American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (12 page)

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VERYONE KNOWS THE STORY
of Osama bin Laden—how he went to Afghanistan to fight the Russians and ended up waging jihad against the entire Western world. But how many know of his predecessor Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian refugee who first preached worldwide jihad and laid the groundwork for bin Laden’s rise to power? In fact it was Azzam’s spellbinding oratory that inspired the 24-year-old Osama bin Laden to leave the comfort of his Saudi Arabian family empire in 1985 and move to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. Moreover, Azzam’s Alkhifa network—originally a fund-raiser for the Afghan mujahideen—eventually metamorphosed into bin Laden’s al Qaeda (“The Base”), which is now terrorizing the world.

Most important is how both Azzam and bin Laden were able to use Islamic organizations in the United States to build their networks. It was the records of Azzam’s Alkhifa organization that we spirited out of the Brooklyn basement when they had been moved there from the Al-Farook Mosque after the first World Trade Center bombing. It was in the United States that Azzam did much of his early fund-raising. It is through Islamic networks in the U.S. that bin Laden has shopped for much of the high-tech gear that runs his worldwide network. Indeed, after Hamas, al Qaeda has achieved a greater penetration on American soil than any other single group. The Investigative Project has even been on the trail of a tantalizing possibility: Osama himself may have once applied for a U.S. visa.

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Born in Palestine in 1941, Abdullah Azzam moved to Jordan, then to Saudi Arabia before migrating to Pakistan at the start of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Starting with not much more than a storefront in Peshawar, Azzam ultimately succeeded in reviving the concept of jihad among the Muslim masses.

People who met Azzam were always dazzled by his spellbinding oratory, his religious scholarship, his abilities as a military strategist, and his interminable energy. The bearded, barrel-chested sheikh hated the West, specifically Christians and Jews, whom he routinely accused of carrying out diabolical conspiracies against Islam. Combined with this was nostalgia for the days of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic caliphate, when non-Muslims were the ones who were treated as second-class citizens.

It was in the United States that Azzam was able to raise much of his money, enlist new fighters, and—most important—enjoy the political freedom to coordinate with other radical Islamic movements. From 1985 to 1989, Azzam and his top aide, Palestinian Sheikh Tamim al-Adnani, visited dozens of American cities, exhorting new recruits to pick up the sword against the enemies of Islam. They raised tens of thousands of dollars and enlisted hundreds and hundreds of fighters and believers.

The First Conference of Jihad was held at the Al-Farook Mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in 1988. In a speech recorded on videotape, Azzam instructed his audience of nearly two hundred to carry out jihad no matter where they were, even in America. “Every Moslem on earth should unsheathe his sword and fight to liberate Palestine,” he shouted in Arabic. “The jihad is not limited to Afghanistan…. Jihad means fighting…. You must fight in any place you can get…Whenever jihad is mentioned in the Holy Book, it means the obligation to fight. It does not mean to fight with the pen or to write books or articles in the press or to fight by holding lectures.”
¹

Azzam’s Office of Services started off in Peshawar, but by the end of the decade, he had succeeded in establishing scores of jihad recruiting centers around the world, in addition to a network of mosques and Islamic centers that joined the jihad orbit. Azzam had also motivated tens of thousands of Arabs from all over the world to volunteer for jihad.

By 1985, according to his own statements and accounts published by the Office of Services in its banner publication
Al-Jihad,
Azzam had teamed up with Saudi financier Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden would soon emerge as the largest single financial backer of the Office of Services for the Mujahideen and of the “Arab-Afghan” jihad movement. Having heard the call of Sheikh Azzam to join the jihad, bin Laden left the comfort of his family’s multi-billion dollar construction company in Saudi Arabia to participate in the jihad against the Russians. During the 1980s, however, bin Laden scrupulously stayed behind the scenes, far away from the glare of publicity.

Azzam opened branches of the Office of Services in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and throughout the Middle East. Dozens of centers opened throughout the United States, mostly at mosques and Islamic community centers. Major Alkhifa Centers were set up in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Pittsburgh, and Tucson, while thirty other American cities were the sites of subsidiary Alkhifa offices.

The Office of Services published a monthly magazine called
Al-Jihad,
a full-color Arabic-language magazine that detailed the battle stories from the front lines of the mujahideen. The issues were frequently full of gory pictures of young men whose limbs had been severed as well as inspiring eulogies to the
shahids
(martyrs) who gave their lives for jihad. In its heyday,
Al-Jihad
reached 50,000 people, at least half in the United States, according to interviews with
Al-Jihad
leaders.
Al-Jihad
was distributed within the United States by the Tucson, Arizona, and Brooklyn, New York, Alkhifa centers. Articles frequently contained incendiary attacks and conspiratorial allegations against the United States, Europe, Christians, and Jews, exposing their “crimes” against Islam. From Palestine to Bosnia,
Al-Jihad
called for Muslims to pick up the gun and wage jihad to kill the infidels and “all enemies of Islam.”

After the Soviet Union crumbled, the duty of jihad was expanded around the globe—to any place that the enemies of Islam were deemed active. Beyond mobilizing support for the jihad in Afghanistan, internal documents show that Alkhifa members in the United States became involved in shipping bombs, timers, and explosives to Hamas in Gaza; counterfeiting tens of thousands of dollars for the purchase of weapons; reconfiguring passports to enable Muslim volunteers to visit the United States as well as to enter jihad battle fronts; and raising money and enlisting new recruits for the jihad in the Philippines, Egypt, Bosnia, Algeria, Kashmir, Palestine, and elsewhere.

