Jihad Joe

by J. M. Berger

  In 2008 Zazi went to Afghanistan and visited an al Qaeda training camp, where he received training in weapons and improvised explosives.31 Drawing on the latter, he returned to the United States with a grocery list of bomb ingredients. He began shopping.

  After the invasion of Afghanistan, al Qaeda’s training apparatus had been rendered into a permanent state of chaos. During the 1990s the training experience was thorough, long term, and rigorous. Post-9/11, the training regimen for most recruits became haphazard and much shorter, sometimes cramming months’ worth of information into just a few days. Like many of al Qaeda’s new brigade of volunteers, the “dumb kid” didn’t learn his lessons very well. When he was arrested shortly before the anniversary of September 11, he was in a panic, having just called overseas for advice on how to complete the job.32

  When the FBI questioned Zazi and his accomplices, they discovered that the man who had ordered the former coffee vendor to bomb his adopted home was none other than Adnan Shukrijumah.33

  In August 2010 the FBI issued yet another alarming alert with precious few details attached. The new media blitz claimed that Shukrijumah had taken over the job of his old boss, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and was now the head of al Qaeda’s external operations.34

  The ramifications of this development were unclear, as was the source. The FBI refused to discuss Shukrijumah for this book.

  Clearly, an American would theoretically be well equipped to plan attacks on the United States, but being the “new” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was a very different thing in 2010 than being the “old” KSM.

  In 2001 Mohammed had the ability to travel with relative freedom, stable facilities to work from, a significant budget to work with, and a small army of professional operatives to make his plans a reality. Shukrijumah, in contrast, had a fraction of the money, no stable geographical base, and a small brigade of enthusiastic but inept amateurs such as Zazi and his friends.

  AMATEUR HOUR CONTINUES: THE TIMES SQUARE BOMBING

  Faisal Shahzad was born in Pakistan and moved to the United States as a college student, where he majored in computer science and engineering at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut. For more than a decade, he lived in the United States without attracting much notice. Shahzad made a good living in the United States and seemed to be comfortable in his new home, if not fully at ease.

  He maintained strong ties in Pakistan, even after marrying an American Muslim from the Denver area. His wife covered her hair, and he often dressed in Pakistani-style clothing, but they didn’t stand out as being unassimilated. Firmly ensconced in the upper middle class, the Shahzads were, by most accounts, relaxed and unremarkable. He became an American citizen in 2009.35

  Yet behind closed doors, Faisal Shahzad was discontented, and that discontent was growing. In the years following September 11, he became enamored of jihadist propaganda and began to segregate himself from non-Muslims, at least internally.36

  In many ways, it was a classic jihadist turn, focused on the victimization of Muslims abroad, especially the rape of Muslim women. Unlike earlier American-born converts, however, Shahzad steeped himself in theological arguments before turning toward action.37

  After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he began to believe that America was working to harm Muslims. That perception was reinforced by the words of English-language jihadist ideologues such as Abdullah Al Faisal and Anwar Awlaki. He began posting to jihadist message boards and railing to his friends about U.S. foreign policy.38 In 2006 he wrote to a friend,

  We all know that most of our Ummah is ignorant of Islam or illiterate of Koran and Sunnah [practices of the Prophet Mohammed]. Koran and Sunnah is our very base and purpose of creation in this world. Most of us get confused with current wars when we try to make logic with our worldly knowledge. Have you every try to look at [it] with Allah’s prospective [sic], do you try to read and understand Koran? Except for just clinging to one excuse that Islam does not allow innocent killings? Not saying that it is right, but we are not sure of who does that either? It might be U.S.A fighter who gives his life to Allah can never disobey His commands. [ … ] We don’t know the realities on ground as to what the Mujahideen goes through but you would have to agree to the fact that there is a force out there that is fighting the west and is defeating them.39

  During trips back to Pakistan, Shahzad increasingly immersed himself in radical company. He worshipped at the Red Mosque in Islamabad, a notoriously radical institution known for catering to worshippers and students from Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, an al Qaeda and Taliban stronghold.40 In 2007 militants at the mosque began to kidnap people they deemed immoral, including police officers and local brothel workers. Pakistan’s security forces stormed the mosque in July 2007, killing dozens of people.41

  Shahzad was in America at the time, gripped by news reports of the violence. Investigators would later conclude that the siege was the “triggering event” that pushed the Connecticut computer expert over the edge from talk into action. His outrage was further stoked by apparent civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where key al Qaeda leaders were suspected of hiding. Shahzad’s family had roots in the region, and the tribal connection put an exclamation point on his rage.

  In early 2008 Shahzad returned to Pakistan with a sense of purpose. Through contacts in Islamabad, he sought out the Pakistani Taliban. Initially the Taliban suspected he was a spy and kept him at arm’s length. Yet over time and with the help of friends in the country, he won the group’s confidence, even meeting with its leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, one of Pakistan’s most wanted militants.

