Jihad Joe (29 page)

The two took a keen interest in Somalia and the activities of the Islamic Courts Union. They were attracted by the ICU's narrative about establishing a pure Islamic state in the war-torn country, the reality of that narrative notwithstanding.
⁸³

The friends agreed to travel to Somalia and join the jihad. Maldonado's quest ended swiftly and ignominiously (see
chapter 11
). Hammami had better luck or maybe more commitment. He managed to work his way in with the Shabab fighters, who were now emerging as heirs to the ICU's jihad.

Hammami wasn't the only foreigner impressed with Shabab. Al Qaeda had taken notice of the group as well. Harun Fazul, Osama bin Laden's top deputy in the Horn of Africa, took an interest in Shabab—and in the young American.

Taking the nom de guerre “Abu Mansour Al Amriki,” Hammami now became fully engaged in Shabab's jihad against Ethiopia and its corresponding reign
of terror over the Somali people. Shabab wasn't only a military operation against the aggressors; it was also establishing a strict shariah code in the country, in the spirit of the worst excesses of the Taliban.

Like al Qaeda, Shabab had established a media division, which was populated largely by Westerners.
⁸⁴
Abu Mansour appeared in a couple of videos with his face covered. In March 2009 he showed his face for the first time in a video titled
Ambush At Bardal
. The video depicted an operation led by Abu Mansour, apparently in command of a small squad that included Somali American mujahideen from Minnesota. In cinema verité style, the camera caught Hammami speaking in hushed tones as his men prepared for action, his accent still containing traces of Alabama, flavored with an Eastern lilt.

We met the enemy,
alhumdillilah
[praise God]. So now, we know, we're not seeing enemies. Right at, at this moment, the enemy's very near, and if we hear that the enemy is moving,
inshallah
[God willing], we'll be able to go and meet him. So, the only reason we're staying here, away from our families, away from the cities, away from, you know, ice, candy bars, all these other things, is because we're waiting to meet with the enemy.
⁸⁵

The video followed Abu Mansour and his fellow jihadists from preparation to after-action in an ambush on Ethiopian troops. After the attack Abu Mansour reported that two of his men were killed. This, he explained, was a good thing.

Our main objective, one of the things that we seek for in this life of ours, is to die as martyrs. So the fact that we got two martyrs, is nothing more than a victory in and of itself.
⁸⁶

Hammami was also shown offering religious instruction to the mujahideen in English and Arabic. The quality of his theology was simplistic—one day of jihad is worth a month of fasting and prayers. Later in the video, Hammami began to sing and chant, accompanied by a rap song by an unnamed performer. Only someone truly committed to the jihad could bear to listen to his attempts to sing for very long.

Blow by blow, year by year,
I'm keeping these kaffirs living in fear.
Night by night, day by day,
Mujahideen spreading all over the place.
Month by month, year by year,
Keeping them kaffirs living in fear.
Blow by blow, crime by crime,
Only gonna add to my venging rhymes.
Bomb by bomb, blast by blast,
Only gonna bring back the glorious past.
⁸⁷

Music is forbidden in Shabab's strict version of Islam, but an exception is made for religiously oriented songs without instrumental accompaniment, called
nasheeds.
Hammami's excruciating singing debut was a big hit with Western jihadists, perhaps due to impaired taste because they were predisposed to be uncomfortable with music. Several follow-up songs were released, featuring other performers speaking, singing, and rapping in American-accented English.

You must make a choice. Are you gonna live like an honorable man, and die like an honorable man, or are you gonna live like a humiliated coward, and die like one?