Abdullah Azzam explained the new worldwide focus at gatherings of the faithful within the United States. At a conference of the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA) in Oklahoma City in December 1988, Azzam inspired participants to even loftier goals: “O brothers, after our experience of Afghanistan, nothing in the world is impossible for us any more! Small power or big power, what is decisive is the willpower that springs from the religious belief.” He insisted that “It has been revealed that you should perform Jihad with your lives and your wealth.”
²
Azzam also made clear that Afghanistan would be used as a training ground where Muslims from around the world could receive preparation for taking the jihad to their respective regions: “The Palestinian youth came here to Afghanistan, and also non-Palestinians, and they were trained, and their souls became prepared, and the paranoia of fear disappeared, and they became experts. Now, every one of them returns…ready to die.”
³

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Tucson, not coincidentally, has been a fertile city for terrorists. When Ramzi Yousef and Ahmed Ajaj, plotters in the first World Trade Center bombing, arrived in the U.S. in 1992, they carried identification tags listing them as working for the Al Bunyan Islamic Information Center in Tucson.

Even the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) used Tucson as the base for its Information Office in the late 1980s. It was from an IAP post office box address in Tucson that the organization published and disseminated, in brochure form, the “Charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement—Hamas” in 1988. Ghassan Dahduli, an IAP leader who had registered this post office box, was a member of the Board of Directors of the Islamic Center of Tucson in the mid-1980s. (Dahduli, who also moved to Arlington, Texas, in the early-1990s, has since been deported from the United States based on visa violations although authorities had collected evidence showing ties to terrorists as well.)

For Azzam, Tucson was just a starting point in the U.S., at a time when his power was growing everywhere. By the end of the 1980s, with the Soviets no longer in Afghanistan, a Muslim alliance had joined forces to rule that country, and mujahideen were branching out to other conflicts including the one most dear to Azzam, the jihad in Palestine. Meanwhile bin Laden was playing a central role in Azzam’s network. In a speech given in Peshawar in 1989, Sheikh Azzam told his followers, “There is one person who has always stood by us. That is Osama bin Laden.”

In November 1989, Azzam, along with two of his four sons, was killed in a sophisticated car bombing in Pakistan. In the wake of Azzam’s death, a power struggle soon developed for control of Alkhifa, not in Pakistan but in the United States, where Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman vied with Mustapha Shalabi, an Egyptian-born militant appointed by Azzam. The sheikh settled in Brooklyn and New Jersey where he had already developed an intensely loyal following among a cadre of Islamic militants.

At stake in the battle over Alkhifa was a transnational Islamic militant power base: the de facto control over hundreds of thousands of dollars and a network of thousands of jihad veterans and future jihad volunteers. Shalabi wanted to plow the money back into the Afghanistan effort, while Sheikh Abdel Rahman wanted to expend the funds on jihad in Egypt and new jihad fronts around the globe.

Shalabi, who by all accounts resented the intrusion of the sheikh, tried to stand up to him and his supporters, especially Mahmud Abouhalima, an Egyptian veteran of the Afghanistan jihad and a loyal follower of the blind sheikh. By early January 1990, Shalabi had received threats from the sheikh’s followers, but still would not agree to hand over control of the funds. Shalabi hoped to move back to Afghanistan where he could count on the protection of Mohammed Yusuf Abbas, who had taken over the Peshawar-based Office of Services and editorship of
Al-Jihad.
Shalabi would never make it. On February 26, 1991, Shalabi opened the door to someone he knew (according to police). His body was found five days later with a bullet hole to his head and multiple stab wounds. No one was ever charged in the killing, but federal officials believe that Shalabi was killed pursuant to a
fatwa
issued by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.

The man who was supposed to take over the Alkhifa offices in Brooklyn as successor to Shalabi was Wadih el-Hage. Born in Lebanon in 1960, el-Hage had come to the United States in the late 1970s to attend school at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette. In 1987, he moved to Tucson, where he became an active member of the Alkhifa office at the Islamic Center. He soon became caught up in the jihad fervor, catching the attention of senior Alkhifa officials in both Tucson and New York.

In December 1988, according to federal documents, el-Hage met other Islamic fundamentalists, including Mahmud Abouhalima and top officials of the Alkhifa Center, at a major radical Islamic conference held at the convention center in Oklahoma City. The conference was sponsored by the Muslim Arab Youth Association and the Islamic Association for Palestine. Abdullah Azzam was the keynote speaker. Videotapes of the conference and other records show that Islamic militants from around the globe converged in Oklahoma City to raise the banner of jihad not only in Afghanistan but in Palestine and elsewhere. Feverish exhortations to carry out terrorist attacks were made by Azzam and the other guest speakers, which included Hamas leader Muhammad Siyyam, militant cleric Ahmed al-Qattan, radical cleric from Lebanon Sheikh Muharram al-Aarifi, and a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mustapha Mash’hur, who currently serves as the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the highest position of leadership in the organization.

Wadih el-Hage was not just watching and listening to mujahideen. In early 1990, U.S. law enforcement officials say he became involved in a murder. The victim was a black Muslim cleric named Rashid Khalifa, who was preaching a variation of Islamic doctrine that was deemed heretical by fundamentalists. According to federal prosecutors and to information volunteered by Wadih el-Hage in interviews he gave to FBI agents, a still unidentified man was sent to Tucson to conduct surveillance on Khalifa. This person visited el-Hage at his home, where they had lunch together, and then was driven by el-Hage to Khalifa’s mosque, where the visitor recorded the movements of Khalifa. El-Hage admitted before a grand jury that he never reported this visit to the authorities.