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He is the most famous American to travel to a distant land to wage jihad, but John Walker Lindh is far from alone. Hundreds, if not thousands, of US residents —some of them US citizens like Lindh—have left their homes to fight for militant Islamic causes overseas in the last 20 years, terrorism experts said.
Until the last few years, the US government did not keep close tabs on most of the US-based fighters who travelled to foreign war zones. It is unclear whether American officials have a firm idea of how many of them are still on the loose, though most US and foreign government officials believe it is a tiny number.
One reason US investigators only sporadically kept track of Americans fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Bosnia in the 1990s is that the travellers were not making war on America.
‘‘There was no focus at the CIA on keeping track of the Americans’’ who joined Muslim movements in hot spots such as Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya, said Reuel Gerecht, a former CIA officer who spent years in the Middle East. ‘‘It was a perfect zippo, a nonexistent issue for the agency.’’
But several militants have been nabbed after September 11. Jose Padilla, a former US street gang member, was detained in May at Chicago and accused of planning with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive bomb.
The first wave of American militants took up arms in the 1980s, travelling to Afghanistan to join the mujahideen battling the Soviet army. Most of these fighters were non-US citizens originally from the Middle East or South Asia who had come to the US on work or student visas.
One exception was US-born Rodney Hampton-el, a kidney dialysis worker at a New York medical clinic who made his way to Afghanistan in 1988 and later was injured by a land mine there. Hampton-el, a convert to Islam, returned to New York and joined a circle of Muslim activists around blind Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in New Jersey and Connecticut.
Hampton-el and Rahman are serving lengthy prison sentences after their 1995 convictions for conspiracy to bomb the Lincoln Tunnel and other New York landmarks.
Hundreds of the Americans who travelled to Afghanistan were dispatched by the al-Kifah Refugee Centre, which was taken over by Rahman when he arrived in the US from Egypt in 1990. The organisation’s remnants became part of the al Qaeda, officials said.
But early on, almost all that ferment was lost on the FBI. Before the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, the bureau’s terrorism unit was so understaffed and demoralised by scandal that it lacked information about militant Islamic movements in this country, and had no idea who was travelling overseas to fight, US officials said.
‘‘We didn’t understand the magnitude of what was going on here, and there,’’ said Robert Blitzer, a former top FBI counterterrorism official and now a corporate consultant. ‘‘We only had a few snippets (about American militants overseas), and we certainly didn’t have the records of al-Kifah.’’
In any case, American militants in Afghanistan were fighting on the same side as the US. When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, hundreds of Muslim militants who fought there moved on to other battles. Dozens and perhaps hundreds of US residents are reported to have joined appeals to fight the Serbs in Bosnia. Other Americans 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 & World Report magazine.
After a year at North Carolina Central University in Durham, Jibreel travelled to Kashmir in 1997. He was killed in a raid on an Indian army post a year later.
In February, the New York Times reported that Hiram Torres was listed on a document its reporters found in a house in Kabul that had been used by Pakistani fighters allied with al Qaeda. Torres briefly attended Yale University before going to Pakistan and then Afghanistan, in 1998.
(LA Times-Washington Post)
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