Enemies Within (14 page)

Mohammed Zazi, newly arrived but long used to the noise of expatriate politics, busied himself in carving out the abstemious life of an immigrant worker. For six years, he devoted himself to sending money to his wife and the children he didn’t know, enough so they could move out of the refugee camps and into a house in Peshawar. He worked in a fast-food restaurant and was promoted to supervisor. But rather than open his own franchise like many other Afghans, he decided to become a taxi driver. His fares went to his children to go to school halfway around the world. “These years were very difficult for Mohammed,” his wife would say many years later. “He was deprived from the joy of seeing his young kids, which is the joyous time of life for parents to watch their young kids grow.”

In 1996 a group of fundamentalist Pashtun religious students known as the Taliban banded together to rid Afghanistan of violence. Their leader was a fearless peasant named Mullah Omar, who’d lost an eye fighting the Soviets. Omar was from the south of Afghanistan, near Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city. With help from the Pakistani government, the Taliban succeeded in taking control of most of the country, except for a swath in the North controlled by the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance. The Taliban brought peace to the country, but at a cost. Women could not go to school and were forced to wear full-length coverings known as burkas whenever they were in public. Music and kite flying, a popular Afghan pastime, were banned.
The Taliban also meted out harsh punishments for those who broke the law. Public beheadings at Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium shocked the world.

That same year, Mohammed was granted asylum as a political refugee in the United States. Finally, he could apply for his family to join him in Flushing. Bibi, Merwari, and Najibullah boarded a plane bound for Queens. After Pakistan, it seemed like paradise. The family moved into a two-bedroom apartment. Najibullah, by then already eleven, enrolled in school and began learning English. But the family continued to struggle. In short order, Bibi gave birth to three more children, bringing the total to five. She and Mohammed took in a nephew, Amanullah, whose destitute parents remained in Pakistan. As the patriarch of the Flushing Zazis, Mohammed refused to apply for public assistance. He wasn’t sick or handicapped. Those are the people who need food stamps, he’d tell his wife, adding that it was
haram
, forbidden by Islam, to take money you didn’t need.

Instead, Mohammed drove the taxi six days a week, from eleven in the morning until one o’clock the following morning. He couldn’t put together the thousands of dollars it would take to buy a taxi medallion, which would have allowed him to own a car instead of working for other people, but he still believed in the American dream that had brought him to Queens, and he reminded his children how fortunate they were to be in America instead of Afghanistan. He called the United States the greatest country in the world and told his children they should consider themselves Americans.

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Najibullah Zazi embraced his new homeland as best as he could. But he struggled to learn English and wrestled with life in a foreign city. In 2000 he started as a freshman at Flushing High School. Built in 1875, the city’s oldest public school was an imposing neo-Gothic landmark adorned with turrets and gargoyles. The building faced a commercial
strip cluttered with Korean-language signs. In the halls of the school, Zazi found friends among those who had similar backgrounds. He bonded with other Muslim students—kids who, like him, had lived through war and displacement and were now faced with the battleground of American teenage life. Like Zazi, Zarein Ahmedzay had fled Afghanistan with his family. The two boys befriended each other immediately, and they also grew close to Adis Medunjanin, an ardent Muslim a year ahead of them who had escaped the Bosnian civil war in 1994 at age ten and whose family sought asylum in the United States.

When the school bell announced the end of the day, the three boys would walk the several blocks to pray at the new Abu Bakr, by then the largest Afghan mosque in the city. The original converted colonial-style house had been knocked down to make way for a mosque with an imposing marble facade capped by a blue-and-white diamond-patterned dome and a minaret that reached toward the urban sky. Zazi volunteered as a janitor and prayed there often, but he was also living a normal American teenage existence. With Ahmedzay and Medunjanin, Zazi would shoot hoops at a park down the street, and play pool and video games. Zazi loved his cell phone and computer, gadgets that were ubiquitous in Flushing’s cheap electronic stores.

