Jihad Joe

by J. M. Berger

  But it just so happened that the number of those who were interested or those who had come and got information, either they had previously investigated something about Islam and, you know, this further information just completed what they were looking for and this convinced or they came and were open-minded enough, they heard this and felt this is what they believed or something closer or made more sense to them or whatever.5

  That was how Philips remembered the program in 2010 during an interview with the author. In 2003 he had told a somewhat different story to an Arabic-language newspaper based in London.

  [A Saudi official] had a strong urge to convert U.S. soldiers into Islam. But, he did not speak English well. So he sought my help in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain. Since that date, I began giving religious lectures to U.S. soldiers on Islam.6

  Philips helped assemble a team that spoke English fluently. The Camp for Cultural Information operated twenty-four hours a day for nearly six months, with imams living on-site and working a rotating schedule.

  “At first we prepared the soldiers mentally,” Philips said in the 2003 interview. One of the team’s members “with experience in broadcasting and American psychology” addressed groups of 200 to 250 soldiers at a time, preparing the ground.7

  The team also arranged for soldiers to visit Saudi families and witness group prayers in Saudi mosques. Some were even taken to see government-sanctioned beheadings (part of the Saudi criminal system). All of this activity was made possible by a standing order from one of the U.S. base’s commanders that allowed Muslim soldiers—including the newly converted—to take a four-day pass to visit Mecca through the program. Expenses were covered by the Saudi government.8

  During one of these field trips, Philips ran into an African American Muslim named Tahir who “just happened” to be in Mecca performing the Umrah, a lesser pilgrimage to the Grand Mosque. Tahir was a Vietnam veteran who later fought alongside jihadists in Afghanistan and had a natural affinity for his fellows in the military.9 Tahir joined the Saudi camp and helped preach about Islam to the soldiers.

  The program was a resounding success. By Philips’s account, the team converted about three thousand U.S. soldiers to Islam, collecting names and addresses of converts and steering them toward Islamic centers back in the United States.10 Other sources pegged the number at sixteen hundred.11 It was an impressive tally either way.

  In 1992 Philips was asked to deploy his U.S. military contacts for an “off the books” mission on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia who had become embroiled in a civil war.

  I was approached by a couple of military people and asked if I knew of any of the troops that had accepted Islam, gone back to the States and had left the American military, you know, who might be willing to go to Bosnia to help train the Bosnians. What they said they were looking for was something like an A-Team of specialists who would then go and train them to help them in resisting the Serbian slaughter.12

  That request marked the start of a program that would soon spiral out of control, embroiling U.S. military veterans in a jihadist circle with links to al Qaeda and to a stunningly ambitious homegrown plot to kill thousands of innocent victims in New York City.

  THE WAR IN BOSNIA

  Bosnia-Herzegovina had a long and storied relationship with Islam, going back to its conquest by the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. The official religion of the empire was Sunni Islam, which was broadly adopted, but Bosnian Jews and Christians were permitted to maintain their practices, resulting in a cosmopolitan mix of religions that worked successfully for centuries.

  After the fall of the Ottomans, religion and ethnicity became hot issues. A Bosnian Serb, motivated by ethnic nationalism, fired the shot that started World War I. As part of Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia during World War II, Croatian Catholics and Bosnian Muslims took part in the extermination of Jews and Romany populations.

  After World War II, Yugoslavia was united in large part by force of will—a cult of personality built around Communist strongman Josip Broz Tito, who suppressed religious expression and raised a generation of secular Slavs for whom the word “Muslim” was mainly an ethnic identifier.

  The Muslims of Yugoslavia became perhaps the world’s most secular. They drank—a lot. They smoked—a lot. They gambled, ate pork, neglected prayers, and charged interest at their banks. Men’s faces were clean shaven, and women’s clothes were low cut.

  For more than three decades, Tito’s iron grip held Yugoslavia together. His death in 1980 was the start of a long and agonizing collapse. In 1991 Croatia and Slovenia peeled away from Yugoslavia, while Serbia and Montenegro maintained most of the infrastructure of the former state under a new flag.

