Author: Chris Heffelfinger
Publication: Asia Times
Date: August 10, 2007
URL: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IH10Df01.html
On July 26, a former Washington cab driver
and resident of Gwynn Oak, Maryland, was sentenced to 15 years in federal
prison for providing material support to a terrorist group.
Ohio-born Mahmud Faruq Brent, 32, admitted
to attending training camps run by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT, Army of the Pure)
in 2002, a Pakistan-based jihadist group established during the 1980s campaign
against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
After training at various locations in Pakistan,
Brent returned to the United States, residing in Baltimore when he was arrested
in August 2005. Brent told Tarik Shah - who pleaded guilty to conspiring to
provide material support to al-Qaeda - that he had been up in the mountains
training with the mujahideen. [1]
Through Shah, Brent's training is linked to
other cases of Americans who attended LeT-run camps in Pakistan. After Shah's
arrest, he agreed to record conversations with Brent in cooperation with the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
In Shah's cellular telephone, along with Mahmud
al-Mutazzim, another name Brent used, was the contact information for Seifullah
Chapman, who also knew Brent. Chapman, a former marine, was part of the "Virginia
Jihad Group", another informal network convicted of terrorism-related
charges stemming from their training in Pakistan. He was sentenced in 2005
to a 65-year prison term.
As disturbing as these cases are individually,
collectively they demonstrate an even more troubling trend of radicalized
American Muslims - bound by Salafi ideology - receiving training overseas
and returning to the United States for potential future operations.
The Virginia Jihad Group
Based out of Falls Church, Virginia, the informal Virginia Jihad Group was
led by Ali al-Timimi. A US citizen, Timimi was sentenced to life in prison
for soliciting others to levy war against the United States. Eleven people
were charged in the case, and the prosecutors successfully argued that the
network was part of the jihadist threat akin to al-Qaeda.
Timimi was born in Washington, his father
a lawyer for the Iraqi Embassy. At age 15, he moved with his family to Saudi
Arabia. While there, he grew interested in Islam, inevitably the Salafi variety
that is espoused by the Saudi religious establishment. After returning to
the US, he received a PhD in computational biology from George Mason University
in Virginia.
In addition to his academic pursuits, Timimi
was an Islamic teacher in the northern Virginia area. Yet he was also involved
with the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA), a group based in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, that receives funding from the Saudis to promote Salafi Islam in
the US, especially in the prison system.
Naturally, Timimi's scholarly ties, more than
anything, reveal his ideological proclivities. Establishing a center for Islamic
education, Timimi contacted the well-known Egyptian-born Salafi Abd al-Rahman
Abd al-Khaliq and translated his works into English. Abd al-Khaliq openly
promoted the Salafi Islam prominent in the Persian Gulf region, and privately
encouraged more militant Salafism among his followers, telling them that US
troops were legitimate targets of the jihad.
Ties to Salafi organizations
Timimi's work for IANA - which included leading a five-person delegation to
Beijing in 1995, where he defended female circumcision at an international
women's conference - ties him into a much broader circle of Salafis, such
as those in the Saudi Salafi establishment.
Like many others who have been a part of that
movement, he sought more militant teachings that condoned violence against
Americans. Yet the path to militancy often begins with seemingly benign teachings
at austere mosques and Islamic centers. Commonly called Wahhabi, they call
themselves Salafi, but for purposes of da'wa (proselytizing) and education,
they do not emphasize their denomination. It is simply presented as "pure"
Islam, and theirs is a purification movement.
A former chairman of IANA, Muhammad al-Ahmari,
told the New York Times that as of 2001, roughly half of his organization's
funding came from the Saudi government, with the remainder primarily coming
from private individual donations from the Gulf region. IANA received at least
US$3 million from 1995 through 2002, which funded the distribution of 530
packages containing Korans, tapes, lectures and other instructional Salafi
educational material to prisoners in the US. Part of the funds, however, also
went to disseminating what is among the most militant Salafi material to date
in the US.
