Saif al-Adel, the high-ranking Egyptian commander in Al Qaeda and longtime associate of Osama bin Laden who has reportedly been appointed the organization’s “caretaker,” is a veteran of the jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and has a reputation as a skilled operational planner and pragmatic commander.
One of the lesser-known stories about his past involves his unofficial role as “caretaker” for the Khadr family.
Egyptian-born Canadian Ahmed Said Khadr was associated with al-Adel and many of Al Qaeda’s Egyptian commanders in the late 1980s and 1990s, when he lived with his family in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
After 9/11, the Khadr family members scattered. Pakistani forces killed the family patriarch in October 2003, during a battle that left his youngest son paralyzed.
Khadr’s wife and children have since moved back to Canada and his second youngest son, Omar, is expected to return this fall from Guantanamo. The 24-year-old pleaded guilty to five war crimes in return for the deal that would allow him to serve the remainder of his sentence here.
During a series of interviews with the Toronto Star in the summer of 2007, three Khadr family members described what it was like to live among Al Qaeda’s elite in the years before 9/11.
One memorable story involving al-Adel began in early 1997, while Khadr was visiting Canada, and his wife and children were living in an Afghan compound belonging to bin Laden.
While most Egyptian leaders respected Khadr, his kids were often seen as too Western, according to those who knew the Khadrs at the time. Abdurahman, the second oldest Khadr son and so-called black sheep of his family, was of particular concern to Al Qaeda.
One day, as a convoy quickly lined up to leave the camp, Abdurahman and his older brother Abdullah got into a screaming match. They were fighting over the front seat, Abduraham said.
Shouting led to shoving, which eventually led to Abdullah running after his brother with an AK-47 pointed at his back. Their mother screamed for her boys to stop.
Bin Laden had reportedly told the family he did not want them following him to the next camp in Kandahar, but Khadr’s wife, Maha Elsamnah, begged the group to keep Abdurahman. “I couldn’t control him,” she said in an interview.
Al Qaeda managed to hang on to Abdurahman for just one night in Kabul, when the group’s members decided they couldn’t handle him, either.
It was left to al-Adel, now Al Qaeda’s new leader, to drive the teenager to the bus station.
“Do not come back until your father is with you,” Abdurahman recalled him saying. “Go to your family.” Then he bought a ticket for Abdurahman to go to Peshawar.
This wasn’t the first time the Khadr children would be in trouble. An informant who worked for the British and French intelligence services, and later wrote a book under the pseudonym Omar Nasiri, described another scene at a training camp when the Khadr boys fought.
“They had broken all the rules we had learned since our first day of training,” Nasiri wrote. “Soon, we were laughing about it, even though it wasn’t funny at all. It made us nervous.”
When the Khadr family later moved to Kabul, they lived once again near al-Adel.
Most of Al Qaeda at this time lived outside of Kandahar, but al-Adel resided in the upscale neighbourhood of Wazzer Akbar Khan, according to Elsamnah.
Many of the Egyptians in Kabul used walkie-talkies to communicate with each other. The Khadr family was given Number 15, but at some point someone said “Kareem” instead, and that name seemed to stick.
Saif al Adel was known on the radio as Number 1.
In describing Al Qaeda’s roots in his book Looming Tower, author Lawrence Wright said al-Adel travelled with bin Laden from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996. “Saif al Adel, later to become al Qaeda’s military chief, sat in the co-pilot’s seat holding a map so he could direct the Russian pilot, who didn’t speak Arabic and whom they didn’t trust,” Wright wrote.
Many Al Qaeda leaders were paranoid about spies within the group, but Wright describes al-Adel as particularly suspicious of a “traitor in his camp.”
News of al-Adel’s appointment as an interim leader was uncovered Tuesday by Noman Benotman, a former Libyan fighter aligned with Al Qaeda, now working at London’s counter-extremism think tank, the Quilliam Foundation.
After 9/11, al-Adel’s whereabouts were a mystery. It was believed he fled to Iran after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in December 2001 and was put under house arrest.
Benotman was reportedly told by sources that al-Adel was released this summer in exchange for kidnapped Iranian diplomats.
His release is expected to raise questions about Tehran’s role determining in Al Qaeda’s future since the killing of bin Laden earlier this month.
Al-Adel is expected to remain in the leadership role until the organization can be taken over by Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri.
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