American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (7 page)

Most conversation with jihadists turns sooner or later to children’s behavior. In Islam, respect for elders is essential in a way that Westerners can barely imagine. For the Islamist, it is essential in establishing proper relations between the sexes. America can hardly hope to win approval on that score.

That afternoon Salih took us to visit Abu Suhaib, a young editor of
Al-Jihad,
Azzam’s monthly magazine. Suhaib was somewhat suspicious of our unanticipated arrival. He told us he had no desire to visit the United States and criticized American life as excessive in its libertinism and negative effects on children. We explained that the Catholic school Khalid’s eldest daughter attended in Chicago was hardly different from the ideal Muslim school. Suhaib registered this information without interest. He had visitors outside but dismissed them, obviously interested in us despite his aloofness.

We were impressed with the production facilities of
Al-Jihad
and wondered how Suhaib did it all himself. He put us off with sincere modesty. “But what about the future?” we asked. “Aren’t you threatened with expulsion, given all the pressure the various Arab capitals are exerting on the Pakistani government?”

“There is nothing to be afraid of,” responded Suhaib. “If we are expelled, we will return to Jordan. Each of us has his profession. Most of us had good jobs before. We are members of the educated class.”

“But won’t you miss the life of a mujahid?” pursued Khalid. “Here you have a mission and a sense of purpose. Won’t it be boring to go back to your old life?”

Abu Suhaib, visibly moved, admitted all this to be true. Behind his equanimity he obviously hoped the war would continue somewhere.

The Arab Afghans we met in Peshawar seemed a milder brand. The tougher ones had all left for Sudan and Yemen, with the most active breed fighting in Kashmir, Bosnia, and Somalia. In addition, fierce fighting was now raging between rival factions in Afghanistan. A few adventurers had moved on to Tajikistan, which promised to be a new Central Asian battleground.

Those who stayed behind were potential settlers. They already had their own infrastructure, with school and community centers. Hamza, Hudaifa’s younger brother, for example, did not attend a Pakistani school. His high school was all Arabic, a product of the Afghan war. The mosque where Azzam had preached his sermons before being blown up had also become a school for the Arab community. Before the war there were no Arab schools in Peshawar.

Tapes show how the elder Azzam would captivate an audience, weaving his account with mesmerizing detail. Hudaifa does the same thing. Like his father, Hudaifa is a storyteller in the tradition of
Arabian Nights.
He told us the story of a Libyan mujahid who became one of the first Arab martyrs to die in Tajikistan, mowing down rows of his enemies even after he had been mortally wounded. Hudaifa’s English seemed to be getting better and better with each episode. He obviously enjoyed talking with us, even though he did not fully trust us. Overall, I thought he seemed far more attracted to the United States than to Pakistan.

Hudaifa confided his problems with his Jordanian passport. It was about to expire and the Jordanian embassy seemed unwilling to renew it. They wanted him to return home. He did not fear jail, even though he would certainly end up there—moderate Islamic governments being much less tolerant of fundamentalism than we are. But he still wanted to travel abroad. We asked him if he would like to come to the United States, where so much of his family has settled. He seemed to like the idea but felt obligated to continue his father’s work. Strangely, he was much more interested in talking with me than with Khalid. While he had been around Muslim scholars like Khalid all his life, I was a curious American journalist runaway from the Great Satan.

The next day Hudaifa showed us the entire jihad organization, including a fairly large compound with ten printing presses. The laborers were all Afghans, the headmen Palestinians. There were no educated Afghanis or Pakistanis around. More and more I realized that he was living in a vacuum with only a few devoted natives, without the rallying support that his father enjoyed before his death.

Hudaifa was not the boss of the show, however. The headman was Muhammad Yusuf Abbas, commonly known as Abu l-Qasim, who was suspicious and angry to find us in his office. He gave a scolding to Hudaifa, who remained remarkably calm, holding his ground without perplexity or embarrassment. Abbas was finally reassured of our purpose and, in the end, he even agreed to be tape-recorded.

“Why has jihad become necessary?” I asked him. “Is it an obligation to Muslims everywhere?”

“After Afghanistan it has spread to many places,” he replied. “It has spread to Kashmir, the Philippines, Algeria, and Bosnia and has grown stronger in Somalia since the U.N. intervention.”

