Made in the U.S.A.
Hundreds of Americans have followed the path to jihad. Here's how and why
U.S. News gained access to records of other American jihadists from some of Pakistan's best-known Islamic schools. There are thousands of these madrasahs, as they are known, and they provided tens of thousands of recruits to the Taliban. One of the most influential, the Haqqania school outside Peshawar, graduated much of the Taliban's senior leadership--along with at least nine Americans. The records are sketchy. In most cases, they list only the student's Arabic name, ethnicity, and home country. In 1995, seven Arab-Americans enrolled in the school, among them Zaid Bin Tufail of North Carolina, Zahid Al-Shafi of Texas, and Ahmed Abi-Bakr of Washington, D.C. All received military training and fought with Taliban units in their drive to unite the country, school officials say. Other students included two African-Americans: a "Dr. Bernard" from New York, who arrived in 1997, and "Abdullah," whose parents left their native Barbados and settled in Michigan; he, too, joined the Taliban and was reported "martyred" near Mazar-e Sharif in 1999 or 2000. None of them, however, shows up in checks of U.S. public records.
Records at another madrasah, the Tajweed-ul-Koran in Quetta, show that three Americans studied there in 1996. Two were African-American--"Omar" and Farooq" are the only names listed in the register--and school officials described the third, "Haidar," as a tall, white fellow, about 25, "with a strong build and small golden beard." The foreigners, they say, left for military training with the Taliban in Kandahar. At another pro-Taliban school in Quetta, the Jamia Hammadia, workers recall a 25-year-old American student from Chicago--Abu Bakar al-Faisal--who arrived in 1995 and died while soldiering with the Taliban in 1999. Al-Faisal, they say, had broken with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam before coming to Afghanistan. Even sketchier records exist at the Jamia Abi-Bakr school in Karachi, where officials say about a dozen African-Americans studied. The madrasah is linked closely to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Kashmir militia Jibreel al-Amreekee joined.
The best-known American jihadist--John Walker Lindh--attended yet another madrasah. The alienated Lindh, a lawyer's son, discovered Islam online and, like many jihadists, later fell in with Tablighi Jamaat, a Pakistani evangelical group. Although not itself linked to terrorism, Tablighi's radical preaching is thought to have influenced several British citizens now held by U.S. forces in Guantanamo, as well as suspected shoe bomber Richard Reid.
Rocket grenades. Through Tablighi, Lindh ended up at his Pakistani madrasah. At age 19, he finished six months of studies at the pro-Taliban school. His next stop was Harakat ul-Mujahideen--the Jihad Fighters Movement--another Kashmir-focused militia tied to hijackings, kidnappings, and bin Laden's terrorist network. In mid-2001, armed with a Harakat letter of introduction, Lindh presented himself to al Qaeda, where he trained with explosives and rocket-propelled grenades, U.S. officials say. Captured in November and then wounded in a revolt, Lindh stayed true to his views, insisting that martyrdom is "the goal of every Muslim." Today, his hair cut and beard shorn, he sits in an Alexandria, Va., jail, facing charges of murder and terrorism. His attorneys argue he is innocent; they say Lindh never fired on Americans and has constitutional rights to bear arms and associate with radicals like al Qaeda.
advertisement
