Title:
MADE IN THE U.S.A.
Author:
David E. Kaplan
Publication: US News
Date: June 10, 2002
URL:
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Hundreds of Americans have followed the path to jihad. Here's how and why
Fifteen thousand feet high in Kashmir and armed with a Kalashnikov–
that was not how friends thought Jibreel al-Amreekee would end up.
All of 19, the restless kid from Atlanta had grown up in a wealthy
family attending Ebenezer Baptist Church, the home pulpit of Martin
Luther King Jr. A soft-spoken youth with long dreadlocks, al-Amreekee
had a passion for sky diving and reading books on the world's
religions.
One religion that drew his interest was Islam, and while he was at
North Carolina Central University, that interest grew into a calling.
By 1997, he had converted and was spending his time at the modest
Ibad-ar-Rahman mosque in Durham, where African-Americans mixed easily
with immigrants from Egypt and Pakistan. He fell in with a group of
fundamentalists who preached of how fellow Muslims were being
slaughtered overseas and how jihad–holy war–was every Muslim's
obligation. For al-Amreekee, it came as a revelation. He dropped out
of school, read the Koran daily, fasted, and prepared for combat
overseas. "He was into it, man," recalled a friend, Jaleel Abdullah
Musawwir. "You know, Islam says when you get into something you go
full ahead, and that's the way he did it."
In late 1997, al-Amreekee took off for Kashmir, where India and
Pakistan have clashed for decades. Through friends in Durham, he
hooked up with Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Righteous Army), a now banned
militia blamed for December's terrorist attack on the Indian
parliament. Lashkar leaders, closely allied with Osama bin Laden's al
Qaeda, have announced plans to "plant Islamic flags in Delhi, Tel
Aviv, and Washington."
After training at a Lashkar base in Pakistan, al-Amreekee got his
chance: His unit began ambushing Indian troops in Kashmir. But the
American didn't last long. After just 21/2 months as a jihadist, he
was dead–killed while attacking an Indian Army post. "He got what he
wanted," said Abdullah Ramadawn, a friend and fellow Georgian who
used to drive him home after prayers. "He always said he wanted to be
a martyr."
Americans are accustomed to thinking of the jihad movement as
something overseas, inspired among the faithful in spartan Pakistani
schools and gleaming Saudi mosques. But there is also an American
road to jihad, one taken by true believers like al-Amreekee and
hundreds of others. For 20 years–long before "American Taliban" John
Walker Lindh–American jihadists have ventured overseas to attack
those they believe threaten Islam. It is a little-known story.
They have left behind comfortable homes in Atlanta, New York, and San
Francisco, volunteering to fight with foreign armies in Bosnia,
Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Their numbers are far greater than is
commonly thought: Between 1,000 and 2,000 jihadists left America
during the 1990s alone, estimates Bob Blitzer, a former FBI terrorism
chief who headed the bureau's first Islamic terrorism squad in 1994.
Federal agents monitored some 40 to 50 jihadists leaving each year
from just two New York mosques during the mid-'90s, he says.
Pakistani intelligence sources say that Blitzer's figures are
credible and that as many as 400 recruits from America have received
training in Pakistani and Afghan jihad camps since 1989. Scores more
ventured overseas during the 1980s, to fight the Soviets in
Afghanistan.
U.S. News traced reports of more than three dozen American jihadists,
many of them previously unknown. Unlike the 9/11 hijackers, who spent
only months here, many are U.S. citizens, native born or naturalized.
Most put down roots here, attended schools, ran businesses, and
raised families. A majority appear to be Arab-Americans–Egyptian,
Saudi, and Palestinian immigrants–or fellow Muslims from lands as far
afield as Sudan and Pakistan. But a fair number are African-
Americans, who make up nearly one third of the nation's Muslims.
Still others are as varied as Lindh, a wealthy white kid from
California's Marin County, or Hiram Torres, a Puerto Rican convert
from New Jersey.
