Jihad Joe

by J. M. Berger

  The founding father of the Afghan Jihad had been assassinated, quite possibly by one of his former friends. Exactly who did it remains unknown to this day. There were a multitude of suspects, including the CIA and the Mossad, but Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri certainly had means, motive, and opportunity.38

  Whoever was responsible, bin Laden took advantage of the situation and began to consolidate his control of the Afghan fund-raising apparatus. In subsequent issues of Al Jihad magazine, which Azzam had founded, the father of the Afghan jihad’s history was rewritten to tell the tale of his support for the global jihad. His death was portrayed as having united the fractious mujahideen factions in Afghanistan—their continued internecine bloodshed notwithstanding.39

  Back in Brooklyn, Mustafa Shalabi was caught in the middle of this breaking storm. Although he had long-standing ties to Zawahiri and kept an open channel with bin Laden, he wanted Al Kifah to continue in the direction Azzam had started, specifically by cultivating the Afghan refugees and working to consolidate Afghanistan as a base for future operations.40

  Things got worse when Omar Abdel Rahman arrived in New York. Shalabi and El Sayyid Nosair picked up Rahman at the airport when he arrived in 1990. Nosair smelled trouble immediately.

  “Each one of them has a different view for the Islamic war,” Nosair told a friend. “They are going to have a clash someday.” Nosair wanted to stay out of it.41

  Although Azzam’s rhetoric was sometimes harsh and always focused on jihad, he was also inspiring and gregarious, offering his vision with a wide smile and a sense of humor. Rahman was an entirely different sort of figure, perpetually angry, delivering fiery speeches that skewed heavily toward the negative. His ambitions went well beyond reclaiming historically Muslim lands. He was intensely focused on expanding the reach of Islam, and anyone who was not with him was against Islam.

  The obligation of Allah is upon us to wage jihad for the sake of Allah. It is one of the obligations that we must undoubtedly fulfill. And we conquer the lands of the infidels and we spread Islam by calling the infidels to Allah. And if they stand in our way, then we wage jihad for the sake of Allah.42

  The dark tenor of Rahman’s rhetoric began to inspire dark thoughts in his followers. Nosair was especially captivated by Rahman’s increasingly violent message. His son, Zak Ebrahim, described one Friday service during a speech against violence delivered in 2010:

  [Rahman] began his khutba, or oration, and I sat there trying my best to mimic my father as he listened intently to his words. That day, the sheikh argued that Western culture was corrupting Muslims all over the world, that the consequences of American democracy were materialism, sexual perversion and idolatry, meant to distract believers from the true word of God, laying blame for the Muslim world’s ills on many of the same groups that Jerry Falwell blamed for 9/11: pagans, feminists and gays. But the sheikh saved his most venomous words for those of the Jewish faith.

  On the drive home that afternoon, I wondered to myself, “What made the sheikh and his followers so intensely devout?” I asked my father, “When did you become such a ‘good’ Muslim?” and he replied, “When I came to this country and I saw everything that was wrong with it.” And in that instant, I recognized the same look on his face that I had seen on the sheikh.43

  Nosair wasn’t content with ideology. On November 5, 1990, he shot and killed Meir Kahane, a radical Jewish leader, during a conference for a Zionist group at the New York Marriott East Side. The controversial founder of the Jewish Defense League, a terrorist organization based in New York, Kahane had an FBI file more than a foot thick. A rabid, over-the-top Zionist and a member of the Israeli parliament, he was considered a racist and an extremist by most Israelis, let alone by anyone else.44

  After Kahane’s speech, Nosair, wearing a skullcap to appear Jewish, approached Kahane and extended his hand. When Kahane reached to return the handshake, Nosair shot him in the neck with a .357 magnum handgun. Kahane died at the hospital a short while later.

