UN ordered the arrest of General Aydid, and the "peace keeping" morphed into guerrilla warfare between US-UN soldiers and the general. Soon after this humiliating defeat President Clinton withdrew all American troops from Somalia. Osama bin Laden would later claim credit for having trained and inspired the guerrillas. www.altapedia.com; Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal, Somalia: human rights abuses by United Nations forces (1993).] March 10, 1994
Silvan Becker and his wife, two German secret agents who are surveilling
terrorists in North Africa for the counter-espionage Bundesamt
für Verfassungsschutz, are assassinated near Surt, Libya.
[Although the Libyan government immediately suspected Bin Laden,
it was not until March 1998 that Libya filed a warrant for the arrest
of Osama bin Laden and three accomplices. Jean-Charles
Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Ben Laden: La vérité
interdite (2002), pp. 137-138.] April 7, 1994 King Fahd of Saudi Arabia announces that Osama bin Laden has been deprived of his Saudi citizenship for behavior that "contradicts the Kingdom's interests and risks harming its relations with fraternal countries." [Pressure had been put on the king by Egyptian President Mubarak, Yemen and Interpol. Also about this time bin Laden was supposedly disowned by his extensive and influential family in Saudi Arabia. Bergen, p. 89; Cooley, p. 123. The Saudi government also froze his assets within the country. However, it is clear that he continued to receive funds from his share of the vast family fortune. He seems to have had some temporary cash-flow problems in the 1994-1998 period, but after the East Africa bombings and the sympathy engendered by Clinton's retaliatory strike, funds for financing his terrorist ventures were no longer a problem. In 1999 Khalid bin Mahfouz was placed under house arrest in Saudi Arabia for allegedly transferring funds from the family's bank to charities that front for bin Laden. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., pp. 101-104.] October 12, 1994 The Pakistani transport and smuggling mafia essentially hire the Taliban to wrest control of the crucial border town of Spin Baldak from Hekmatyar and his bandits who are charging exorbitant tolls. The Taliban are successful, losing only one soldier out of the 200-man contingent. Part of their booty is a large munitions depot containing 18,000 Kalashnikovs and several vehicles. Rashid, pp. 27-28. November 4, 1994 The Taliban emerge as a significant military and political force after they rescue a Pakistani convoy that has been captured by warlords in the Kandahar area who are demanding a large ransom, a share of the convoy's profits, and Pakistan's pledge to stop support of the Taliban. [With the loss of only a dozen men the Taliban routed the warlords, hanged the commander from the barrel of his tank and proceeded on to capture Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city. Then they cleared the chains from all the toll roads, making it safe for Pakistani commerce and smuggling. By December, 1994 ten thousand Afghani and Pakistani Pashtuns who had been studying in madrassas rushed to Kandahar to join the Taliban. The majority were very young, between 14 and 24. As described by Ahmed Rashid, they were the displaced youth of the war who had grown up in refugee camps with their only education being that of the madrassa where they studied the Koran "as interpreted by their barely literate teachers [who had no] formal grounding in maths, science, history or geography. Many of these young warriors did not even know the history of their own country or the story of the jihad against the Soviets.... They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbours nor the complex ethnic mix of peoples that often made up their villages and their homeland.... They were literally the orphans of the war, the rootless and the restless, the jobless and the economically deprived with little self-knowledge. They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in messianic, puritan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning. Untrained for anything, even the traditional occupations of their forefathers such as farming, herding or the making of handicrafts, they were what Karl Marx would have termed Afghanistan's lumpen proletariat." Rashid, pp. 28-29, 31-32.] December 11, 1994 The Bojinka Plot, Phase One: Two hours after Philippines Air Lines Flight # 34 leaves Cebu City in the Philippines en route to Tokyo a small bomb explodes under seat 26K. The unfortunate occupant of the seat is killed instantly, and six other passengers are wounded. The blast blows a small hole in the floor and damages the cables that control the flaps. The Captain dumps fuel and only through consummate skill