No records. Surprisingly–despite the key role some have played in
terrorism –investigators have never tracked them as a group.
Immigration agents keep no records on foreign travel by U.S. citizens
and resident aliens. FBI and CIA officials say that fear of political
spying charges has kept them from monitoring suspicious trips by U.S.
citizens abroad. Nor does the State Department have files. "Why would
we keep records?" asks one official. "These are people who are
dropping out of U.S. society." With few such records, government
files on al Qaeda backers here were woefully incomplete. Thus, after
September 11, most of the 1,200 suspects arrested were found by
combing immigration rolls for persons out of compliance–not by
tracking those with jihadist ties or training in the jihadist
military camps of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Those camps–once run freely by bin Laden and his allies–are the
connective tissue binding together the international jihadist
movement. To date, the United States and its allies have captured al
Qaeda fighters from no fewer than 33 countries, including Australia,
Belgium, and Sweden. Only two "American Taliban" are in custody:
Lindh and Yasser Esam Hamdi, a Baton Rouge-born 22-year-old who spent
most of his life in Saudi Arabia. But some counterterrorism officials
are convinced dozens more remain active, including several who may
play key roles within bin Laden's network. Their trails are difficult
to track; dual citizenship and false passports are common, and they
typically have Arabic names, either given or adopted, with multiple
spellings. "God knows where the hell they are, because we never found
them," says Blitzer. "It's always been a potential time bomb."
They are, to be sure, a tiny minority of the nation's 4 million
Muslims. Law enforcement officials stress they see no evidence of a
tightly organized "fifth column" among America's diverse Muslim
communities. And many jihadists have fought in struggles that the
United States either supported or was neutral in–against the Russians
in Afghanistan and Chechnya, for example, or against ethnic cleansing
in Bosnia. In fact, Americans have long fought in other nations'
wars. Such actions may violate the Neutrality Act–which bans fighting
against nations with which America is at peace–but the law is rarely
enforced. During the late 1930s, for example, nearly 3,000 Americans
fought the fascists in Spain's civil war.
But the international jihad movement is different, analysts say. It
has become virulently anti-American, anti-Western, and steeped in the
kind of absolutist religious fervor that is the hallmark of bin
Laden's al Qaeda network. In that, American holy warriors resemble
their brethren overseas: They tend to be young, smart, and motivated,
often introverted and detached, and ready to risk life and
limb. "These are the true believers," says Howard University's
Sulayman Nyang, author of Islam in the United States of America. "You
feel you are an instrument of God, or part of a historical force."
Call to war. Jihad–literally, "struggle" in Arabic–can also mean
one's private spiritual quest. But today it is widely used to connote
holy war. And for many, that journey begins in the mosques and
Islamic centers of America. There young Muslims may hear imams full
of fire and brimstone sermonizing on the persecution of Muslims
abroad. They may be handed videos depicting a Muslim world under
siege, filled with images of bloodied and broken corpses. Those same
images beckon online. Since the mid-1990s, Web sites have spread the
call to holy war at cyberspeed. Links like almuhajiroun.com and
azzam.com now bring the faithful to harrowing displays of refugees
and martyrs in faraway lands. In 2000, a Chechen jihadist Web site,
www.qoqaz.net, directed recruits to network quietly: "Anyone
interested in going to fight . . . should contact members of their
own communities and countries who are known to have been for Jihad.
You will know these people and they will know you."
Others proselytize less subtly. For years, the San Diego-based
American Islamic Group sent its Islam Report to Internet news groups
with its bank account listed. "Supporting Jihad is an Islamic
obligation," read one report. Included were communiqués from
Algeria's terrorist Armed Islamic Group and war reports from Bosnia
and Chechnya. In a 1995 Internet posting titled "First American
Martyr in Chechnya," the group mourned the loss of Mohammad Zaki, an
American killed in Chechnya that year. Zaki was a Washington, D.C.,
native who ran the group's Chechnya relief effort, his colleagues
wrote. The father of four, he reportedly died in a Russian air attack
while delivering aid to Chechen villages. U.S. and Russian officials
in Moscow have no record of Zaki's death. (Kifah Jayyousi, who was
then the San Diego group's head and later facilities chief for the
Detroit and Washington, D.C., school districts, could not be located
for comment.)