  “The son of a bitch killed the Rabbi,” someone yelled. “See if you can catch him!” “Stop, murderer!” shouted another. Nosair shot one bystander fleeing the room, then shot an off-duty postal inspector while trying to escape. Unfortunately for the assassin, the inspector was wearing a bulletproof vest and returned fire, taking Nosair down.45

  Nosair lay on the ground with his arms outstretched and a smile on his face. If he was dreaming that he had achieved martyrdom, he was destined to be disappointed. The killer was taken to the hospital and soon recovered.46

  Investigators hauled boxes of documents out of Nosair’s apartment. Most were in Arabic, but the stash included military training manuals and documents given to Nosair by Sergeant Ali Mohamed, the jihadist mole at Fort Bragg. The material went into storage without close examination. The NYPD’s chief of detectives decreed that Nosair had acted alone.47

  Kahane was widely loathed by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In a room full of people, no one had gotten a good-enough look to clearly identify Nosair as the man who fired the killing shot. Between those who didn’t think he was guilty and those who didn’t mind if he was, Nosair became a local hero, especially among the more radical segment of the Muslim community.

  Supporters showed up at his hearings and trial proceedings in large and often loud numbers. The hat was passed, and money was raised. One large contribution to Nosair’s defense fund came from abroad—Osama bin Laden sent $20,000 for the cause.48

  Because of the lack of eyewitnesses, Nosair was acquitted of murder and escaped life in prison, but he went to jail on a handgun charge. Crowds cheered outside the courtroom when the verdict was announced. Later, Nosair would receive a stream of visitors in prison, including many of his friends in the blind sheikh’s circles.

  In this air of increasing violence, Mustafa Shalabi tried to make things work with the blind sheikh. He helped Rahman get an apartment in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn. He hosted gatherings at his home, where he introduced Rahman to his circle of followers. Some of them swore bayat—an oath of allegiance—to the sheikh. An Egyptian named Abdo Haggag entered the inner circle, serving as Rahman’s speechwriter. Unlike his peers, Haggag found Rahman to be a hypocrite and eventually turned against him, spying on Rahman for the Egyptian government and (much later) becoming a cooperating witness for the United States.49

  The conflict that had played out in Afghanistan between bin Laden and Azzam was repeating itself in Brooklyn through their respective proxies. Rahman was involved with bin Laden. It’s not entirely clear how solid that relationship was, but it was strong enough that bin Laden sent several $5,000 payments to help cover Rahman’s living expenses in the United States.50

  Shalabi was sitting on a significant amount of money, at least tens of thousands of dollars, and some reports put the total as high as $2 million. Rahman wanted the money for the global jihad, including Egypt specifically, but with an eye toward a widening conflict that would soon encompass the United States. Shalabi remained focused on Azzam’s vision—Afghanistan first and the rest of the world later.51

  Shalabi had also taken money out of the center and opened a shop, with the apparent intention of rolling the profits back into the jihad. Yet questions about Shalabi’s honesty had persisted for years, and some called this theft. In a 1989 memo sent to Al Kifah officers in the United States and abroad, Fawaz Damra, one of the founders of the Brooklyn office, accused Shalabi of embezzling $1 million from the center.52

  Damra was forced out of his post as imam of the Al Farook Mosque and sent into exile in Ohio. Omar Abdel Rahman replaced him, but he, too, began to bitterly criticize Shalabi, first for his handling of Al Kifah’s funds and then for his religious inadequacy. The two issues were inextricably linked, as far as the sheikh was concerned, and both were matters of life and death.

  Rahman did not enjoy unequivocal support from the community. Al Farook members suspected that he himself was funneling Al Kifah funds for his own purposes, such as sup
porting his family back in Egypt. Shalabi again won the power struggle, and Rahman was dismissed from his duties at Al Farook. Unlike Damra, however, he would not go quietly.53

  Rahman’s loyalists began a whisper campaign against Shalabi that soon grew to a roar. They passed pamphlets around the community warning local Muslims not to trust their money to the Al Kifah Center.

  At the beginning of 1991, the tide began to turn against Shalabi. Fearing for his life, he called Ali Mohamed, the jihadist Special Forces sergeant who worked for Ayman Al Zawahiri, and asked him to take Shalabi’s wife and son to the airport, where they flew back to Egypt. Shalabi intended to leave the country himself within a few days, but his time had run out.54

  Enter Wadih El Hage, the al Qaeda member from Tucson who had been mysteriously linked to the brutal killing of liberal imam Rashad Khalifa little more than a year earlier.

