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American holy warriors { July 16 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9947-2002Jul15.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9947-2002Jul15.html
For U.S., American 'Holy Warriors' Hard to Track
Until Sept. 11, Government Rarely Monitored U.S. Residents Fighting in Overseas Muslim Causes
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 16, 2002; Page A10
He is the most famous American to travel to a distant land to wage "jihad," or holy war, but John Walker Lindh is far from alone. Hundreds, if not thousands of U.S. residents -- some of them American citizens like Lindh -- have left their homes to fight for militant Islamic causes overseas in the last 20 years, terrorism experts said.
While the Lindh case throws a spotlight on the phenomenon, until the last few years, the U.S. government did not keep close tabs on most of the U.S.-based fighters who traveled to foreign war zones. It is unclear whether American officials have a firm idea of how many of them are still on the loose, though most knowledgeable U.S. and foreign government officials believe it is a tiny number.
One reason U.S. investigators only sporadically kept track of Americans fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Bosnia in the 1990s is that the travelers were not making war on America.
"There was no focus at the CIA on keeping track of the Americans" who joined Muslim movements in hot spots such as Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya, said Reuel Gerecht, a former CIA officer who spent years in the Middle East. "It was a perfect zippo, a nonexistent issue for the agency."
But a number of militants have been nabbed due to increased government vigilance after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Jose Padilla, a former U.S. street gang member, was detained in May at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and was accused of planning with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive bomb. Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was born in Louisiana and raised in Saudi Arabia, was captured in Afghanistan last year and is in a Navy brig in Norfolk.
The first wave of American militants took up arms in the 1980s, traveling to Afghanistan to join hastily assembled Muslim paramilitary forces battling the Soviet army. Most of these fighters were non-U.S. citizens originally from the Middle East or South Asia who had come to the United States on work or student visas.
One exception was U.S.-born Rodney Hampton-el, a kidney dialysis worker at a New York medical clinic who made his way to Afghanistan in 1988 and later was injured by a land mine there. Hampton-el, a convert to Islam, returned to New York and joined a circle of Muslim activists around blind Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in New Jersey and Connecticut.
Hampton-el and Rahman are serving lengthy prison sentences after their 1995 convictions for conspiracy to bomb the Lincoln Tunnel and other New York landmarks.
Hundreds of the Americans who traveled to wage jihad in Afghanistan were dispatched by the al-Kifah Refugee Center, an organization that had offices in Tucson, Jersey City and many other cities around the world. The group was taken over by Rahman when he arrived in this country from Egypt in 1990, and the organization's remnants became part of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda movement, officials said.
But early on, almost all that ferment was lost on the FBI. Before the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, the bureau's terrorism unit was so understaffed and demoralized by scandal that it lacked information about militant Islamic movements in this country, and had no idea who was traveling overseas to fight, U.S. officials said.
"We didn't understand the magnitude of what was going on here, and there," said Robert Blitzer, a former top FBI counterterrorism official and now a corporate consultant. "We only had a few snippets [about American militants overseas], and we certainly didn't have the records of al-Kifah."
In any case, American militants in Afghanistan were fighting on the same side as the United States, which was covertly supporting anti-Soviet guerrillas there.
When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan starting in 1989, hundreds of Muslim militants who had fought there moved on to other battles. Dozens and perhaps hundreds of U.S. residents are reported to have joined appeals to fight the Serbs in Bosnia.
One was a former Howard University groundskeeper named Clevin Raphael Holt. He converted to Islam, took the name Isa Abdullah Ali and fought with a Muslim brigade against the Israelis in Lebanon during the 1980s. In the 1990s, he joined a Muslim guerrilla unit in Bosnia and in 1996 was briefly the subject of a U.S. manhunt there after officials obtained evidence he had tried to enter a NATO compound.
Other Americans were inspired to fight in Kashmir, the site of years of bloody warfare between Muslim and Hindu forces along the Indian border with Pakistan. One U.S. citizen who is reported to have gone there was Abu Adam Jibreel, a middle-class youth who grew up in Atlanta and attended the city's renowned Ebenezer Baptist Church before converting to Islam as a teenager, according to U.S. News & World Report magazine.
After Jibreel experienced militant Muslim stirrings during a year at North Carolina Central University in Durham, he traveled to Kashmir in 1997 and trained with Islamic fighters at remote camps in the Hindu Kush mountains. He was killed in a raid on an Indian army post a year later.
Details are just as skimpy about a number of other Americans alleged to have joined the Muslim underground overseas. In February, the New York Times reported that the name of an American, Hiram Torres, was listed on a document its reporters found in a house in Kabul that had been used by Pakistani fighters allied with al Qaeda.
Torres's age, 20, and his New Jersey address were listed as well, along with the fact that he knows how to drive and that he also uses the name Mohammed Salman. Relatives in New Jersey and Puerto Rico said that Torres briefly attended Yale University before going to Pakistan and then Afghanistan, in 1998, and falling out of contact.
U.S. officials have documented other Americans' role in al Qaeda. Wadih el-Hage was a tire store worker and the father of seven children in Arlington, Tex., in the 1990s when U.S. authorities concluded that the naturalized U.S. citizen was a top aide to bin Laden. Last year, he was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa.
Former U.S. officials said one reason they paid little attention to the American jihadis is that often they didn't appear to be violating U.S. laws -- at least any that are ever enforced. The U.S. Neutrality Act bans taking up arms against a nation with which the United States is at peace, but prosecutions under the law are rare.
At the same time, U.S. officials are known to be investigating some militant Muslim groups in this country that embrace violent struggle against the United States. Last week, the Seattle Times reported that federal authorities are looking into what they called a "cell" tied to al Qaeda and to a radical London cleric named Abu Hamza al-Masri.
The group scouted a property in southern Oregon that officials believe may have been intended as a paramilitary training site, the paper said.
Another militant network, sometimes called Jamaat ul-Fuqra, has occupied a number of isolated rural properties around the United States in recent years that have drawn intense interest from investigators. The group, founded in the early 1980s by a Pakistani cleric named Mubarik Ali Gilani, has engaged in firebombings and assassinations against its perceived enemies, such as Hindus and Muslims whom the group believes are apostates, U.S. officials say.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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