  By 2009 Shahzad was ready to pack in his American life and moved his family abroad soon after taking his oath of U.S. citizenship. He returned to Pakistan with the intent of creating a life there, but the Taliban had other plans for him.

  Before September 11 an al Qaeda operative who was intended for an attack on the United States would receive months of expert training before being sent on a mission. But the Taliban was not al Qaeda—the strike, if successful, would have been the group’s first attack abroad. And the luxury of time had been deeply disrupted by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the corresponding Pakistani crackdown along the border.42 Shahzad was shuttled into a training camp in the border region of Waziristan, where he went through a few short weeks of general training followed by only five days of instruction on the art of bomb making.43

  The utter failure of Shazad’s training was on full display when he returned to the United States to make his move. During the course of a few months, he gathered bits and pieces of flammable and explosive materials, any two or three of which would have been enough to create a fairly dangerous bomb, and then he proceeded to mash them together in the back of his Nissan Pathfinder SUV. He stuffed fireworks, propane, gasoline, and fertilizer into the vehicle and wired it up with a bizarre combination of timers and fuses, all purchased with thousands of dollars of Taliban money.

  Despite the demented design, dumb luck might have ignited the improvised bomb into a significant fireball. Fortunately, Shahzad was poised at the nexus between competent and incompetent. If he had been a little better at his job, it would have worked. If he had been a little less ambitious with his design, it would have worked. He fell perfectly in the middle.

  Shahzad drove the SUV to Times Square on the evening of May 1, 2010, and left it parked on the side of a crowded street. The detonator mechanism created so much smoke that it choked off the oxygen supply that would have ignited the flammable components. The fertilizer he chose for its supposed explosive power turned out to be inert. He forgot to arm a key component of the bomb—and he left his car and apartment keys in the Pathfinder.44

  The attack was a disaster, just not the disaster that Shahzad had intended. As he fled back to his apartment in Connecticut, the Taliban e-mailed a triumphant audio to the terrorism news website The Long War Journal, claiming credit for what it described as a “jaw-breaking blow” against the United
States.45 Shahzad was captured while trying to flee the country.

  After cooperating with investigators for several weeks, Shahzad appeared in court on June 21, 2010, and entered a defiant guilty plea—“guilty and one hundred times more”—calling himself a “Muslim soldier” and insisting that he acted alone while in the United States. Questioned by the judge about his willingness to kill children in Times Square, Shahzad was unrepentant.

  Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims. [ … ] I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.

  LASHKAR-E-TAYYIBA

  Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not the only organizations recruiting Americans for violent jihad. There are a host of enemies, stretching from West Africa through the Middle East, Asia, South Asia, and on into Southeast Asia: al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Fatah Al Islam, Hamas, Tawhid and Jihad, the Abu Sayyaf Group, and a score more of various sizes and shapes.

  Most are concerned primarily with local issues, but they also accept foreigners in their ranks. Some aspire to play on a broader stage.

  In Pakistan, not far from the Taliban’s domain, a cold war has been threatening to go hot for more than twenty years. The border between Pakistan and India is disputed. The conflict has played out in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim-majority area known for its great natural beauty.

  India and Pakistan have been fighting over the region to a greater or lesser extent since 1947. The dispute was settled in favor of India, but an insurgency has festered since 1989, fueled by mujahideen fighters and terrorists from Pakistan and abroad, with significant covert support from Pakistan’s intelligence service. In addition to the two nation-states tussling over the region, a move for Kashmiri independence was also roiling internally.46

  As the twentieth century wound to a close, Randall Royer, the white kid from Virginia who had joined the Bosnian mujahideen, was growing restless. He moved in heady circles during his day job with the Council for American-Islamic Relations, rubbing shoulders with top State Department officials (including its counterterrorism coordinator) and even attending White House functions. At one, he had his picture taken with President Clinton.47

  It was a job that seemed to fit his disposition, but in time he found his attention drawn once more to the fields of jihad. With a group of friends—up to a dozen American-born citizens and immigrants from the Washington, D.C., area—Royer began to train with firearms for jihad in Chechnya, where an Islamist insurgency had been carrying out a campaign of guerrilla war and terrorism against the Russian government.

  They practiced for jihad using paintball guns, as well as live weapons, including the weapon of choice for mujahideen around the world, the Russian-made Kalashnikov assault rifle, better known as an AK-47. Three members of the group were U.S. military veterans, and the team practiced at times on military firing ranges.48 In April 2000 Royer applied for a visa to go to Pakistan, where he met with members of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT), Urdu for “Army of Righteousness.”

  LeT was a Pakistani Islamist group formed in 1989 that had attracted a significant number of Afghan war veterans. Royer had arranged an introduction through mujahideen fighters he had met in Bosnia who were now in Pakistan.49

  According to Royer, he researched the group before going to Kashmir and determined that it had not been designated a terrorist organization.50 This was technically true (LeT was not formally designated as such until December 2001), but it would have been difficult to research the group without discovering its terrorist activities.51 By 2000 the organization had been implicated in attacks on Indian civilians and troops in Kashmir. Its members had killed scores of victims in just a few short years.52

  Royer connected with LeT in Lahore, where he saw what he called an “idyllic” Islamic community. According to Royer, he sought and received assurances that the group was opposed to extremism generally and al Qaeda specifically.