Some jihadists become radicalized overseas, as did Lindh. In the past
25 years, Saudi and Pakistani groups have targeted African-American
Muslims, in particular, offering scholarships to study Islam and
Arabic in their countries, according to Prof. Lawrence Mamiya, an
expert on Islam at New York's Vassar College. "The first step is
education, and then they're recruited by more militant groups," he
says. "Being in those countries, they come across the oppression
those people confront."
New recruits. Once recruited, the jihadists all but disappear. A rare
window opened on their world at last year's trial of U.S. Embassy
bomb- ers, in which a half-dozen names surfaced of Americans
allegedly tied to al Qaeda. Wadih el-Hage, an Arlington, Texas, tire
store manager and top bin Laden aide, got some media attention, but
others passed unnoticed. There was Mubarak al-Duri, an Iraqi native
living in Arizona, who officials say worked with bin Laden's firms in
Sudan; Mohamed Bayazid, a Syrian-American who allegedly bought
weapons and uranium for al Qaeda; and Abu Osama, an Egyptian-American
said to have trained al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. Government
witness L'Houssaine Kherchtou testified to knowing "some black
Americans" who he believed were al Qaeda associates in Sudan and
Pakistan. Perhaps most intriguing were accounts of Abu Malik, a
martial arts expert from New York who allegedly fought in Afghanistan
and later turned up at al Qaeda's headquarters in Sudan.
U.S. News gained access to records of other American jihadists from
some of Pakistan's best-known Islamic schools. There are thousands of
these madrasahs, as they are known, and they provided tens of
thousands of recruits to the Taliban. One of the most influential,
the Haqqania school outside Peshawar, graduated much of the Taliban's
senior leadership–along with at least nine Americans. The records are
sketchy. In most cases, they list only the student's Arabic name,
ethnicity, and home country. In 1995, seven Arab-Americans enrolled
in the school, among them Zaid Bin Tufail of North Carolina, Zahid
Al-
Shafi of Texas, and Ahmed Abi-Bakr of Washington, D.C. All received
military training and fought with Taliban units in their drive to
unite the country, school officials say. Other students included two
African-Americans: a "Dr. Bernard" from New York, who arrived in
1997, and "Abdullah," whose parents left their native Barbados and
settled in Michigan; he, too, joined the Taliban and was
reported "martyred" near Mazar-e Sharif in 1999 or 2000. None of
them, however, shows up in checks of U.S. public records.
Records at another madrasah, the Tajweed-ul-Koran in Quetta, show
that three Americans studied there in 1996. Two were
African-American–
"Omar" and Farooq" are the only names listed in the register–and
school officials described the third, "Haidar," as a tall, white
fellow, about 25, "with a strong build and small golden beard." The
foreigners, they say, left for military training with the Taliban in
Kandahar. At another pro-Taliban school in Quetta, the Jamia
Hammadia, workers recall a 25-year-old American student from Chicago–
Abu Bakar al-Faisal–who arrived in 1995 and died while soldiering
with the Taliban in 1999. Al-Faisal, they say, had broken with Louis
Farrakhan's Nation of Islam before coming to Afghanistan. Even
sketchier records exist at the Jamia Abi-Bakr school in Karachi,
where officials say about a dozen African-Americans studied. The
madrasah is linked closely to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Kashmir militia
Jibreel al-Amreekee joined.
The best-known American jihadist–John Walker Lindh–attended yet
another madrasah. The alienated Lindh, a lawyer's son, discovered
Islam online and, like many jihadists, later fell in with Tablighi
Jamaat, a Pakistani evangelical group. Although not itself linked to
terrorism, Tablighi's radical preaching is thought to have influenced
several British citizens now held by U.S. forces in Guantánamo, as
well as suspected shoe bomber Richard Reid.
