michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: In his final years, Osama bin Laden seemed to be grooming a handpicked successor to run the most feared terror network in the world: his own son. Rukmini Callimachi on what we learned this week about those plans. It’s Wednesday, August 7. Rukmini, what do we know about Hamza bin Laden?

rukmini callimachi

Hamza bin Laden was the son of the woman who became Osama bin Laden’s favorite wife. She was a woman who was highly educated. She was a child psychologist who had graduate degrees and who, in many ways, became Osama bin Laden’s equal. But because they met when she was in her mid-30s, and because she was frail of health, she had difficulty giving birth. She had multiple miscarriages, and Hamza bin Laden is her only child. So this is the child of his favorite wife, and that positioned him to become Osama bin Laden’s favorite son. The one way to think of Hamza is that he grows up alongside Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was founded in 1988. We believe that Hamza bin Laden was born a year later, in 1989, in Saudi Arabia. Soon after, he moves with his mother and father to the war theater in Afghanistan. They are eventually kicked out of Afghanistan and seek refuge in Sudan, and he spends the first seven years of his life in Sudan. He is in Sudan when his father begins plotting the major terrorist attacks that we know Al Qaeda for — the East Africa embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, a warship that was attacked in the Gulf of Yemen, and eventually 9/11.

michael barbaro

So what happens to Hamza after 9/11?

rukmini callimachi

So less than two months after 9/11, Osama bin Laden takes three of his sons, including Hamza, to the base of a mountain in the Hindu Kush and says goodbye to him. In the goodbye, they stand in an olive grove. They embrace each other. And Osama bin Laden gives each of his children a Muslim rosary. These rosaries have 99 beads, which represent the 99 names of God in classical Arabic. And bin Laden reminded his sons to remain steadfast in their faith, to pray, and to seek strength from God. The three boys, along with their mothers, leave across the mountains. They initially go to Pakistan. From there, they’re smuggled into Iran, where, for a time, they lived in a safe house run by a senior Al Qaeda member. At a certain point, the Iranian regime learned of their whereabouts and arrested them, and they spent the next couple of years in a series of military detention camps. But it is in these camps that somehow, Hamza bin Laden and the people around him are able to begin getting letters out. These are letters that are smuggled out of the camps and across the region to where bin Laden is in hiding, and it is in these letters that you begin to glimpse the rich relationship between father and son, and the hope that Osama bin Laden had placed in the future of his son Hamza.

michael barbaro

So what do the letters actually say?

rukmini callimachi

The letters are incredibly revealing of the relationship that Hamza had with his father, and of the enormous amount of care that Osama bin Laden was taking to ensure Hamza bin Laden’s survival. One set of letters are the letters that Hamza wrote to his dad, and they are infused with the love he felt for his father. Let me read from just one. It begins, “My beloved father.” “My beloved father, I could not imagine the length of this bitter separation when you left me, my brother Khalid, and my brother Bakr at the foot of the mountains that you went to near the olive farm. Eight consecutive years. My eyes still do remember the last time they saw you, when you were under the olive tree and you gave every one of us a Muslim rosary, God remembers this, then you bid us farewell and we left, and it was as if we pulled out our livers and left them there. My honorable father, how many times — from the depths of my heart — I wished to be beside you while I was growing up, which passed by, as I was 13 years old when you left and have now become 22.”

michael barbaro

I didn’t expect that from the bin Ladens.

