Author: David E. Kaplan
Publication: US News and World
Report
Date: June 10, 2002
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 tion'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 bombers, 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)
