Jihad Joe (5 page)

Rashid did little to refute the “swelled head” theory, inflating his fifteen minutes of fame into an epic tale about a man of consequence.

The word had spread pretty far and wide, who I was and what my experience was, because the videotape went throughout the world. I used to hear from people in Egypt and Yemen, and people coming from Saudi Arabia I never even met would tell me we saw your film. And people who were not Muslims would say we saw your films.
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Although the scope of his stardom was exaggerated, Rashid did achieve a certain notoriety within the growing circle of Americans enamored of jihad. Within days after his release from the hospital, Shalabi gave Rashid a ticket to Boston, where he spoke at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and at other events in the area.

Despite the fairly short and inglorious reality of his mujahid career, word spread around town that “Doctor Rashid” was the real deal, and he would soon find other ways to make himself useful. When Abdullah Azzam next came to America, Rashid and several other members of the Brooklyn community accompanied him on recruiting trips around the United States. Even though the Soviets were now on the run, the Al Kifah operation was still going strong.
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August in Peshawar is hot by any measure, but it's relatively dry and about 20 degrees cooler than the 110-degree days typical of June.

On one such August day in 1988, a small group of Arab men who had fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan gathered in the dusty border town to discuss the future of jihad.

Among those attending were the legendary Abdullah Azzam, father of the global movement to support the Afghanistan jihad; his protégé, Osama bin Laden; and a handful of bin Laden's closest followers. Azzam and bin Laden agreed the time had come to form a new group. The question at hand: what would that group set out to accomplish?
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One man furiously scratched out a few sparse pages of notes to memorialize the meeting. He was known in the room as Abu Rida Al Suri, but his real name was Mohammed Loay Bayazid, and he was an American citizen from Kansas City.

From its very first day, the newly christened group, al Qaeda, would include American citizens at its highest levels.

Bayazid had arrived at this momentous day through Abdullah Azzam. He was born in Syria, and his family moved to the United States while he was in his teens.
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Bayazid was not particularly religious, but he encountered a handout written by Azzam that described miraculous happenings in Afghanistan and decided he had to see for himself.
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Azzam was prone to sweeping and poetic descriptions of the lightly armed and vastly outnumbered mujahideen who were prevailing over elite Russian
soldiers thanks only to their faith in God.
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There were stories about the
shahid
, or martyrs killed in the line of action, whose bodies were said to give off a sweet perfume.
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In 1985 Bayazid decided to fly to Afghanistan and ask questions later. After making contact with Azzam's organization through a phone number printed on the handout, he found himself thrust into a world unimaginably different from his fairly typical American life back in Kansas City. The enormous culture shock dislocated him from his old life.
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Bayazid fought alongside Azzam and later Osama bin Laden during the jihad against the Soviets. Earning bin Laden's trust over time, by 1987 he had been put in charge of managing the Saudi's finances and other war assets. Records maintained by al Qaeda give a glimpse into Bayazid's routine duties—bin Laden fired off memo after memo to the American mujahid, requesting inventories of weapons and instructing him to distribute money and arms to other bin Laden allies.

In the spring of 1987, bin Laden wrote to Bayazid, summoning him from Karachi to take part in a battle against the Soviets. “[I hope] that you move toward us immediately in anticipation of the attack on the Russians as the time has come,” bin Laden wrote. Bayazid was told to research whether bin Laden needed a visa to travel to Yemen, then visit one of bin Laden's sick friends, and then come to the front lines with money and men.
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Bayazid went to meet bin Laden for a strike against an Afghan government installation in Khost, just over the border from Pakistan. When he got there, he found bin Laden ill and the Arabs in disarray. The battle went badly, and the Arab fighters were humiliated in front of their Afghan counterparts. Bin Laden learned from his mistakes, though, and the group did better next time, engaging in more and more ambitious attacks.
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By 1988 bin Laden and Azzam were deep into planning the next phase of the jihad. The war against the Soviets was clearly coming to an end, and the mujahideen were emerging victorious. Yet the Afghan factions were poised to start a bloody civil war over who would run the country when the Soviets left. Azzam wanted the Arab volunteers to stay out of that conflict.

