Jihad Joe

by J. M. Berger

  On another occasion, Rashid attempted to travel to Bosnia himself. He was assisted in this task by an American Muslim he had met through Tahir. They made it as far as Zagreb but were turned away at the border.55

  Although Project Bosnia was still nominally focused on Bosnia, Siddig’s Day of Terror was increasingly the fixation of Rashid’s battalion of trainees. Siddig broached the idea of bombing the tunnels to selected members of the Pennsylvania team—and to Rashid.

  There is some ambiguity about Rashid’s response to Siddig’s overtures. In conversations taped by the FBI, he seemed to equivocate about hitting American targets. During a May 30, 1993, conversation in which Siddig was asking for detonators and other supplies, Rashid replied,

  If it’s not used for jihad, akie [brother], so I got, I got blockbusters and mortar rockets and a few others. Your doing it, it has to be for jihad, akie. It has to be used for the widows and children (unintelligible words) and in Zagreb and Bosnia and stuff like that.

  This exchange took place a few short weeks before the Day of Terror arrests. Later, Rashid specified that he was going to talk to “the head man from Project Bosnia”—Bilal Philips—about getting money, but that Philips was interested only in jihad outside of America.

  When pressed by Siddig, Rashid agreed to obtain the detonators, but there is no clear evidence that he followed up with action. Rashid’s lawyer, interviewed in 2008, said Rashid was “bullshitting” Siddig in the hopes that this plan, like so many before it, would simply fall by the wayside.56

  “[Rashid’s] passion was jihad, but overseas,” recalled Tom Corrigan. “And even in his phone conversations with people, if there were events that occurred over in Bosnia that he was very upset about, he would get almost weepy. He’d get very angry with what was going on over there.”57

  Yet it’s also quite clear from the transcript of the conversation that Rashid understood that Siddig was talking about setting off bombs in New York as an act of jihad. Rashid’s objections to the plan were pretty mild in comparison to the magnitude of the crime Siddig was planning, and, needless to say, he didn’t alert the police about a mass homicide in the making.

  However, he did call Bilal Philips. As Philips told the story, Rashid called him and said the trainees were talking about doing jihad in the United States. (Philips blamed an FBI informant, Emad Salem, for inciting the group to violence, but this claim is not supported by surveillance tapes and testimony about the case.) As Philips recalled the conversation:

  When, uh, Doc [short for Doctor Rashid] heard about it, you know, he was quite upset. He wanted to stop it, told them, “Don’t do it, this is not good,” and so on so on. And Doc called me up, and told me about it and I told him, “Yes, definitely, you know, disband this group and get them out of there. Let them go to some other country or whatever.”

  You know, I said, send them anywhere there is some other conflict or where Muslims are suffering, if they wanted to go and do something, this is where they should do it, in the areas of conflict not in, you know, in the United States. It was just totally inappropriate. It becomes, some kind of, you know, terrorism really, you know, unleashing violence against civilian population. It’s not acceptable.58

  One front in particular looked promising: the Philippines. In May, Philips and Rashid flew to the Philippines, where Muslim separatists were fighting the government in the south of the country. There, they met with Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a Saudi businessman and a volunteer with the Muslim World League. Khalifa was also the brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, and U.S. intelligence later believed he was an al Qaeda financier with connections to Ramzi Yousef.

  Philips assumed that Khalifa could use his connections to businesses and Muslim relief efforts in the south to arrange an introduction with the separatists. According to both Philips and Rashid, the meeting didn’t take place. The visit was intended to give Rashid a feel for the location, and a subsequent trip was planned to advance the project.59

  In one respect, at least, the trip was a smashing success. Rashid was enamored of the separatists and thought that the spirit of jihad was alive and well in Mindanao. It didn’t hurt that he had met a young Filipino woman whom he began to court as a second wife (to the great annoyance of the wife he already had in Brooklyn).

  When Rashid returned to the States, he waxed on about the trip and the worthiness of the separatists’ cause. After hearing Rashid’s stories, Siddig Ali was moved. He would indeed be interested in relocating his jihad to the Philippines— just as soon as he was finished with his jihad against New York.60

  In June Siddig finalized the list of targets and began to purchase components for his bombs. Financing came from Mohammed Saleh, a Hamas associate, and not from the Project Bosnia bankroll (although the team’s members had been trained on TWRA’s dime). Siddig told his coconspirators that they would all escape to the Philippines after the bombs went off.

  The team rented a safe house in Queens so that they could start to build the bombs—at which point the plan fell apart.

  The JTTF had been watching Siddig and Rashid for months, but after the World Trade Center bombing, the Justice Department decided Corrigan and his team deserved the resources they had been asking for all along. The surveillance was stepped up dramatically, and the investigators were given permission to reactivate Emad Salem, a strong informant whom the FBI had unwisely fired the year before. Salem taped nearly every conversation he had with Siddig. He joined the conspiracy and was given the job of finding a safe house—which the FBI then wired for video.61

  On June 14 Rashid, Siddig, and Salem met to discuss their plans. Rashid was asked about his perennially delayed efforts to obtain detonators and other supplies Siddig needed to complete his preparations. Rashid assured them that he was working on it and then said he was leaving for the Philippines at the end of the week. On hearing this, the authorities decided to move in.62

  On the evening of June 24, they burst into the safe house and arrested eight people inside, including Siddig, in the act of building their bombs.