Why is jihad necessary in Muslim countries like Egypt and Algeria? Does it make sense for Muslims to be killing Muslims?

“In the countries that used to follow Islam, the so-called Muslim countries, the jihad movement has arisen because they have been deprived of Islam. Western colonialism ruled those countries without Islam and the liberation movements were unable to restore Islam to its rightful place. Muslims have finally become aware of this point. Now everywhere they want Islam.”

What are the teachings of jihad? Should it go west? Is it the role of Muslims to carry out jihad everywhere?

“The Islamic teaching about jihad says that it is to clear the way for those calling to God’s religion. Wherever the missionaries of Islam are fought against, it becomes necessary for the Muslim power to protect them.”

In so many words, the answer was that America and the West were new arrivals on the target list, as legitimate a target as Israel or the secular regimes of the Muslim world. Jihad would follow wherever the warriors went.

*  *  *

At the checkpoint, Hudaifa, at our behest, tried to rush through over the protests of the militia guards. Using all his broken Pashtu, he played strongman, trying to impress them with his invisible authority. The guards were polite and apologetic but firm. They were only doing their duty and might get in trouble with their superiors. Finally, realizing there was no point in having a confrontation, Khalid pulled their officer aside and explained in Urdu—the government language—that we just wanted to go a few hundred yards to take some photos. He immediately agreed.

One of the militia accompanied us. Upon learning Hudaifa is Palestinian, he immediately said, “PLO,” to which Hudaifa replied, “No, Hamas!” Surprisingly, the militiaman didn’t seem to recognize Hamas.

Unable to go as far as Dara, the region’s famous arms bazaar, or Landi Kotal, a smugglers’ paradise where Pakistanis go to buy electrical appliances and other goods, we settled for a small outdoor market near the Khyber Gate. Here it was all in miniature—small shops filled with smuggled clothing and TV sets plus weapons from all of the world, some duplicated by Afghan tribesmen in primitive workshops. Seeing a local manufactured Kalashnikov knock-off, Hudaifa could hardly contain himself. He rented it for a half-hour for the pleasure of firing a few rounds in the air. “I haven’t done that in more than a year,” he exulted. I took photos of this trigger-happy international revolutionary. Then Khalid almost burned himself handling the gun. Hudaifa explained that that was the difference between the local varieties and the real thing; the Russian guns generated much less heat.

We returned to Peshawar just in time for Friday prayer services at the mosque. The sermon was over but we did catch the prayer. The majority of the faithful at this overcrowded mosque were Pakistani but there were about forty Arabs among them. Most were members of Azzam’s organization. As we left the mosque, two Sudanese passed us, then turned back and shook hands, greeting us in Arabic with special friendliness.

Hudaifa, now accompanied by his brother Hamza, pulled us into a group of his followers and suggested we visit his uncle, Abu Adil, another important survivor of Azzam’s group. We would have lunch at his house before catching our plane back to Islamabad at five o’clock. When we arrived at the house, however, Hudaifa informed us that his uncle was renting it from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghani fundamentalist then serving as the new prime minister of Afghanistan. Khalid had denounced Hekmatyar many times in the international Islamic press. Several of his friends in Peshawar had actually been killed in retribution by Hekmatyar’s commandos. He was now horrified to realize we would be having lunch in Hekmatyar’s house. “It’s not that I’m afraid,” he confided to me. “But it would be terribly unethical.” But Khalid was trembling.

As it turned out the food was not ready so we had an excuse for not staying long. The suburban villa was actually an oasis of ease compared with the mud huts that constituted most refugee settlements in and around Peshawar. Squatting on the floor, we asked Abu Adil how he felt about the open warfare that had erupted between Hekmatyar and President Rabbani, who had emerged as his chief rival. (Both sides were using the tanks and artillery left behind by the CIA and KGB to hammer each other.) Abu Adil responded by showing us photographs in which Hekmatyar, Rabbani, and Azzam stood with their arms locked in Islamic brotherhood. “We knew them only as mujahideen,” he said. “Now they are statesmen.”

