Jihad Joe

by J. M. Berger

  Gilani was ensnared by the legend of veteran jihadist Ilyas Kashmiri and his “supernatural powers and miracles.” Kashmiri had taken part in the jihad against the Soviet Union, running a training camp in Waziristan, the lawless region of Pakistan that shared a border with Afghanistan. In later years he took up the cause of Kashmir as a militant and a terrorist, establishing a relationship with al Qaeda and making a name for himself as one of Pakistan’s most wanted. Gilani met Kashmiri during his time with LeT and swore bayat, an Islamic oath of allegiance, to the senior leader.62

  In 2002 LeT still operated with relative impunity. Training started with a three-week course that consisted of strictly religious indoctrination. In August Gilani returned for weapons training. The next year he returned again and learned close combat, grenade tactics, and survival skills. The courses continued through 2003—countersurveillance, intelligence, combat, and tactical maneuvers. By the end of 2003, he was a sworn member of LeT with a host of dangerous new skills.63

  In late 2005 Gilani’s training and loyalty were finally rewarded. He was activated in the early stages of what would be a massive terrorist strike on Indian soil. Unlike most terrorist strikes in the post-9/11 era, this program would be meticulously planned.

  Gilani was assigned to visit India, using his valuable U.S. passport, and case possible terrorist targets, including public places and government installations. He changed his name from Daood Gilani to David Coleman Headley, taking his mother’s American-sounding name in order to ease any prospect of suspicion during border crossings.

  His destination was Mumbai. Armed with a video camera, Gilani prowled the city gathering intelligence on prospective terrorist targets. During the course of multiple trips, he narrowed down the targets, gathering more and more specific intelligence on the best targets. Finally, one stood out as the central location: the Taj Mahal, a sumptuous five-star hotel favored by wealthy Western tourists and political luminaries. His contact at LeT told him that the attackers would come in by boat and conduct a suicide commando raid on the hotel and several other landmarks in the vicinity. Gilani picked out a landing site for the squad.64

  In November 2008 the plan was executed. A team of 10 terrorist commandos, trained by LeT, hijacked a boat and went ashore. Starting late on a Wednesday, they opened fire on civilians in several locations, seized the Taj, and took hostages from among the 450 guests. The killing didn’t stop until Saturday morning. More than 160 people were killed, including six Americans. More than 300 were injured.65

  Gilani was in Pakistan at the time of the attack, somewhere between Kariachi and Lahore, already working on his next terrorist assignment. This time the target was in Copenhagen, Denmark—the offices of a Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten, that had sparked a global firestorm by publishing cartoon images of the Prophet Mohammed. Many Muslims were outraged by the publication, and radical Muslims like Gilani even more so. Just a few weeks before the Mumbai attack, he had e-mailed former high school classmates on the cartoon controversy.

  Everything is not a joke. [ … ] We are not rehearsing a skit on Saturday Night Live. Making fun of Islam is making fun of [Mohammed]. Call me old-fashioned but I feel disposed towards violence for the offending parties, be they cartoonists from Denmark or Sherry Jones (Author of Jewel of Medina) or Irshad Manji (Liberal Muslim trying to make lesbianism acceptable in Islam, amongst other things). They never started debates with folks who slandered our Prophet, they took violent action. Even if God doesn’t give us the opportunity to bring our intentions to fruition, we will claim ajr [credit with Allah for good deeds] for it.66

  In other messages around the same period, Gilani characterized terrorism, suicide bombings, and beheadings as heroic.

  Some of us are saying that “Terrorism” is the weapon of the cowardly. I will say that you may call it barbaric or immoral or cruel, but never cowardly. Courage is, by and large, exclusive to the Muslim nation.67

  Gilani’s disposition toward violence was not mere talk. In a discussion with his LeT handler, he was already laying out the scope of a new attack. Gilani suggested that they target the Danish newspaper’s editor and cartoonist. “All Danes are responsible,” his handler replied.