manages to turn the plane and effect an emergency landing in Okinawa. [The previous occupant of seat 26K on the Manila-Cebu segment had been Ramzi Yousef. He had smuggled two nine-volt batteries hidden in his shoes (and thus below the reach of the airport metal detectors) onto the plane, then in the wash room assembled the tiny bomb of liquid nitroglycerine with a Casio watch for a timer, secreted the finished product in the life vest beneath his seat, and left the plane in Cebu to return to Manila. He telephoned the AP in Manila, giving the Abu Sayyaf group the credit for the explosion. The Japanese investigators released the details of their findings to the US Federal Aviation Administration which sent out a high-level security alert to all US airliners operating in Asia. Yousef had been progressively refining the architecture of his miniature bombs and, with financing provided by Osama bin Laden, had spent several weeks on Basilan island, teaching his bomb-making skills to members of Abu Sayyaf. Reeve, The New Jackals, pp. 74-81.] December 24, 1994 Four terrorists from the Armed Islamic group of Algeria (GIA) hijack an Air France Airbus in Algiers bound for Paris. Before the plane lands at Marseilles for refueling, they kill three passengers. None of the hijackers knows how to fly a plane; instead they hold a gun at the pilot's head and issue orders. They plan to crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower. However at the refueling stop, French counter-terrorist forces storm the plane and kill all the hijackers. [Shortly thereafter the GIA killed four Catholic priests in Algeria to retaliate for the deaths of the hijackers. Algeria, more than any other country, has suffered from blowback from the "Afghan Arabs" who were trained in Afghanistan and converted to the Taliban version of Islam. It is estimated that 100,000 civilians have died 1991-2001 in the efforts of GIA and its offshoots to change Algeria into a fundamentalist Muslim country. "Defending Islam. Denouncing Muslim Extremists," International Review Summer, 1995; "Algeria valuable in hunt for terrorists," Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, November 18, 2001.] January 6, 1995 The Bojinka Plot, Phase Two: Ramzi Yousef's grandiose plans come to a flaming halt when the chemicals that he and Abdul Hakim Murad are mixing in Yousef's Manila apartment catch fire and they are forced to leave the apartment. Murad is arrested when he returns to recover Yousef's laptop and manuals. Yousef escapes capture (but only for a month.) [The laptop revealed details of a massive and ingenious terrorist scheme that Yousef had named the Bojinka Plot: Five code-named terrorists (Yousef, Murad and three others) would board the first segments of flights going in different directions, leaving bombs to explode on the second segment, then board a second flight, leaving a second bomb for another explosion. In all eleven flights on American-owned airlines were scheduled to explode about the same time over the Pacific Ocean en route to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Honolulu and Los Angeles. (One man, probably Yousef, would have to do a triple.) His plan would insure that the American airline industry would be severely damaged and there would be many American passengers among the estimated 4000 fatalities. A second plan allowed for two of the airplanes to crash into important buildings in the United States, including the World Trade Center in New York, The Sears Tower in Chicago, the Transamerica Building in San Francisco, and the White House and the Pentagon in Washington. (Murad admitted that members of the group had taken flying lessons in the Philippines in preparation for Bojinka. The investigators also found plans for the aborted assassination of President Clinton (commissioned by bin Laden for the president's visit to the Philippines the previous November), electronic and chemical reference books stolen from the Swansea (UK) library, and diagrams for the construction of his miniature bombs. There were maps of the Pope's route during his forthcoming visit to Manila, priests' robes and Bibles in preparation for an attempt to assassinate the Pope. And Yousef, despite all his careful planning, had left a partial fingerprint. Now the man hunt for him went into high gear with a reward offered of $2 million and Yousef's picture featured in Newsweek. Reeve, The New Jackals, pp. 76-78, 84-96; World Tribune, September 19, 2001. The Filipino police shared all of this information with the FBI including details of Murad attending flying schools in four American states and his great desire to dive-bomb a hijacked plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He got a commercial pilot's license in North Carolina. "Clues Before Sept. 11 W | |||