Jihad Joe (15 page)

When you follow the lives of those who belittle jihad and instead of fighting and martyrdom they give university lectures, write in magazines or give speeches about fighting and martyrdom in conferences; you will find a common denominator which combines them by reason and unites them in sickness. The common denominator among the discouraging and the refusing—those who have those opinions and theories—is that they did not take part in jihad. There were no opportunities for them, and they were not as lucky to join the military camps of the mujahideen. At those camps luxuries are not available, necessities are few, and they feel the difference between a day in the camp and the day in the university, with air-conditioned classes, restaurants, and playfields.

They did not enter the battle fronts nor did they join the war arenas. One battle which the person takes part in would correct all notions. In few hours, a soldier could see what would turn him gray in bombs and shrapnel, snatching the souls of his best friends, those who traveled with him, trained with him, and went to jihad with him. Those with missiles and explosives detonate over them and they see with their own eyes from down below: hands, feet, and stomachs flying. Then those members with sound, symmetrical bodies end up one-eyed, one legged, one armed or paralyzed. This is the secret of doubt and the abode of sickness. In just few hours or days the Mujahid sees what others will not see in decades: hardship, difficulty, and pain. Those who see these hardships of jihad find it impossible to compare personal jihad to other peaceful calls. So those who enter the issue of jihad, or who want to tell others to quit fighting, should join a camp at least as a janitor, or take part in a battle at least as a cook, and then we will see if the pen is equal to the Kalashnikov for him.
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Even though it ventured into deeper intellectual waters at times,
Al Hussam
played all of the classic cards of jihadist incitement, including lurid tales of atrocities and rape. One mailing suggested that readers tell their children tales of the slaughter of Albanian Muslims as a bedtime story—“The evil people killed many Muslim youths, and harassed many women. Even domesticated animals did not escape their savagery.” Children who were too young to fight could donate part of their allowance to jihad, the newsletter suggested.
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A favorite ploy of
Al Hussam
's editors was to publish letters purportedly written by jihadists in between battles abroad. These letters combined appreciation for the meaningful nature of jihad with accounts of offenses against Muslims and repudiations of those who did not choose to fight. One letter from a mujahid to his mother (a popular subgenre of jihadist literature) was especially colorful:

Dear Mother: Remember me with every fragment which the enemies of Allah rip out of the body of this ummah. Remember me with every resounding scream uttered by a pure Muslim woman in the land of Jerusalem, or Chechnya. Remember me with every whip which cracks down on the back of a monotheist in the prisons of the oppressors and tyrants. And, remember me with every victory the Islamic revival achieves, and with every cry of “Allahu Akbar” which is given to shake the earth beneath the feet of the oppressors.
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Other articles told the tale of American jihadists in the third person:

He was seared by the horrifying pictures reaching us from all over. Sleep was driven out of his eyes by the reports of Muslim women's chastity being violated at the hands of the Crusader criminals. His heart was rent by the sight of a Bosnian child slaughtered before his parents, while the whole world looked on apathetically. [He realized] that there could not be a life in this country, for his life could only be lived in the land of jihad. [ … ]

Thus, he packed his suitcases and left, never to return, at a time when the world was starting to turn toward him—he was receiving job offers and marriage proposals from all over. He was well-known for having great respect for his mother, but the call to jihad was stronger, and the screams of the Muslim women were louder to his ears than the words of all seeking to hold him back.
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The absolutism of the newsletter belied battles behind the scenes. As in New York, the Boston leadership—about thirty people who had a greater or lesser voice in the office's direction—was divided about the course of jihad in the wake of the Soviet defeat. The argument continued long after the dust of the last departing Soviet tank had settled.

As in Brooklyn and Afghanistan, the question on the table was whether to continue building an Islamic state in Afghanistan or to take jihad to the rest of the world. The top leadership of the Boston office had sworn loyalty to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord who was now working closely with Osama bin Laden. The leaders had reservations about bin Laden, but more and more of them wanted to take the fight to new fronts.
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The outbreak of the war in Bosnia helped edge the undecided toward global jihad. The highly visible atrocities provided an easy hook for recruiting and fund-raising—in some ways even easier than Afghanistan, although the secular proclivities of Bosnian Muslims blunted some of the enthusiasm of the hard-core Islamists. Propaganda videos explained that the mujahideen had to “correct” the Bosnian practice of Islam before fighting could begin. E-mails from CARE's allies complained that “large sums of money were being sent from various ‘Jihad' funds to Bosnian, wine-drinking, womanizing, communist ‘Mujahideen.'”
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The sums were indeed large. Checks flowed into CARE International from individual donors, sometimes only $10 or $50, with the words “mujahideen of Bosnia” or “martyr's family” scrawled in the memo line. Sometimes individual donations ran into the thousands.
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Once deposited with CARE, the money was often laundered through other fraudulent charities, including the Benevolence International Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation, both in Chicago, and to front organizations in Bosnia and Chechnya. In total, hundreds of thousands of dollars passed through CARE for distribution to jihadists and jihad-support organizations overseas.
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CARE was wired into a national network that included jihadist organizations in Texas, New Jersey, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, and Illinois. Working individually and sometimes in concert, this more diffuse conglomeration of groups continued the work of the original Al Kifah but also helped it evolve into new forms.

