Jihad Joe (14 page)

The majority of the participants were drawn into the plot on the pretext that they were training to fight on behalf of the Bosnians, whether as trainers,
mujahideen fighting abroad, or support workers in the United States. Sometimes this pretext was extraordinarily thin. At other times, it was incredibly intense. But nearly every one of the nine people prosecuted in the Day of Terror attacks (not counting Nosair and Rahman) claimed that they got involved in the plot because of Bosnia.

Of course, most of them also claimed they had not done things they were caught on tape doing. To this day, Abdullah Rashid denies he committed the acts for which he was convicted. In an e-mail sent from prison in 2009, he insisted that the FBI had admitted he was not guilty of the crimes for which he was imprisoned.
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Nevertheless, wiretaps and surveillance logs clearly back up the conspirators' universal claim that they originally became involved in the plot because they thought they were doing something on behalf of Bosnia. The leaders of the cell fixated on Bosnia and endlessly discussed what they could do to help the Bosnian Muslims.

From a May 30, 1993, audio recording:

HAMPTON-EL: All those powers of [infidels] being aided by people like, Mubarak, Hussain, Khomeini, Assad et cetera, et cetera, um. What's happening now,
akie
[Arabic for “brother”], is that here in America, the government story in the news media to justify to their physical attack on Muslims [inaudible]. In fact the people of the world who don't really give a damn what's going on in Bosnia, will say [inaudible] a Muslim [inaudible] because the people in Bosnia—

SIDDIG ALI: Massacred.

HAMPTON-EL:
Hamdillah
[praise Allah], I mean massacred and the world has not cried out with outrage. You know, we'll keep talking. Ah, the Muslims of America, at that time coming [they will] need preparation, very few of them are.

Similarly, Siddig, in a lecture where he appeared after Saffet Catovic, berated the audience for passively sitting by while Muslims were dying.
⁶⁸

With their passions inflamed, the participants in the Day of Terror plot took incremental steps in the direction of violence—first buying weapons, then training, then buying more weapons, then stockpiling ammunition, and finally purchasing the components for bombs.

Equally incremental was the change in intent, from waging jihad in Bosnia to waging jihad in New York in the name of Bosnia. In the language of jihadist theology, this change in focus is known as the “near enemy” versus the “far enemy,” a concept championed by Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman Al Zawahiri.
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Near and far in this context refer to the distance from the offending behavior. For Bosnia, the near enemy was the Serbs; the far enemy was the United States, whose policies (in Siddig's worldview) were enabling the Serbs to carry out their atrocities.

The distinction between fighting the near and far enemies is useful in distinguishing between jihadism and terrorism, at least during this period. Jihadists often tend to work in a gray area of morality, fighting battles that are to some degree justifiable against targets seen as directly persecuting Muslims—in other words, the Serbs. In contrast, terrorists often aim for the symbolic target, those they see as supporters or even just passive enablers. However, the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have blurred the distinction between the two classes of combat, perhaps irretrievably, as terrorist tactics and the intentional targeting of civilians have become part and parcel of the jihadist-insurgent handbook.

It's unlikely that either Siddig or his disciples had a deep-enough grasp on jihadist theology to understand the distinction between near and far. Siddig was parroting themes he had heard from Rahman and Nosair. For instance, in January 1993 Rahman gave an incendiary speech at a conference on “Solidarity with Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in which he directly tackled the “far enemy” and specifically erased any distinction between jihadist and terrorist:

The Western mass media is accusing those who perform jihad for the sake of God of being terrorists. And when we defend ourselves saying “No, we are not terrorists, we are far away from terrorism.” As if we are standing in the cage of the accused persons and our enemy is accusing us because we are trying to defend our religion. And we defend ourselves against what we are accused of. And this is a bad way that we are putting ourselves in the cage of the accused persons.

We are defending ourselves and refuting the accusations. No, if those who have the right to have something are terrorists, then we are terrorists. And we welcome being terrorists. And we do not deny this charge to ourselves….

There are two main enemies. The enemy who is at the foremost of the work against Islam are America and the allies. Who is assisting the Serbs? And who is providing them with weapons and food? Europe and behind it is America, who are providing them with weapons, money and food, in order to completely exterminate the Muslims, and because they declared that they do not want the establishment of an Islamic republic in Europe.
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Chris Voss, an FBI agent who worked on the case, feels strongly that Siddig was a terrorist first and a jihadist second, who knowingly used manipulative tactics to win over people whose intentions might have been good in the beginning. His observations are important to understanding the process by which American Muslim terrorists are born.

Siddig and the others that were recruiting knew that if you could recruit someone to go and fight in Bosnia or any other place in the world, you got an individual to agree to engage in battle. So at that point, it's a much smaller step to simply change the battlefield. And that was Siddig's intention. It might not have been the person that was being recruited, it may have not been their intention when they were starting out, and sort of by definition these people in many ways walked into this very unwilling.

If you're a Muslim and you see Muslims being exterminated in another country, you can't help wanting to do something about it, in some fashion or another. Anybody, if you identify strongly with a religious group or your ethnicity, if they are being exterminated someplace else, if there is massively unjust bloodshed going on, it might be easy to manipulate you into, maybe you donate, maybe you feel strongly enough that you want to go and fight. And if you're willing to train, that might have been your intention all along, but the recruiter is thinking something else, they've got their own agenda.
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Beyond the ideological currents and the manipulation lies a simpler, more human dynamic that merits consideration.

At the start, Siddig's jihadist volunteers were pumped up with anger, their heads filled with heroic fantasies of traveling to strange lands to rescue fellow Muslims.