  Rashid wasn’t at the safe house, but he was arrested at his home the same night. His wife, Alia, was out of town when it came down. She returned to New York and visited Rashid in prison. On the ride back, she found herself in a car with Siddig Ali’s wife, Shema. It was the first time the two had met.

  “My husband told me if anything happened, there’s a righteous brother out there, you know, call him,” said Shema.

  “What’s the brother’s name?” Alia asked.

  “Rashid.”

  “Well,” Alia replied, “the righteous brother’s in jail, so how can you call him?”

  A number of people escaped prosecution, for various reasons. Bilal Philips had left the country but was named by prosecutors as an unindicted coconspirator (for which he blames Emad Salem). Today he lives in Qatar, where he works in Islamic education. Some years after the events in New York, he gave his view about the United States during a 2003 interview:

  The United States considers any serious Islamic action as contrary to its cultural principles. I am one of those who believe that the clash of civilizations is a reality. So I say that western culture led by the United States is enemy of Islam, as it seeks to oblige the Islamic culture to accept its secular system.63

  In a 2010 interview with the author, he did not back down from this view, although he phrased the premise in slightly softer terms:

  [The] secular outlook on life, is completely, completely opposite to the shariah perspective, where everything is looked at from the perspective of God and the law of God. [ … ] So that obviously is a foundational clash. It’s a clash of concepts. I’m not necessarily saying it has to be a military clash, but it’s a clash of concepts, right? And then the issue of democracy, you know, where the fundamental concept of human beings making laws for the whole society, in all aspects, [is] again in conflict with the shariah perspective, where that is the role of God.64

  One person who slipped through the cracks
was former marine gunnery sergeant Qaseem Uqdah, the head of the Muslim Military Members organization, who provided Philips and al Qaeda member Tahir with information about Muslim soldiers who could be recruited for the Bosnia project.

  During his trial Rashid used a false name when testifying about “the marine sergeant,” and JTTF investigators never learned the marine’s name. The CIA had spotted Rashid and Philips together. After sneaking a look at documents carried by Philips on an international trip, they pegged him as someone who had an interest in infiltrating the U.S. military, but Uqdah never came to their attention.65

  Uqdah was subsequently hired by Abdurrahman Alamoudi’s American Muslim Council (AMC) to head outreach to Muslims in the military, an operation that later spun off into its own organization, the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council (AMAFVAC).

  In his capacity with AMC and later with AMAFVAC, Uqdah was responsible for selecting, training, and certifying Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military. The chaplaincy program was created in large part thanks to Philips’s success in converting soldiers during the Gulf War. Uqdah continues to be involved with the certification of Muslim military chaplains to this day.66

  I began trying to reach Uqdah for comment on the Bosnia program in May 2009. I followed up with periodic e-mails through 2010 describing the general nature of my questions and my contacts with Rashid and Philips. While writing this book, I also began trying to reach him by phone. Calls to his office were met with a busy signal; calls to his cell phone went directly to voicemail; calls to his home went unanswered.

  Finally, in November 2010, I placed a call to Uqdah from a Washington, D.C., phone number, which I had not provided to him in my e-mails. This time, I got through.

  We spoke for about ten minutes. Uqdah informed me he had received my previous messages and that he was dealing with serious health issues. He said he was focused on his family and his health and would not comment on anything for the book or clarify his role in the Bosnia recruitment program.

  “Whatever you’re going to print, you’re going to print,” he said. “As long as it’s the truth, we’re good.” He refused to answer any question that related to the program or his actions.

  TRANSFERENCE AND THE FAR ENEMY

  Aside from its obvious ambition, there are a number of interesting features in the Day of Terror plot and its relation to the war in Bosnia. Without the Bosnian cause to draw the participants together, the plot would likely have failed to gain critical mass. And although I was unable to find evidence that the Third World Relief Agency funded the bombing plot directly, it did finance the activities that brought most of the conspirators together.

  The majority of the participants were drawn into the plot on the pretext that they were training to fight on behalf of the Bosnians, whether as trainers, mujahideen fighting abroad, or support workers in the United States. Sometimes this pretext was extraordinarily thin. At other times, it was incredibly intense. But nearly every one of the nine people prosecuted in the Day of Terror attacks (not counting Nosair and Rahman) claimed that they got involved in the plot because of Bosnia.

  Of course, most of them also claimed they had not done things they were caught on tape doing. To this day, Abdullah Rashid denies he committed the acts for which he was convicted. In an e-mail sent from prison in 2009, he insisted that the FBI had admitted he was not guilty of the crimes for which he was imprisoned.67

  Nevertheless, wiretaps and surveillance logs clearly back up the conspirators’ universal claim that they originally became involved in the plot because they thought they were doing something on behalf of Bosnia. The leaders of the cell fixated on Bosnia and endlessly discussed what they could do to help the Bosnian Muslims.

