Titans of History (80 page)

In 1991, as the net seemed to be closing in around him, Escobar offered a deal to the Colombian authorities: in order to avoid extradition he would accept five years' imprisonment. As part of the deal, Escobar was allowed to build his own “prison,” which naturally turned out to be another luxurious palace, from where he could direct his drugs empire by telephone. He was allowed to leave to attend the occasional football match or party, and was also permitted to receive visitors, including prostitutes (the younger the better) and business associates, two of whom were murdered on his premises—he liked to torture his victims personally.

On July 22, 1992, as he was being transferred to a tougher prison, Escobar managed to escape. The Colombian authorities launched a massive manhunt, with help from the USA, and also from Escobar's enemies, including Los Pepes (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar), a paramilitary group composed of his victims and members of the rival Cali Cartel. During the sixteen-month search, hundreds of people—both policemen and Escobar's henchmen—were killed. Escobar was eventually tracked down to
a safe house in Medellín and shot in the leg, torso and head as he attempted a daring rooftop escape; he died instantly. It was December 2, 1993, the day after his 44th birthday.

Escobar's supporters regarded him as a hero and a champion of the poor, but in reality he was an outlaw of unrivaled greed and sadism. His token gestures of philanthropy did not disguise his scant regard for human life, and at the height of its influence his cartel was responsible for an average of twenty murders every month.

1957–2011

The pieces of the bodies of infidels were flying like dust particles. If you would have seen it with your own eyes, you would have been very pleased, and your heart would have been filled with joy
.

Osama bin Laden, at the wedding of his son following the murder of seventeen US soldiers in the suicide bombing of the USS
Cole
, October 12, 2000

Osama bin Laden was the fanatical mastermind of the murderously spectacular 9/11 plane-bomb attacks against the Twin Towers and Pentagon that killed thousands of innocent people in the name of an intolerant and dogmatic distortion of the Islamic faith. Promoting a jihadi ideology that glories in killing and endorses a nihilistic cult of suicide, he aimed to eliminate American and Western power, wipe out Israel and restore a caliphate over any part of the world ever ruled by Islam. But his only real
practical policy was terrorizing innocent people and destroying tolerant democratic societies, using impressionable youths as living bombs against victims chosen solely because they are citizens of the free, democratic West.

Bin Laden was born in Riyadh in 1957, the son of Muhammad Awad bin Laden—who acquired huge wealth after his construction company secured exclusive rights from the Saudi royal family to religious building projects within the country—and his tenth wife, Hamida al-Attas, subsequently divorced. The only son of that marriage, though with numerous siblings on his father's side, Osama—after his mother's remarriage to Muhammad al-Attas—was raised as a Sunni Muslim, displaying uncompromising piety from an early age. He studied at an elite school and then King Abdulaziz University, marrying his first wife, Najwa Ghanem, in 1974. He has had another four wives, divorcing two, and has fathered between twelve and twenty-four children.

In 1979, bin Laden, together with thousands of other devout jihadists—known collectively as the mujahedeen—traveled to Afghanistan to repel the Soviet Union's invasion of the country. He joined fellow militant Abdullah Azzam and established Maktab al-Khadamat, a paramilitary organization devoted to fighting what he saw as jihad. The war was also backed and funded by the United States, ever fearful of Soviet expansion, and when bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1990, he was widely feted for having resisted the forces of communism. Already, though, he was making plans for a new organization to further his goal of driving America (“the Great Satan”) out of the Muslim world. It would become known as Al-Qaeda (the Base).

Following the Gulf War of 1991, bin Laden denounced the Saudi royal family for allowing US troops to be stationed in the country, upon which, in 1992, they expelled him. He moved to Sudan, from where, working with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ),
he masterminded the December 29, 1992 attack on Aden in which two people were killed. Following an unsuccessful assassination attempt, however, on President Mubarak of Egypt in 1995, the EIJ were expelled from Sudan, prompting bin Laden to return to Afghanistan, where he allied himself with the Taliban, bankrolling training camps for thousands of jihadists.

