The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  Noting a British estimate that 9/11 cost al-Qaeda five hundred thousand dollars, bin Laden said: “Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs. As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.… And it all shows that the real loser is you. It is the American people and their economy.… So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future.”3

  But why did al-Qaeda want to bring America down? In the November 24, 2002, “Letter to the American People” that bore his name, bin Laden explained: “Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.”4 That stated neatly the requirements of defensive jihad, but the overarching goal of jihad warfare remained: the war against the United States would not end with the U.S.’ ceasing to attack the Muslims; it would end only with the submission of the United States to the warriors of jihad, as bin Laden stated succinctly: “The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.”5

  Other al-Qaeda plotters involved in planning the September 11 attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, issued a statement in 2009 that explicitly grounded their actions in Islamic religious terms: the very motive that neither the media nor the government showed any inclination of wanting to acknowledge or examine. The statement was even entitled “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations.”

  “Many thanks to God,” they wrote about the attacks, “for his kind gesture, and choosing us to perform the act of Jihad for his cause and to defend Islam and Muslims. Therefore, killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion. These actions are our offerings to God. In addition, it is the imposed reality on Muslims in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, in the land of the two holy sites [Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia], and in the rest of the world, where Muslims are suffering from your brutality, terrorism, killing of the innocent, and occupying their lands and their holy sites.”

  They emphasized, however, that this was not solely a response to American attacks. It stemmed ultimately from the fact that the United States was not an Islamic polity: “Nevertheless, it would have been the greatest religious duty to fight you over your infidelity. However, today, we fight you over defending Muslims, their land, their holy sites, and their religion as a whole.”6

  Denial

  Despite the open avowals of the perpetrators, one of the most controverted aspects of the September 11 attacks became the question of whether or not they had anything to do with Islam and jihad. The foremost personage to deny the connection was the putative leader of the free world. On September 17, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush appeared at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., in the company of several prominent Muslim leaders, and said:

  These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.

  The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.

  The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.

  When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that’s made brothers and sisters out of every race—out of every race.7

  As Americans still searched the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center for the remains of their loved ones, President Bush cautioned Americans against thinking ill of Muslims, as if the 9/11 attacks had been perpetrated by Americans targeting Muslims:

  America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.

  Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes. Moms who wear cover must be not intimidated in America. That’s not the America I know. That’s not the America I value.

  I’ve been told that some fear to leave; some don’t want to go shopping for their families; some don’t want to go about their ordinary daily routines because, by wearing cover, they’re afraid they’ll be intimidated. That should not and that will not stand in America.

  Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.

  This is a great country. It’s a great country because we share the same values of respect and dignity and human worth. And it is my honor to be meeting with leaders who feel just the same way I do. They’re outraged, they’re sad. They love America just as much as I do.8

  Muslims were not being subjected to wholesale vigilante attacks in the United States, at that time or at any point subsequently. This speech was an exercise in vassalage that would have made the late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century Byzantine emperors ashamed, yet Bush was by no means alone. Political leaders all over the West echoed his words about Islam’s being a religion of peace, having nothing to do with terrorism. After September 11, this became a commonplace of the Western political discourse, rejected only by a small minority, who were quickly stigmatized as cranks.

  The Saudi Involvement in September 11

  Why Bush turned so quickly after the September 11 attacks to dissembling about their motivating ideology remains a mystery, but the best explanation for it remains Saudi influence in Washington, including within his administration itself.

  For many years this involvement was concealed. The twenty-eight-page section of the 9/11 report detailing Saudi involvement in the September 11, 2001, jihad attacks was finally released in July 2016 (albeit with substantial portions redacted), and made it clear why one president who held hands with the Saudi king (George W. Bush) and another who bowed to him (Barack Obama) worked so hard for so many years to keep these pages secret: they confirmed that the 9/11 jihad murderers received significant help from people at the highest levels of the Saudi government.9

  The report states that Omar al-Bayoumi, who “may be a Saudi intelligence officer,” gave “substantial assistance to hijackers Khalid al-Mindhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi after they arrived in San Diego in February 2000.10 Al-Bayoumi met the hijackers at a public place shortly after his meeting with an individual at the Saudi consulate.”11 Around the same time, al-Bayoumi “had extensive contact with Saudi Government establishments in the United States and received financial support from a Saudi company affiliated with the Saudi Ministry of Defense.”12 That company “reportedly had ties to [O]sama bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida.”13 The Saudis also gave al-Bayoumi 400,000 dollars to finance the construction of a mosque in San Diego.14

