The Terrorist Next Door (8 page)

For starters, I knew that the group was linked to al-Muhajiroun, a notorious pro-jihad organization in Great Britain that had been banned by the British government and seen several former members arrested on terrorism charges.
¹
I had also watched clips of ITS members burning the American flag on the streets of New York during a previous rally amid shouts of “Allahu Akhbar.” So at the very least, I knew that attending the ITS event in front of the Danish consulate would give me an up-close glimpse of some of New York City's most hardcore Islamists.

While the protest didn't descend into physical violence, there was no shortage of genocidal rhetoric for me to record, all delivered under the watchful eye of the NYPD, which had sent a large contingent of officers to monitor the event. One speaker warned that Denmark would soon suffer “Allah's wrath.” Another broadened the message to include all non-Muslims, bellowing into a megaphone, “We are here to tell you that there is nothing you can do and that your days are numbered.... All of you who disbelieve: speak good, or Allah will silence you.” Non-Muslims were branded as “scum” and the Danish flag stomped upon before the event reached its crescendo with the Israeli flag feeding frenzy, which is a staple of ITS rallies. I spoke to an ITS member afterward who refused to go on camera but denied any links to al-Muhajiroun—even though ITS members waved the same black flag with Arabic inscription regularly displayed at al-Muhajiroun rallies in Great Britain.

My first thought as I watched the ITS event unfold was that it was occurring just a few miles north of where the Twin Towers had fallen four and a half years earlier. My second thought was that I was quite possibly staring at a group of future Islamic terrorists. And sure enough, in the years since that February 2006 ITS rally, at least three men connected
with the group have been arrested on terrorism-related charges. One NYPD intelligence analyst has said the group's “anti-Western, antidemocratic, anti-U.S., pro-al Qaeda message” makes the ITS “almost bug lights for aspiring jihadists.”
²

There are a few routes that these up-and-comers can take to receive instruction and guidance on how to aid in the “global Islamic struggle” against America, Europe, and Israel. They can become active members of an American Islamist group like ITS and stir the pot on U.S. soil, or they can travel overseas to train with al-Qaeda before returning home to plot deadly attacks. But the easiest way is simply to go online, where a fledgling
mujahid
can receive all the instruction he needs on how to turn himself into a veritable one-man jihad. A case in point is
Inspire
magazine.

A few weeks after the failed Yemen Cargo Plane Plot, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released a new issue of its glossy online publication, describing the cost-effective operation in detail. According to
Inspire
, which is undoubtedly a hit among the teenybopper set in Gaza and Waziristan, not to mention the ITS crowd in America, “Operation Hemorrhage” cost just $4,200 to carry out, with AQAP bombmakers designing the explosives to elude airport security devices and bomb-sniffing dogs.
³
Although the magazine went on to praise the 9/11 attacks for causing massive death and carnage, it argued that the future of jihad, at least in the short term, lies in smaller, cheaper attacks like Operation Hemorrhage: “It is more feasible to stage smaller attacks that involve less players and less time to launch and thus we may circumvent the security barriers America worked so hard to erect.”
⁴

The author called this “the strategy of a thousand cuts.” And based on what we've seen unfold over the past three years, al-Qaeda has found a winning approach. “How could you say their strategy is working?” you might counter. “It's been ten years and we still haven't been hit with another 9/11. Admit it, Stakelbeck: we're winning this war!”

How wrong you are. Although al-Qaeda admittedly has failed to duplicate the kind of history-altering destruction we witnessed on 9/11
(though not for lack of effort), in the jihadists' eyes, the past few years have brought some major successes. But before reviewing them, we need to examine a few recent developments within al-Qaeda that have signaled a new direction for the organization.

For starters, al-Qaeda's hierarchy has reluctantly accepted the fact that post-9/11, apocalyptic attacks will be extremely difficult to pull off. This is due to three main factors. First, intelligence services around the world have stepped up their game considerably over the past decade, gaining a firmer understanding of the threat and doing a much better job at surveillance and information sharing. Second, many of al-Qaeda's trusted funding sources have dried up since 9/11 due to a global crackdown on terrorist financing. This makes it difficult to conduct large-scale, 9/11-style operations or to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a longheld al-Qaeda goal.
⁵
Last, large attacks take a great deal of planning. September 11 took five years to plot and carry out, while the 1998 Africa Embassy bombings took at least three years—and remember, these attacks occurred when America's guard was
down
.

The post-9/11 world is a much trickier beast for a terrorist group to navigate, but al-Qaeda had been slow to accept this reality in the years immediately following its greatest triumph. After all, it set the bar extremely high on 9/11, which established a standard for economic, psychological, and physical devastation that is difficult to surpass. What do you do for a follow-up to the most destructive terrorist attack in modern history? While attacks on the mass transit systems of Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 were acceptable, al-Qaeda's brain trust felt that its encore on U.S. soil had to be massive. Whether by weapons of mass destruction, a dirty bomb, or another round of multiple airplane hijackings, the next attack had to be as big as or bigger than 9/11. The group had a fearsome reputation to uphold in America, and killing a hundred people with a bomb on a train just wouldn't do. Thousands of casualties, mass paranoia, and economic collapse were the only acceptable outcomes.

That's one reason al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called off a planned cyanide gas attack against the New York City subway system in 2003—he felt that the plot, which likely would have killed hundreds, simply would not cause enough casualties or make a big enough splash.
⁶

Al-Qaeda would surely not call off that attack today, as evidenced by a foiled 2009 plot to bomb that same New York City subway system. The main foot soldier in that scheme was 25-year-old Afghan native Najibullah Zazi, who had been recruited by al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
⁷
A trusted intelligence source told me the feds were late to the game in uncovering the Zazi plot, and that New York dodged a bullet only because the aspiring terrorist got cold feet at the last second and was then arrested. Whatever the case, al-Qaeda's lowering of the bar with the Zazi plot revealed a bit of desperation.