Then, at the beginning of Zazi’s sophomore year, his world slipped off its axis. Flushing High was almost fifteen miles from ground zero in Lower Manhattan, but the crash of the al-Qaeda-piloted jetliners into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, reverberated throughout the Afghan community. Muslims—American citizens and immigrants alike—fell under intense suspicion simply because they were Muslims, requiring many to defend their allegiance to their adopted country in the newly declared War on Terror. The thousands of Afghans in Queens faced a doubly difficult reality: Their country had been used as a staging ground for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his small army of terrorists to launch the devastating attacks on New York and
Washington, DC, and their homeland was now in the crosshairs of the US military.

One woman, Fatana Shirzad, a twenty-six-year-old who had left Afghanistan in 1993, told the
New York Times
how she felt: “When I saw this attack, I prayed, please make it not be Muslims. Because I knew. And I watched and I prayed, and I was very sorry.”
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At Abu Bakr, ethnic tensions roiled the congregation. The mosque’s soft-spoken and friendly imam, Mohammad Sherzad, was an educated Pashtun who despised the Taliban and accused them of committing atrocities against the insurgent Northern Alliance. But a contingent led by Imam Saifur Rehman Halimi, the former head of the Mujahideen Information Bureau, backed the Taliban, whose representatives had opened their own office the year before above a Taiwanese dental clinic on Flushing’s Main Street. Halimi credited the Taliban with securing Afghanistan and ending the anarchy of the civil war. He wasn’t convinced that bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks, and he believed bombing Afghanistan was a mistake. After Sherzad denounced the al-Qaeda attacks during services at the mosque, Halimi and his allies walked out and began to hold prayers outside. The split spilled into the newspapers. Sherzad complained that Halimi and his followers harassed him when he spoke out against the Taliban and bin Laden. They believed that bin Laden was a good Muslim.
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Mohammed Zazi backed Halimi. He and his son sided with the pro-Taliban faction praying in the parking lot. But, like others in the group, they appear to have been sympathetic to the Taliban, which was dominated by ethnic Pashtuns like them, not to al-Qaeda hijackers. “I don’t know how people could do things like this. I’d never do anything like that,” Najibullah Zazi told a friend later.
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Like many in the Afghan community, he realized that people who had never given them a second thought were suddenly very interested in what they were doing. The police became a visible presence. Reporters were often around. In October the US invaded Afghanistan; pundits talked about bombing the
country back to the Stone Age. In Flushing, Afghan immigrants began to subtly alter their behavior in public. Veiled women were reluctant to walk the streets. Mothers told their children to speak English and not Dari, one of Afghanistan’s common dialects.

But as months and then years passed without incident, Zazi and the other Afghans went back to their daily routines. Restive and doing poorly in school, Zazi dropped out of Flushing High in 2003, his junior year. College wasn’t in the cards, and he felt he could help his family most by earning money. He went to work stocking shelves in a Korean-owned grocery, packing a daily lunch of halal meat and rice. In 2005 Zazi decided to follow his older sister, Merwari, and her husband into the coffee cart business. Before the sun rose over New York, Zazi, now twenty, would trek to Brooklyn, load his cart with pastries, and tow it to Lower Manhattan, where he set up on Stone Street, eight blocks from ground zero. On his cart was a sign: “God Bless America.”
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His customers knew him, and he knew them, learning their tastes. When they approached, he had their morning favorites ready at hand.

But as time passed, customers noticed a change in the friendly Afghan coffee man. He tried to sell one of his customers a Koran, Islam’s holy book. He lectured another about religion and happiness. He spoke less. The gentle, enterprising young immigrant seemed to be aging into a more severe and withdrawn adult.

Zazi wasn’t alone. Already his friend Medunjanin had undergone a spiritual awakening in the ninth grade. He had prayed before a football game and scored a touchdown. The next game, he failed to pray and broke his arm. For Medunjanin, it was a sign that Allah was displeased with him, and he vowed not to fail again. He decided that he would teach his friends how to be good Muslims. Over the years, Medunjanin encouraged Zazi and Ahmedzay to dedicate their lives to Allah. By 2006, while Ahmedzay drove a cab and Zazi manned his coffee cart, Medunjanin worked as a security guard in Manhattan and studied economics at Queens College, where he became involved in the Muslim
Student Association. Medunjanin was active at Abu Bakr, holding short classes between prayers for the younger men, teaching them lessons from the Koran and proper Arabic. He explained the difference between spiritual and violent jihads.