Hudaifa, Abu Adil, and the immediate family were all jovial and lighthearted, in contrast to some of the other fundamentalists we met earlier that day at another mujahid home in Peshawar. They were dour and tense, exuding unrelenting distrust and hostility. They even slept with their Kalashnikovs. We sensed how rudderless the group had become without Azzam. Whenever we brought up the name of another potential leader with Hudaifa, he immediately dismissed him. The others always agreed. Only two names struck a positive chord: Osama bin Laden and Wa’il Jalaidan. Bin Laden was in Khartoum at the time. Jalaidan, another Saudi, was nearby in Islamabad. He had been put in charge of the Pakistan office of the Muslim World League, a worldwide Islamist organization richly funded by the Saudis. When we expressed interest in Jalaidan, Hudaifa promised a meeting the next day, before our plane left for Syria. But in the end he was unable to arrange it.

Jalaidan has since been described by U.S. authorities as “one of the founders of al Qaeda along with Osama bin Laden” and as “the logistics chief of Bin Laden’s organization.” He remains essential to the organization.
¹
When the American-led coalition attacked al Qaeda in 2001, graffiti in Pakistan on Islamic schools proclaimed, “Kill one Osama, 100 other Osamas will take his place.” Jalaidan would be a possible candidate. Ironically, prior to his indoctrination into the jihad leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Jalaidan lived and worked at the Islamic Center of Tucson. Eight years ago in Islamabad, we barely missed meeting him.

*  *  *

T
O UNDERSTAND HOW
the jihad movement has made full use of American hospitality, it helps to examine a single chain of organizations with as much unity of purpose and operations as possible. Searching for a source of terror in America, many people have pointed fingers at al Qaeda, whose first outposts here were set up in the late 1980s. Yet there is another organization, familiar from countless headlines stemming from terrorism in the Middle East, that has flown under the media’s radar in the wake of September 11, 2001: Hamas. Hamas’s aims may seem more modest; no international Hamas celebrity has reached the status of Osama bin Laden, let alone declared that all U.S. citizens are legitimate targets. Yet Hamas is extremely well entrenched in the United States, and the interlocking operations with which it is associated are extraordinary in their reach.

Hamas is world famous as the main Islamist organization in the Palestinian territories. Yet it is a relatively recent organization, formed immediately after the
intifada
of 1987. Hamas not only opposes the Middle East peace process, it seek’s Israel’s destruction. It has a political and a military wing; the former builds schools and hospitals in Palestinian territories. Graduates from its political wing earn the right to carry out terrorist attacks against Israeli targets.

Of all the Islamic militant groups, Hamas has developed the most sophisticated American infrastructure. The story of how a young man named Nasser Issa Jalal Hidmi was recruited and trained by Hamas illustrates just how central is the American role in Hamas’s network. I have been able to reconstruct Hidmi’s story by studying documents retrieved by Israeli investigators and confessions to Israeli courts by various Hamas operatives and the recordings of Hamas conferences in the U.S.

As a student in a Jerusalem preparatory college, Hidmi joined an Islamic religious group that served as a nursery for future military operatives. Motivated by a strong antipathy to the Israeli occupation, he was introduced to a cleric who went by the
nom de guerre
of Abu ‘Ubaada and who supervised a wing of Hamas terror squads. In a short time, Hidmi showed promise as a rising Hamas star. The organization’s leaders needed a safe place to send him for training. Rather than Lebanon or Syria, he was sent to the United States.

In June 1990, only months after arriving in the United States and settling in Manhattan, Kansas, Hidmi received a phone call from Mohammed Salah, the Chicago-based used-car dealer who was subsequently imprisoned by the Israelis. Per Salah’s instruction, Hidmi flew to Chicago where he was one of twenty-five other Palestinian youths selected for a weekend of terrorist training at a campground on the outskirts of the city.

In their Hamas “basic training” course, the recruits were given instruction in Islamic religious issues—but also in the planting of car bombs. The car-bomb instructor identified himself as a Libyan-American man who had previously served in the Marines and was married to an American woman. Using charts and diagrams, the instructor showed how to place a bomb in a car’s engine and how to insure its detonation at the point of ignition. The first stage of the training completed, the students returned home.

Later that year, Hidmi and the other Hamas inductees were told to attend an Islamic convention in Kansas City. For these young militants, the presence of so many Hamas leaders in one place—let alone the United States—was startling. During the next three days, numerous top officials exulted in the operations of Hamas, reveling in the glory of the burgeoning international Islamic movement and railing against the crusader-Zionist-infidel conspiracy being carried out by the perfidious Jews.

