Jihad Joe (2 page)

Jihadist incitement
:
When people in this book are called jihadists even though they have not committed violence, this refers to those who make explicit and unqualified calls to take part in violent acts specifically described as jihad.

I documented more than 240 American citizen jihadists while researching this book. About half of them were born in the United States. I also examined 41 legal long-term residents of the United States. For every case we know about, there are a certain number of cases that have never become public, particularly those concerning Americans who fought overseas in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Based on an extensive review of court records, interviews, and witness accounts, as well as informal conversations with intelligence and law enforcement officials and private experts working in the field of counterterrorism, my best guess is that at least 1,400 Americans have taken part in some form of military jihad over the last 30 years. However this number should be treated with extreme caution. We simply don't know for certain.

I performed about one hundred interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement, military, and diplomatic officials; Muslim radicals and counterradicals (including former jihadists and al Qaeda members); the families
and the associates of former jihadists; and academics who study Islam and Islamic radicalism as well as some third-party accounts.

I mined tens of thousands of pages of court records and drew on dozens of intelligence and diplomatic documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), as well as material generously shared by sources and colleagues. Included in the data set are more than one thousand pages of FBI records pertaining specifically to September 11, which I obtained through the FOIA and which can be viewed on my website, Intelwire.com.

I also reviewed scores of hours and thousands of pages of jihadist and Salafist propaganda, as well as al Qaeda internal records and documents captured in the process of prosecuting the war on terrorism. A more complete description of this material and its sourcing can be found in the acknowledgments.

This book is primarily concerned with who American jihadists are, how they are recruited and indoctrinated, and why they do what they do. In order to maintain that focus, I have deliberately downplayed terrorist tradecraft, except where it is exceptionally relevant.

The World Trade Center bombing and the September 11 attacks have been covered in lavish detail elsewhere. I made a conscious decision to avoid rehashing the details of those attacks at length, except where I felt I could add something new and distinctly American to the record. After wrestling with the question, I also decided to devote relatively little time to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad activities in the United States.

This decision should not be read as a dismissal of the importance of Palestinian jihadist groups in the fabric of American jihadism. Although the U.S. activities of these organizations are important and represent a serious challenge for law enforcement, they exist on a slightly different plane from the broader global jihad movement, which is most dangerously represented by al Qaeda.

The involvement of foreign jihadists as fighters in Israel and Palestine is relatively limited. Most Americans involved with Hamas and Hezbollah have been fundraisers and propagandists, with a handful of arms traffickers and an even smaller number who have actually tried to go to the Holy Land to fight.

Finally, the Palestinian political issue is very complex, especially as it plays out
among Americans, both Muslim and otherwise, and condensing the topic into one or two chapters would require more simplification than I was prepared to accept.

American politicians habitually describe al Qaeda's motive as the creation of a global caliphate—a world-spanning Islamic state with dreams of conquest. Although this does reflect the view of certain Islamic thinkers and fringe Muslim leaders, jihad is most often characterized as defensive in nature. When Muslims are imperiled, other Muslims are urged to wage jihad in their defense.

Bosnia is one of the most obvious examples of this line of thought. Serbian assaults on Bosnian Muslims provided a clear rationale for why Muslims from around the world should lend assistance, whether directly by fighting or indirectly by financially supporting Muslim fighters.

The definitions of when Muslims are being attacked and what type of attack justifies a military response, however, are extremely fluid and subject to manipulation by cynical and ambitious figures such as Al Qaeda's top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, with its clearly imperialist intentions, was deemed sufficient to justify jihad and even for some scholars to declare jihad mandatory for all able-bodied Muslims. Yet the American invasion of 2001—vastly different in its intent and execution—was also characterized by some scholars as a justification for jihad. And the persecution of Muslims need not be military. Much of Al Qaeda's ideological justification is based on American and Western economic and (to a lesser extent) cultural hegemony.

It's not surprising that American Muslims would take part in the jihad against the Soviets when Ronald Reagan was denouncing communism and pronouncing the mujahideen heroes and freedom fighters. It may be harder to see why Americans go to Somalia and kill fellow Muslims.

American jihadists are an incredibly diverse group. They include all levels of economic success and failure and every sort of background and ethnicity, including blacks and whites, Latinos, women, and even Jews. They come from big cities and small towns and every part of America, including the East and West Coasts, the Deep South, and the Midwest.

These are their stories.

Islam has been a significant part of the American fabric since at least the days of the slave trade, when African Muslims were forced from their homes and brought to the United States to labor in the fields. Perhaps one in ten slaves was Muslim—maybe more, maybe less. No record was made. Most Muslim slaves lost their traditions; some were forced to convert under duress.
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Bilali Muhammad was one such Muslim slave, captured in North Africa in the late eighteenth century, who tried to keep the traditions of Islam alive on the Sapelo Island plantation where he was enslaved in Georgia. He wrote about the Islam he remembered, using the Arabic alphabet but not the Arabic language, and kept the document close to his heart until he died. Although he did not ultimately succeed in preserving the religious tradition he had chronicled, traces of Islam pervade the Christian and cultural practices of his descendants. Black churches on the island face east toward Mecca.
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“We were Christian by day and Muslim by night,” one former Sapelo slave told her daughter.
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Other traces of Islam lingered like a half-forgotten dream. The “Levee Camp Holler,” an early blues song whose roots stretch back to slave music in Mississippi, is strikingly reminiscent of the Islamic call to prayer, which sounds five times a day from minarets around the world.
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For the most part, however, the memory of original Islam faded over decades of slavery and Christianization.

