Jihad Joe Read online

  JIHAD

  JOE

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  JIHAD JOE

  AMERICANS WHO

  GO TO WAR

  IN THE

  NAME OF ISLAM

  J. M. Berger

  Copyright © 2011 by J. M. Berger

  Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Berger, J. M. (John M.)

  Jihad Joe : Americans who go to war in the name of Islam / J.M. Berger. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-59797-693-0 (hbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Terrorists—Recruiting—United States. 2. Terrorism—Religious aspects—Islam. 3. Religious militants—United States. 4. Jihad. 5. Islamic fundamentalism—United States. 6. Qaida (Organization) I. Title.

  HV6432.B464 2011

  363.3250973—dc22

  2010053161

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

  Potomac Books, Inc.

  22841 Quicksilver Drive

  Dulles, Virginia 20166

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: The “New” Problem

  1 The Early Years

  2 Al Qaeda’s Americans

  3 The Death Dealers

  4 Project Bosnia

  5 Rebuilding the Network

  6 War on America

  7 The Rise of Anwar Awlaki

  8 Scenes from September

  9 The Descent of Anwar Awlaki

  10 A Diverse Threat

  11 The Keyboard and the Sword

  12 The Future of American Jihad

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  The “New” Problem

  In 1979 a motley band of several hundred extremists staged an armed takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site. It was an unprecedented heresy, and it marked the dawn of the modern age of terrorism.

  They were mostly Saudis, but the terrorists included Egyptians, Sudanese, Kuwaitis, Iraqis, Yemenis, and at least two Americans.1

  The siege took place during a period of violent change in the Islamic world, soon after the revolution that installed the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and just before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. As many as six hundred followers of a Saudi named Juhayman Al Otaibi believed they had discovered the mahdi, an Islamic messiah figure embodied by Juhayman’s cousin. They struck during the Hajj, Islam’s most sacred pilgrimage, seizing the Grand Mosque and taking scores of hostages. For two weeks, Saudi Arabia was paralyzed by the siege, which eventually ended with a violent raid that left most of the terrorists dead and the historic mosque smoldering from its minarets.2

  Juhayman and a handful of his men were captured and publicly executed. One of his American followers was taken prisoner and then secretly whisked home. Weeks after the siege ended, the wife of the other American walked into the U.S. consulate in Jeddah to inform officials that her husband, Faqur Abdur-Rahman, had been killed during the takeover. Saudi police had showed her his picture. His body had been buried in a mass grave, along with everyone else who was killed while taking part in the attack. “She does not desire to attempt to recover her husband’s remains,” a State Department official reported.3

  The Siege at Mecca was only the beginning. Thirty years later, after a highly visible series of incidents in 2009 and 2010, U.S. media outlets discovered a new reason to worry. Americans were “suddenly” signing up for violent jihad.

  Yet the phenomenon is far from new. Since 1979 American citizens have repeatedly packed their bags, left wives and children behind, and traveled to distant lands in the name of military jihad, the armed struggle of Islam.

  Their reasons are as varied as their backgrounds—some travel to defend Muslims in peril, and some fight to establish the reign of Allah on earth. Some are channeling a personal rage that has little to do with religion. Others seek a community where they can belong.

  Americans fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, and at least one American citizen was present at the founding of al Qaeda. Americans have gone to jihad in Bosnia, Chechnya, Somalia, and Yemen. Virtually every major terrorist attack against the United States—including 9/11—has included Americans as willful accomplices.

  While all major religions have rules that limit or justify war, a small but significant minority of Muslims believe that under the correct circumstances, war is a fundamental obligation for everyone who shares the religion of Islam. When war is carried out according to the rules, it is called military jihad or simply jihad.

  “Jihad” is a word that has become contentious, with many Muslims arguing that it is most properly applied to a host of nonviolent activities, such as self-improvement or seeking justice. Although this argument applies in certain contexts, military jihadists do not make such qualifications when they call their work jihad.

  “Whenever jihad is mentioned in the [Koran], it means the obligation to fight. It does not mean to fight with the pen or to write books or articles in the press, or to fight by holding lectures.” Those are the words of Abdullah Azzam, the spiritual and physical leader of the volunteer jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, who was speaking in Brooklyn in 1988.4 This book will generally follow Azzam’s usage, although it will also examine those who use the pen and the lectern to incite others to acts of physical jihad.

  I acknowledge that there is a debate in the public square on this issue, but this book defines jihad as jihadists do—as the use of violence to achieve specific goals, usually either the defense of Muslims perceived to be in peril or the advancement of Islam’s global position.

