•
•
•
The other famous fugitive from the mountains of Tora Bora, is, of course, Osama bin Laden. Although the world knows much more about Osama than about Omar, it is worth filling in a few details of his background. After the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Muslims from all over the world were encouraged by the United States and its allies to flock to Pakistan to join the Afghan mujahideen in the jihad against the Soviet Union. In 1982, a Palestinian—Dr. Abdüllah Azzam—and a group of spiritual leaders established an organization called Maktaba al Khidmat in Peshawar, Pakistan. Osama bin Laden was Azzam's deputy. The organization provided financial, logistical, and other support to the mujahideen. Most of the financing came from Osama bin Laden, whose family is very rich. Of course, all this didn't happen in a vacuum; neither was it the private initiative of a few Arabs. The CIA and Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence were encouraging and helping them along. However, by the middle of the 1980s Osama bin Laden started disagreeing with his mentor, Azzam. He no longer wanted to be only a donor to the cause; he also wanted to fight and become a mujahid. Instead of joining an Afghan mujahideen group, he formed his own Arab force of a few hundred fighters. It was popularly called the "Arab brigade" among everyone involved in the jihad. Osama considered the Afghan fighters too pragmatic, the sort that would leave battle if they sensed defeat, to return to fight another day. Osama's Arab fighters were fired by greater zeal. They had come all this way to fight for God, so they embraced martyrdom happily. The Afghans, on the other hand, were much more likely to return to their villages to sow or harvest crops, to get married, to attend marriages or funerals. The Arabs had nowhere to go. But I suspect that, more than this, Osama bin Laden wanted to forge his own identity—separate and distinct from the Afghan mujahideen leaders. In 1986, Osama set up his own base close to a Soviet garrison in eastern Afghanistan, near a village called Jaji, about ten miles (sixteen kilometers) from Pakistan. In a rare display of ego, he named it Masada—"Lion's Den"—I suspect after himself, for the name Osama means lion. In the spring of 1987, Osama bin Laden fought a pitched