Jihad Joe
Page 6
In late 1989 the head of the Al Kifah Center, an al Qaeda–linked Egyptian named Mustafa Shalabi, sent an envoy from New York, an Egyptian, to investigate the Rashad Khalifa situation.
The envoy met up with El Hage, who helped him confirm the liberal cleric’s teachings. The envoy went to Masjid Tucson to witness Friday prayers but was turned away because of his long beard, which Khalifa’s followers correctly interpreted as a sign of conservatism. Peering in the windows, the envoy saw that men and women were indeed sitting together.
The man returned to New York to report his findings. The bloody response came within a couple of months. On January 31, 1990, a group of men broke into the Masjid Tucson and stabbed Khalifa repeatedly.6 His body was drenched in a flammable paint thinner. The valves had been opened in a gas stove on the premises, but the fumes had not ignited.7
When asked about the killing years later, El Hage said simply, “I think it was a good thing.” El Hage was investigated but never charged for the murder—in the end, there would be plenty of other things to charge him with. Yet because of El Hage’s involvement, the killing of Rashad Khalifa is considered the first act of al Qaeda–linked violence in the United States.8
Khalifa had already seen how he would die. In September 1989 police in Colorado Springs investigating a series of robberies raided a storage locker being used by members of a radical Islamic fraternity known as Al Fuqra. They found a cache of homemade explosives, military equipment, and training manuals. They also discovered a detailed plan for murdering Rashad Khalifa, including surveillance notes on his movements. The plan was nearly identical to Khalifa’s ultimate fate.9 Police warned the imam of the plot two weeks before he was killed.10
One of the alleged killers, a Trinidadian Muslim who went by the name of Benjamin Phillips, had gotten close to Khalifa by posing as a student. He fled the country and escaped prosecution for nearly 20 years before finally being apprehended.11 Several Al Fuqra members were also convicted of conspiracy in the killing.12
AL FUQRA
It’s hard to imagine how an Islamic sect with a history of extreme violence and dozens of armed compounds all over the United States stays out of the headlines. Yet that is the story of Al Fuqra.
In 1980 a Pakistani sheikh named Mubarek Ali Gilani came to the Yasin Mosque on Herkimer Street in Brooklyn.13 He was looking for men to go to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. Gilani was one of the first non-Afghans to join the battle, but his dream went beyond the conflict with communism.
A mystic and an Islamic faith healer of some renown, Gilani had a vision of a purified Islam, purged in fire and blood, with Muslims being segregated from the world of “kaffirs” (infidels) and living day to day, according to the precepts of their religion.14 His followers referred to themselves as Jamaat al Fuqra—the Society of the Poor. The group later changed its name to the Muslims of the Americas.15
Gilani’s message resonated with African American Muslims, and he began to attract adherents, first in Brooklyn and soon throughout the country, including significant centers of gravity in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. Some of Gilani’s new American recruits were brought to Pakistan to train in insurgent techniques with mujahideen factions fighting India in the disputed border region of Kashmir. American members of Al Fuqra would eventually take part in other jihadist conflicts, from Chechnya to Lebanon.16
Members of the group segregated themselves from Western influences, moving into rural compounds and small private villages in the United States and Canada with names like “Islamberg” and “Islamville.” The group also had outposts in Jamaica and Trinidad.17 Some of the communities aspired to be self-sufficient. Others were financed by “security” firms run by the sect, enterprises that tended to be a mix of bodyguard services and illicit arms trade.18
By the mid-1990s there were about thirty such communities in various parts of the United States, in addition to what investigators called “covert paramilitary training compounds” in several remote locations. Most of these communities still exist today.19
During the group’s thirty-year history, members of Al Fuqra filled a scorecard with crimes of shocking violence, including at least thirty-four incidents that ranged from bombings to kidnappings to murder, but the government has never moved against the group in an organized manner.20
Members of Al Fuqra were threaded through the Brooklyn Muslim community, but they stood apart from the hierarchy of scholars and fighters that was, around the same time, crystallizing at the Al Farook Mosque and the Al Kifah Center. A number of news stories during the 1990s, citing multiple anonymous sources, claimed that Abdullah Rashid, the African American mujahid who almost lost his leg in Afghanistan, was closely linked to Al Fuqra.
Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst who tracked Rashid during the early 1990s, said that Rashid and some of his associates were “at least tangentially involved” in the group. But Tom Corrigan, a member of the New York City Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) who investigated Rashid in the United States, said he wasn’t aware of any connection and that Rashid didn’t seem to know what the group was in a conversation between the two men during the mid-1990s.21
AZZAM’S MAN IN NEW YORK
The murder of Rashad Khalifa was eerily echoed in Brooklyn one year later, but this time the victim was one of the radicals’ own—Mustafa Shalabi, the red-headed American citizen from Egypt who headed the Al Kifah Center.22
Shalabi had worked in Brooklyn as an electrical contractor during the 1980s. Like so many other Americans, he had become entranced with the jihad against the Soviets through the writings and speeches of Abdullah Azzam. Shalabi traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight and help raise funds for the mujahideen. He returned to Brooklyn as Azzam’s trusted lieutenant, in charge of the American Al Kifah operation. His deputies included the imam of Al Farook, Fawaz Damra, and another naturalized Egyptian American, Ali Shinawy, who had come to the United States during the 1970s and worked repairing trains for the New York City Transit Authority.23
In addition to providing Azzam with an operating base in the United States, the Al Kifah Center had quickly evolved into a transit station for the jihad, helping would-be jihadists find transportation and secure visas while providing support for those left behind.
Shalabi was an entrepreneur. In order to support Al Kifah’s operations, he employed a number of for-profit criminal enterprises, including gunrunning, arson for hire, and a counterfeiting ring set up in the basement of the jihad office.24
Al Kifah also provided training for jihadists in the United States, nominally as preparation for Afghanistan. The Calverton gun club visits organized by Pittsburgh transplant El Sayyid Nosair were part of this program, as were the advanced training sessions conducted by Ali Mohamed. All of this activity was undertaken in the service of Azzam. As the 1980s wound to a close, Azzam remained the shining star of the jihadi world.
The war against the Soviets was finally coming to an end, largely due to the efforts of the native Afghan mujahideen. Yet in the wider Muslim world, a healthy dose of spin transformed the victory of the Afghan resistance into a victory for pan-Islamic jihad, the confluence of foreign money and imported Muslim fighters, with Azzam at the center, managing, inspiring, and holding the whole effort together.
The end of the war posed a powerful question, however. Azzam was heir apparent to a substantial fund-raising operation and an army of irregulars who hung on his every word. Where would this army go? The battle over direction raged on two fronts: in Pakistan, where Azzam tussled with his fellow war veterans, and in the United States, where it took a different form.
Although Azzam was the most influential figure in the jihad machine, he was not the only one. Another prominent scholar with a significant following in the United States was an Egyptian named Omar Abdel Rahman. Blind since childhood, Rahman had managed to memorize the entire Koran, an impressive act of scholarship even for the sighted.
He earned a degree from Cairo’s Al Azhar, the most presti
gious Sunni Islamic university in the world, and lectured there on the fundamentals of Islam. He also became embroiled in the seething cauldron of the Islamic movement in Egypt and eventually emerged as a spiritual guide to the Islamic Group and the EIJ organization led by Ayman Al Zawahiri.25
The relationship between Rahman and Zawahiri was close and operational but riddled with rivalry and animosity. At one point, Zawahiri sided with a faction that sought to remove Rahman from his position on the grounds that blindness made him an unfit leader for the jihad. Nevertheless, they were both potent figures who commanded substantial resources, and ultimately an uneasy accommodation was reached. Rahman continued to lead the Islamic Group, while Zawahiri established a branch of EIJ in exile. Each man exerted significant influence within the other’s circles, despite the tensions.26
Rahman was arrested after the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat by EIJ in 1981 and accused of having foreknowledge of the attack and having provided a fatwa to justify the killing on religious grounds. He was acquitted, but Egypt became unfriendly ground for him. Despite his blindness, he made his way to Afghanistan to “see” the war for himself and soon became one of the most vocal supporters of the mujahideen.27
Some people in the United States looked on Rahman favorably because of his support for the CIA-backed jihad in Afghanistan. He made several trips to the United States to raise funds for the mujahideen and call American Muslims to join the fighting, attracting a large number of followers. Although Afghanistan was a strong focus for his speeches, Rahman roused a different sort of inspiration than Azzam and attracted more of a hardcore radical audience.