Rocket grenades. Through Tablighi, Lindh ended up at his Pakistani
madrasah. At age 19, he finished six months of studies at the pro-
Taliban school. His next stop was Harakat ul-Mujahideen–the Jihad
Fighters Movement–another Kashmir-focused militia tied to hijackings,
kidnappings, and bin Laden's terrorist network. In mid-2001, armed
with a Harakat letter of introduction, Lindh presented himself to al
Qaeda, where he trained with explosives and rocket-propelled
grenades, U.S. officials say. Captured in November and then wounded
in a revolt, Lindh stayed true to his views, insisting that martyrdom
is "the goal of every Muslim." Today, his hair cut and beard shorn,
he sits in an Alexandria, Va., jail, facing charges of murder and
terrorism. His attorneys argue he is innocent; they say Lindh never
fired on Americans and has constitutional rights to bear arms and
associate with radicals like al Qaeda.
Harakat ul-Mujahideen seems to be a favored home for traveling
jihadists. Earlier this year, an apparent list of recruits surfaced
in a Harakat safe house, bearing the name Hiram Torres–a Puerto Rican
from New Jersey missing for years. In 1995, Harakat officials claimed
they were hosting several hundred foreign Muslims at their training
camps, including 16 Americans. That year, at Harakat offices in
Lahore, Pakistan, two Saudis boasted of their own American
backgrounds to a reporter. In smooth English, Muhammad Al-Jabeer
claimed to be from Chicago, where he'd studied for an M.B.A. His
friend, Ahmed Usaid, said he hailed from New Jersey and held a B.S.
in computer science. Usaid, Harakat sources say, died in battle near
Mazar-e Sharif in 1999 and was buried in Afghanistan.
One well-trod route to jihad leads through London, a city so popular
among radical Islamists that some call it Londonistan. This was the
apparent path taken by New Yorker Mohammad Junaid. The grandson of
Pakistani immigrants, the 26-year-old Junaid surfaced in Pakistan
last October, vowing to kill fellow Americans on sight. Sounding much
like a New Yorker, Junaid claimed to have grown up listening to
Whitney Houston and riding roller coasters. The stocky, spectacled
Junaid said he'd left a dot-com job in midtown Manhattan, but even
more striking was the claim that his own mother escaped from the
ninth floor of the World Trade Center.
None of that lessened his rage at America, which stemmed, he said,
from racist taunts at his Bronx high school. At college, Junaid read
of how Muslims were under attack worldwide; he later linked up with
the London-based al-Muhajiroun (the Emigrants). The group is believed
to have sent hundreds of foreign jihadists to Pakistan and
Afghanistan, largely by targeting British colleges and immigrant
communities. Now banned on U.K. campuses, its leaders have praised
the 9/11 attacks and say that America has declared war on Islam.
Junaid believes them. "I will kill every American that I see," he
vowed to a TV reporter. "I'm not a New Yorker. I'm a Muslim."
Holy warriors like Junaid deeply worry authorities, but that wasn't
always the case. During the Cold War, Washington encouraged the jihad
movement in its drive to bog down the Soviets in Afghanistan. As many
as 25,000 foreigners answered the call during the 1980s, most notably
bin Laden. The majority hailed from Arab nations, but many journeyed
from Sudan, Southeast Asia, China, and Great Britain. Others came
from the United States, among them dozens of native-born Americans.
One, Muhammed Haseeb Abdul-Haqq, was the son of a Baptist preacher in
New York. A recent convert to a Pakistani Sufi sect, Muslims of the
Americas, Abdul-Haqq rallied fellow Americans to fight the Soviets in
the early 1980s. The group set up "jihad councils" across the country
and in 1982 sent 12 members to Pakistan, intent on finding their way
into battle. "It was amazing for me," recalls Abdul-Haqq. "I had no
military training, but I knew what I was doing was for the Almighty."
