Made in the U.S.A.
Hundreds of Americans have followed the path to jihad. Here's how and why
Harakat ul-Mujahideen seems to be a favored home for traveling jihadists. Earlier this year, an apparent list of recruits surfaced in a Harakat safe house, bearing the name Hiram Torres--a Puerto Rican from New Jersey missing for years. In 1995, Harakat officials claimed they were hosting several hundred foreign Muslims at their training camps, including 16 Americans. That year, at Harakat offices in Lahore, Pakistan, two Saudis boasted of their own American backgrounds to a reporter. In smooth English, Muhammad Al-Jabeer claimed to be from Chicago, where he'd studied for an M.B.A. His friend, Ahmed Usaid, said he hailed from New Jersey and held a B.S. in computer science. Usaid, Harakat sources say, died in battle near Mazar-e Sharif in 1999 and was buried in Afghanistan.
One well-trod route to jihad leads through London, a city so popular among radical Islamists that some call it Londonistan. This was the apparent path taken by New Yorker Mohammad Junaid. The grandson of Pakistani immigrants, the 26-year-old Junaid surfaced in Pakistan last October, vowing to kill fellow Americans on sight. Sounding much like a New Yorker, Junaid claimed to have grown up listening to Whitney Houston and riding roller coasters. The stocky, spectacled Junaid said he'd left a dot-com job in midtown Manhattan, but even more striking was the claim that his own mother escaped from the ninth floor of the World Trade Center.
None of that lessened his rage at America, which stemmed, he said, from racist taunts at his Bronx high school. At college, Junaid read of how Muslims were under attack worldwide; he later linked up with the London-based al-Muhajiroun (the Emigrants). The group is believed to have sent hundreds of foreign jihadists to Pakistan and Afghanistan, largely by targeting British colleges and immigrant communities. Now banned on U.K. campuses, its leaders have praised the 9/11 attacks and say that America has declared war on Islam. Junaid believes them. "I will kill every American that I see," he vowed to a TV reporter. "I'm not a New Yorker. I'm a Muslim."
Holy warriors like Junaid deeply worry authorities, but that wasn't always the case. During the Cold War, Washington encouraged the jihad movement in its drive to bog down the Soviets in Afghanistan. As many as 25,000 foreigners answered the call during the 1980s, most notably bin Laden. The majority hailed from Arab nations, but many journeyed from Sudan, Southeast Asia, China, and Great Britain. Others came from the United States, among them dozens of native-born Americans. One, Muhammed Haseeb Abdul-Haqq, was the son of a Baptist preacher in New York. A recent convert to a Pakistani Sufi sect, Muslims of the Americas, Abdul-Haqq rallied fellow Americans to fight the Soviets in the early 1980s. The group set up "jihad councils" across the country and in 1982 sent 12 members to Pakistan, intent on finding their way into battle. "It was amazing for me," recalls Abdul-Haqq. "I had no military training, but I knew what I was doing was for the Almighty."
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