  According to El Hage, Shalabi called the Arizona Muslim and invited him to New York to look after the Al Kifah office while Shalabi flew to Pakistan, possibly to make his case with what remained of Abdullah Azzam’s organization back in Peshawar.55

  On March 1 neighbors found Shalabi dead in his South Brooklyn apartment, a stain of dried blood beneath him. His death had been extraordinarily violent—he had been shot in the face but somehow survived and tried to fight back against his killers, who then stabbed him to death.56

  The investigation into Shalabi’s assassination was hampered by the standards of the day. At the time, both the NYPD and the FBI were prohibited from conducting investigations predicated on religion. Although Shalabi’s killing had clear connections to his religious community, investigators weren’t even allowed to use the word “Muslim” in their reports.57

  Within the local Muslim community, rumors flew hard and fast. Some said the CIA had killed Shalabi; others suggested a Jewish conspiracy. In 2005 New York City detectives extracted a confession that confirmed what had long been suspected: the killing was carried out by the increasingly fanatical followers of Omar Abdel Rahman. According to the confession, three men, all American citizens, took part in the murder—Bilal Alkaisi, Mohammed Salameh, and Nidal Ayyad. None were ever prosecuted for the crime.58

  As in the Khalifa case, El Hage told investigators he knew nothing about the murder. He claimed that Shalabi had failed to pick him up at the airport as they had arranged, and he had hitched a ride with another Al Kifah official, only to hear about the murder days later.59

  With Shalabi out of the way, there were few personalities who could draw focus away from the blind sheikh, and the local jihadists either lined up in his camp or dropped out altogether. Rahman had a galvanizing effect on the Brooklyn jihadists who, under Shalabi, had mostly confined themselves to training on weekends.

  “He was like a major league ballplayer that wound up playing in a minor-league stadium. He made everybody else around him better,” said Tom Corrigan, an NYPD detective who worked with FBI agents on New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), which had taken an interested in Rahman’s circle after the Kahane killing.60

  The energy generated by Rahman was building to a peak. Shalabi’s killers were not sated; they desired more violence and were now plotting as a terrorist cell.

  Goaded by Nosair, whom they had visited in prison, Salameh and Ayyad settled on the strategy of bombing Jewish targets in New York City. Alkaisi, a Palestinian American who had trained in explosives in Afghanistan, broke with the group after an argument over money. The remaining plotters now lacked expertise.61

  The cell sought help from overseas, and in September 1992 Ramzi Yousef and Ahmad Ajaj flew into New York City from Peshawar, Pakistan.62

  Yousef, a Pakistani, was an explosives genius who had refined his craft at Khaldan, an al Qaeda training camp in the vicinity of Khost, Afghanistan, and at the University of Dawa and Jihad in Pakistan. He spent several months shuttling between Khost and Peshawar, extending his own knowledge to others. Ajaj was one of his students.

  At the camps, Yousef, Ajaj, and unknown accomplices had been discussing a plot to bomb the World Trade Center in New York. When Salameh’s cell called for help, it was the perfect opportunity to make his scheme a reality.63

  Investigators do not know exactly how the New York conspirators managed to secure Yousef’s participation in the plot, but several of the New York plotters— including Salameh, Ayyad, and Egyptian immigrant Mahmud Abouhalima—had been trained by Ali Mohamed, al Qaeda’s mole at Fort Bragg.64

  Mohamed was in Afghanistan when the connection was made, training al Qaeda commanders in military tactics while working on his Encyclopedia of Jihad. For the flight to America, Ajaj had packed a collection of terrorist and military manuals in Arabic and English. The books were virtually identical to those Mohamed had given Nosair in New Jersey a few years earlier.65

  Was Mohamed the link between the New York cell and Ramzi Yousef? The evidence is lacking, but the circumstantial case is intriguing.