Fearing an international incident, alarmed U.S. and Pakistani
officials stopped the group from entering Afghanistan. But others
followed. "We were the spark," says Abdul-Haqq. "Different avenues
opened and others got through." Indeed, during the war, a handful of
journalists came across Americans fighting alongside the Afghans.
Among them was 34-year-old Akhbar Shah, an African-American from
Boston found by reporters in 1985. Shah claimed to be a U.S. Army
veteran helping the rebels organize training camps and said he'd seen
two dozen other black American Muslims in Afghanistan.
Soldiers of Allah. Meanwhile, Abdul-Haqq's Muslims of the Americas
continued to preach jihad. The sect's American branch had been
founded in 1980 by a charismatic Pakistani cleric, Sheik Mubarik Ali
Hasmi Shah Gilani, who appeared at a Brooklyn mosque bedecked with
ammunition belts and calling on his mostly African-American converts
to wage holy war. A recruitment video from the early 1990s–Soldiers
of Allah–depicts would-be guerrillas handling firearms and explosives
and shows Gilani boasting how recruits are given "highly specialized
training in guerrilla warfare." The organization freely admits
sending more than 100 of its members–all U.S. citizens–to Pakistan,
but says it was only for religious study. Federal agents believe that
dozens also received military training there and that some fought in
Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Kashmir. It was Gilani whom the Wall
Street Journal's Daniel Pearl was seeking before he was murdered–on a
tip the cleric was tied to alleged shoe bomber Reid. Gilani was
questioned and released.
Gilani's claims of nonviolence would be easier to believe if so many
of his followers were not in trouble with the law. Over the years,
the group has drawn more than 1,000 members to rural compounds in a
half-dozen states. During the 1980s, its followers engaged in a
bloody campaign of U.S. bombings and murders, largely against Indian
religious figures in America, officials say. Two Muslims of the
Americas members were recently convicted on firearms charges, and
another was charged with the murder of a deputy sheriff in
California. The group's Abdul-Haqq says that these crimes are not
typical of his membership and that most occurred many years ago. Law
enforcement officials, meanwhile, have found nothing to tie the group
to bin Laden's al Qaeda and note that Gilani's Sufism has long been
at odds with Taliban-style Islam.
The dream of Gilani and other jihadists to drive the Soviets from
Afghanistan came true in 1989. For them, it was a great victory, the
triumph of international Islam over a godless superpower. Even as
America withdrew its CIA officers and its funding, the emboldened
jihadists stayed and plotted new campaigns. Some went on to new
battles overseas; some returned to their homelands, such as Egypt or
Saudi Arabia, intent on making them strict Islamic states. Others
took aim at America, angry over its support of Israel and basing of
troops in Saudi Arabia.
On Feb. 26, 1993, their pent-up rage exploded in the form of a 1,200-
pound bomb under the World Trade Center, which killed six and injured
more than 1,000. That first attempt to topple the twin towers led
investigators to a sheik named Omar Abdel Rahman. An Afghan war
veteran, Abdel Rahman had been driven from his native Egypt for his
ties to terrorism. He arrived in Brooklyn in 1990, and soon, he, too,
was preaching holy war at local mosques. More important, Abdel
Rahman's followers took control of an obscure "charity" in Brooklyn–
the Alkifah Refugee Center. Founded in Pakistan in the early 1980s,
Alkifah had scores of branches around the world, including Jersey
City, N.J.; Tucson, Ariz.; Boston, and 30 other U.S. cities. Most
were little more than storefronts–the Brooklyn one sat atop a Chinese
restaurant–but they raised millions of dollars to support the Afghan
resistance. And, they sent men along with the money. By 1993, the
Brooklyn office alone had sent as many as 200 jihadists from America
to join the mujahideen, investigators say.