  Gilani returned to the United States and began to plan his reconnaissance mission. He made up business cards and contacted Jyllands Posten to ask about placing an ad, the pretext he would use to enter the office. In January 2009 he flew to Copenhagen. As in Mumbai, he took extensive video of the newspaper’s buildings and the surrounding area. He also succeeded at getting inside the building.

  Returning to Pakistan, he reported on the site, but the attack had to be postponed. LeT was feeling the heat that Mumbai had created. At the direction of Ilyas Kashmiri, Gilani was instructed to meet with a contact in Europe who would provide non-LeT manpower willing to carry out a suicide attack. Kashmiri told Gilani to make sure the volunteers recorded martyrdom videos before the attack. Unsatisfied with the grisly carnage that LeT had wrought in Mumbai, he also told Gilani that the attackers should decapitate the newspaper’s employees and throw their severed heads out of the building’s windows. The attack was to take place as soon as possible, Kashmiri told the American terrorist, intimating that the leaders of al Qaeda wanted it that way.

  But in July 2009, Gilani’s LeT handler switched gears again, postponing the Denmark attack (to Gilani’s dismay) and calling him back to Pakistan in order to work on a follow-up attack in India. Gilani was resistant, complaining that his handlers “had rotten guts” and telling an associate that he could complete the project without the organization’s assistance.68

  He had overestimated his chances. In October 2009 Gilani was arrested at the airport while trying to fly from Chicago to Philadelphia, apparently in preparation to connect to Denmark. In his luggage FBI agents found maps of Copenhagen and a memory stick containing video surveillance of the newspaper office and other locations.69 He cut a deal and pleaded guilty to complicity in the Mumbai attack.70

  As of this writing, he may also face charges in India.71 Under interrogation by Indian officials as part of his plea agreement, Gilani was said to be abusive, referring to his interrogators with “the choicest of Hindi expletives” and mocking Indian intelligence.

  “The attack was planned and executed in your own backyard. You didn’t even get a whiff of it and now you want to question me,” Gilani reportedly scoffed.72

  AL SHABAB

  Somalia has known little but violence since the ruling dictatorship collapsed in 1991. The conflict was one of al Qaeda’s earliest investments (see chapter 6). In 2004 a fragile agreement was crafted to restore order to the country under the auspices of a transitional government.73

  Barely two years later, an Islamist movement known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) confronted the young government. The ICU, which wanted to establish shariah law, looked like a group of extremists to many observers, and there were rumors of links to al Qaeda. Although much of its activity was directed against the remaining shreds of the Somali government, ICU leaders blamed neighboring Ethiopia, a predominantly Christian nation, for interfering in Somalia’s affairs and blamed the United States for supporting the interference.74

  The ICU’s rise didn’t last long, and its fall was swift. Pressured by Ethiopia on one side and the Somali government on the other, then hammered by U.S. air strikes, the ICU crumbled and its leaders resigned.75

  Soon afterward, a second-wave Islamist movement arose—Al Shabab, made up of the most militant members of the ICU, who had split to form their own organization, and a number of foreign mujahideen. The new militia used any means available to undercut the Somali government, including assassinations and suicide bombings. Most of its victims were, and continue to be, Somalis.76

  Given the intense internal conflict, including Muslim-on-Muslim violence and a deep entanglement with essentially local conflicts of long standing, Somalia bore little resemblance to previous magnets for the global jihad movement.77 Unlike the Afghans in the 1980
s and the Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, Al Shabab did not possess a clear claim to the moral high ground, and it certainly did not enjoy the support of Western governments and media.

  Nevertheless, Al Shabab has attracted an extraordinary number of American jihadists. In 2007 and 2008, at least twenty young men from Minneapolis, Minnesota, left America to study the art of war at Al Shabab’s training camps. Several other Americans from all over the country also left for the battlefield. The vast majority of those who joined the conflict were Americans of Somali descent. Many had been born in Somalia, and most had family or tribal ties to the combatants. In 2008 former Minneapolis resident Shirwa Ahmed earned the unhappy distinction of being the first American suicide bomber.78

