Jihad Joe (28 page)

In early 2002 he began commuting to Pakistan to attend terrorist training camps, possibly while he was still working for the DEA, and trained at a camp run by Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.

Gilani was ensnared by the legend of veteran jihadist Ilyas Kashmiri and his “supernatural powers and miracles.” Kashmiri had taken part in the jihad against the Soviet Union, running a training camp in Waziristan, the lawless region of Pakistan that shared a border with Afghanistan. In later years he took up the cause of Kashmir as a militant and a terrorist, establishing a relationship with al Qaeda
and making a name for himself as one of Pakistan's most wanted. Gilani met Kashmiri during his time with LeT and swore
bayat
, an Islamic oath of allegiance, to the senior leader.
⁶²

In 2002 LeT still operated with relative impunity. Training started with a three-week course that consisted of strictly religious indoctrination. In August Gilani returned for weapons training. The next year he returned again and learned close combat, grenade tactics, and survival skills. The courses continued through 2003—countersurveillance, intelligence, combat, and tactical maneuvers. By the end of 2003, he was a sworn member of LeT with a host of dangerous new skills.
⁶³

In late 2005 Gilani's training and loyalty were finally rewarded. He was activated in the early stages of what would be a massive terrorist strike on Indian soil. Unlike most terrorist strikes in the post-9/11 era, this program would be meticulously planned.

Gilani was assigned to visit India, using his valuable U.S. passport, and case possible terrorist targets, including public places and government installations. He changed his name from Daood Gilani to David Coleman Headley, taking his mother's American-sounding name in order to ease any prospect of suspicion during border crossings.

His destination was Mumbai. Armed with a video camera, Gilani prowled the city gathering intelligence on prospective terrorist targets. During the course of multiple trips, he narrowed down the targets, gathering more and more specific intelligence on the best targets. Finally, one stood out as the central location: the Taj Mahal, a sumptuous five-star hotel favored by wealthy Western tourists and political luminaries. His contact at LeT told him that the attackers would come in by boat and conduct a suicide commando raid on the hotel and several other landmarks in the vicinity. Gilani picked out a landing site for the squad.
⁶⁴

In November 2008 the plan was executed. A team of 10 terrorist commandos, trained by LeT, hijacked a boat and went ashore. Starting late on a Wednesday, they opened fire on civilians in several locations, seized the Taj, and took hostages from among the 450 guests. The killing didn't stop until Saturday morning. More than 160 people were killed, including six Americans. More than 300 were injured.
⁶⁵

Gilani was in Pakistan at the time of the attack, somewhere between Kariachi and Lahore, already working on his next terrorist assignment. This time the
target was in Copenhagen, Denmark—the offices of a Danish newspaper,
Jyllands Posten
, that had sparked a global firestorm by publishing cartoon images of the Prophet Mohammed. Many Muslims were outraged by the publication, and radical Muslims like Gilani even more so. Just a few weeks before the Mumbai attack, he had e-mailed former high school classmates on the cartoon controversy.

Everything is not a joke. [ … ] We are not rehearsing a skit on
Saturday Night Live
. Making fun of Islam is making fun of [Mohammed]. Call me old-fashioned but I feel disposed towards violence for the offending parties, be they cartoonists from Denmark or Sherry Jones (Author of
Jewel of Medina
) or Irshad Manji (Liberal Muslim trying to make lesbianism acceptable in Islam, amongst other things). They never started debates with folks who slandered our Prophet, they took violent action. Even if God doesn't give us the opportunity to bring our intentions to fruition, we will claim
ajr
[credit with Allah for good deeds] for it.
⁶⁶

In other messages around the same period, Gilani characterized terrorism, suicide bombings, and beheadings as heroic.

Some of us are saying that “Terrorism” is the weapon of the cowardly. I will say that you may call it barbaric or immoral or cruel, but never cowardly. Courage is, by and large, exclusive to the Muslim nation.
⁶⁷

Gilani's disposition toward violence was not mere talk. In a discussion with his LeT handler, he was already laying out the scope of a new attack. Gilani suggested that they target the Danish newspaper's editor and cartoonist. “
All
Danes are responsible,” his handler replied.