Somalia is the place,
[Emigrants] from every race base come.
Don't delay.
Come before you're bein' judged on Judgment Day.
Life is rising, surprising.
The [infidels] are high-rising, talking, advising, chastising, advising.
We got a plan finalizing.
Crystallizing, Muslims realizing.
Ain't no disguisin', we're on the horizon.
⁸⁸

The combination of a familiar youth-oriented format with American speakers proved to be a powerful recruiting tool. Additional videos were produced, including one showing Hammami leading an event on behalf of children whose fathers
had died fighting for Shabab. The male children were given toy guns and encouraged to play “mujahideen.”
⁸⁹

Abu Mansour's stock continued to rise with a wider and more diverse audience, thanks to the influence of online American friends such as Daniel Maldonado. Somalia was fast becoming a cause célèbre for a new breed of jihadist recruits.

Perhaps no case illustrates the incredible diversity of the American jihadist community better than the story of Colleen LaRose, better known as “Jihad Jane.”

Jihad is mostly a boy's game, both in the United States and abroad. From time to time, jihadist organizations will trumpet the formation of a women's brigade, equipped with Kalashnikovs and modest, body-covering uniforms, but these are the exception rather than the rule. A handful of women have also volunteered as suicide bombers, mostly to exploit the security hole created by expectations that a terrorist will be male. In the United States, women jihadists have mostly been confined to the sidelines, raising small amounts of money for groups like Al Shabab and providing moral support to jihadist husbands.
⁹⁰

So when a blue-eyed, blonde woman from Pennsylvania emerged as an accused terrorist, it made headlines across the country. Colleen LaRose was born in 1963 and lived a life “like a country music song,” as one investigator told the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
She grew up in Texas, married at sixteen, divorced, married again eight years later, then divorced again. Her life was dotted with fights, drunken escapades, bad checks, and at least one suicide attempt.
⁹¹

Moving to Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, in 2002, she continued to struggle with her inner demons, finally converting to Islam late in life with little fanfare. She didn't stop drinking and brawling, but she did start surfing the Web. Her Internet postings—under the username “JihadJane”—were a strange combination of love and hate. On the one hand, she was desperately seeking a Muslim husband (unbeknownst to her live-in boyfriend in Pennsburg), but on the other, she steadily posted scenes of jihadist violence on YouTube.
⁹²

Through connections made online, LaRose met like-minded people in Europe and Asia. One of them promised to marry her if she just took care of one little task—find and kill a Swedish cartoonist whose work had been deemed offensive to Islam. In August 2009, investigators alleged, LaRose flew to Sweden and began
stalking the cartoonist but did not complete her mission. When she returned to the United States in October, she was arrested.
⁹³

One of LaRose's online correspondents was Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, an American woman from Colorado. Paulin-Ramirez had converted to Islam after learning about it online. Using e-mail and chat, she communicated with Muslim men in Europe, hiding her interactions from her family.

LaRose encouraged the Colorado woman to join her for terrorist training in Europe. On September 11, 2009, with her six-year-old son in tow, Paulin-Ramirez got on a plane and flew to Europe. Two days later, she married one of the men she had met online. With her new husband and several other men allegedly linked to the Sweden plot, she moved to Ireland.

In March 2010 investigators in the United States and Europe, following leads from the LaRose investigation, arrested four men and three women in rural Ireland for complicity in the assassination scheme. Paulin-Ramirez was pregnant when she was returned to American soil and indicted.
⁹⁴
LaRose pleaded guilty to her role in the assassination plot in early 2011. As of this writing, Paulin-Ramirez was awiting trial.

LaRose and Paulin-Ramirez were extremely unusual examples of women involved in operational terrorism, but the manner in which they were radicalized has become disturbingly common. Although American Muslims have made great strides in driving radical recruiters out of bricks-and-mortar mosques, on the Internet, extreme forms of Islam are only a click away.

The jihad movement is fueled by propaganda. In the earliest days, it was mostly ephemeral— flyers, newsletters, short handouts, and live English translations of speeches by jihadist figures visiting the United States.