As agents closed in on Abdel Rahman's network, they were stunned at
the number of jihadists heading overseas, says Blitzer, the former
FBI counterterrorism chief. "What the hell's going on?" he remembers
thinking. Five years after the Soviets had left Afghanistan, the
jihad movement was booming in America. "It was like a modern
underground railroad," says Neil Herman, who supervised the FBI
investigation of the bombing. Most were Arab immigrants, but
investigators remember many native-born Americans who frequented the
center.
One of those Americans was a bearded black Muslim named Rodney
Hampton-el, known to his friends as Dr. Rashid. Hampton-el juggled
several roles: He battled local drug dealers on the streets of New
York's 67th Precinct, while at his job he worked a dialysis machine
in an AIDS ward. By 1988, he'd made his way to Afghanistan and joined
the rebels, but he was nearly killed by a land mine. Recuperating in
a Long Island hospital, Hampton-el gave a revealing interview to
anthropologist Robert Dannin, author of Black Pil- grimage to Islam.
A true believer, Hampton-el said his wound was "a blessing" and he
hoped to return soon to Afghanistan. "To be injured in jihad is a
guarantee that you will go to Paradise," he explained. "Most
important of all, you must have faith in order to go. This is the
ultimate honor for a true Muslim."
Bomb plots. Within months, Hampton-el was leading workshops on
guerrilla warfare for Abdel Rahman's followers in Connecticut and New
Jersey. By 1993, there was talk among his group of fighting in
Bosnia, but increasingly attention focused on America. Hampton-el
offered to supply his friends with bombs and automatic weapons, part
of a plot that included attacks on major bridges and tunnels leading
into Manhattan. He never got the chance. The FBI nabbed Hampton-el,
Abdel Rahman, and eight others, who all received heavy prison
sentences in 1996.
And what became of the Alkifah Center and its jihadists? The Brooklyn
center closed, but the network of other jihad centers remained
active, where they helped form the nucleus of bin Laden's al Qaeda
network. Indeed, the centers were left largely intact, even in the
United States. "They certainly continued on, but were somewhat
fragmented," says Herman, the former FBI case agent. Only in the wake
of 9/11–eight years after the 1993 attack–did the White House issue
an executive order freezing Alkifah's assets.
By then, however, the centers had gone underground. Today, many of
the connections are handled informally, through radical members of
mosques and Islamic centers, investigators say. But officials believe
a network of Islamic charities has also helped fill the void, among
them the Illinois-based Benevolence International Foundation. With
offices in nine countries and a budget last year of $3.4 million,
Benevolence is one of the nation's largest Muslim charities. In
December, federal officials froze its assets, and in April they
arrested its director, Enaam Arnaout, for allegedly lying about ties
to terrorism. They claim that Arnaout, a Syrian-born U.S. citizen, is
an Alkifah veteran and longtime bin Laden associate. According to an
FBI affidavit, the 39-year-old Arnaout helped send jihadists to
Bosnia and nearly $700,000 to Chechen rebels, and direct- ed arms
convoys into Afghanistan and Croa- tia. Arnaout denies any
wrongdoing, and his foundation is suing the government to recover its
funds.
Whatever the outcome of those cases, the jihad movement in America
remains alive and well. And while it is easy enough to dismiss the
varied jihadists as adventurers or extremists, most seem motivated by
unselfish aims; they care deeply about the suffering of their
brethren overseas. What else would propel someone like Jibreel al-
Amreekee, the soft-spoken Atlanta teenager, to leave his home, travel
7,000 miles, and get killed fighting a foreign army? "The Muslims
don't have any help," says Abdul-Haqq of Muslims of the
Americas. "Look at the world's hot spots; look at how many places
Muslims are being killed." The problem is balancing their right to
intervene against the danger posed by the fanaticism that infects so
much of their movement. For now, America seems convinced that the
business of jihad needs to come to an end. "The government did too
little too late," says Herman. "Had law enforcement looked harder at
some of these issues, we wouldn't be talking about it today."
With Monica M. Ekman, Jonathan Elliston in Durham, N.C., Aamir Latif
in Pakistan, Michael Reynolds, and Kit R. Roane in New York