For ten years, the organization has released countless audio tapes and videos threatening devastating new attacks against the United States that would rival 9/11. Thankfully, as of this writing, this has not materialized. That marks an entire
decade
of boasts and threats by al-Qaeda's hierarchy against America—with nothing to show for it. They came close in 2006 with an intricate plot to hijack ten transatlantic airliners traveling from Britain to the United States and blow them up in midair, but the plan was ultimately foiled.

If you talk a big game but fail to back it up, eventually people begin to tune you out—and that applies to Islamists like anyone else. Our whathave-you-done-for-me-lately culture demands instant results, and with al-Qaeda downsizing its ambitions, others in the jihadist world are eagerly filling the void. We have Iran threatening the West, vowing to wipe out Israel, and feverishly trying to develop nuclear weapons. After going toeto-toe with Israel in 2006, Iran's proxy, Hezbollah, plunged Lebanon into crisis by bringing down the Western-backed government and maneuvering its chosen candidate into the position of prime minister. Then there are the Turks, led by their fiery Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
who sent a flotilla of Hamas supporters to stage a violent confrontation with the Israeli Navy. And of course, from Egypt to Tunisia to Libya and beyond, you have the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups seeking to capitalize on political instability and usher in new Islamist states.

These actions have made Iran, Hezbollah, and Turkey the toast of the Islamist world and, for many, the vanguard of the global jihad. Al-Qaeda, however, resents the growing primacy of Iran and Hezbollah. They are the standard bearers of Shia Islam, a sect al-Qaeda regards as heretical (though it will still cooperate with either entity to target Israel and the West). Simply put, al-Qaeda's hierarchy knows that it has to do something to stay relevant and maintain its jihadi street cred among young Muslims worldwide, especially after it stood on the sidelines and watched impotently as a new mass movement formed in Egypt and, within weeks, overthrew a secular government that al-Qaeda itself had tried for years to dislodge. Now similar events could unfold in Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere. But with 9/11-style attacks a difficult proposition in the short term, how can al-Qaeda regain its cachet? Mumbai provided the blueprint.

As the Mumbai massacre unfolded over Thanksgiving weekend 2008, it became clear we were seeing the next stage of Islamic terrorism. Ten young Pakistani men—each armed with assault rifles and bombs—fanned out across the Indian city of Mumbai and engaged in a murder spree that killed 175 people and wounded more than 300. Among the slaughtered were Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his six-months-pregnant wife, Rivka Holtzberg, who were murdered along with four other hostages after the jihadists stormed a Jewish center in downtown Mumbai. The dead bodies showed signs of torture. Indian intelligence later revealed that the attackers were “told by their handlers in Pakistan that the lives of Jews were worth 50 times those of non-Jews.”
⁸

The assailants were directed throughout the attack via satellite phones by members of the Pakistan-based, al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
⁹
They were disciplined and well-trained (probably by
Pakistan's notoriously corrupt and Islamist-ridden Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI)
¹⁰
and formed a tight paramilitary unit that initially surprised and overwhelmed Indian police and counter-terror forces. Incidentally, an American Muslim of Pakistani descent, David Coleman Headley, was later convicted of aiding and abetting the Mumbai attackers. Headley had traveled five times from America to India to scout out potential targets for Lashkar-e-Taiba.
¹¹

The Mumbai operation presented an appealing package to the jihadist world. It garnered massive media coverage and dominated the international news cycle for nearly a week. It was cheap, low-tech, and didn't take much manpower to pull off, yet it still caused immense carnage and crippled the world's second-largest city for days. It also created the kind of psychological terror and economic damage that Islamic terrorist groups yearn for, and showed how a major city could be completely unprepared for a coordinated onslaught by jihadi foot soldiers.

Think back to the fall of 2002, when two devout Muslims known as the “Beltway snipers” killed ten people and created havoc across the Washington, D.C. area for weeks. Now multiply those two terrorists by five, equip them with explosives to go along with their assault rifles, and drop them downtown in a sleepy, mid-sized American city like Des Moines or Boise at lunchtime. We'll take for granted that they have trained with al-Qaeda in the tribal regions of Pakistan or some other foreign terrorist safe haven, that they have spent months surveilling their intended targets, and that they are fully prepared to die to achieve their mission. Is America ready for that? Major cities like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles would clearly be far better equipped to deal with such a scenario, and New York in particular has a top-notch counter-terrorism team. But even those cities would suffer significant casualties due to the sheer suddenness and randomness of a Mumbai-style attack.

And what about middle America? How many lives would be lost, how much devastation would ensue, before a ten-man team of well-armed, well-trained jihadists could be subdued in a city like Columbus,
Ohio? Local police would take them on at first. The FBI, SWAT, and potentially even the National Guard would later rush to the scene. Eventually the situation would be brought under control—but not before many people were killed and countless more wounded.

But forget about a ten-man team—what about a single committed jihadist acting all by his lonesome? It doesn't take a brain surgeon to walk into a shopping mall during the Christmas shopping season, yell “Allahu Akhbar,” and mow down a few dozen people with an assault rifle and grenades. Remember, Nidal Malik Hasan murdered thirteen people and wounded thirty in just ten minutes using nothing but two handguns—and that was at Fort Hood, where he was surrounded by highly trained military personnel. Let's be honest: Americans are psychologically unprepared right now to live under the kind of threat environment that Israelis have gritted through for decades, where the next danger is always just around the corner and may be sitting next to you with a bomb under his jacket at your child's playground.