These deliberations set the stage for the August 1988 meeting, recorded by Bayazid.
⁹
The idea was to start a new organization from scratch, or “below zero,” as the American wrote it, but the nature of the organization was a point of
contention. Bin Laden was moving into waters that Azzam saw as extreme, and tension between the two had been building.

“Disagreement is present,” Bayazid noted laconically. Bin Laden had several bullet points he wanted to achieve, which included inserting himself into the struggle for Afghanistan in opposition to local warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, a veteran of the Soviet jihad whom Azzam supported.
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Bin Laden also argued that the jihad organization owed a debt to its Egyptian faction, led by Ayman Al Zawahiri of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whose ultimate goal was to overthrow the Mubarek regime back home and install an Islamic state. Again Azzam pushed back. One year earlier the Palestinian scholar had helped create Hamas.
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Why would the organization tackle Egypt when the Palestinians were suffering under Israeli occupation?

Finally, bin Laden wanted to run the jihad with an open door recruiting policy in order to increase the numbers available for the newly minted al Qaeda. At the time of the meeting, bin Laden had identified a little more than three hundred candidates for specialized training with the new group. Azzam favored a more discriminating approach that would rely on trusted, proven brothers.
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Some days later the conversation resumed. This time the meeting included a core of eight or nine bin Laden loyalists, and Azzam was not invited. The first day was consumed with complaints about Azzam and his organization. On the second day, the conversation turned pragmatic. The men discussed which training camps would be controlled by al Qaeda and how to direct fighters from one to the other, along with the requirements for new members, which included “obedience,” references, and “good manners.”

On the third day, the minutes read, “the work of al Qaeda commenced.”
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Americans were easy to find among the first recruits. Bin Laden seemed strangely enamored of Americans and people who had spent time in the United States, but the first consideration was practical. Someone with a U.S. passport could travel anywhere in the world without arousing suspicion, and bin Laden needed couriers to ferry money and information for his increasingly global operation.
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One of the first American recruits was Wadih El Hage. He must have read the memo about obedience, because on his application to join al Qaeda, he listed as his sole work qualification “carrying out orders.”
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El Hage was born into a Catholic family in Lebanon. They moved to Kuwait when he was two. He learned about Islam as a teenager and converted shortly after he moved to the United States to attend the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1978. El Hage had spent three years involved with the jihad against the Soviet, starting in 1982, when he took a job with the Muslim World League's office in Peshawar. He returned to America in 1985, married an American convert to Islam, and became a U.S. citizen in 1989. After getting married, El Hage took a job directly under Abdullah Azzam in Quetta, Pakistan, starting in 1987.
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In Quetta he met Osama bin Laden, and the following year he applied to join al Qaeda. According to his wife and his attorney, El Hage was never a combatant, and he suffered from a congenitally deformed arm that would have put a crimp in his military aspirations. Nevertheless, his application to join al Qaeda stated that he had been trained on “most types of weapons, mines, explosives and booby traps.”
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Another of Al Qaeda's early members was Jamal Al Fadl, a young Sudanese man who spent time in Saudi Arabia in his youth but was forced to leave after he narrowly escaped being caught smoking pot. He moved to Brooklyn in 1986, where he worked as a grocery bagger and eventually found Allah at the radical Al Farook mosque.
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Al Fadl began to volunteer in his spare time at Abdullah Azzam's Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn. At first, he raised money and recruited members locally. Toward the end of 1988, not long after the founding of al Qaeda, Al Kifah's emir, Mustafa Shalabi, decided it was time for Al Fadl to join the fight. Unlike some other would-be jihadists, Al Fadl got the full ride. Shalabi gave him his ticket and some spending money.