Then the training began, which made the prospect seem more tangible and grounded in the real world. Training could take place only on weekends because
they had to work. Wives and families complained about their frequent absences. The training was difficult—even within Project Bosnia's relatively short span, about 75 percent of the recruits washed out.

They found themselves penned in by more and more obstacles: the cost of travel, the language barrier, fear, inertia, sickness, family obligations, and other factors beyond their control. Some—like Rashid—managed to overcome all of these hindrances, only to be stopped at the final stage of a difficult border crossing.

And so their romantic dream failed—but they were still angry. Because every day the news brought reports of yet another massacre, and every Friday, the imam was still talking about Bosnia.

And the “far enemy” began to look like the realistic enemy. The enemy next door.

After the twin disasters of the World Trade Center bombing and the subsequent Day of Terror plot, the Al Kifah Center in New York was, for all intents and purposes, finished. But the jihad was heating up, especially in Bosnia, where Western media reporting meshed with the rhetoric of Muslim speakers to create a sense of urgent and growing outrage.

Omar Abdel Rahman had welded his Islamic Group to the Al Kifah brand, and the combined operation dwarfed the remaining handful of independent jihad recruiters. His spectacular fall left the direction of the entire American movement up in the air. As the hammer of federal law enforcement smashed down on Brooklyn, the movement dispersed to satellite centers around the country.

Al Kifah's office in Boston, established in the early 1990s, emerged from the World Trade Center debacle relatively unscathed. Little more than two weeks after the bombing, the head of the Boston office, Emad Muntasser, changed the name of the Boston office from Al Kifah to CARE International.
¹

Positioning itself as a nonpolitical charity (at least as far as non-Muslims were concerned), CARE applied for and received a tax exemption from the IRS, but its operations continued as before—supporting jihad overseas with money and men.
²

Al Kifah's Boston operation was leaner and more focused than the Brooklyn office had been. Largely absent were the power struggles and the intrigues, and absent, too, were the angry young men hatching plots to kill Americans on American soil. Jihadists passing through Boston were more likely to be focused on conflicts overseas.

One example was Layth Abu Al Layth, a Moroccan who had moved to the United States in 1990. While working at a Dunkin' Donuts in the Boston area, he met other local jihadists who inspired him to join the Afghan mujahideen in 1991. Given the timing, that likely meant training with al Qaeda. Abu Layth trained at the camps, then entered combat to “purify” Afghanistan of any lingering non-Islamic influences. In February 1993 he was killed in battle when he stepped on a land mine.
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The main recruiting tool for the Boston office was a newsletter called
Al Hussam
, which translated as “The Sword.” Published in both English and Arabic, the newsletter was stuffed with short, informative news items from various fronts in the global jihad. Bosnia, the most active theater, took up most of the ink, but updates also flowed in from Chechnya, Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere. The authors tried, with less success, to whip up support for Islamic revolts in Saudi Arabia and Libya.

The issues were filled out with short articles written by local jihad supporters and the occasional reprint of classic tracts by Abdullah Azzam and other jihadist luminaries. The articles urged Americans, in no uncertain terms, to take up the banner of jihad.

Al Hussam
's publication was the next rung in an evolution of tone from the early days of American jihadists. Although the newsletter still occasionally celebrated the “miracles” that Abdullah Azzam had leveraged so effectively, the thrust was more abstractly religious than some of its predecessors, quoting chapter and verse from the Koran and
hadith
(stories of the life of Mohammed) and waxing on about the need for Islamic solidarity and its attendant religious obligations.
⁴

In part, this was a function of the end of the Soviet war, which was a clearer case of enemy aggression, where the lure of adventure often made complex ideological concepts unnecessary. The end of the Soviet occupation had not ended the need for jihad, the newsletter explained. “There are still many solutions to problems in the hands of those who are not playing the roles they should.”
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Jihad was not just a boy's adventure anymore. It was, the newsletter trumpeted, an absolute imperative and an individual obligation for every Muslim.

It is no longer a secret to Muslims on earth that they are struck repeatedly everywhere: their scholars are crushed and dispersed, their morals are
trampled. Wherever the Muslims show military force or action, the infidels move and antagonistic camps are set up against Muslims warning and threatening, promising and pledging, foaming and frothing, then striking and destroying.
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The newsletter was sometimes frighteningly reductive in its view of the primacy of jihad over any other imaginable activity. One article, citing accounts of the Prophet's companions, argued,

[Y]ou find that the first thing mentioned is “He took part in all of the attacks.” It does not say “He gave a hundred speeches” or that “he wrote such and such a book,” or “he had a lot of money.” It says “He took part in all of the attacks.” This is the greatest virtue, excellence, or merit of the friends of the Messenger. The value of someone in Islam is measured by the “number of battles he took part in.”

Today when they write about our dead, what do they say? Do they mention how many attacks they took part in? No. If they are truthful they will write “This famous scientist, this matchless preacher did not shoot one bullet for Allah's cause in all of his life.”
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The authors of
Al Hussam
fired back at Muslim critics in the United States who were under increasing pressure to renounce jihad, which in the minds of most Americans had now become inextricably linked to terrorism. During the mid-1990s, a movement began among more mainstream American Muslim leaders to redefine jihad, at least for non-Muslim audiences.

The greatest jihad, they argued, was resisting temptation within oneself. These gestures toward moderation were a growing problem for
Al Hussam
; mosques were starting to ban the newsletter because of its extremist views.
⁸
One of
Al Hussam
's leading voices, a writer using the pen name Abu Zubair, had little use for such semantics.

Some are amazed when they hear that self-jihad is less than other jihads, or that jihad for the sake of Allah is less than other jihads or obedience. Yet, if we look at those people's lives, inquire about their history, and ask about the secret of the discrepancy we will find that the explanation of their stand is easy.