Looking Back on 9/11 with Lawrence Wright: The Savage Wars of Jihad (Part 3)

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

“Death on a grand scale was a goal in itself. There was no attempt to spare innocent lives, since the concept of innocence was subtracted from al-Qaeda’s calculations.” wrote Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. The twenty-fifth anniversary year of the mother of all terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, (9/11) is an appropriate occasion to review in Wright’s 2006 book and other works jihad’s longstanding and widespread atrocity record.

Indiscriminate violence was an “unusual” characteristic of jihadist terrorists like Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden noted by Wright, distinct from terrorists with other motivating ideologies who often engaged in more targeted attacks. Perhaps no better example of such Muslim mayhem came from the Algeria’s civil war that resulted after the military intervened in 1992 to preempt an expected Islamist electoral victory and subsequent government takeover. In reaction, Algeria’s Groupe Islamique Armée (GIA) “drenched the country in blood” for the next five years, Wright noted, with Al Qaeda’s initial support and encouragement.

In uncivil strife that would ultimately claim more than 100,000 deaths, Wright wrote, GIA

began by killing non-Muslims, concentrating on priests and nuns, diplomats, intellectuals, feminists, doctors, and businessmen. According to the logic of GIA, democracy and Islam were incompatible; therefore, anyone who had a voting card was against Islam and deserved to be killed. The warrant was extended to include anyone who worked in establishments allied with the government, such as public schools. In two months of 1994 alone, thirty teachers and principals were killed and 538 schools were torched.

Rohan Gunaratna in his 2002 book Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, further elaborated that GIA

raiding parties slit the throats of their victims, including children; kidnapped men and women including young girls; and at times they massacred entire village populations by hacking their victims with daggers, swords, axes and knives. Others were beheaded, beaten to death, or cut with chain saws…. Those who attempted to flee were doused in petrol and set on fire, and during some massacres the terrorists broke for lunch, demonstrating their macabre mindset. To create panic and fear, the GIA issued ultimatums and forced entire villages to evacuate their homes. Their mass casualty attacks included detonating car bombs in public places. Claiming that its actions were driven by jihad, the GIA bombed markets, restaurants, hotels, schools, universities, discotheques, cinemas, public beaches and city centres, both in Algiers and elsewhere. Trains, school buses and even ambulances were not spared, people were murdered inside mosques, houses were set ablaze when the victims were still inside, and women who failed to cover their heads were killed in the street.

While Wright noted that GIA’s London-based weekly newspaper, Al-Ansar, celebrated these outrages, Gunaratna analyzed that even jihadists could question, however cynically, the efficacy of GIA’s bloodthirstiness. GIA’s

veritable cult of violence shocked Islamists worldwide. At this point Al Qaeda distanced itself from the GIA, reflecting Osama’s pragmatism. The massacres prompted four Islamist groups, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, to issue communiques denouncing what was taking place, and by mid-1996 Al Qaeda and other Islamists withdrew support from the GIA leadership. It is noteworthy that anger was directed at the leadership, not at the group or the cause.

Al Qaeda itself exhibited little humanity in the 1990s during the ethnic and sectarian bloodbath in the Balkans when jihadists responded to Serbian savaging of Bosnian Muslim populations in kind. “The ferocity of the retaliatory killings by the Arab mujahidin shocked the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), and is still talked of today,” noted Gunaratna. “Al Qaeda videos showing Arab mujahidin playing football with the severed heads of Serbian soldiers were seen by several Western journalists at the time.”

Egypt formed in the 1990s formed another pre-9/11 venue of merciless jihad. As Wright observed, jihadists from Egypt’s Islamic Group

had undertaken an unparalleled rampage of murder and pillage. In order to weaken the government and prod the masses into rebellion, they chose to attack tourism, the tent pole of the Egyptian economy because it opened the country to Western corruption.

The bloody climax of this campaign occurred on November 17, 1997, when six Islamic Group jihadists, with Al Qaeda financing, attacked the ancient Egyptian Luxor temple, a world-renowned tourist site. Wright recalled that the jihadists

crisscrossed the terraced temple grounds, mowing down tourists by shooting their legs, then methodically finishing them off with close shots to the head. They paused to mutilate some of the bodies with butcher knives. One elderly Japanese man was eviscerated.

“The killing went on for forty-five minutes, until the floors streamed with blood,” Wright noted. The jihadists beheaded one Swiss woman’s father right before her eyes. “The dead included a five-year-old British child and four Japanese couples on their honeymoons,” for a total death toll of 58 tourists and four Egyptians, “the worst act of terror in modern Egyptian history.”