rukmini callimachi

To be truthful, I didn’t either. And among the other things that you see in the letters is the eagerness on the side of Hamza to please his dad. He begs his dad to not treat him differently, to not show him any special favor. He wants to be a fighter. At one point, he complains, and he says, “What truly makes me sad is the Mujahidin legions have marched and I have not joined them. The Mujahidin have impressed greatly in the field of long victories, and I am still standing in my place, prohibited by these steel shackles.” He wants to be part of the jihad. He has spent, at this point, the better part of his childhood and early manhood in captivity, where he’s not able to take part in the jihad that his father has preached. But then there’s also a series of letters that deal with Hamza’s future. And these are letters not to Hamza directly, but letters between Osama bin Laden and one of his trusted aides. And they discuss everything, including the curriculum that Hamza should be studying, what type of religious texts he should be absorbing, the kind of military and explosives training that his father wanted him to have, and then long, drawn-out discussions about how to extract Hamza and his mother from Iran, and how to bring them to him. And his biggest worry is that they’re going to be under surveillance, and that it could be that he is allowed to leave Iran because intelligence agencies will assume that Hamza and his mother would be headed to bin Laden. So it would essentially be a way to track bin Laden. And so he comes up with this elaborate ruse. He writes, “No doubt, such news will be exchanged over the phone while the phones are monitored. Thus, the information will be available to the adversaries. Accordingly, if the intelligence commander in the area is aware, he will think that they” — meaning Hamza and his mother — “are headed to me, and will survey them to find the place that they will settle in. And regardless of the possibilities and monitoring them, we have to be on the cautious side and take the following steps to break the surveillance. They will go to the tunnel between Kohat and Peshawar and arrange a meeting between them and another brother. The meeting must be precise in timing. It will be inside a tunnel, and there they will change cars. So they will ride in the car with the brother that they will meet, instead of the car they were riding in. And the brothers who were going to drive the car must be instructed on the strict adherence to the timings. After changing cars, the brother who was driving the car that is subject to the surveillance will drive to an area that is unsuspected, and the people coming from Iran will go to Peshawar, go to one of the closed markets, and change cars again, then head to a safe place in Peshawar until we arrange for them to come.”

michael barbaro

So bin Laden is micromanaging his son’s escape from hundreds of miles away. He’s extremely detail-oriented.

rukmini callimachi

Exactly.

michael barbaro

So what do you make of the dynamic between father and son from these letters, given everything you’ve explained about Hamza’s place?

rukmini callimachi

Well, what’s clear is the importance that he has in Osama bin Laden’s life, and in Osama bin Laden’s plans for the future. He’s being protected. Osama bin Laden doesn’t want him to be on the front lines, doesn’t want him to be taking part in any actual fighting. At one point, he tells the aide that he doesn’t even want his son to be let outside of the house where he is staying in Iran.

michael barbaro

Why not?

rukmini callimachi

Because he’s too precious. This is a person who was being groomed — apparently — to become a future leader. And so even though he’s very eager to be out on the battlefield, having him be injured or hurt or killed would put a wrench in those plans. And this tension continues until May 2, 2011.

archived recording (barack obama) Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.

rukmini callimachi

Osama bin Laden is killed by American special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

michael barbaro

So in this moment, Hamza bin Laden loses his protector and his groomer, but I wonder if it’s also an opportunity.

rukmini callimachi

It does create an opportunity for Hamza, yes. Yes.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. Rukmini, what happens to Hamza after his father dies? What becomes of this plan to groom him into the next great leader of this movement?

rukmini callimachi

So Osama bin Laden is killed in the spring of 2011, and we lose track of Hamza for a while at this point. But this moment in time coincides with the period when Al Qaeda begins to splinter.

archived recording What does that mean? Does that mean Al Qaeda disappears? Of course it does not. Al Qaeda has become a very different, a very splintered, a very fractured organization. You can find pieces of it in Yemen, pieces of it in Somalia, pieces of it still in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, pieces of it around the world.

rukmini callimachi

2011 is the start of the rise of ISIS.

archived recording 1 The group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq describes all Christians as legitimate targets. archived recording 2 New threats and declarations from the militant group ISIS. archived recording 3 [CHANTING]

rukmini callimachi

A dispute emerges between ISIS and Al Qaeda over ISIS’s presence in Syria, and they formally split in 2014, which coincides with when ISIS declares its territorial caliphate.