  Another possible Saudi agent, Osama Bassnan, who “has many ties to the Saudi government” and was also a supporter of Osama bin Laden, boasted that he did more for al-Mindhar and al-Hamzi than al-Bayoumi did.15 He also “reportedly received funding and possibly a fake passport from Saudi government officials.”16 The report says that at one point, “a member of the Saudi Royal Family provided Bassnan with a significant amount of cash,” and that “he and his wife have received financial support from the Saudi ambassador to the United States and his wife.”17 That ambassador was Prince Bandar, about whom The New York Times later noted: “No foreign dip
lomat has been closer or had more access to President Bush, his family and his administration than the magnetic and fabulously wealthy Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia.”18

  Bassnan “spoke of bin Laden ‘as if he were a god.’ Bassnan also stated to an FBI asset that he heard that the U.S. government had stopped approving visas for foreign students. He considered such measures to be insufficient as there are already enough Muslims in the United States to destroy the United States and make it an Islamic state within ten to fifteen years.”19

  Then there was Shaykh al-Thumairy, “an accredited diplomat at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles and one of the ‘imams’ at the King Fahad mosque in Culver City, California,” who also “may have been in contact” with al-Mindhar and al-Hamzi.20

  Saleh al-Hussayen, “reportedly a Saudi Interior Ministry official, stayed at the same hotel in Herndon, Virginia where al-Hazmi was staying. While al-Hussayen claimed after September 11 not to know the hijackers, FBI agents believed he was being deceptive. He was able to depart the United States despite FBI efforts to locate and re-interview him.”21

  The name of “another Saudi national with close ties to the Saudi Royal Family” was redacted, but the report notes that he was “the subject of FBI counterterrorism investigations and reportedly was checking security at the United States’ southwest border in 1999 and discussing the possibility of infiltrating individuals into the United States.”22 There is no telling who this could have been, but Prince Bandar’s unlisted phone number turned up in a phone book of Abu Zubaida, “a senior al-Qa’ida operative captured in Pakistan in March 2002.”23 Abu Zubaida also had the number of “a bodyguard at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC.”24

  The report also mentions a CIA memorandum that “discusses alleged financial connections between the September 11 hijackers, Saudi Government officials, and members of the Saudi Royal Family.”25 This memorandum was passed on to an FBI investigator; yet “despite the clear national implications of the CIA memorandum, the FBI agent included the memorandum in an individual case file and did not forward it to FBI Headquarters.”26 Why?

  The declassified twenty-eight pages also revealed a great deal about Saudi mosque financing inside the United States. The King Fahad mosque in Culver City, California, “was built in 1998 from funding provided by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdelaziz. The mosque is reportedly attended by members of the Saudi consultant in Los Angeles and is widely recognized for its anti-Western views,” and is a “site of extremist-related activity.”27 In fact, “several subjects of FBI investigations prior to September 11 had close connections to the mosque and are believed to have laundered money through this mosque to non-profit organizations overseas affiliated with [O]sama bin Ladin. In an interview, an FBI agent said he believed that Saudi government money was being laundered through the mosque.”28

  David D. Aufhauser, a former Treasury Department general counsel, told a Senate committee in June 2004 that estimates of how much money the Saudis had spent worldwide since the 1970s to promote Wahhabism went “north of seventy-five billion dollars.” The money went to mosques, Islamic centers, Islamic schools, Islamic preachers, and the printing of hundreds of millions of copies of the Qur’an and other Islamic religious books.29

  Terrorism expert Yehudit Barsky noted in 2005: “The people now in control of teaching religion [to American Muslims] are extremists. Who teaches the mainstream moderate non-Saudi Islam that people used to have? It’s in the homes, but there’s no infrastructure. Eighty percent of the infrastructure is controlled by these extremists.”30 Nor was this happening in the United States alone. In December 2015, German vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel declared: “We have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over. Wahhabi mosques all over the world are financed by Saudi Arabia. Many Islamists who are a threat to public safety come from these communities in Germany.”31

  Seven years after the September 11 attacks, a U.S. government cable noted: “Government and non-governmental sources claimed that financial support estimated at nearly 100 million USD annually was making its way to Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith clerics in the region from ‘missionary’ and ‘Islamic charitable’ organizations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates ostensibly with the direct support of those governments.”32 The Deobandi was a Sunni revivalist movement found primarily in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh; the Ahl-e-Hadith was another revivalist movement based in India. As we have seen throughout Islamic history, revivalist movements quite frequently resort to jihad.

