The Indecisive Terrorist

In a video shot in 2000 at Tarnak Farms, then Osama bin Laden’s headquarters, 12 miles outside Kandahar, we see Ziad al-Jarrah pacing in the receiving room of a guesthouse. He is dressed in a flowing white galabiya, his head swathed in a black makeshift turban. He seems nervous and uncertain of what to say or how to dress. He puts on his glasses, then takes them off; he takes his turban off, then puts it back on. He reads from a sheet of paper, first standing up, then sitting down. He walks out into the brown and dusty desert. Everyone around him is armed. In the tape’s last 20 minutes, he sits cross-legged next to Mohammed Atta. The two of them laugh and joke, a machine-gun propped on the wall behind them. At one point, al-Jarrah looks away from the camera and rolls his eyes. He had been at Tarnak Farms for a month or so, having come from Hamburg with three fellow university students for military training. A few days into their stay, al-Jarrah and his friends were escorted to bin Laden’s private quarters. Two days later, they swore bayat, an oath of allegiance, to him.