Made in the U.S.A.
Hundreds of Americans have followed the path to jihad. Here's how and why
Fearing an international incident, alarmed U.S. and Pakistani officials stopped the group from entering Afghanistan. But others followed. "We were the spark," says Abdul-Haqq. "Different avenues opened and others got through." Indeed, during the war, a handful of journalists came across Americans fighting alongside the Afghans. Among them was 34-year-old Akhbar Shah, an African-American from Boston found by reporters in 1985. Shah claimed to be a U.S. Army veteran helping the rebels organize training camps and said he'd seen two dozen other black American Muslims in Afghanistan.
Soldiers of Allah. Meanwhile, Abdul-Haqq's Muslims of the Americas continued to preach jihad. The sect's American branch had been founded in 1980 by a charismatic Pakistani cleric, Sheik Mubarik Ali Hasmi Shah Gilani, who appeared at a Brooklyn mosque bedecked with ammunition belts and calling on his mostly African-American converts to wage holy war. A recruitment video from the early 1990s--Soldiers of Allah--depicts would-be guerrillas handling firearms and explosives and shows Gilani boasting how recruits are given "highly specialized training in guerrilla warfare." The organization freely admits sending more than 100 of its members--all U.S. citizens--to Pakistan, but says it was only for religious study. Federal agents believe that dozens also received military training there and that some fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Kashmir. It was Gilani whom the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl was seeking before he was murdered--on a tip the cleric was tied to alleged shoe bomber Reid. Gilani was questioned and released.
Gilani's claims of nonviolence would be easier to believe if so many of his followers were not in trouble with the law. Over the years, the group has drawn more than 1,000 members to rural compounds in a half-dozen states. During the 1980s, its followers engaged in a bloody campaign of U.S. bombings and murders, largely against Indian religious figures in America, officials say. Two Muslims of the Americas members were recently convicted on firearms charges, and another was charged with the murder of a deputy sheriff in California. The group's Abdul-Haqq says that these crimes are not typical of his membership and that most occurred many years ago. Law enforcement officials, meanwhile, have found nothing to tie the group to bin Laden's al Qaeda and note that Gilani's Sufism has long been at odds with Taliban-style Islam.
The dream of Gilani and other jihadists to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan came true in 1989. For them, it was a great victory, the triumph of international Islam over a godless superpower. Even as America withdrew its CIA officers and its funding, the emboldened jihadists stayed and plotted new campaigns. Some went on to new battles overseas; some returned to their homelands, such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia, intent on making them strict Islamic states. Others took aim at America, angry over its support of Israel and basing of troops in Saudi Arabia.
On Feb. 26, 1993, their pent-up rage exploded in the form of a 1,200-pound bomb under the World Trade Center, which killed six and injured more than 1,000. That first attempt to topple the twin towers led investigators to a sheik named Omar Abdel Rahman. An Afghan war veteran, Abdel Rahman had been driven from his native Egypt for his ties to terrorism. He arrived in Brooklyn in 1990, and soon, he, too, was preaching holy war at local mosques. More important, Abdel Rahman's followers took control of an obscure "charity" in Brooklyn--the Alkifah Refugee Center. Founded in Pakistan in the early 1980s, Alkifah had scores of branches around the world, including Jersey City, N.J.; Tucson, Ariz.; Boston, and 30 other U.S. cities. Most were little more than storefronts--the Brooklyn one sat atop a Chinese restaurant--but they raised millions of dollars to support the Afghan resistance. And, they sent men along with the money. By 1993, the Brooklyn office alone had sent as many as 200 jihadists from America to join the mujahideen, investigators say.
advertisement