Most of the new breed positioned themselves as nonprofit charities, rather than political organizations, which would eventually provide the basis for prosecuting them after September 11. CARE was ultimately brought down on tax charges rather than for its promotion of jihad, as Aloke Chakravarty, the federal prosecutor who handled the case, explained to me:

It's not the U.S. government's role to ever persecute somebody for what they believe. Our case really has been a testament to the fact that it's not what you
believe or what you say that should ever result in some kind of culpability. This is all about freedom of expression. However, in our case, you don't have a right to be subsidized to engage in your beliefs. And in our case, CARE International is one of many similar types of organizations that had obtained a tax exemption, so that U.S. taxpayers were actually funding them.
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One of CARE's closest alliances was with the American Islamic Group (AIG), the official U.S. chapter of Omar Abdel Rahman's Gamaat Islamiyyah. AIG was founded by Mohammed Zaki, the red-headed Egyptian who had saved the leg of Brooklyn mujahid Abdullah Rashid after he stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan.

Zaki inspired fierce loyalty in those he met. One of his comrades described him as “a man whose like is rare nowadays,” telling a colleague that “you will be amazed by him.”
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After relocating from Brooklyn to San Diego, Zaki created AIG, along with a number of so-called charities that actually helped finance and supply the mujahideen in Bosnia and Chechnya, including the Islamic Information Center of the Americans and American World Wide Relief, also known as Save Bosnia Now. The first organization focused on fund-raising and propaganda; the latter helped fly mujahideen—including al Qaeda operative and naturalized American citizen Hisham Diab—from the United States to Bosnia so they could take part in fighting.
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Zaki traveled back and forth to Boston to take part in Al Kifah events and fire up crowds with his charisma and tough talk. At one point, Muntasser asked him to fly to Boston “because we are looking for a brother who knows about matters [in Bosnia] to give an inciting speech.”
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But unlike some of his peers, Zaki wasn't only talk. In 1993 and 1994 Zaki traveled to Bosnia, where he fought alongside the mujahideen, becoming well-known as “Abu Umar the American.” He also made videotapes of the mujahideen camps, which he took back to the United States to use for fund-raising. In early 1995 he departed for Chechnya, telling a friend, “I hope that I will be granted martyrdom this time.”
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That wish was granted in May 1995. According to his comrades, Zaki was discussing the Koran with his fellow fighters when the class was shelled by the
Russians. Zaki was the only casualty. Struck by shrapnel, he lingered briefly before dying. On his deathbed, he said that he had seen the virgins of paradise promised to jihadist martyrs, and “they told me I would follow them.” His supporters back in the United States took up collections for his family, a wife and four children left behind in San Diego.
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Despite the best efforts of
Al Hussam
to drum up interest in Chechnya, relatively few Americans joined Zaki on the Russian front. Many more were attracted to Bosnia, where a significant number of Americans joined the jihad.

In many cases, details are sketchy. A Caucasian American named Abu Man-sour was sighted by a few Bosnian mujahideen, one of whom said that he hailed from the Virginia area. Two African Americans named Abu Khalid and Abu Aysha were also seen. The former was killed fighting the Serbs; the latter came late to the conflict and didn't stay long. An American named Abu Musa had come to Bosnia as part of Bilal Philips's recruitment program and stayed until at least 1993, taking part in raids in Serbian territory.
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One who stayed was an African American named Clevin Holt, who became a bit of a legend in intelligence circles. In 2010 Holt was spotlighted in
American Jihadist
, a riveting documentary by journalists Mark Claywell and Jody Jenkins, who spent years researching Holt's story and captured hours of interviews with the fighter himself.

Raised in a Washington, D.C., household tense with chaos and abuse, Holt joined the U.S. Army as an underage teenager to fight in Vietnam but was eventually forced out after becoming involved in a race riot on an army base; his true age was revealed during the investigation.

Full of anger and despair, Holt returned to Washington. He considered going on a killing spree, then turned his gun on himself, he told Claywell and Jenkins. Yet before he could pull the trigger, Holt said, he saw a vision of an angel, which caught him up short. Three days later he met an African American Muslim convert who introduced him to Islam. Holt converted, changing his name to Isa Abdullah Ali; he aligned himself with Shi'a Islam and joined an American Islamic group sponsored by the Iranian intelligence service. As he related the change in
American Jihadist
,

I was greatly influenced by the words of Ayatollah Khomeini. A lot of what he said in the past, matched everything that I ever thought, ever felt, and even some of the things I would verbalize. In my learning experience through Islam, the answers started becoming more and more clear.
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Although his angel had stopped him from embarking on a campaign of indiscriminate killing, Ali felt that his military training was all that he had in the world. He left to fight in Afghanistan for one month in 1980, making him one of the very first true American jihadists—Ali arrived on the scene before virtually any other foreign fighters, let alone Americans.
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Soon after that, he joined the Shi'ite Amal Militia in Lebanon, where he fought during the civil war, earning another rare distinction—American mujahideen have almost never fought Israelis directly. He came to Lebanon strapped for war and packing ordinance, including military-grade explosives. In Lebanon he trained Hezbollah and Amal fighters (even women) and took part in combat, killing at least nine Israelis by his own account.
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“When advice is needed, I give it. When it's not, I'm a sniper,” Ali told the
Washington Post
in 1982. During the same interview, he described his wish to see death in battle:

I'm quite sure that sooner or later I'm going to get killed. Where the end is only my God knows. When the Iranians reach [Jerusalem], I ask my God to give me martyrdom. Once Palestine is free, I have no desire to stay in this life any longer.
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Ali considered himself a “professional soldier of Islam” who was trying to achieve martyrdom, but he was too good at the former to accomplish the latter. In
American Jihadist
, he remembered:

I started talking to the angel of death. And I told him, straight up, look, you need to get inside of me. You know, and take all these human characteristics away from me … I actually stopped counting in 1981. I stopped counting the number of the persons I had killed. I had stopped at that time at 173. There are countless numbers that I don't even know, to this day.

“He was special. He had high training skills,” said Hamzah akl Hamieh, a military leader of the Amal Militia at the time. “He put makeup on his face for an undercover operation. All of this attracted the guys. He was that violent phenomena for them. And he trained a lot of them.”
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