  The conflict was different here than in Bosnia, more complex and multifaceted (although, in fairness, the narrative in Bosnia had also been greatly oversimplified by both the press and jihadist ideologues). For Royer it boiled down to a series of indignities against “the oppressed”—meaning the Muslim oppressed, as opposed to the Hindus being terrorized by LeT. Royer went to the Kashmir area and wielded a gun during the visit. He sought to minimize the incident as firing “a few rounds over the front line in the general direction of an Indian military bunker.”53

  Royer returned to the United States and made arrangements for other members of his group to travel to Pakistan to train and eventually fight with LeT. Back in the states, the men continued to acquire weapons, military equipment, and ammunition.

  Then September 11 happened. Some members of the paintball group were already in Pakistan. Those who remained were told by their spiritual guide, Ali Al Timimi, that an all-out war would soon break out between the United States and Islam and that fighting Americans was a legitimate act of jihad. Everyone in the room should talk to Royer about joining their comrades at the LeT training camps, Timimi said. After the meeting, Royer began working the phones. Four more members of the group flew to Pakistan by the end of the month.

  In Pakistan the former paintballers trained in light and heavy weaponry. Royer sent his family to Bosnia, his wife’s homeland, and in December 2001 he took a second group of recruits to join LeT.54

  Several of the LeT trainees, including Royer, eventually made their way back to the United States. Although no evidence was found of a specific terrorist plot in the works, the FBI swept in and arrested most of the group in June 2003. A dozen men were indicted, including Ali Timimi. Three were believed to be at large somewhere abroad.55 Two of the men cut pleas; the rest were convicted of conspiracy and material support for terrorism. Timimi was sentenced to life in prison for inciting terrorism.56

  Royer wrote a long letter to the judge before his sentencing, pleading a combination of good intentions, bad judgment, and a level of obliviousness that is difficult to credit in someone of such obvious intelligence.

  I am not bitter about my arrest. I realize that the government has a legitimate interest in protecting the public from terrorism, and that in this post–9/11 environment, it must take all reasonable precautions. I have repeated this often to law enforcement, and I said as much to the FBI agents who arrested me. As I wrote in March of 2003, in these times, “law enforcement should at least keep tabs on those suspected of being responsible for violence overseas.” It is also quite clear to me now that I crossed the line and, in my ignorance and phenomenally poor judgment, broke the law. I will live with regret for my actions and their consequences for the rest of my life. Had I known that my conduct—at the core of my plea agreement—was illegal, I would have done many things differently.57

  Media coverage of the case often focused on contentious discussions around the paintball exercises, which the defendants had sought to portray as innocent fun. Relatively little attention was given to Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. As a participant in a complicated local conflict abroad, the organization seemed as if it presented little threat outside its corner of the world. But another American recruit would soon show how deadly LeT could be.

  Daood Syed Gilani was born in Washington, D.C., in 1960. His father was a Pakistani diplomat and a devout Muslim, conservative but with an affinity for music. Gilani spent his first ten years living with the family in Pakistan, then his mother—Serrill Headley, thoroughly American and a feminist—rebelled and returned to her native Philadelphia and her secular roots, leaving him behind with his father. She opened a bar called the Khyber Pass, which she liked to tell pe
ople was haunted.58

  When Gilani turned seventeen, he joined his mother in Philadelphia to attend a local college. He assimilated into his new life with some difficulty. The contrast between his upbringing in Pakistan and his mother’s Western ways was stark. Gilani never left Islam, but he became erratic in its practice—avoiding pork but indulging growing weaknesses for drink, drugs, and women. Gilani’s prowess in the latter arena was the stuff of local legend. “Girls fell on their faces for him,” said one woman who used to tend bar with him.59

  Gilani’s life seemed to swing on a pendulum. He worked first at his mother’s bar, which she turned over to him with disastrous results. They sold the bar and started a video store called FliksVideo, which Gilani eventually expanded to several branches in New York City, making a decent living.60 Yet the darker side of American life drew him in, and he became involved in heroin trafficking through a Pakistani drug ring in New York City, where he eventually developed a drug habit himself.

  His uncle William Headley captured the contradictions perfectly in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “I have this image of him. He would have the Koran under one arm and a bottle of Dom Pérignon under the other.”61

  Starting in the late 1980s, Gilani’s extralegal activities began to catch up with him. He was arrested and convicted of heroin trafficking, released, then arrested again several years later. Copping a plea in 1997, he worked for a time as an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency. He traveled to Pakistan on the agency’s behalf, where he rediscovered his roots in Islam. During this time, Gilani grew a beard, adopted Pakistani dress and married a Pakistani Muslim woman, with whom he had four children.

  In early 2002 he began commuting to Pakistan to attend terrorist training camps, possibly while he was still working for the DEA, and trained at a camp run by Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.