archived recording 1 That’s an Islamic State from Syria to eastern Iraq. And it’s calling on Muslims to swear allegiance to it. archived recording 2 [SPEAKING ARABIC] archived recording 3 They essentially said, we are the Islamic State. We are the one and only leaders around here. And Al Qaeda effectively said, not so fast. We’re not bowing down to you. So there was really a political power struggle there, I think. archived recording 4 The man who leads Al Qaeda central made it clear earlier this year that his group has nothing to do with ISIS, citing disobedience —

rukmini callimachi

Very quickly, they go from having been part of the same organization to being enemies that were out to kill each other. I remember this moment very well, because at that point in time, I was talking to members of Al Qaeda on social media — on Twitter, on Telegram, et cetera. And I started to see how members of Al Qaeda that had sworn fealty to Al Qaeda began to have doubts, and began defecting in order to join ISIS, which was seen as the new kid on the block and the more exciting, youthful group, and the one that was actually making things happen. They had declared a caliphate, whereas Osama bin Laden had always spoken of a caliphate as a dream for the distant future.

archived recording (hamza bin laden) [SPEAKING ARABIC]

rukmini callimachi

2015 is the next time that we hear from Hamza.

archived recording (hamza bin laden) [SPEAKING ARABIC]

rukmini callimachi

And he emerges in an audio recording, where he is introduced to the jihadist universe by Ayman al-Zawahri, who is the current leader of Al Qaeda.

archived recording (hamza bin laden) [SPEAKING ARABIC]

rukmini callimachi

And in that audio recording, Hamza goes on to call for lone wolf attacks in the west, very much extending his father’s message.

archived recording (hamza bin laden) [SPEAKING ARABIC]

michael barbaro

So how much do you think the reappearance of Hamza bin Laden in this moment, when Al Qaeda is losing young members to ISIS, may have been a deliberate attempt to kind of reframe Al Qaeda?

rukmini callimachi

It sure looks like that. At this point in time, Al Qaeda is hemorrhaging members, and they’re having an especially hard time recruiting young jihadists. Anyone who is a millennial or a 20-something is, in general, choosing to join ISIS over choosing to join Al Qaeda, and now, suddenly, they bring out this person, who has the most famous name in terrorism. He’s handsome. He’s young. And although they don’t say this, it does begin to look that way. And if you look at ISIS propaganda, there’s kind of a subset of ISIS literature that attacks Al Qaeda, and that specifically attacks their leader, Ayman al-Zawahri. What’s interesting about that dynamic is that I am not aware of ISIS ever attacking Hamza bin Laden. Even though ISIS has removed itself from the Al Qaeda sphere and has had a divorce with its former terrorist parent, they continue to revere Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden remains a beloved figure among jihadists all over the world.

michael barbaro

Why?

rukmini callimachi

You know, he’s the creator of this. He’s the person who created this army of jihad that went on to quite literally harm America. And that’s something that no one else has done. And by extension, Hamza bin Laden is part of that sphere. So he is a part of Al Qaeda that ISIS does not feel that they can critique. And in 2016, I started a folder on my laptop entitled Hamza bin Laden, because 2016 was the moment when I started to feel that Hamza bin Laden is being floated as a future leader. Not just as somebody who can take over Al Qaeda, but as somebody who can unite these divided factions. I was preparing for the moment when the current leader of Al Qaeda is killed in an airstrike — which is something that we are expecting — and Hamza bin Laden is announced to be the new emir, as they call them, of Al Qaeda. Instead, what happened is a couple of days ago —

archived recording 1 Tonight, the man groomed to be the heir apparent to Osama bin Laden, his son Hamza, is dead. archived recording 2 U.S. media outlets now reporting that officials have received intel confirming his death. The circumstances surrounding it are not yet clear.

rukmini callimachi

NBC broke the news that Hamza bin Laden had most likely been killed in an airstrike in the first two years of the Trump administration.

michael barbaro

Rukmini, what does it mean for these groups that Hamza bin Laden — if this reporting is correct — has been killed?

