1979 and the Roots of 9/11

Twentieth of November, nineteen seventy-nine. The courtyard of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, tens of thousands of worshippers, the black cube of the Kaaba at the centre... and armed extremists seize the holiest ground in Islam and hold it. That's shock number one. There are two more coming in the same twelve months, and somewhere inside that year is a young man nobody is watching yet. Remember him. The line that runs out of nineteen seventy-nine ends on a Tuesday morning in New York... and then it goes on to redraw the borders of an entire region. Rewind ten months. January sixteenth: the shah of Iran and his family flee the country. February first: Ayatollah Khomeini lands in Tehran after fifteen years in exile. In Baghdad that same year, Saddam Hussein takes open power. And on Christmas Eve, Soviet tanks roll into Afghanistan. Thirty thousand troops at first. A hundred thousand before long. Arab News calls those events seismic shocks. Analysts at the American Enterprise Institute say it plainer: the political tectonic plates of the region shifted, violently. Put your finger on Afghanistan. Landlocked. Mountainous. Wedged between Iran, Pakistan and what was then the Soviet Union. For Washington, that shape is an opportunity, a place to bleed Moscow, so money and weapons flow in through Pakistan to the Afghan resistance. But something else flows in too. A Palestinian scholar, Abdullah Azzam, issues a fatwa that turns a geopolitical crisis into a personal religious duty. Arab volunteers start arriving. And among them, the son of a Saudi construction fortune. Quiet. Very tall. Osama bin Laden. Nineteen ninety. Saddam takes Kuwait, and suddenly the oil fields of eastern Saudi Arabia are a short drive from his tanks. The kingdom asks America for help. And American troops arrive... in the country that holds Mecca and Medina. That is bin Laden's break with the state he was born in. In his own words: the solution to the crisis is the withdrawal of American troops... their military presence is an insult for the Saudi people. Geography again. Not a border this time. A deployment. Soldiers on the wrong sand. August, nineteen ninety-six. A long, rambling document gets faxed to Arabic newspapers, a lot of them in London. The title: Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places. The nine eleven Commission later summarised what was in it. He condemned the Saudi monarchy for permitting an army of infidels beside Islam's most sacred sites. He praised the nineteen eighty-three bombing in Beirut that killed two hundred forty-one US Marines. He pointed to Iraqis dying under sanctions. Almost nobody in America read it. Three months later, in front of an ABC camera in Afghanistan, he says it out loud: for Muslims, killing Americans matters more than killing anyone else. Then February twenty-third, nineteen ninety-eight. A second fatwa. Kill Americans and their allies... and it calls that an individual duty, for every Muslim who can do it, in any country in which it is possible to do it. That summer, two American embassies in East Africa are bombed minutes apart. Two years later, a small boat packed with explosives rips into the USS Cole. And the plan that follows doesn't come out of a cave. It comes out of an apartment in Hamburg, Germany. Students. Engineering. Urban planning. European paperwork, decent English, clean records. They travel to Afghanistan, they come back, they enrol in American flight schools. September eleventh, two thousand one. Four aircraft. A Tuesday morning. Almost three thousand people gone before lunchtime. That's your young man from nineteen seventy-nine. It took him twenty-two years to land. Then the map answers back. Within weeks, American forces are in Afghanistan. In two thousand three, they're in Iraq. And here is the decision that reshaped everything: the occupation dissolves the Baath party and disbands the Iraqi army. Overnight, the people who ran the ministries are unemployable, and men with weapons training are out on the street. Armed. Humiliated. Broke. Insurgency. Then sectarian war. And into that vacuum walks al-Qaeda in Iraq, a franchise that did not exist before the invasion... and that later mutates into the group calling itself Islamic State. Which then bulldozed the berm on the Iraq–Syria frontier and declared the line drawn by Britain and France a century earlier dead. But the quietest winner was Tehran. Saddam had been Iran's great enemy. Remove him, and Iranian influence runs west through Baghdad toward the Mediterranean... a corridor no Iranian army could ever have taken by force. So when you read about strikes on Iranian proxies, or a border that no longer holds, or Afghans still leaving, you're not reading news. You're reading aftershocks. Maps remember. And this one is still shaking.