Over time, more sophisticated products began to emerge, including
Al Jihad
magazine from Abdullah Azzam's Services Bureau, the
Al Hussam
newsletter, and the
Islam Report
(see chapter 5). Many of these publications fell by the wayside, due in part to shifting tolerances among American Muslims, as well as the arrest and incarceration of the publishers. By September 11 a significant amount of jihadist propaganda already had moved online; this accelerated after the attack.

For many years jihadists' use of the Internet and computer technology had tracked closely with the wider world's. Some specific organizations, including al Qaeda, were early adopters, keeping digitized records on computers and using e-mail to communicate by the mid-1990s.

After September 11 and even more after the invasion of Iraq, terrorists began to use the Internet in increasingly innovative ways. The decentralized nature of the Internet offered terrorist leaders real promise as a way to bypass the media and distribute their message on a global scale, far more affordably than through traditional print media. The
Al Hussam
newsletter ran upward of $1,000 per month to publish and distribute.
¹
In contrast, a website might cost only a few hundred dollars per year.

For a time, a number of terrorist and jihadist organizations tried to maintain traditional static websites, but starting around 2003, and corresponding to a rise
in social media generally, online message boards and forums became the dominant outlet for jihadist talk and propaganda. When a server was knocked offline, the forum's database could be restored quickly on a new site.

The forums also had a democratizing effect on the jihad movement, allowing the audience to participate and bring their own thoughts and opinions to the table. Would-be jihadists and curiosity-seekers could interact directly with leaders of terrorist and jihadist organizations, asking questions, having their dreams interpreted, and requesting fatwas to reinforce their intentions.

Some interesting personalities have emerged over the course of the online jihad, and a smaller percentage of these figures have become involved in more than talk. Terrorism expert Jarret Brachman coined the term “jihobbyist” for those who engage in jihad talk online without taking direct action to become involved in violence. But jihobbyism has increasingly emerged as a gateway to violent action.

It's important to understand the following case studies in context. None of the figures profiled here have a particularly large following or any real credibility as scholars, religious leaders, or fighters. They tend to orbit around more established authority figures, such as Anwar Awlaki or Jamaican cleric Abdullah Al Faisal. They are fringe personalities within American Islam and even within the jihadist movement itself. They are symptoms rather than causes.

But they are not insignificant. They reflect and sometimes amplify and interpret the views of real opinion leaders and are themselves candles around which lesser moths may flit. They are the loudest voices in an angry mob. As such, they help make the mob sound louder and look angrier.

Perhaps most important, they tend to disclose a lot of information about themselves, from which we can learn. They provide a window into what attracts Americans to radical beliefs, and when they move from jihobbyism to jihadism, they leave a trail we can follow.

After September 11, “official” websites for the Taliban and other jihadist outlets in the West were among the first casualties of the war on terror. One of the most prominent, Azzam.com, was shut down and its London-based operator arrested.
²

The change in jihad media during the last decade reflects the change in the broader media. Organizational strength has been eroded by Web 2.0—media
outlets are more disjointed, and individual voices can be dramatically amplified. Most jihadist organizations online have abandoned static websites in favor of anonymously administrated Web forums that allow for “official” announcements, along with direct user interaction.

Any Internet user with average to high skills can create an online message board quickly and with relative anonymity. Visitors to the site can read messages or register as users to post their own comments, news, or files. A host of jihadist and jihad-accepting forums have sprung up since September 11, most of which are strictly fan sites. A smaller number of these forums operate with the direct involvement of active jihadists such as al Qaeda, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Shabab, the Taliban, Chechen mujahideen, and so on.

In addition to hosting conversations by individuals around the world who are interested in jihad, these officially sanctioned forums—usually run by noncombatants in nonconflict zones—frequently post official communications from their affiliated groups. This allows readers to feel confident that they are reading authentic messages from jihadist figures, who range from the famous to the obscure.

The top-tier forums have password-protected sections that active jihadists can use to communicate and where those who are interested in moving from talk to action can contact jihadists abroad and sometimes arrange to join them.