Made in the U.S.A.
Hundreds of Americans have followed the path to jihad. Here's how and why
Call to war. Jihad--literally, "struggle" in Arabic--can also mean one's private spiritual quest. But today it is widely used to connote holy war. And for many, that journey begins in the mosques and Islamic centers of America. There young Muslims may hear imams full of fire and brimstone sermonizing on the persecution of Muslims abroad. They may be handed videos depicting a Muslim world under siege, filled with images of bloodied and broken corpses. Those same images beckon online. Since the mid-1990s, Web sites have spread the call to holy war at cyberspeed. Links like almuhaji roun.com and azzam.com now bring the faithful to harrowing displays of refugees and martyrs in faraway lands. In 2000, a Chechen jihadist Web site, www.qoqaz.net, directed recruits to network quietly: "Anyone interested in going to fight . . . should contact members of their own communities and countries who are known to have been for Jihad. You will know these people and they will know you."
Others proselytize less subtly. For years, the San Diego-based American Islamic Group sent its Islam Report to Internet news groups with its bank account listed. "Supporting Jihad is an Islamic obligation," read one report. Included were communiques from Algeria's terrorist Armed Islamic Group and war reports from Bosnia and Chechnya. In a 1995 Internet posting titled "First American Martyr in Chechnya," the group mourned the loss of Mohammad Zaki, an American killed in Chechnya that year. Zaki was a Washington, D.C., native who ran the group's Chechnya relief effort, his colleagues wrote. The father of four, he reportedly died in a Russian air attack while delivering aid to Chechen villages. U.S. and Russian officials in Moscow have no record of Zaki's death. (Kifah Jayyousi, who was then the San Diego group's head and later facilities chief for the Detroit and Washington, D.C., school districts, could not be located for comment.)
Some jihadists become radicalized overseas, as did Lindh. In the past 25 years, Saudi and Pakistani groups have targeted African-American Muslims, in particular, offering scholarships to study Islam and Arabic in their countries, according to Prof. Lawrence Mamiya, an expert on Islam at New York's Vassar College. "The first step is education, and then they're recruited by more militant groups," he says. "Being in those countries, they come across the oppression those people confront."
New recruits. Once recruited, the jihadists all but disappear. A rare window opened on their world at last year's trial of U.S. Embassy bombers, in which a half-dozen names surfaced of Americans allegedly tied to al Qaeda. Wadih el-Hage, an Arlington, Texas, tire store manager and top bin Laden aide, got some media attention, but others passed unnoticed. There was Mubarak al-Duri, an Iraqi native living in Arizona, who officials say worked with bin Laden's firms in Sudan; Mohamed Bayazid, a Syrian-American who allegedly bought weapons and uranium for al Qaeda; and Abu Osama, an Egyptian-American said to have trained al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. Government witness L'Houssaine Kherchtou testified to knowing "some black Americans" who he believed were al Qaeda associates in Sudan and Pakistan. Perhaps most intriguing were accounts of Abu Malik, a martial arts expert from New York who allegedly fought in Afghanistan and later turned up at al Qaeda's headquarters in Sudan.
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