  All of these machinations left Bosnia with a mixed population that rapidly and violently separated along “ethnic” lines, even though members of the three main groups—Croats, Serbs, and Muslims—had intermarried, spoke the same language, and looked alike.

  There were a few who had kept the Islamic flame alive despite severe state repression. After Tito’s fall, longtime Islamic activist Alija Izetbegovic took over the presidency of Bosnia on behalf of the Muslim-controlled Party of Democratic Action (SDA in the Bosnian language) after the country’s first multiparty election in 1990.

  Izetbegovic hadn’t won the election. The actual winner was a charismatic businessman named Fikret Abdic whose appeal cut across ethnic lines. Abdic declined to take the presidency as the result of political machinations that have never been disclosed. Izetbegovic—perceived by many Western leaders as a moderate and secular Muslim—later commissioned a fatwa against Abdic, declaring him an infidel and offering the rewards of martyrdom to anyone who was killed fighting his supporters.13

  Izetbegovic’s personal beliefs are unclear—he was a cipher to his closest associates, as well as to international intelligence agencies—but his actions soon demonstrated that he had no problem wrapping himself in Islam if it provided some benefit.

  The new president and his cabinet were unusually well connected in the Muslim world, keeping up strong ties in both Saudi Arabia and Iran despite the sectarian antagonism between the two countries. As civic chaos gave way to a three-way civil war among Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, these international connections came into play.

  The Iranians chipped in with direct shipments of arms and elite intelligence operatives to assist the Muslims. The Saudis provided copious funds from the kingdom’s coffers but also used their religious leverage to internationalize the conflict.

  As part of the latter effort, Izetbegovic was obliged to accept an influx of mujahideen fighters. Between 1,000 and 2,000 foreign fighters took part during the course of the conflict, and they led about 3,000 Bosnians who opted to fight as mujahideen rather than as part of the regular army.14

  The most prominent leaders of the Bosnian mujahideen were Egyptians associated with Omar Abdel Rahman’s Islamic Group and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.15 Bosnian president Izetbegovic was allied with these leaders, even consenting to be videotaped during a grip-and-grin meeting with fighters closely tied to Osama bin Laden and Omar Abdel Rahman.16

  Bin Laden sent several al Qaeda members to Bosnia in an effort to exploit the conflict. The mastermind of September 11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, also traveled to Bosnia looking for recruits he could turn from military jihad to terrorism, and two of the 9/11 hijackers fought in Bosnia. However, the majority of the mujahideen were not overtly connected to al Qaeda (see chapter 5).17

  THE VIEW FROM AMERICA

  The Saudi government had invested tremendous resources into shaping the opinions and the organizations of American Muslims. Its most overt tool for this purpose was the New York office of the Muslim World League.

  As the war in Bosnia heated up, the English-language MWL Journal placed the conflict front and center, with dozens of articles and cover stories focusing on the Muslims’ disadvantages in terms of arms and training, compared to the Serbs and the Croats.

  The journal also chronicled
the impotent rage of the Islamic Conference states over a UN arms embargo that covered the conflict zone. The embargo was widely perceived by Muslims and non-Muslims alike to provide a devastating advantage to Bosnian Serbs by preventing Muslims from defending themselves.

  The Muslim States and communities have been patient. For months on, they have been watching with their hands on their hearts Bosnian Muslims being mercilessly butchered and their children and women being ruthlessly evicted from their homes and farms as Serbia occupies more land and gains more ground.18

  Others were steering the narrative in American policy circles. Abdurrahman Alamoudi was a player who had over the years worked for several mainstream U.S. Muslim organizations before founding the American Muslim Council in 1990. He was also wired into the Muslim underground. According to an informant, he carried regular payments of $5,000 from Osama bin Laden to Omar Abdel Rahman in New York to cover the cost of Rahman’s rent and expensive international phone bills.19