  Some fighters were recruited by people directly connected to Al Shabab or al Qaeda. Al Shabab recruiters were able to successfully leverage the involvement of Ethiopian troops working in conjunction with the Somali government to create a narrative of “Crusader” aggression. In this respect, they recreated some of the strengths of the old Soviet jihad recruiting model, in which jihadists lured young men to the battlefield first, then indoctrinated them with radical Islamic ideas in a tightly controlled environment. By the fall of 2010, U.S. intelligence estimated that several American citizens had risen to senior leadership positions in the organization.79

  The Minneapolis community most heavily targeted by Al Shabab recruiters faced a particularly difficult version of the American experience, living in poverty and violence in and around a housing project called Riverside Plaza. Murders and drug violence were endemic, and random death came to both criminals and innocent bystanders. The desire for an escape was understandable. Although life with Al Shabab was hardly an improvement in security, some recruits found that the chance to die for a cause compared favorably with the very real risk of dying for no reason at all.80

  While the problem of American ethnic Somalis joining Al Shabab is a serious concern, it’s also diagnosable and thus a manageable problem for intelligence and law enforcement (up to a point). But the appeal of Al Shabab didn’t stop there. Starting in 2006 and continuing through 2010, an increasingly diverse selection of American Muslims have tried to go to Somalia to take part in jihad.

  Jehad Mostafa was an American citizen of Kurdish descent who was raised as a Muslim. He was known as a friendly young man without any particular extremist leanings. A college friend remembered him as an unlikely mujahideen. “I used to tease him that his name was pronounced like ‘jihad,’ and I’d say you’re named after holy war? He’d say Islam is a religion of peace and love.” He prayed at the Islamic Center of San Diego, one of the locations visited by the September 11 hijackers. He married a Somali woman in about 2005, left the country shortly thereafter, and eventually made his way to Al Shabab.81

  There were several others (see chapter 11), but the most significant player was a Muslim named Omar Hammami, who hailed from the small southern town of Daphne, Alabama.82

  His father was a Syrian Muslim immigrant, and his mother was an American Christian. In high school Hammami had been a gifted student and the class president. Popular and well liked, Hammami showed little interest in his father’s religion while growing up, but during his sophomore year, he visited Syria with his father and became enamored of the Muslim culture he saw there. When he returned home, he began a gradual process of conversion.

  Hammami eventually adopted the conservative Salafi school of thought. He aggressively pursued dawah—calling others to Islam. Not surprisingly, his quest was not well received in small-town Alabama. Eventually, he moved to Toronto with a childhood friend, Bernard Culveyhouse, who had also converted to Islam, thanks to Hammami’s influence.

  Surrounded by a much more robust and diverse Muslim community, including a significant number of Somali immigrants, Hammami became more attuned to world events. He eventually grew angry and obsessed with America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as with conspiracy theories about September 11.

  Seeking to educate himself about these issues, he discovered the jihadist Internet and began to take a more militant view of his obligations as a Muslim. Unlike many of his American predecessors, Hammami believed that the only true purpose of jihad was to establish an Islamic state.

  Hammami met and married a Somali woman, guiding her from a relatively liberal view of Islam into Salafist conservatism and convincing her to wear an abaya and a niqab, which in combination form a full-body covering, leaving only the eyes visible.

  Hammami and Culveyhouse decided that they wanted to study at Egypt’s Al Azhar University. They moved to Alexandria briefly, but their applications were rejected, and Culveyhouse became disenchanted with Hammami’s increasingly stringent path. He returned to the United States, leaving his friend behind.

  Hammami turned to the Web for reinforcement on his journey. He met a kindred spirit online: Daniel Maldonado, an American citizen also living in Egypt.

  The two took a keen interest in Somalia and the activities of the Islamic Courts Union. They were attracted by the ICU’s narrative about establishing a pure Islamic state in the war-torn country, the reality of that narrative notwithstanding.83

  The friends agreed to travel to Somalia and join the jihad. Maldonado’s quest ended swiftly and ignominiously (see chapter 11). Hammami had better luck or maybe more commitment. He managed to work his way in with the Shabab fighters, who were now emerging as heirs to the ICU’s jihad.