Azzam, in his rhetoric, had a tendency to lead with the glories of jihad, leveraging the spectacle to introduce ideological aspirations more subtly. His writings and speeches still contained plenty of blood and fire, and his goals were unabashedly those of Islamic supremacism. The Azzam style, however, was to first entice new recruits to Afghanistan to see the miracles and later inculcate them with ideology—that approach had drawn in Loay Bayazid, the mostly secularized Muslim from Kansas City, among others.
If Azzam used jihad as the carrot, for Rahman it was unquestionably the stick. The blind sheikh was more vocally—or at least more visibly—critical of Western and American morals than many of his contemporaries. Yet much of his venom was reserved for Muslim leaders. As the incendiary nature of his rhetoric became clear, Rahman was added to a State Department watch list that barred him from entering the United States.
Soon afterward, he wrote a scathing commentary questioning whether the leaders of Arab countries could be considered Muslims. His arguments were consistent with the radical Islamic movement known as takfir—Arabic for “excommunication”—claiming that only leaders who conformed to the strictest interpretation of Islam should be considered Muslims. Leaders who adopted secular legal systems, instead of shariah law such as the government of Egypt, could legitimately be killed in the name of jihad and “must not remain unopposed even for a moment.”
How could a Muslim be so bold, after all we have seen, as to replace even one part of the Shariah? How could a ruler claim to follow Islam, and still do such a thing? Wouldn’t he be aware that by giving preference to his own legislation over that of Allah he would inevitably have excluded himself from the Islamic Community? [ … ] The common people and their rulers, the educated and the ignorant, the cultured and the illiterate, all agree that these things are fundamental to Islam. Someone who denies any part of this has left Islam, and must perish in the mire of apostasy.28
In April 1989 Rahman was arrested by Egyptian authorities on charges of provoking an antigovernment riot. A few days later, the Islamic Group began to make tentative overtures to the U.S. government, a delicate proposition given American support for Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, an ironclad dictator.
One of Rahman’s disciples secretly came to the U.S. embassy in Cairo and met with State Department diplomats to spin the Islamic Group as a legitimate political organization, rather than a terrorist gang. Rahman, he explained, was innocent of the instigation charge that had been leveled against him, and the group was inclined to work with the government to make Egypt more Islamic and less secular. During the long conversation, the IG operative also assured the diplomats that the blind sheik’s organization had not attacked U.S. citizens, and he dangled the prospect of cooperation with the Americans where mutual interests could be found.29
The embassy officers were intrigued but cautious. The approach seemed like a “desperate outreach effort,” one of them wrote in a cable back to Washington. The Islamic Group operative “has revealed much more than we would have considered prudent. [ … ] We deduced that [name redacted]’s willingness to meet with embassy officers, most recently at the embassy itself, is motivated [by] a desperate hope of securing U.S. ‘support.’”