Though the gathering was in America, and many of the speakers lived in this country, their targets were international. Musa abu Marzook, a resident of Falls Church, Virginia (and separately, Louisiana), was one major Hamas leader who spoke there. He called upon Muslims to destroy the “outpost of Western influence” that was created with the “purpose of being a spearhead in the heart of the Muslim world”—i.e., Israel.

During the conference, Mohammed Salah organized a series of smaller workshops for Hidmi and other Hamas recruits at a nearby Ramada Inn. At the front of a room, a burly man introduced himself as Ibrahim Mahmoud Muzayyin, director of an organization called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which officially raises money for “charity” in the West Bank and Gaza. Muzayyin told the group: “You have been assembled here because you are all residents of the occupied territories. And you have been chosen to carry out operations to escalate the
intifada
on behalf of the Hamas movement.”
¹

One noted Islamic militant at this session was Jordanian parliamentarian Ishaq al-Farhan, who gave the students a pep talk. Al-Farhan had been found by Jordanian security forces to have collaborated with a Hamas leader in Jordan in acquiring weapons for the group in Gaza. Another was Najib al-Ghosh, editor-in-chief of the Muslim Arab Youth Association’s flagship magazine,
Al-Amal,
published out of Plainfield, Indiana.

After a series of pep talks, the group was divided into smaller clusters for their car-bomb lessons. They also learned how to handle improvised explosives and hand grenades. In other parts of the conference, the youths were segmented into areas of specialized training, including interrogation and execution of collaborators, surveillance, and political organizing.

Six months later, the group met again in Kansas City. Mohammed Salah introduced Najib al-Ghosh, who lectured on the methods of interrogation of Israeli intelligence as well as on the different types of hand grenades and bombs. “The purpose of all this,” Salah interjected, “is so that everyone will go home and plant explosives in the area where he lives.”
²

Before Hidmi had a chance to plant explosives, he was arrested on his return to Israel. More than a dozen of the original twenty-five from Hidmi’s class still remain in the United States. In early 1993, chief organizer Salah was arrested by Israeli authorities on a visit to Israel while arranging Hamas terror operations. When news of his arrest was first reported, including the fact that he was a military commander of Hamas, the FBI (as well as American media) dismissed the allegations skeptically. “We were wrong,” says former FBI Director of Counterterrorism Oliver “Buck” Revell. “We didn’t know what was going on in our own backyard.” During his interrogation—conducted in Arabic—Salah confessed to making several surreptitious trips to Israel, where he directed Hamas terror operations, organized military cells, and transferred more than $1 million for the purchase of weapons. Other information obtained by Israeli authorities confirmed that since 1987, Salah had recruited hundreds of Hamas operatives, trained them, and personally built fourteen time bombs. Salah kept a map showing where two kidnapped Israeli soldiers had been buried by Hamas death squads.

Hamas’s success in planting some of its most senior military officials in the United States provides some of the most compelling evidence of the deep roots of radical Islamic networks on American soil. One of those officials, Musa abu Marzook, provided Salah’s instructions for his incursions into Israel to provide funds to Hamas operatives within the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Abu Marzook has been one of the highest-ranking officials in Hamas ever since its inception, and used the United States freely as a base to organize and plot terror operations on and off for fifteen years. Today he lives in Syria and appears frequently as a spokesman for Hamas’s political bureau. But his formative years as a terrorist and organizer were spent here.

Abu Marzook was born in 1951 in the town of Rafiah in the Gaza Strip. He earned a college degree in engineering in Cairo in 1975 and soon moved to Louisiana to get his doctorate. By the early 1980s, abu Marzook had become increasingly involved with a growing community of militant Muslims in the United States, whose worldwide ideological fundamentalist fervor was unleashed by the Iranian revolution, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Together with several colleagues, abu Marzook helped create an umbrella organization called the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP); abu Marzook would be elected head of the group’s “Majlis al-Shura” or consultative council, which oversaw all of the group’s activities. By the mid-1980s, several years before Hamas came into formal existence in December 1987, the IAP had established offices in Indiana, Arizona, Illinois, and California and published a militant magazine called
Ila Filistin
(which routinely called for the death of “infidels and Jews”). Internal Hamas documents strongly suggest that the 1988 Hamas charter—a virulent anti-Semitic conspiratorial tract that incorporates elements of both Nazi dogma and the notorious turn-of-the-century “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—was first written by members of the lAP in the United States in the early to mid-1980s.