  Articulate and media-savvy, Alamoudi was a regular presence on television and in newspapers, always ready to provide a quote or a sound bite when journalists needed someone to represent the voice of mainstream American Islam. Alamoudi was an advocate of U.S. intervention in Bosnia, staging protests and rallies for the cameras and writing op-eds for both Muslim and mainstream publications:

  Candidate Clinton called for increased U.S. involvement in the Balkans designed to halt Serb aggression and violations of human rights. President Clinton, however, has dithered and drifted, abdicating his responsibilities as leader of the free world and ignoring the considerable powers of his office.20

  These lobbying efforts were helped by a combination of pragmatism and idealism on the part of the mainstream media. Pragmatically, it was extremely unsafe to report firsthand on the unfolding war, so journalists frequently relied on official pronouncements from Bosnian Muslim officials as to what exactly was going on. Idealism was an even more powerful force—CNN’s Christiane Amanpour flatly stated that attempts to report on the conflict from a neutral perspective would have made reporters “complicit in genocide.”21

  Few other reporters would go that far in public, but most Western coverage clearly favored the Muslim side in the war. And in many important respects, the narrative was correct—the Muslims were, by and large, the victims of Serbian aggression, and they endured horrifying war crimes in Bosnia. Nevertheless, most reporting tended to neglect important complexities, such as atrocities and war crimes committed by Bosnian Muslim factions, including the mujahideen, about whom little was known.

  On the policy side, things were no better. Top administration officials were either oblivious to the mujahideen or dismissive of their importance. Although Clinton could not be moved to overturn or violate the UN embargo directly, his administration quietly opted to turn a blind eye toward illegal arms shipments to the Bosnian government from Muslim countries, including Iran and Turkey.22

  As the crisis dragged on, Alamoudi rallied a diverse, media-friendly collection of religious leaders to join his “American Task Force on Bosnia.” Despite his support for radicals such as the blind sheikh, Alamoudi won strong backing from American Jews, in part thanks to frequent comparisons between the actions of Bosnian Serbs and the Holocaust:

  Our children and their children will not forgive this generation, will not forgive us, all of mankind, for allowing this genocide—and if I may respectfully call it the second Holocaust of this century. The mass rape, the destruction that went on for more than a year must not be forgiven. We have allowed the destruction not only of life, of property, but of cherished principles of international law, the bedrock of the United Nations itself.23

  The comparison was profoundly ironic, given that Izetbegovic reportedly collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.24

  In American mosques, Friday khutbas (sermons) increasingly concerned the slaughter of Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, and speakers recounted lurid reports of atrocities—especially allegations about the rape of Muslim women, a frequent theme in jihadist propaganda.

  Under the influence of the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, the Al Kifah operations in Brooklyn and Boston had also started to focus heavily on Bosnia. Al Kifah’s newsletter, which was personally supervised by Rahman, exhorted readers to provide both “money and men,” ruling that jihad in Bosnia was obligatory for all Muslims:

  We help the mujahideen in Bosnia so the [infidels] won’t spread in the region. [ … ] We help the mujahideen in Bosnia just to protect this Ummah [the community of Muslims] and to return the torturing of the enemy after the backing off of many of the Muslim leaders and their begging the United States to lift the weapon embargo.25

  Rahman himself echoed these sentiments in extravagant speeches around the New York area.

  Where’s virtue? Where is loyalty which remained with the Muslims? … They find the women as their honors were violated, and the Bosnian women ask in some conferences what do we do with our pregnancies what do we do? And what should we do? They ask while they are crying…. Have the eyes cried? Have the tears shed? Have the hearts been broken? For what is happening to our sisters there? While their honors are violated and they became pregnant out of wedlock, no one lifts a finger.26

  Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, a bespectacled Sudanese immigrant who worked as Omar Abdel Rahman’s translator in New York, echoed his spiritual leader’s outrage in speeches around New York.