Yet those origins influenced the shape of Islam in America for many years after the Civil War. Although orthodox Sunni Islam was represented by a few
individuals and small, isolated congregations in the young United States, the dominant expression of Islamic thought in the twentieth century came from African American communities, whose interpretations often differed greatly from the original traditions.

The Moorish Science Temple, founded in New Jersey and later established in Chicago, was one of many early groups claiming to be part of an Islamic tradition. In reality, it was a barely recognizable amalgamation of theosophical beliefs revolving around a book called the
Seven Circle Koran
, which was derived from the incipient New Age movement.
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Later, the Nation of Islam channeled Black Nationalism through a filter of Islamic rhetoric, making significant alterations in the process. Malcolm X led many African Americans into a more orthodox understanding of Islam after completing the Hajj—a ritualistic trip to the holiest site in Islam, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, that all Muslims are required to make at least once if they are able.

Starting in the 1960s, these indigenous Islamic communities were joined by increasing numbers of orthodox Muslim immigrants from Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Muslim world. The immigrants initially organized under the banner of the Muslim Brotherhood and established a beachhead on college campuses, where many of its members were students.
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Around the same time, the Saudis began to take an interest in American Islam. With its de facto control over Hajj pilgrims and a massive reservoir of oil money, the Saudi government had struck a long-time deal with its extremely conservative clerical establishment. In exchange for political backing from the religious authorities, the government would provide all of the support needed to spread the Saudi interpretation of Islam to every corner of the world.

The primary vehicle for this support was the Muslim World League (MWL), founded in 1962 with help from several major Brotherhood figures. One of the league's founders and at least one other member of its leadership council were also CIA intelligence assets.
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The MWL was richly subsidized by the Saudi government, and it passed along that subsidy to Islamic organizations around the world, including those in the United States. Of course, the support came with strings attached.

The MWL's scholars were out to “correct” Muslims whose practices did not fall in line with the ultraconservative beliefs of the Saudi establishment, often
referred to as Wahhabism, after its founder, an eighteenth-century cleric named Muhammad Ibn Abd Al Wahhab. Starting in the mid-1970s, the MWL began an aggressive campaign to take control of American Islam under the guise of “coordinating” the Islamic work. The league directly hired top leaders away from American-based groups such as the Muslim Students Association and used a variety of means to install Saudi-influenced imams in mosques around the country.
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The Saudis were especially concerned with reforming the beliefs of African American Muslims under the influence of the Nation of Islam and eventually pulled its leader, W. D. Muhammad, into their orbit. The group's internal political struggle gradually splintered the Nation of Islam along fault lines that dated back to the assassination of Malcolm X.

Factions emerged, which aligned at various points on the spectrum between religious and Black Nationalist orientations. Sometimes these conflicts broke out in violence. In January 1973 members of the Nation of Islam from Philadelphia brutally executed seven relatives of Khaliffa Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, the African American leader of a Sunni-oriented breakaway sect who had written scathing letters attacking the character and religious beliefs of NOI leaders. Four of Khaalis's young children—one just a baby—were among the victims.

Unsatisfied with the justice of the courts, Khaalis and several followers responded by laying siege to Washington, D.C., in March 1977, killing one person, wounding several more, and taking more than a hundred hostages. Khaalis demanded that the men who had killed his family, by then in prison, be delivered to him for execution, along with prominent members of the national Nation of Islam who had no clear connection to the case.

Khaalis also demanded that movie theaters boycott the film
Mohammad, Messenger of God
, a biographical drama directed by Syrian American Moustapha Akkad. Although widely considered respectful of Islam, the film's depiction of Muslims offended Khaalis's sensibilities.

It is difficult to look at the unthinkable tragedy that devastated Khaalis's family and conclude that the siege was primarily an act of religiously motivated jihad. Yet the protest against the movie foreshadowed later controversies, and Khaalis framed much of his rhetoric in terms of broad Islamic principles. The siege was broken during its second day, and Khaalis and his accomplices were arrested and imprisoned. Today the incident is largely forgotten.
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Such moments of high drama were relatively few. The unfolding tension between NOI and the growing Sunni-influenced African American community simmered but seldom boiled over. The Saudis patiently and steadily supported the conversion of Black Nationalist Muslims into Sunni Muslims, equipping many communities with imported Egyptian and Saudi imams.

In 1978 the Muslim World League sponsored a massive convention in Newark, New Jersey, attended by virtually every Muslim organization with an address in the United States, including several members of the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Speakers at the convention urged the participants to take part in the Saudi desire to “coordinate the Islamic work” in North America and dangled financial enticements for those who would take part.
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The Saudis also paid to fly prominent African American converts to Saudi Arabia for extensive religious indoctrination.

At the end of 1979, three events in the Islamic world coalesced into a multifaceted crisis that would reverberate for decades. In Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power after months of political crisis, transforming the secular government into an Islamic republic and displacing the Shah of Iran, who had been installed in power and supported for decades by the United States. Because of America's support for the Shah, anti-American sentiment quickly built to a fever pitch and culminated in the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November. Sixty-six American hostages were captured, launching an international crisis that would eventually bring down the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
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