The World

That other princeling, Osama bin Laden, six foot four, striking and charismatic, embraced the ideas of Sayyid Qutb, and attended the lectures of his brother in Jeddah. Above all, he believed that only holy war against godless European infidels – Soviets, Americans, Zionists – and the restoration of sharia law would return Islam to its ancient and pure origins. Having inherited $25 million from his father, he left college without graduating and, backed by King Fahd and Prince Salman, travelled to Pakistan where, aided by the ISI, he used his fortune to gather around 2,000 Arab fighters for the struggle against the Russians. While he was in Peshawar, he met a bespectacled multilingual Egyptian surgeon, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, aged thirty, a member of a terrorist faction, Islamic Jihad, also keen to organize Afghan resistance. Al-Zawahiri would become his doctor, adviser and successor, but for now he returned to Cairo, where his comrades were planning to murder President Sadat.

In September 1981, Sadat ordered mass arrests of jihadists, Muslim Brothers and intellectuals, even Copts, but he missed a network of conspirators within the army command. They infiltrated a platoon led by a jihadist lieutenant named Islambouli into a parade of artillery and tanks to celebrate Sadat’s 1973 war against Israel. On 6 October, as Sadat took the salute of fighter jets, Islambouli seized one of the army trucks taking part in the review while his posse, with grenades hidden in their helmets, jogged towards the stand. Thinking they were part of the review, Sadat stood and saluted, whereupon they threw grenades and opened up on the president, hitting him in the chest. As all hell broke loose, Islambouli climbed on to the stand and emptied his magazine into the prone president – the best Egyptian leader since Mehmed Ali. The vice-president Hosni Mubarak was wounded, but he succeeded to the presidency, ruling Egypt for thirty years, maintaining the Israeli peace and surviving an assassination attempt by Islambouli’s brother. The assassins were executed – and Dr al-Zawahiri was arrested. When he was released, he rejoined Osama bin Laden in Pakistan fighting the Soviets. Together they founded a jihadi terror organization, the Base – al-Qaeda.

Sadat was not the only one facing a jihadi challenge, but Assad dealt with his differently: on 2 February 1982, his howitzers started to bombard his own city of Hama.

Assad, ruling a small country with a centralized Soviet-style economy, had created a greater Syria by intervening in Lebanon. Beirut was famed for its decadent charms and weak state, its domination by Maronite Christians resented by a downtrodden Shia minority recently empowered by a ferocious militia, Hezbollah – Party of God – funded by Khomeini. Its collapse was exacerbated by two other players – a Druze warlord, Walid Jumblatt, a pistol-packing playboy spouting Marx from the back of his Harley-Davidson, and Arafat’s PLO, which had built its own fiefdom and helped spark a civil war. In 1976, Assad sent in troops to staunch the bloodletting, while his brother Rifaat and other princelings made fortunes there. But Assad’s secular dictatorship, suppression of Islamicists and Alawite heresy infuriated the Muslim Brotherhood.

In June 1980, as Islamicist disturbances hit Hama, Homs and Idlib, jihadists tried to kill Assad; in response, on 27 June his brother Rifaat slaughtered a thousand Muslim Brotherhood prisoners at Tadmur (Palmyra) prison and assassinated their leaders. In February 1982, after Sadat’s assassination, the brothers decided to liquidate the Islamicist problem: Rifaat surrounded the insurgency’s centre, Hama, with 12,000 Defence Company troops and attacked with helicopters and howitzers, then stormed the city with tanks, possibly using gas, killing around 40,000 people.

The Assad brothers carefully monitored their Lebanon province, which the PLO was using as a base for attacking Israel. The brothers loathed Arafat and undermined him by championing their own Palestinian factions, but their attacks on Israel drew the Jewish state into the imbroglio. On 6 June 1982, Menachem Begin, inspired by his swaggering defence minister, Ariel Sharon, a veteran general, hero of the 1973 war, ordered an invasion to expel the PLO; as Syrian and Israeli pilots duelled overhead, the Israelis besieged Beirut. In August, Arafat and the PLO were forced out of Lebanon, and an Israeli ally, the Christian Bachir Gemayel, was elected president.