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It has been revealed that some American nationals have fought along with militants operating in Kashmir, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya.
These Americans belong to both immigrant Muslim families as well as White Americans who converted to Islam, a report said.
"We did not understand the magnitude of what was going on here (in the US) and there (abroad). We only had a few snippets (about American militants overseas)," Robert Blitzer, a former top FBI counter terrorism official, who is now a corporate consultant, told The Washington Post.
Some of these American jehadis, said the Post, were "inspired to fight in Kashmir."
One US citizen who is reported to have gone there was Abu Adam Jibreel, a middle class youth who grew up in Atlanta and attended the city's renowned Ebenezer Baptist Church before converting to Islam as a teenager, according to US News and World Report magazine.
Jibreel travelled to Kashmir in 1987 and trained with Islamic fighters at remote camps in the Hindu Kush mountains. He was killed during a raid on the Indian Army post a year later, the report said.
Details are just as skimpy about a number of other Americans alleged to have joined the Muslim underground overseas, the Post noted, but pointed out that in February, the New York Times reported that the name of an American, Hiram Tores, was listed in a document its reporters found in a house in Kabul that had been used by Pakistani fighters allied with the al-Qaeda.
The US has woken up to the involvement of not only Pakistanis but also American militants during investigations about White American jehadis like John Walker Lindh, captured while fighting with the Taliban, the report said.
US officials have documented other Americans' role in the al-Qaeda.
Wadih el-Hage was a tyre store worker and father of seven children in Arlington, Texas, in the 1990s when US authorities found that the naturalized US citizen was a top aide to Bin Laden.
Last year, he was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in East Africa.
Former US officials told The Post that one reason they paid little attention to the American jehadis who fought from Afghanistan to Kashmir, from Bosnia to Chechnya, is that often they did not appear to be violating US laws -- "at least any that are ever enforced."
The Post noted that the US Neutrality
Act bans taking up arms against a nation with which the US is at
peace, but prosecutions under the law are rare.
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