  The following year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s office noted:

  While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) takes seriously the threat of terrorism within Saudi Arabia, it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority. Due in part to intense focus by the USG over the last several years, Saudi Arabia has begun to make important progress on this front and has responded to terrorist financing concerns raised by the United States through proactively investigating and detaining financial facilitators of concern. Still, donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.… [M]ore needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources, often during Hajj and Ramadan. In contrast to its increasingly aggressive efforts to disrupt al-Qa’ida’s access to funding from Saudi sources, Riyadh has taken only limited action to disrupt fundraising for the UN 1267-listed Taliban and LeT-groups that are also aligned with al-Qa’ida and focused on undermining stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan.33

  In an October 2013 speech, Clinton declared: “Some of us thought, perhaps, we could, with a more robust, covert action trying [sic] to vet, identify, train and arm cadres of rebels that would at least have the firepower to be able to protect themselves against both Assad and the Al-Qaeda-related jihadist groups that have, unfortunately, been attracted to Syria. That’s been complicated by the fact that the Saudis and others are shipping large amounts of weapons—and pretty indiscriminately—not at all targeted toward the people that we think would be the more moderate, least likely, to cause problems in the future, but this is another one of those very tough analytical problems.”34

  But there was still no hint of a rift in the U.S.–Saudi alliance. It was a tough analytical problem because the United States, even as it faced a comprehensive jihad challenge, was politically and economically entangled with one of the chief financiers of the jihad. But no Washington analysts appeared willing to ponder the implications of that, or to try to devise ways to extricate the nation from this conundrum.

  And when there was a regime change in Washington and Donald Trump became president of the United States, he did the sword dance in Riyadh with Saudi royals.

  The Iranian Involvement in 9/11

  Less noted but no less significant is the Islamic Republic of Iran’s role in the September 11 attacks—also a subject of U.S. government cover-up attempts.35

  On December 22, 2011, U.S. District judge George B. Daniels ruled in Havlish, et al. v. bin Laden, et al., that Iran and Hizballah were liable for damages to be paid to relatives of the victims of the September 11, 2001, jihad attacks in New York and Washington, as both the Islamic Republic and its Lebanese proxy had actively aided al-Qaeda in planning and executing those attacks.36

  Daniels found that Iran and Hizballah had cooperated and collaborated with al-Qaeda before 9/11 and continued to do so after the attacks.

  Before 9/11, Iran and Hizballah were implicated in efforts to train al-Qaeda members to blow up large buildings—resulting in the bombings of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.37

  Shortly after the Cole
attack, the 9/11 jihad plot began to come together—and Iran was involved. Former MOIS operative Abolghasem Mesbahi, a defector from Iran, testified that during the summer of 2001, he received messages from Iranian government officials regarding a plan for unconventional warfare against the U.S., entitled “Shaitan dar Atash” (“Satan in Flames”).38

  “Satan in Flames” was the elaborate plot to hijack three passenger jets, each packed full of people, and crash them into American landmarks: the World Trade Center, which jihadis took to be the center of American commerce; the Pentagon, the center of America’s military apparatus; and the White House.39

  A classified National Security Agency analysis referred to in the 9/11 Commission report reveals that eight to ten of the 9/11 hijackers traveled to Iran repeatedly in late 2000 and early 2001. The 9/11 Commission called for a U.S. government investigation into Iran’s role in 9/11, but none was ever undertaken. Kenneth R. Timmerman of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran was, in his words, “engaged by the Havlish attorneys in 2004 to carry out the investigation the 9/11 Commission report called on the U.S. government to handle.”40

  Timmerman noted that during the 9/11 hijackers’ trips to Iran, they were “accompanied by ‘senior Hezbollah operatives’ who were in fact agents of the Iranian regime.”41 Iranian border agents did not stamp their passports, so that their having been inside the Islamic Republic would not arouse suspicion against them when they entered the United States.42