In 1997, he sponsored the infamous Luxor massacre of November 17, which killed sixty-two civilians, and the following year Al-Qaeda bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing nearly 300 people. A more sinister trend emerged in October 2000 when, once more in Aden, a suicide bomber attacked the US Navy ship USS
Cole
, killing seventeen. Such bombing swiftly became Al-Qaeda's weapon of choice, militant young Muslims being indoctrinated to seek martyrdom. Later the same year, bin Laden, with his lieutenant Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri—whom he had first met during the Afghan war—co-signed a
fatwa
declaring that Muslims had a duty to kill Americans and their allies.

Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri subsequently concocted their most ambitious plan yet. Early on the morning of September 11, 2001, two teams of jihadists boarded four passenger jets at airports in Washington DC, Boston and Newark. Authorities learned shortly afterward that the planes had been hijacked by nineteen Middle Eastern men. At 8:46 a.m. local time, American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the north of the Twin Towers in New York, the biggest buildings in Manhattan. Then, as television cameras were trained on the unfolding disaster, United Airlines Flight 175 slammed at 9:02 a.m. into the south tower. Thirty-five minutes later, news filtered through that American Airlines Flight 77 had crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia, and at 10:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93, destined for the White House, was brought down over Pennsylvania by heroic passengers who had heard the fate of the other planes as they frantically called their relatives on onboard telephones.

Apocalyptic scenes followed in New York. The Twin Towers, both of which had been fatally weakened by the impact of the jets and ensuing fires, collapsed to the ground—the south at 9:59 a.m. and the north at 10:28 a.m.—killing thousands of victims still trapped inside, and sending out a cloud of dust that engulfed the south side of Manhattan. Excluding the hijackers, nearly 3000 people died that day—246 on the jets, 125 in the Pentagon and 2603 in the Twin Towers (including 341 heroic firefighters and 2 paramedics).

Committing itself to a war on terror, America vowed to hunt down bin Laden, who already topped the FBI's most wanted list. Allied forces soon toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda had been allowed to operate for years, but bin Laden fled to the mountains bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan. A chance to capture him there was missed in late 2001 when advancing troops failed to search the Tora Bora caves where he was almost certainly hiding. When the caves were subsequently raided in August 2007, he was gone.

Since 9/11, radicalized Muslims, led by bin Laden's twisted message of hate and violence, have relentlessly continued Al-Qaeda's murderous campaign. On October 12, 2002, three bombs exploded in Bali, killing 202 people and injuring a further 209. Then, in 2004, a series of bombs exploded on the Madrid rail network, killing 191 people and wounding 1755. The following year, on July 7, London was the target, three bombs exploding within a minute of each other during the morning rush hour on the London Underground system and another on a bus in Tavistock Square less than an hour later. Besides the four suicide bombers, fifty-two commuters were killed and 700 injured. Further carnage was only avoided a fortnight later when the bombs of four would-be suicide bombers failed to explode. October of the same year saw a second attack on Bali, twenty people being killed
and 129 injured. In Iraq, through a ruthless campaign of bombing, Al-Qaeda has focused on fomenting sectarian slaughter between Sunni and Shia Muslims to foil American plans for Iraqi democracy. On May 2 after the biggest manhunt in history, US commandos raided a house in Abbottabad, the town in Pakistan that houses Pakistan's military academy, and killed bin Laden. His body was buried at sea.

Alexander the Great, from “The Alexander Mosaic,” 1st Century
BC
. (Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy, / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library)

Suleiman II, oil on canvas, 16th century. (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria / The Bridgeman Art Library)

Elizabeth I,
c.
1600. (Private Collection / Photo © Philip Mould Ltd., London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

Akbar the Great giving an audience, by Husays Naggash and Kesu, from the “Akbarnama,” Mughal,
c.
1590. (Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library)

Louis XIV in Royal Costume, 1701, by Hyacinthe Rigaud. (Louvre, Paris, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library)