The meetings apparently took place without the knowledge of U.S. ambassador to Cairo Frank Wisner, who was aware of the Islamic Group as an Egyptian opposition movement involved with the assassination of Sadat. Wisner said he was unaware of the contacts that were being cultivated within the embassy. Any formal asylum request would have had to go to Wisner for his signature, and he said that no such request was ever filed. An embassy official directly involved in the meetings refused to be interviewed for this book.30
A little more than a year after this meeting, in July 1990, Omar Abdel Rahman moved to the United States via a circuitous route from Egypt to Pakistan to Sudan. Despite the presence of his name on a watch list, Rahman’s visa to enter the United States was signed by a CIA officer assigned to the embassy in Khartoum who was pulling duty as a consular officer. The government characterized the decision to allow the visa as a simple oversight. The CIA’s involvement, investigators said, was merely coincidental.31
Even as Rahman’s visa was working its way through the system, the blind sheikh was openly telegraphing his hostile intent toward the United States. In early 1990, Rahman gave a speech in Denmark:
If Muslim battalions were to do five or six operations to the Americans in surprise attacks like the [1983 terrorist bombings] in Lebanon, the Americans would have exited [the Persian Gulf] and gathered their armies and gone back [ … ] to their country.32
POWER STRUGGLE
As Rahman was preparing to leave Egypt, a dramatic development in Pakistan changed the course of the jihad movement with a literal explosion. In the wake of the August 1988 creation of al Qaeda, the unified jihad front created by Azzam started to crumble.
Osama bin Laden wanted to expand the movement into a wide-ranging global jihad with aspirations to reclaim Muslim lands in the Middle East from “corrupt” Muslim rulers, with Egypt near the top of the target list. Included in this global jihad would be Egypt’s most important patron, the United States.
Azzam, by most accounts, had little interest in fighting fellow Muslims, which he saw as counterproductive. His strategic vision for the long term was attuned more toward lands that had historically been Muslim, such as Spain, the Balkans, and especially Palestine, where Muslims faced a clear external enemy in Israel. His short-term strategy was to consolidate his power base in Afghanistan and help stabilize the political situation there in the wake of the Soviets’ departure. To accomplish this, he appealed to the elders of the community.33
The passion of youths might be enough to win a war, but to create an Islamic revolution in Afghanistan required serious thinkers, and Muslims fully committed to the propagation of Islam. Azzam was interested in nation building. In December 1988 Azzam wrote:
It is possible for Muslims to obtain many benefits from the school of the Afghan Jihad. It is also possible for more distinguished models, people with mature abilities and wiser, more mindful propagators to come to the land of jihad. Thousands of such people could bring about a tremendous revolution in the reality of Afghanistan, and in the inhabited regions thereafter. Those thousands may change history.
Mature propagators are still the talk of t
he hour in the Islamic jihad of Afghanistan, and the subject of pressing necessity and glaring need. There are still many solutions which lie in the hands of those who are not playing the roles they should.34
In the months after al Qaeda was established, Azzam used his considerable influence in an effort to seize control of the copious amounts of Saudi money flowing into Peshawar under the pretext of humanitarian relief. He strong-armed former friends, spread nasty rumors about those who didn’t play ball, and even called in favors with bank officials to have strategic accounts frozen. When persuasion and politics failed, he turned to force, sending loyalists to beat his opponents and seize their assets. Yet the al Qaeda faction committed to bin Laden was growing in influence. The Saudi had friends in high places, in Afghanistan and back in Saudi Arabia, where donors were becoming concerned about the infighting and the lack of direction. Azzam was forced to create a committee to explore the possibility of exporting jihad to other fronts around the world.35
In late 1988 Azzam was dragged into arbitration over one of these disputes, involving a project account worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The deck was stacked against him. The chief arbitrator was Sayyid Imam Al Sharif, a legendary jihadist ideologue known best by his pen name, Dr. Fadl. Sharif was an Egyptian, a longtime friend of Zawahiri, and a member of the Islamic Jihad. One of Azzam’s trusted lieutenants, a financier with close ties to bin Laden, testified that Azzam had falsified evidence in the case. In the end, Azzam suffered a humiliating loss; he was ordered to relinquish the funds and return the materials he had seized during the dispute.36
The situation continued to deteriorate. Sometime in 1989 his enemies planted dynamite under the pulpit in a Peshawar mosque where Azzam preached every Friday. That improvised bomb failed to detonate, but the next one succeeded. On November 24, 1989—just days after a contentious meeting about money with bin Laden’s supporters—Azzam’s car was bombed.37