The group's webmaster, Sami Omar Hussayen,
was a graduate student in Idaho when he posted two fatwas from Saudi Salafi-Jihadis
Salman al-Awda and Safar al-Hawali, which incited jihad against Americans.
Sami's uncle, Saleh Hussayen, is a high-ranking Saudi minister who gave at
least $100,000 to IANA. He was also a director of a northern Virginia organization
(the Safa Group) with, the US government contends, about 100 front companies
operating under it to launder money to al-Qaeda through Isle of Man and Swiss
bank accounts.
Those raids, which took place in late 2001
and early 2002, have not yet come to trial. More inexplicable yet, Hussayen
also came under scrutiny for a trip to the US, where, on September 10, 2001,
he stayed at the same Marriott Residence Inn near the Washington area's Dulles
Airport as three of the Saudi hijackers who crashed Flight 77 into the Pentagon
the following day.
Hussayen was questioned by the FBI, but there
was no evidence he actually met or interacted with the hijackers. He was said
to feign a seizure during the interview and taken to the hospital, where he
was declared to be in good health. He returned to Saudi Arabia and to his
post as minister of religious endowments, overseeing the two holy mosques
in Mecca and Medina.
From ideology to action
After conducting numerous case studies at the Combating Terrorism Center at
West Point, New York, research has demonstrated a pattern for radicalization
among Americans who embrace jihad, whether foreign or US-born. The cases of
the Lackawanna Six, the Portland Seven, and the Virginia Jihad Group as well
as John Walker Lindh, Adam Gadahn and others demonstrate the need to travel
overseas to receive training.
In all of the above cases, the individuals
traveled, or attempted to travel, to Pakistan or Afghanistan. As the base
of al-Qaeda's leadership and the site of the first jihad, the area continues
to be one of the primary destinations for mujahideen seeking training.
These individuals and others from the US may
have arrived at LeT camps, rather than at the Farouq camp or others that have
been under Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, because they enjoy far less scrutiny.
Founded shortly after 1986 as the military wing of the Center for Da'wa and
Guidance, LeT initially helped Pakistani mujahideen enter the Afghan jihad
against the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, they focused their efforts on Kashmir
and have two of their training camps in Muzaffarabad, the capital of the Pakistan-administered
section of the disputed province.
LeT also claims to have trained thousands
of combatants to join the mujahideen in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Chechnya, Kosovo and the Philippines. Clearly, among American Muslims radicalized
by militant Salafi Islam, LeT camps in Pakistan became a center for incoming
mujahideen, as did bin Laden's guesthouse in Peshawar two decades ago.
Conclusion
These cases all suggest that ideology, above anything else, is the common
identity among group members. Their belief and commitment to the Salafi movement
and its aims to purify Islam, which is the foundation on which bin Laden and
other jihadist leaders have built their platforms, was the common factor that
bound together these diverse individuals with various ethnic, national and
linguistic backgrounds.
Even a cursory look at the Brent case reveals
ties to members of Ali al-Timimi's northern Virginia jihadist group and, through
them, a much larger world of official Saudi funding and militant Salafi influence.
For nearly all the terrorism cases involving radical Islam, the subjects began
their journey with the Salafi Islam offered by the Saudi establishment, its
leading scholars, and its prestigious institutions in Mecca and Medina.
Although they are clearly responsible for
a portion of the radicalized Muslims now on a course for militancy, whether
headed for a jihadist front in Iraq, Somalia or Lebanon or in the United States
or the United Kingdom, those same individuals who have committed themselves
to the cause cannot be effective without adequate training. Such individuals
are encouraged - by Ali al-Timimi and Abu Musab al-Suri alike - to seek training
in a place such as Pakistan as an essential stage in their path to truly serving
the jihad.
Chris Heffelfinger is an independent researcher
affiliated with the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy,
West Point, New York.
Note
1. See the criminal complaint "United States of America v Mahmud Faruq
Brent, aka Mahmud al-Mutazzim", filed in the US District Court, Southern
District of New York, August 3, 2005.
(This article first appeared in The Jamestown
Foundation. Used with permission.)