Gilani returned to the United States and began to plan his reconnaissance mission. He made up business cards and contacted
Jyllands Posten
to ask about placing an ad, the pretext he would use to enter the office. In January 2009 he flew to Copenhagen. As in Mumbai, he took extensive video of the newspaper's buildings and the surrounding area. He also succeeded at getting inside the building.

Returning to Pakistan, he reported on the site, but the attack had to be postponed. LeT was feeling the heat that Mumbai had created. At the direction of
Ilyas Kashmiri, Gilani was instructed to meet with a contact in Europe who would provide non-LeT manpower willing to carry out a suicide attack. Kashmiri told Gilani to make sure the volunteers recorded martyrdom videos before the attack. Unsatisfied with the grisly carnage that LeT had wrought in Mumbai, he also told Gilani that the attackers should decapitate the newspaper's employees and throw their severed heads out of the building's windows. The attack was to take place as soon as possible, Kashmiri told the American terrorist, intimating that the leaders of al Qaeda wanted it that way.

But in July 2009, Gilani's LeT handler switched gears again, postponing the Denmark attack (to Gilani's dismay) and calling him back to Pakistan in order to work on a follow-up attack in India. Gilani was resistant, complaining that his handlers “had rotten guts” and telling an associate that he could complete the project without the organization's assistance.
⁶⁸

He had overestimated his chances. In October 2009 Gilani was arrested at the airport while trying to fly from Chicago to Philadelphia, apparently in preparation to connect to Denmark. In his luggage FBI agents found maps of Copenhagen and a memory stick containing video surveillance of the newspaper office and other locations.
⁶⁹
He cut a deal and pleaded guilty to complicity in the Mumbai attack.
⁷⁰

As of this writing, he may also face charges in India.
⁷¹
Under interrogation by Indian officials as part of his plea agreement, Gilani was said to be abusive, referring to his interrogators with “the choicest of Hindi expletives” and mocking Indian intelligence.

“The attack was planned and executed in your own backyard. You didn't even get a whiff of it and now you want to question me,” Gilani reportedly scoffed.
⁷²

Somalia has known little but violence since the ruling dictatorship collapsed in 1991. The conflict was one of al Qaeda's earliest investments (see chapter 6). In 2004 a fragile agreement was crafted to restore order to the country under the auspices of a transitional government.
⁷³

Barely two years later, an Islamist movement known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) confronted the young government. The ICU, which wanted to establish shariah law, looked like a group of extremists to many observers, and
there were rumors of links to al Qaeda. Although much of its activity was directed against the remaining shreds of the Somali government, ICU leaders blamed neighboring Ethiopia, a predominantly Christian nation, for interfering in Somalia's affairs and blamed the United States for supporting the interference.
⁷⁴

The ICU's rise didn't last long, and its fall was swift. Pressured by Ethiopia on one side and the Somali government on the other, then hammered by U.S. air strikes, the ICU crumbled and its leaders resigned.
⁷⁵

Soon afterward, a second-wave Islamist movement arose—Al Shabab, made up of the most militant members of the ICU, who had split to form their own organization, and a number of foreign mujahideen. The new militia used any means available to undercut the Somali government, including assassinations and suicide bombings. Most of its victims were, and continue to be, Somalis.
⁷⁶

Given the intense internal conflict, including Muslim-on-Muslim violence and a deep entanglement with essentially local conflicts of long standing, Somalia bore little resemblance to previous magnets for the global jihad movement.
⁷⁷
Unlike the Afghans in the 1980s and the Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, Al Shabab did not possess a clear claim to the moral high ground, and it certainly did not enjoy the support of Western governments and media.