  Although most religions include guidelines for war and civic defense, the rules of jihad are fundamental to the core texts of Islam. A small minority of Muslims even rate jihad as one of Islam’s most basic obligations.

  OTHER DEFINITIONS

  Throughout this book, I have put a premium on representing the voices of American jihadists and letting their own words explain their actions. This doesn’t mean I accept everything they say as being sincere and legitimate. Far from it—there are clear lies in some cases, distortions and misconceptions in others. But regardless of how imperfect these sources are, the words of American jihadists provide a window into their overt reasons for taking up arms and their moral context for the violence they inflict.

  In many cases, however, these sources are strong. Some, of course, are statements given in interviews after an arrest—attempts to rationalize or justify violent acts in an effort to win a lighter sentence or to burnish a public image. Yet many of the quotes you will read in these pages were intended for Muslim audiences. Many are taken from surveillance tapes in which these Americans talked with their peers in unguarded moments. Such sources are invaluable windows into why Americans take up the banner of jihad.

  What lies in their hearts only Allah knows. One can only work with the sources as they exist. To ignore the stated reasons th
at jihadists use to justify their actions is, at the least, foolish. To impose imagined reasons without examining the evidence is reckless.

  Many labels exist for people who embrace a vision of global jihad or the dream of a world ruled by Islamic law, such as Salafis, Wahhabis, Deobandis, Muslim Brotherhood, and Islamists. For the most part, I have tried to downplay these labels, in part to spare the reader a barrage of unfamiliar and confusing technical terms whose meanings are often disputed.

  One area where important definitions can get murky is the distinction between “terrorist” and “jihadist.” The two terms have become conflated in recent years, in part due to a deliberate and systematic rebranding of the word by Western diplomatic maneuvers and psychological operations. Here, I think an important distinction can be drawn. Not all jihadists are terrorists, but virtually all Muslim terrorists define their activities as jihad.

  No definition of terrorism is universally accepted. For purposes of this book, terrorists are nongovernment actors who engage in violence against noncombatants in order to accomplish a political goal or amplify a message. Noncombatants include political leaders (such as Anwar Sadat) and military personnel not engaged in a conflict (for instance, the victims of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing). Terrorists may be supported by states, but they have a fundamental quality of independence—or at least of disavowal and deniability.

  Under this definition, John Wilkes Booth would be considered a terrorist, as would the Unabomber. The Third Reich would not be considered a terrorist organization, but American neo-Nazis would. The state of Israel is not a terrorist organization, regardless of one’s views on the morality of its actions, but the Jewish Defense League was. The label is about describing context and behavior, not about assigning moral judgment. As it is used here, the word “terrorism” is not a moral qualifier or a tool for demonizing individuals or groups; it’s an attempt to verbalize the fundamental difference between the actions of an established and recognized nation and what is essentially a vigilante mentality targeting noncombatants.

  A key term in this book is “jihadist.” Generally, anyone characterized as a jihadist will fit into one of the following categories:

  • Someone who travels abroad to fight in a foreign conflict specifically in the name of Islam.

  • Someone who takes part in terrorist activities that are explicitly defined by the participants as a form of military jihad or that are explicitly motivated by jihadist ideology.

  • Someone who actively finances, supports, advocates, or provides religious justification for explicit military jihad as described previously.

  Not all jihadists are terrorists or even criminals. Not everyone profiled in this book is a terrorist or a criminal, although many are. The sample of people discussed in these pages is skewed toward terrorists because those cases are better documented and because, in the post–September 11 environment, many American Muslims who took part in jihad but not in terrorism are understandably reluctant to draw attention to themselves. I can sympathize with their reasons, but I wish I could have found more people who would step forward for this discussion in order to present a more balanced point of view. Anyone with this kind of history should feel free to contact me—there will be other opportunities to tell those stories, and I think it’s important.

  A few other useful terms to consider:

  Radicals: For purposes of this book, radicals are people or institutions that advocate an ideology with clear connections to nonstate violence, whether by justifying it or by providing rationalizations that are clear precursors to action.

  Conservative and/or fundamentalist: Wherever possible, I prefer the former term to the latter. In discussing Muslim terrorism, the discussion of religious views and social mores is unavoidable. Muslims or people who adhere to forms of Islam described herein as conservative tend to be communities that strictly enforce such Islamic or Arab cultural practices as covering women’s faces, banning music, or criminalizing homosexuality.

  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.

  WHAT WENT INTO THIS BOOK

  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.

  WHAT IS NOT INCLUDED IN THIS BOOK

  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.

  CLOSING THOUGHTS

  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 j
ihad 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.

  1

  The Early Years

  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.1