In 1989, abu Marzook became the founding president of the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), which incorporated in Illinois. Four years later, one detainee would tell Israeli authorities that UASR acted as “the political command of Hamas in the United States.”
³
The executive director of UASR, Ahmed bin Yousef, who consistently denies any leadership role in Hamas, was also named by this detainee as a “Hamas leader in the United States.” Not surprisingly, bin Yousef, prior to joining UASR, was employed by the Islamic Association for Palestine as a journalist with both their English and Arabic-language publications.
⁴
Bin Yousef has also edited a popular book about Hamas’s founder and leader entitled
Ahmed Yassin: The Phenomenon, the Miracle, and the Legend of the Challenge.
⁵
It contains odes of praise and letters extolling the imminent victory of Hamas over the Jews. One letter to the Hamas fighters in Palestine is from a Hamas activist in Chicago: “Greetings to you from here in America, from over the seas, that you may know that we are your sons of the era, the era of Allah, the era of Islam, the era of Palestine, the era of Jihad, the era of Hamas, until complete liberation of all Palestine from the river to the sea!”
⁶

In a UASR pamphlet by Ahmed bin Yousef called
Hamas: Background of Its Inception and Horizons of Its March,
⁷
Hamas is glorified as being the only solution to the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis: “Verily Hamas is the only way of dealing with the nature of the conflict, distinguishing itself from the other forms of confrontation, given the fact that Allah has promised that in the Muslims fighting the Jew, the Muslim would be victorious.”
⁸

In June of 1991, in Herndon, Virginia, the UASR joined with the Virginia-based International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT) to cosponsor a conference entitled “The Islamic Movement in the Shadow of International Change and Crisis in the Gulf.” UASR published a monograph of the proceedings of this conference which reads like a
Who’s Who
of radical Islamist leaders worldwide. Presenters included Musa abu Marzook, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah and Sami al-Arian associated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (see
Chapter 6
), Ishaq al-Farhan of the Jordanian Islamic Action Front (who had also attended Nasser Hidmi’s training sessions), and, of course, UASR’s own Ahmed bin Yousef.

The connections between Musa abu Marzook and the UASR (and Mohammed Salah) were further underscored when court documents surfaced in Chicago in June 1998 pursuant to a civil forfeiture of $1.4 million in bank accounts and other assets belonging to Salah and a related charitable organization, the Quranic Literacy Institute. An affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Robert Wright alleged that Nasser al-Khatib—who was described as abu Marzook’s “personal secretary”—had transferred the funds to Salah that Salah had distributed to Hamas activists in the Middle East.
⁹
Al-Khatib left the United States in June 1993, but upon his return he was interviewed by the FBI. In that interview al-Khatib admitted that he was a supporter of Hamas, that he donated money to Hamas causes, and that he was returning to the United States in order to begin work with UASR.
¹⁰

While continuing to use the United States as his base, abu Marzook eventually took on the title of Head of the Political Bureau of Hamas. In this position, he traveled to and from the Middle East frequently. All that changed, however, on July 25, 1995, when he was detained at JFK International Airport. A routine inspection by an INS agent revealed that abu Marzook’s name and date of birth matched a database entry on a “terrorist watch” list. He was under indictment in Israel for conspiring with other Hamas members in a series of at least ten incidents, in which at least 47 people died and 148 others were injured. Among the incidents were two bus bombings and some stabbings. Israeli documents stated that he not only knew about such activities but was integrally involved in providing the funds for them; it was he who gave the go-ahead for the murders. Part of the Israelis’ evidence came from Mohammed Salah, who by this point had given evidence against Marzook.

On August 7, 1995, the Deputy U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York requested abu Marzook’s arrest and extradition. Extradition hearings proceeded slowly until April 1997, when Israel announced it would no longer seek abu Marzook’s extradition (no doubt out of fear of a backlash). Nonetheless, with proof of abu Marzook’s connections to actual terrorist acts, the United States deported him to Jordan. In 1999, Jordan’s King Abdullah II announced that the Hamas leadership in Jordan, including abu Marzook, would in turn be deported. After moving from country to country in the Middle East, abu Marzook finally settled in Syria.