  We cannot announce and pronounce [Koranic verses about] Jihad, even when we come to America here, because we are still afraid that the CIA or the FBI or the authorities of countries are going to be behind us. Therefore, we still have to stay in our shells, and not come out and confront the idea or confront the disease, confront the humiliation, confront the oppression, and confront the [infidels] who has taken our own sisters, our brothers, as slaves in Bosnia.27

  Siddig should have taken the threat of FBI surveillance more seriously, as will become clear.

  THE A-TEAM

  Thanks to these public sympathies and his excellent social network, Bilal Philips was making rapid strides in his program to recruit U.S. soldiers who could help train Bosnia’s besieged fighters in their efforts against the Serbs. The first step was to secure financing and support for the plan, so Philips flew to Switzerland to meet with a representative of the Bosnian government.

  Hasan Cengic was an imam, an official in the Bosnian army, and a notorious gunrunner. Cengic and Izetbegovic had served time in prison together under Tito for their Islamic activism. A trusted confidant, Cengic had been appointed to help manage the torrent of donations flowing to Bosnia’s Muslims from around the world, especially from Saudi Arabia.28

  Izetbegovic and Cengic funneled the donations through a fake charity called the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), which was for all meaningful purposes a branch of the Bosnian government. The organization’s titular head was a Sudanese national named Fatih El Hassanein, whom one al Qaeda informant called “Osama bin Laden’s man in Bosnia.” Cengic ran the day-to-day operations, deciding how the money would be spent.29

  “Cengic was a very interesting guy that we followed for a long time, but we really couldn’t put a nail into him,” recalled Mike Scheuer, who led the CIA’s Sunni extremist analysis team during the Bosnian war. “But he was clearly able to supply an awful lot of guns into Bosnia. He was a very important gunrunner.”

  As the Saudis aimed their substantial financial resources at Bosnia, Izetbegovic charged Cengic with receiving the money through TWRA and transforming it into weapons, in defiance of the UN embargo. During the course of the war, TWRA would take in at least $300 million in funds, raised mostly by Saudi citizens and royals.

  Although TWRA does appear to have carried out some actual charity work, it spent far more of its cash on illicit activities. It was, at its core, a criminal organization. TWRA employees—including some of Bosnia’s most notorious and violent mobsters—dealt drugs and committed murder, in addition to purchasing weapons and ammunitio
n for the Bosnian army. Much of the money collected had simply disappeared by the time the war ended.30

  The charity supported Islamic extremism with whatever was left over after lining the pockets of its principals. Omar Abdel Rahman was closely tied to TWRA, which distributed his sermons on tape in Europe. In at least one instance, Rahman appears to have sent a New York–based operative to Bosnia through TWRA’s office in Austria (the operative was turned away at the border). Later, investigators would be told by an informant that TWRA was a front for Osama bin Laden. There appears to be some truth in this claim, although the full scope of the linkage is unclear.31

  Cengic agreed to provide Philips with funds to recruit military veterans who would come to Bosnia in what would end up being a largely futile effort to give the mujahideen a dose of U.S. military professionalism. TWRA funds would be used to pay for the vets’ travel and expenses. Although the mission was said to be strictly for training, Cengic also agreed to compensate the families back home should any of the volunteers be killed.32

  After the meeting, Philips started to canvass his military friends back in the United States. Two proved exceptionally helpful. One was Tahir, the Vietnam vet who had helped convert U.S. soldiers back in Riyadh. His connection to that program meant he had strong ties to new Muslim converts with military experience who could be swayed to help the Bosnians. Now living in the New York area, Tahir quickly took charge of the initial recruitment program and helped prepare the Muslim trainers with equipment such as rifle scopes and night-vision goggles.33

  The second contact was an African American convert to Islam named Archie Barnes, who had changed his name to Qaseem Ali Uqdah. A marine since 1975 and a Muslim since his teenage years, Uqdah held the rank of gunnery sergeant when he retired around 1991 and became executive director of Muslim Military Members (MMM), an organization that arranged access to literature and places of worship for Muslim soldiers around the United States.34 Philips had been involved in MMM from its inception.