Nevertheless, Al Shabab has attracted an extraordinary number of American jihadists. In 2007 and 2008, at least twenty young men from Minneapolis, Minnesota, left America to study the art of war at Al Shabab's training camps. Several other Americans from all over the country also left for the battlefield. The vast majority of those who joined the conflict were Americans of Somali descent. Many had been born in Somalia, and most had family or tribal ties to the combatants. In 2008 former Minneapolis resident Shirwa Ahmed earned the unhappy distinction of being the first American suicide bomber.
⁷⁸

Some fighters were recruited by people directly connected to Al Shabab or al Qaeda. Al Shabab recruiters were able to successfully leverage the involvement of Ethiopian troops working in conjunction with the Somali government to create a narrative of “Crusader” aggression. In this respect, they recreated some of the strengths of the old Soviet jihad recruiting model, in which jihadists lured young men to the battlefield first, then indoctrinated them with radical Islamic ideas in a tightly controlled environment. By the fall of 2010, U.S. intelligence
estimated that several American citizens had risen to senior leadership positions in the organization.
⁷⁹

The Minneapolis community most heavily targeted by Al Shabab recruiters faced a particularly difficult version of the American experience, living in poverty and violence in and around a housing project called Riverside Plaza. Murders and drug violence were endemic, and random death came to both criminals and innocent bystanders. The desire for an escape was understandable. Although life with Al Shabab was hardly an improvement in security, some recruits found that the chance to die for a cause compared favorably with the very real risk of dying for no reason at all.
⁸⁰

While the problem of American ethnic Somalis joining Al Shabab is a serious concern, it's also diagnosable and thus a manageable problem for intelligence and law enforcement (up to a point). But the appeal of Al Shabab didn't stop there. Starting in 2006 and continuing through 2010, an increasingly diverse selection of American Muslims have tried to go to Somalia to take part in jihad.

Jehad Mostafa was an American citizen of Kurdish descent who was raised as a Muslim. He was known as a friendly young man without any particular extremist leanings. A college friend remembered him as an unlikely mujahideen. “I used to tease him that his name was pronounced like ‘jihad,' and I'd say you're named after holy war? He'd say Islam is a religion of peace and love.” He prayed at the Islamic Center of San Diego, one of the locations visited by the September 11 hijackers. He married a Somali woman in about 2005, left the country shortly thereafter, and eventually made his way to Al Shabab.
⁸¹

There were several others (see
chapter 11
), but the most significant player was a Muslim named Omar Hammami, who hailed from the small southern town of Daphne, Alabama.
⁸²

His father was a Syrian Muslim immigrant, and his mother was an American Christian. In high school Hammami had been a gifted student and the class president. Popular and well liked, Hammami showed little interest in his father's religion while growing up, but during his sophomore year, he visited Syria with his father and became enamored of the Muslim culture he saw there. When he returned home, he began a gradual process of conversion.

Hammami eventually adopted the conservative Salafi school of thought. He aggressively pursued
dawah
—calling others to Islam. Not surprisingly, his quest
was not well received in small-town Alabama. Eventually, he moved to Toronto with a childhood friend, Bernard Culveyhouse, who had also converted to Islam, thanks to Hammami's influence.

Surrounded by a much more robust and diverse Muslim community, including a significant number of Somali immigrants, Hammami became more attuned to world events. He eventually grew angry and obsessed with America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as with conspiracy theories about September 11.

Seeking to educate himself about these issues, he discovered the jihadist Internet and began to take a more militant view of his obligations as a Muslim. Unlike many of his American predecessors, Hammami believed that the only true purpose of jihad was to establish an Islamic state.

Hammami met and married a Somali woman, guiding her from a relatively liberal view of Islam into Salafist conservatism and convincing her to wear an
abaya
and a
niqab
, which in combination form a full-body covering, leaving only the eyes visible.

Hammami and Culveyhouse decided that they wanted to study at Egypt's Al Azhar University. They moved to Alexandria briefly, but their applications were rejected, and Culveyhouse became disenchanted with Hammami's increasingly stringent path. He returned to the United States, leaving his friend behind.

Hammami turned to the Web for reinforcement on his journey. He met a kindred spirit online: Daniel Maldonado, an American citizen also living in Egypt.