Bin Laden commissioned a fifty-minute video that showed him riding horses, talking to Arab volunteers, broadcasting on the radio, firing weapons—the same things many commanders without video cameras did routinely. He sought out Arab journalists and gave lengthy interviews designed “to use the media for attracting more Arabs, recruiting more Arabs to come to Afghanistan,” as one of the journalists recalled. It was the birth of bin Laden’s media strategy, aimed primarily at the Arabic-speaking world;