All three were still living with their parents. Zazi had married a cousin, Marzia, in an arranged wedding in Peshawar in 2006. Ahmedzay was married and had a daughter living with his family in Afghanistan. The trio would still play hoops as they had when they were in high school; increasingly, though, they spent their time studying the Koran and other religious texts. Medunjanin introduced his friends to the sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen from Yemen and an influential al-Qaeda figure in his native land. A charismatic cleric, Awlaki had returned to Yemen from America, where he had lived in New Mexico, Southern California, and Virginia. He delivered inspiring sermons in English exhorting his followers to attack the United States. His diatribes were easy to find on the internet, and, in the view of American intelligence agencies, uniquely appealing to impressionable young men. Some of Awlaki’s lectures dealt with becoming a martyr by fighting US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Others addressed such subjects as “The Hereafter” and “The Lives of the Prophets.”

Zazi alone had a hundred hours of footage on his laptop and iPod. He also devoured lectures by Sheik Abdullah al-Feisel, a Jamaican-born imam who taught lessons with titles such as “Jihad, Aim and Objectives.” Feisel said that suicide bombings were acceptable; they weren’t considered suicide. Medunjanin agreed that was a good “war tactic.”

Zazi and his friends listened to Awlaki’s sermons almost every day. They also absorbed news about their parents’ homeland. The American war in Afghanistan had demonstrably failed to improve the country. The Taliban, bolstered by hardened mujahideen fighters, was waging a relentless insurgency against US troops. For many Afghans, including those who had supported the invasion, the United States was now viewed as no better than the Russians or the British before them. Innocent
civilians were dying in drone attacks and night raids, while the American-sponsored government foundered under the leadership of President Hamid Karzai. Zazi made regular trips to visit his wife in Peshawar, which the Taliban used as a base to wage war on the Americans in Afghanistan, recruiting fighters and raising money while Pakistani authorities looked the other way. What the young Afghan-American saw there only confirmed what he heard people say at home: The Americans were the source of Afghanistan’s problems.

Together Zazi, Ahmedzay, and Medunjanin trawled the internet, collecting al-Qaeda videos of American forces being ambushed in Afghanistan and terrorists going on suicide missions. They grew beards. They kept up their American lives, but the propaganda was having its desired effect. The Taliban, they thought, were fighting for justice against American occupiers. It was up to them to do something about it.

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In 2008 Medunjanin went on the hajj, the religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. It was there that he learned, four years after they became public, about the photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad by American military police as they abused and sexually humiliated their Iraqi captives. It only reinforced the sense of righteous injustice growing inside Medunjanin, who was looking for a purpose greater than guarding a fancy building in New York. When he returned to Flushing from Mecca, he talked about waging violent jihad. He challenged his Muslim friends to do something about US oppression. He thought they “didn’t have the balls” to take on their adopted homeland. He imagined himself as a modern-day incarnation of rebel slave leader Nat Turner. Medunjanin refused to be a “house nigger.”
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The three friends continued to pray at Abu Bakr, where Medunjanin wasn’t shy about voicing his frustrations or inflammatory beliefs. They were an unlikely group of plotters: Medunjanin, doughy and book
smart, the intellectual leader, a Bosnian who aspired to be a general in the Taliban army; Zazi, a polite but headstrong young man with a solid build and a disarmingly gentle expression, whose difficulty in school had left him insecure about his capabilities; and Ahmedzay, an avid conspiracy theorist who believed that Jews controlled a shadow government in the United States. In the spring of 2008, they gathered in the parking lot of Abu Bakr, out of earshot of anyone listening. After years of posturing, they had decided to turn their frustrations into action. “Allah doesn’t like when you only talk about something and don’t do it,” Ahmedzay said, citing what he said was a verse from the Koran.