Al Fadl's experience—recounted in noteworthy detail during the 2001 East African Embassy bombings trial—was typical for new recruits in the early days of al Qaeda and bears a strong, noncoincidental resemblance to a cult indoctrination. When he arrived in Peshawar, Al Fadl and several other recruits were taken to a guesthouse and instructed to give up their money, their personal effects, their passports, and even their names. Al Fadl was rechristened Abu Bakr Al Sudani.

With these indoctrination techniques, al Qaeda removed the trappings of the outside world, physically severing new recruits from their previous lives. The method mentally dislocated the recruits and forced them to reorient in a totally
new world. The method had been tested and refined by Azzam's organization on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fighters who went before Al Fadl during the war against the Soviets.

“I went to Afghanistan with a blank mind and a good heart,” Loay Bayazid told journalist Lawrence Wright many years later. “Everything was totally strange. It was like I was born just now, like I was an infant, and I have to learn everything new. It was not so easy after that to leave and go back to your regular life.”
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At the guesthouse, Al Fadl went through two days of basic indoctrination about the concept of jihad and conditions inside Afghanistan. Then he and his fellow recruits were shipped off to an al Qaeda–controlled training camp in Afghanistan. They started with small arms—including the classic terrorist weapon of choice, the Kalashnikov rifle—and rocket-propelled grenades.

This phase of the training lasted forty-five days, then he was sent to another guesthouse inside Afghanistan for ten more days of religious training, some of which was provided by Osama bin Laden himself, who spoke about the obligatory jihad to defend Muslim lands that had been invaded. According to bin Laden, this obligation eclipsed all other obligations, such as family, business, and school, reinforcing the recruits' emotional disconnect from the outside world with a religious dimension.

The third phase was combat. Al Fadl and his fellow recruits spent two months on the front lines, fighting in some of the lingering conflicts with the occupation government and getting involved in the factional disputes that were just starting to crystallize.

After this, the recruits were formally part of the organization. Following a brief leave in Peshawar, Al Fadl was sent to a succession of camps for additional training. He was always on the move and adjusting to new environments while being fed a constant diet of religious indoctrination and being trained in improvised explosives, booby traps, and advanced weaponry.

Al Qaeda's young army of volunteer jihadists came from everywhere in the world, including the United States. Many American volunteers were first- or second-generation immigrants of Arab descent, but not all of them.

Daniel Boyd was one of the recruits who stood out from the crowd, a tall, white American with a baby face and a lion's mane of blond hair, looking
otherworldly in traditional Arab dress and taking the name “Saifullah.”
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Boyd arrived at the tail end of the jihad against the Soviets and managed to log some combat hours before it was over, including an attack on a Russian plane.
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“Man, it hit the ground. It was an ammunition plane,” he told a government informant in 2009. “Son, you had to see the explosion on that thing. Everybody getting down. [ … ] Now that explosion filled the horizon. [ … ] I was high, high, higher.”
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Boyd stayed on for advanced training, spending about three years in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The jihadists he spent time with were closely linked to al Qaeda. He returned home to North Carolina after a run-in with the law in Pakistan, where he had been robbing banks. Although outwardly he seemed to resume a normal life, he was quietly raising a family inculcated with his strict, militaristic reading of Islam, stocking his home with weapons and ammunition for what he saw as his inevitable return to jihad.

“One day,
inshallah
[God willing], Allah's going to put me back. I saw the
deen
[Islamic way of life in practice],” he told some friends, years later. “I saw the
deen
.”
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Another dabbler in jihad was Khaled Ibrahim, an Egyptian-American living in Newark. Ibrahim was moved to join the armed struggle in Afghanistan after hearing a speech by Azzam, but he wanted to be trained before he left. Ibrahim signed up for firearms instruction after seeing a poster at the As-Salaam mosque in Jersey City. That decision brought him into contact with one of the most dangerous operatives in the history of terrorism—Ali Abdelsaoud Mohamed, the most formidable of al Qaeda's Americans.