rukmini callimachi

Right. So on the one hand, it’s a blow to Al Qaeda’s future. He’s the one figure that they had who met all of those qualifications. He was young. He was charismatic. He had a famous pedigree in terrorism. So on the one hand, stripping these groups of their leaders — we hope — is going to hobble them. It’s going to hurt their organization. It’s going to cause the organization to implode. But the other way that it can go is that the lack of a charismatic leader means that the glue goes away. And so already, with the death of Osama bin Laden, we saw soon after that Al Qaeda split into two — Al Qaeda and ISIS. Now, with the death of Hamza, this could be a fatal blow to Al Qaeda. I don’t actually think it is. What would be worse is if Al Qaeda then begins to splinter internally, and then you have just a many-headed snake.

michael barbaro

Why would that be worse?

rukmini callimachi

The splitting of Al Qaeda and ISIS created a landscape that made the world more dangerous than it was before, because ISIS, in order to differentiate themselves from Al Qaeda, became a much more brutal group. I hate to say this, because it sounds almost obscene to say it, but Al Qaeda, in a way, was a moderate group compared to what we saw ISIS become. ISIS introduced levels of torture and levels of atrocities that we have never seen before. And so there is always a danger that if Al Qaeda splinters again, that the new group that emerges from that could be more brutal, could be more deadly, could be more vicious than the one we already have in place. Taking people like Hamza bin Laden, who are actively calling for the death of Americans — taking those people off the battlefield — it’s hard to argue that that isn’t a sound policy. But unfortunately, we have a recent history to reckon with. And that is the history of the last five years with the rise of ISIS, where we saw a monster even worse than Al Qaeda be born. It could be that. Or it could be that the organization has just faced too many blows, and that in the lack of any clear leader, that they lose their way.

michael barbaro

Thank you, Rukmini.

rukmini callimachi

It’s my pleasure, Michael.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording (mike dewine) Today, I’m announcing the following initiatives, the following actions. Number 1, safety protection orders.

michael barbaro

On Tuesday, the governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, proposed a series of laws that he said would reduce the chances of another mass shooting like the one in Dayton over the weekend.

archived recording (mike dewine) We have to empower people to get help for family or loved ones who may be a danger to themselves, or a danger to others, and have access to firearms — a deadly combination.

michael barbaro

Governor DeWine called for a red flag law that would allow police to confiscate guns from anyone deemed dangerous by a court, and for a law requiring background checks for gun buyers. ^ARCHIVED RECORDING^ (CHANTING) Do something! Do something! Do something! Do something! The plan comes two days after DeWine, a Republican, was interrupted during a vigil for victims of Sunday’s shooting by constituents who demanded that he take action.

archived recording (mike dewine) Some chanted, do something! And they were absolutely right. We must do something. And that is exactly what we are going to do.

michael barbaro

The Times reports that congressional Republicans, also facing intense pressure, are coalescing around a federal version of a red flag law. If passed, it would be the most significant gun control legislation enacted in 20 years. And —

archived recording (toni morrison) At the very beginning, when I wrote the first book, “The Bluest Eye,” I came at it as not a writer, but a reader. And such a story didn’t exist. Every little homely black girl was a joke, or didn’t exist in literature, and I was eager to read about a story where racism really hurts and can destroy you, and it’s not a joke, as they made out that we were.

michael barbaro

Toni Morrison, who transformed the American literary canon by telling the story of black identity in 11 best-selling novels, including “Song of Solomon,” “Beloved” and “Paradise,” and by becoming the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, has died. In a 2015 interview with The Times, Morrison described writing as a life-sustaining force.

archived recording (toni morrison) I don’t think I could have happily stayed here with the calamity that has occurred so often in the world if I did not have a way of thinking about it — past, present, future — which is what writing is for me. It’s control. Nobody tells me what to do. I am in control. It is my world. It’s sometimes wild, the process by which I arrive at something. But nevertheless, it’s mine, it’s free, and it’s a way of thinking. It’s pure knowledge.

michael barbaro