Somewhat EFL
In late 1997, al-Amreekee took off for Kashmir. 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."
| We're all pretty much aware of that. The ultimate aim of the Islamists is world domination... |
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 2 1/2 months as a jihadist, he was dead — killed while attacking an Indian Army post.
| Too bad. I hope it was very painful... |
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.
| Is it just me, or is it stupid to leave places like this in business? I know, the Brits have Finsbury Mosque and we have at least two New York mosques that serve as funnels. Leaving them in business lets the Feds monitor their activities. It's also a thumb in the eye of any effort against terrorism... |
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.
| I'm hoping that most are cavorting with 72-year-old virgins, but I'm probably wrong... |
Surprisingly–despite the key role some have played in terrorism — investigators have never tracked them as a group.
| And that is dumb. It's also tied to various "privacy act" and intel oversight laws enacted during the 70s... |
Immigration agents keep no records on foreign travel by U.S. citizens and resident aliens. Nor does the State Department have files. "Why would we keep records?" asks one official.
| "Duhhh... Why would we do dat?" |
"These are people who are the droppings of 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.
| Rather than using entry and exit records, the intel guys have to build their networks through analyzing each Bad Guy's contacts... |
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.
| We've run into the same problem here. There's no standard transliteration system, and each guy can have two or three legitimate names. Then throw in the absolute love of false passports and it's an awful mess. Sometimes I'm surprised at the success we do have... |
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. 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.
| Concentrating on American blacks has the added benefit to the enemy of driving the racial wedge deeper into American society... |
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.
Harakat ul-Mujahideen seems to be a favored home for traveling jihadists. 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. |