As already indicated by Algeria’s civil war, however, jihadist terror in Egypt ultimately backfired. At Luxor itself, “tour guides and villagers on scooters and donkeys, who had little more to fight with than shovels and stones,” pursued the fleeing Islamic Group terrorists, Wright observed. In the end, the jihadists “apparently killed themselves in a ritualistic suicide,” leaving behind their corpses arranged in a circle in a cave.

Afterwards, “Egypt was in shock. Revolted and ashamed, the population decisively turned against the Islamists,” Wright assessed. “Luxor proved to be the turning point in the counterterrorist campaign in Egypt.” As Wright analyzed, the jihadists

support evaporated, and without the consent of the population, there was nowhere for them to hide. In the five years before Luxor, Islamist terror groups in Egypt had killed more than 1,200 people, many of them foreigners. After Luxor, the attacks by the Islamists simply stopped.

Undeterred, Al Qaeda would extend jihad’s bloody trail with dual bombings of American embassies in the East African capitals of Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7, 1998. The date marked the eighth anniversary of American troops deploying to Saudi Arabia to defend the kingdom against the military of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who had just overrun Saudi Arabia’s neighbor Kuwait. This introduction of non-Muslim infidels into the supposedly sacred sands of Saudi Arabia’s Islamic holy land had outraged pious Muslims like Osama bin Laden globally.

With cruel and cold calculation, Al Qaeda associates like the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri planned their anniversary assault on America. Zawahiri himself had overseen the Islamic Jihad bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, on November 19, 1995, another anniversary reviled by jihadists. On this day in 1977, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had flown to Israel’s capital of Jerusalem to initiate diplomacy that would lead to the 1979 Egyptian-Israel Camp David peace accords.

Zawahiri, Wright noted, learned from the Islamabad bombing “that an initial explosion brought people running to the windows, and many were decapitated by flying glass when the real bomb went off.” Therefore, Zawahiri planned for one jihadist in Nairobi to initiate the attack with a stun grenade in the embassy parking lot to lure similar gawkers to their deaths. Meanwhile August 7, 1998, was a Friday, the Islamic sabbath, and Al Qaeda planned the embassy bombings for 10:30 a.m., when local observant Muslims would be in a mosque away from any danger of collateral damage among the faithful.

The final casualty count in the East African carnage detailed by Wright was 21 dead, including 12 Americans, in Nairobi, along with 4,500 injured. In Dar Es Salaam 11 died along with 85 injured, Africans all. “Although the East Africa bombings killed more Africans than Americans, there was no backlash by Muslims,” given “widespread antipathy of Muslims towards US policy in the Middle East,” Gunaratna noted. In Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda operated under the refuge provided by the Taliban government under Mullah Omar, “Osama had convinced Mullah Omar that Allah guided” bin Laden. Therefore “the Taliban leader continued to stand by him come what may, even after the East Africa bombings.”

Wright thus analyzed the contending emotions of common human decency among Muslims and non-Muslims alike and sympathies among various Muslims towards jihadists like Osama bin Laden:

Those Muslims who had objected to the slaughter of innocents in the embassies in East Africa were cowed by the popular support for this man whose defiance of America now seemed blessed by divine favor. Even in Kenya and Tanzania, the two countries that had suffered the most from al-Qaeda’s attacks, children would be spotted wearing bin Laden T-shirts.

Indeed, Al Qaeda’s example would inspire individual jihadists internationally. On December 14, 1999, an American border official caught the would-be jihadist Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian man, trying to infiltrate the American-Canadian border at Port Angeles, Washington. In Ressam’s car were what Wright described as “the makings of an Oklahoma City-type bomb,” later determined to be destined for a millennial attack at Los Angeles International Airport.

Although Ressam had trained in one of bin Laden’s Afghanistan camps, Ressam actually “was a freelance terrorist sailing under al-Qaeda colors, the sort that would proliferate after 9/11,” Wright wrote. Living in Montreal, Canada, Ressam had “formed his own ad hoc cell” for jihad. Ressam “had called Afghanistan before the attack to inquire if bin Laden would like to take credit for the act, but he never heard back.”

Against such empirical evidence of jihadist rage across history even before 9/11, that sunny September Tuesday appears less an exceptional event, along with Hamas’ October 7, 2023, carnage in Israel, bizarrely denied by some. Admittedly, Al Qaeda on that day spectacularly confronted for the first time many individuals across the globe innocent of any understanding of Islam’s various dangerous doctrines. Yet critical inquiry into Islam reveals that this faith often fails to embody the moniker of “religion of peace” so superficially invoked as an apologetic after 9/11. No matter how much jihadist horrors may continually shock the human consciences of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, jihadist ideology perdures, for it is anchored in Islamic canonical history, as the next article in this series will document.