Bin Laden’s Voice Out of Nowhere

A few days ago, he was unknown, nearly unheard of even in his own country, Kuwait.

Now, Sulaiman abu Ghaith is suddenly on television screens throughout the world. The FBI and CIA are scrutinizing his every word. His government has disowned him.

Abu Ghaith has become the voice of Osama bin Laden. In three separate appearances during the past nine days, he has protested the U.S. bombing campaign against Afghanistan and delivered chilling predictions of future mayhem on behalf of Al Qaeda, the terrorist network Bin Laden heads.

Abu Ghaith’s sudden rise to prominence, combined with the absence of any prior indication of his role, is another sign of how little is known about the mechanics and makeup of Bin Laden’s inner circle.

“He was an unknown figure. There he was, suddenly, on TV,” said Abdulrahman Awadi, a former high-ranking Kuwaiti government official. “We couldn’t imagine how he reached so high a ranking.”

As it turns out, Abu Ghaith exhibited earlier signs of radicalism. Until he left Kuwait for good about a year ago, he worked as a cleric at a local mosque. Friends have described him as an effective and emotional preacher who would sometimes cry when sermonizing about death.

But his fiery rhetoric also got him into trouble. The government banned him from the mosque after he strayed from officially approved religious themes. According to one report, he attacked the Kuwaiti Constitution, saying it belonged “under my shoe.”

“He didn’t stick to the script,” said Mohammed Awadi, a friend and fellow cleric.

The stocky, bearded Abu Ghaith was born in 1965 and attended elementary and middle schools in an upscale suburb of Kuwait City. He graduated from Kuwait University with a degree in Islamic education in 1988.

Shortly afterward, he joined thousands of other Arabs headed to Afghanistan to take part in the Muslim guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation. Bin Laden was in Afghanistan helping to recruit and equip the so-called Afghan Arabs, but it is unclear whether the two met then.

Back in Kuwait, Abu Ghaith took to preaching and gained notoriety during the Persian Gulf War for his sermons urging attacks against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, whose forces had invaded the country. The United States and its allies succeeded in driving Hussein from Kuwait but did not remove him from power.

Abu Ghaith was also involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, a nonviolent Islamic movement dating to the late 1920s that seeks to unite all Arab countries into a single Muslim nation. The group has often been a target of persecution in Arab states such as Egypt.

Still, he was not considered an extremist.

“He was moderately religious. He had no beard then,” said Awadi, his friend, who writes religious tracts for a local Kuwaiti newspaper.

But in 1994, Abu Ghaith resigned from the Muslim Brotherhood after it posted candidates for Kuwaiti elections. He was apparently upset at its willingness to participate in what he considered a corrupt electoral system, Awadi said.

Abu Ghaith went to Bosnia-Herzegovina to join Muslim guerrillas fighting in the war there.

When he returned to Kuwait, Abu Ghaith worked as a high school religion teacher for the government’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs. He also began preaching again at a mosque outside Kuwait City.

One of his main topics was the predicted arrival of a new leader named Mohammed, who would usher in a new era of peace. That leader, he said, would be called a terrorist by the world’s rulers.

Abu Ghaith reportedly left Kuwait permanently in June 2000 with his wife and six children. The family, who could not be reached for comment, later returned to Kuwait.

Abu Ghaith’s final outburst before he appeared seated with Bin Laden in a video that aired Oct. 7 on the pan-Arab TV network Al Jazeera came a week after the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. He published a fatwa, or religious edict, in a Kuwaiti newspaper in which he called on Muslims to fight “Jews, Americans and all their allies.”

After the Oct. 7 video, when he showed up on television screens worldwide to introduce Bin Laden, Abu Ghaith appeared alone in two broadcasts.

In Kuwait, those appearances proved the final straw. On Sunday, the Cabinet voted to strip him of his citizenship. The foreign minister, Sheik Sabah al Ahmed al Jabbar al Sabah, described him as a traitor and a criminal.

Abu Ghaith’s prominence has shocked many Kuwaiti government officials, who have grown increasingly worried about extremist elements in their society. Fundamentalists hold 20 seats in the 50-seat parliament.

Abu Ghaith’s high profile as Bin Laden’s mouthpiece has even led to fears of a backlash against Kuwait’s limited democracy.

“This is a wake-up call that we have to be very careful with freedom,” said Awadi, the former government official. “Democracy and freedom of choice may be good for Western cultures, but for the Gulf countries, those are dangerous things. These people are using freedom to achieve their ends.”

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Associated Press contributed to this report.