  From a May 30, 1993, audio recording:

  HAMPTON-EL: All those powers of [infidels] being aided by people like, Mubarak, Hussain, Khomeini, Assad et cetera, et cetera, um. What’s happening now, akie [Arabic for “brother”], is that here in America, the government story in the news media to justify to their physical attack on Muslims [inaudible]. In fact the people of the world who don’t really give a damn what’s going on in Bosnia, will say [inaudible] a Muslim [inaudible] because the people in Bosnia—

  SIDDIG ALI: Massacred.

  HAMPTON-EL: Hamdillah [praise Allah], I mean massacred and the world has not cried out with outrage. You know, we’ll keep talking. Ah, the Muslims of America, at that time coming [they will] need preparation, very few of them are.

  Similarly, Siddig, in a lecture where he appeared after Saffet Catovic, berated the audience for passively sitting by while Muslims were dying.68

  With their passions inflamed, the participants in the Day of Terror plot took incremental steps in the direction of violence—first buying weapons, then training, then buying more weapons, then stockpiling ammunition, and finally purchasing the components for bombs.

  Equally incremental was the change in intent, from waging jihad in Bosnia to waging jihad in New York in the name of Bosnia. In the language of jihadist theology, this change in focus is known as the “near enemy” versus the “far enemy,” a concept championed by Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman Al Zawahiri.69

  Near and far in this context refer to the distance from the offending behavior. For Bosnia, the near enemy was the Serbs; the far enemy was the United States, whose policies (in Siddig’s worldview) were enabling the Serbs to carry out their atrocities.

  The distinction between fighting the near and far enemies is useful in distinguishing between jihadism and terrorism, at least during this period. Jihadists often tend to work in a gray area of morality, fighting battles that are to some degree justifiable against targets seen as directly persecuting Muslims—in other words, the Serbs. In contrast, terrorists often aim for the symbolic target, those they see as supporters or even just passive enablers. However, the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have blurred the distinction between the two classes of combat, perhaps irretrievably, as terrorist tactics and the intentional targeting of civilians have become part and parcel of the jihadist-insurgent handbook.

  It’s unlikely that either Siddig or his disciples had a deep-enough grasp on jihadist theology to understand the distinction between near and far. Siddig was parroting themes he had heard from Rahman and Nosair. For instance, in January 1993 Rahman gave an incendiary speech at a conference on “Solidarity with Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in which he directly tackled the “far enemy” and specifically erased any distinction between jihadist and terrorist:

  The Western mass media is accusing those who perform jihad for the sake of God of being terrorists. And when we defend ourselves saying “No, we are not terrorists, we are far away from terrorism.” As if we are standing in the cage of the accused persons and our enemy is accusing us because we are trying to defend our religion. And we defend ourselves against what we are accused of. And this is a bad way that we are putting ourselves in the cage of the accused persons.

  We are defending ourselves and refuting the accusations. No, if those who have the right to have something are terrorists, then we are terrorists. And we welcome being terrorists. And we do not deny this charge to ourselves….

  There are two main enemies. The enemy who is at the foremost of the work against Islam are America and the allies. Who is assisting the Serbs? And who is providing them with weapons and food? Europe and behind it is America, who are providing them with weapons, money and food, in order to completely exterminate the Muslims, and because they declared that they do not want the establishment of an Islamic republic in Europe.70

  Chris Voss, an FBI agent who worked on the case, feels strongly that Siddig was a terrorist first and a jihadist second, who knowingly used manipulative tactics to win over people whose intentions might have been good in the beginning. His observations are important to understanding the process by which American Muslim terrorists are born.

  Siddig and the others that were recruiting knew that if you could recruit someone to go and fight i
n Bosnia or any other place in the world, you got an individual to agree to engage in battle. So at that point, it’s a much smaller step to simply change the battlefield. And that was Siddig’s intention. It might not have been the person that was being recruited, it may have not been their intention when they were starting out, and sort of by definition these people in many ways walked into this very unwilling.

  If you’re a Muslim and you see Muslims being exterminated in another country, you can’t help wanting to do something about it, in some fashion or another. Anybody, if you identify strongly with a religious group or your ethnicity, if they are being exterminated someplace else, if there is massively unjust bloodshed going on, it might be easy to manipulate you into, maybe you donate, maybe you feel strongly enough that you want to go and fight. And if you’re willing to train, that might have been your intention all along, but the recruiter is thinking something else, they’ve got their own agenda.71

  Beyond the ideological currents and the manipulation lies a simpler, more human dynamic that merits consideration.

  At the start, Siddig’s jihadist volunteers were pumped up with anger, their heads filled with heroic fantasies of traveling to strange lands to rescue fellow Muslims.

  Then the training began, which made the prospect seem more tangible and grounded in the real world. Training could take place only on weekends because they had to work. Wives and families complained about their frequent absences. The training was difficult—even within Project Bosnia’s relatively short span, about 75 percent of the recruits washed out.

  They found themselves penned in by more and more obstacles: the cost of travel, the language barrier, fear, inertia, sickness, family obligations, and other factors beyond their control. Some—like Rashid—managed to overcome all of these hindrances, only to be stopped at the final stage of a difficult border crossing.