  “That would make more sense than anything I’ve heard before,” said Corrigan, the JTTF investigator, when asked whether Mohamed could have arranged for Yousef to join the cell. On the other hand, Andrew McCarthy, a federal prosecutor who investigated Ali Mohamed and convicted Omar Abdel Rahman, argues there is “not a shred of evidence” that Mohamed had any prior knowledge of the World Trade Center bombing. Without new evidence, the issue must remain in the realm of speculation.66

  Yousef took command of Salameh’s cell. The conspirators included Abouhalima, Ayyad, and Abdul Rahman Yasin, an American citizen of Iraqi descent born in Bloomington, Indiana, and raised in Iraq. He returned to the United States in 1992 to join family members living in New Jersey. Yasin had been living on welfare when he encountered Yousef, who was renting an apartment downstairs from him. Eyad Ismoil, a Jordanian in the United States on a visa, joined the plot late, as a driver.67

  With Yousef’s arrival, the plans rapidly moved into high gear. Under Yousef’s expert supervision, the crew built a devastating and sophisticated truck bomb. Salameh rented the truck, and Ismoil drove it into position—a parking garage under the World Trade Center. Shortly after noon on February 26, 1993, Yousef used a cigarette lighter to ignite a simple fuse. It took twelve minutes to burn down.

  The explosion left a crater one hundred feet wide, gouging a hole in the building several stories deep and several more high. The epicenter was the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Flames and fumes shot up through the building. People who weren’t trapped soon poured out of the building, panicstricken and covered in soot. More than a thousand people were injured, some seriously, with crushed limbs, fractured skulls, burns, and bleeding wounds. Six died almost instantly.

  It was a stunning act of terrorism and mass murder but less than Yousef had desired. His plan was that the explosion would topple one of the towers onto the other, killing thousands.68

  Ajaj, who had traveled to the United States with Yousef, was already in prison on immigration charges. Salameh was arrested when he tried to recover the deposit on the rental truck used in the attack. Ayyad was next. Yousef, Yasin, and Abouhalima fled the country. Abouhalima was soon captured in Egypt and returned to the United States for trial. Yousef would remain free for two years before being captured in Pakistan. Yasin was detained in Iraq for years. His current whereabouts are unknown. Except for Yasin, everyone in the cell was eventually convicted for the bombing, and all are in prison today.69

  Investigators knew that Salameh and Ayyad were followers of Omar Abdel Rahman, and they began to increase their scrutiny of the blind sheikh’s other followers. What they found was a second wave in the making, an even more ambitious plan to wreak havoc on New York, camouflaged by the jihadists’ new cause: the genocidal war raging in Bosnia.

  4

  Project Bosnia

  When he was in high school, Dennis Philips fronted a rock band emulating Jimi Hendrix.

  Philips was Jamaican by birth, but his Protestant parents had moved to Canada when he was very young, and th
at was the culture he knew. Caught up in the turmoil of the sixties, Philips dropped out of college and began to travel through America, bouncing around the drug scene and toying with communism and Black Nationalism, before converting to Islam in the early 1970s and taking on the name Bilal.

  He had encountered Islam several times in his travels, but the book that won him over was Islam, the Misunderstood Religion, penned by the younger brother of Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb. Muhammad Qutb served a crucial role in widening the appeal of his brother’s ideas by massaging them into a less overtly incendiary form.1

  In his quest to understand his new religion better, Philips went to study Islam at the University of Medina in Saudi Arabia and afterward earned a master’s in Islamic theology in Riyadh. He began to write and teach about Islam, viewing every engagement as dawah—an opportunity to call his students to Islam.2

  In 1992 U.S. forces deployed to Saudi Arabia to defend the country against Saddam Hussein, whose army had seized neighboring Kuwait and was menacing Islam’s heartland.

  The Saudi government saw an opportunity in the deployment. In an open field next to the main U.S. encampment, an impromptu bazaar had sprung up. The Saudi military requested permission from the U.S. military to set up a “Cultural Information Tent” on the site so that the troops could learn more about Saudi culture.3

  Although Saudi officials assured U.S. commanders that the program was a simple introduction to Arab culture, it was in reality an epic-scale evangelical effort.4 Leading this revival was Bilal Philips, now a member of the Saudi Air Force’s religion brigade. As Philips recalled it, the intent of the program was simply to provide information about Islam.

  In the course of time, a number of people after listening decided to accept Islam, and that number started to increase and increase ’til we were averaging something around twenty converts per day. And, uh, the tent quickly became to be known amongst the chaplains as the Conversion Tent. Although this was not specifically our intention, was not necessarily to convert them but to convey information.