  Hammami wasn’t the only foreigner impressed with Shabab. Al Qaeda had taken notice of the group as well. Harun Fazul, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy in the Horn of Africa, took an interest in Shabab—and in the young American.

  Taking the nom de guerre “Abu Mansour Al Amriki,” Hammami now became fully engaged in Shabab’s jihad against Ethiopia and its corresponding reign of terror over the Somali people. Shabab wasn’t only a military operation against the aggressors; it was also establishing a strict shariah code in the country, in the spirit of the worst excesses of the Taliban.

  Like al Qaeda, Shabab had established a media division, which was populated largely by Westerners.84 Abu Mansour appeared in a couple of videos with his face covered. In March 2009 he showed his face for the first time in a video titled Ambush At Bardal. The video depicted an operation led by Abu Mansour, apparently in command of a small squad that included Somali American mujahideen from Minnesota. In cinema verité style, the camera caught Hammami speaking in hushed tones as his men prepared for action, his accent still containing traces of Alabama, flavored with an Eastern lilt.

  We met the enemy, alhumdillilah [praise God]. So now, we know, we’re not seeing enemies. Right at, at this moment, the enemy’s very near, and if we hear that the enemy is moving, inshallah [God willing], we’ll be able to go and meet him. So, the only reason we’re staying here, away from our families, away from the cities, away from, you know, ice, candy bars, all these other things, is because we’re waiting to meet with the enemy.85

  The video followed Abu Mansour and his fellow jihadists from preparation to after-action in an ambush on Ethiopian troops. After the attack Abu Mansour reported that two of his men were killed. This, he explained, was a good thing.

  Our main objective, one of the things that we seek for in this life of ours, is to die as martyrs. So the fact that we got two martyrs, is nothing more than a victory in and of itself.86

  Hammami was also shown offering religious instruction to the mujahideen in English and Arabic. The quality of his theology was simplistic—one day of jihad is worth a month of fasting and prayers. Later in the video, Hammami began to sing and chant, accompanied by a rap song by an unnamed performer. Only someone truly committed to the jihad could bear to listen to his attempts to sing for very long.

  Blow by blow, year by year,

  I’m keeping these kaffirs living in fear.

  Night by night, day by day,

  Mujahideen spreading all over the place.

  Month by month, year by year,

  Keeping them
kaffirs living in fear.

  Blow by blow, crime by crime,

  Only gonna add to my venging rhymes.

  Bomb by bomb, blast by blast,

  Only gonna bring back the glorious past.87

  Music is forbidden in Shabab’s strict version of Islam, but an exception is made for religiously oriented songs without instrumental accompaniment, called nasheeds. Hammami’s excruciating singing debut was a big hit with Western jihadists, perhaps due to impaired taste because they were predisposed to be uncomfortable with music. Several follow-up songs were released, featuring other performers speaking, singing, and rapping in American-accented English.

  You must make a choice. Are you gonna live like an honorable man, and die like an honorable man, or are you gonna live like a humiliated coward, and die like one?

  Somalia is the place,

  [Emigrants] from every race base come.

  Don’t delay.

  Come before you’re bein’ judged on Judgment Day.

  Life is rising, surprising.

  The [infidels] are high-rising, talking, advising, chastising, advising.

  We got a plan finalizing.

  Crystallizing, Muslims realizing.

  Ain’t no disguisin’, we’re on the horizon.88

  The combination of a familiar youth-oriented format with American speakers proved to be a powerful recruiting tool. Additional videos were produced, including one showing Hammami leading an event on behalf of children whose fathers had died fighting for Shabab. The male children were given toy guns and encouraged to play “mujahideen.”89

  Abu Mansour’s stock continued to rise with a wider and more diverse audience, thanks to the influence of online American friends such as Daniel Maldonado. Somalia was fast becoming a cause célèbre for a new breed of jihadist recruits.

  JIHAD JANE

  Perhaps no case illustrates the incredible diversity of the American jihadist community better than the story of Colleen LaRose, better known as “Jihad Jane.”