Connecting The Dots Of Americans Joining The Jihad

The conventional wisdom has long been that America was immune to the heady currents of radicalization affecting both immigrant and indigenous Muslim communities elsewhere in the West.[1] It has now been shattered by the succession of cases that have come to light in recent months of terrorist radicalization and recruitment occurring in the United States. And while it must to be emphasized that the number of U.S. citizens and residents affected or influenced in this manner remains small; at the same time the sus­tained and growing number of individuals heeding these calls is nonetheless indisputably alarming.

Homegrown Recruitment and Radicalization

More than a year ago, inSITE reported the first clear evidence of a terrorist radicalization and recruitment process existent in the U.S. Nearly 30 Somali-American youths from the Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota had been radicalized and recruited in this country by a terrorist group based in Somalia——with close links with al-Qaeda——calling itself al-Shabaab.[2]The group first surfaced in 2006 as a result of the ongoing civil war that has been fought in Somalia over the past twenty years. Al-Shabaab came into being as the shock troops or military wing of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU or Council of Islamic Courts), a loose coalition of Islamic extremists seeking to seize power from Somalia’s perennially weak central government and impose shar’ia (Islamic law) on the country. With the ICU and its al-Shabaab foot soldiers in control of the southern half of Somalia, including the capital, Mogadishu, key al-Qaeda operatives from East Africa and elsewhere were welcomed back to that country. Among them was the late Saleh Nabhan, who was wanted in connection with the 1998 bombing by al-Qaeda of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya and who was also the mastermind behind the 2002 al-Qaeda suicide attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombassa, Kenya. According to the U.S. government,

Following the death of an al-Shabaab fighter in Somalia as a result of a U.S. cruise missile attack in 2008, the group warned that it would “hunt the U.S. government.” A statement released afterwards addressed “To the other mujahideen included in the American terrorist list” proclaimed further:

The following year, al-Shabaab claimed credit for a mortar attack at Mogadishu Airport that targeted a visiting U.S. Congressman.

The first solid evidence that al-Shabaab was recruiting in the U.S. surfaced in October 2008 when a 27 year-old former University of Minnesota student and naturalized American citizen of Somali heritage named Shirwa Ahmed became the first U.S. citizen to carry out a suicide bombing. Ahmed had staged a suicide terrorist attack on 29 October 2008 in northern Somalia that had targeted United Nations aid workers and killed at least 30 persons. His death had followed by less than a month that of a Seattle, Washington native and African-American convert to Islam, cum ex-felon, named, Ruben Luis Shumpert, who was also fighting in Somalia with al-Shabaab. Then, in early November 2008, news broke that several Somali-American youths from the same Minneapolis, Minnesota immigrant community to which Ahmed belonged had left the U.S. to train and fight with al-Shabaab. The families of three of young men had come forward publicly with information that their sons and three other young Somali-Americans had secretly departed the U.S. for Somalia. Almost without exception, the youths who slipped out of the U.S. in November 2008 were described as good boys who were also good students and from good families and who also had never before been in trouble with the law.

Perhaps the most infamous American recruit to al-Shabaab, however, is a twenty-five year former resident of Alabama named Omar Hammami. Now known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mansoor al-Amriki, “the American,” Hammami, the son of a Syrian Muslim immigrant and an American Christian mother, has been featured in al-Shabaab recruitment videos aimed at both European as well as American audiences. “We’re waiting for the enemy to come,” he confides to the camera in one video. “We’re going to kill all of them."[5] In another, he explains that, “The only reason we are staying here, away from our family, away from the cities, away from ice and candy bars and other things is because we are waiting to meet the enemy.”[6]

There have been reports of other youths from tight-knit Somali communities as diverse as San Diego, California; Boston, Massachusetts; Portland, Maine; and Columbus, Ohio who have similarly left home to fight in Somalia. The indictment of yet another Somali-American, named Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, also known as “Talha,” in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in March 2010, provides additional evidence of both the geographical dimensions and diversity of al-Shabaab’s efforts in the U.S. Ahmed has been charged with providing “material support and resources” to al-Shabaab: including raising funds for the group and engaging in the recruitment of persons to join al-Shabaab. He is also alleged to have received training at an al-Shabaab camp in Somalia, including bomb making and bomb detonation.[7]

A different kind of case, also previously discussed in inSITE, involves Major Nidal Hassan, the U.S. Army officer who gunned down 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in November 2009. Hassan appears to have been radicalized or at least encouraged in his extremist beliefs through his e-mail contact with a known radical Islamic cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and is an American citizen, is a known al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) senior operative. The AQAP is the same group that trained and dispatched a 23 year-old Nigerian national, and former student at London’s prestigious University College, named Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab on a Christmas Day 2009 bombing mission. An improvised explosive device concealed in his underwear had failed to ignite on Northwest Airlines flight #253 that day. Alert passengers and crew pounced on Abdulmuttalab and subdued him, thus averting a potential disaster.

But, in addition to Hassan and Abdulmuttalab, there is still another terrorist incident on U.S. soil that involved both AQAP and the radicalization of an American citizen, that inSITE also previously reported. Last June, an African-American convert to Islam named Abdulhakim Muhammad, returned from Yemen to the U.S. and traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas where he gunned down one U.S. Army recruiter and wounded another. Muhammad has recently claimed that he carried out the shootings in Little Rock at the behest of AQAP.

Finally in 2009 there is the case of the five Muslim-American youths from a Washington, DC suburb who traveled to Pakistan in December 2009 with the intent of receiving terrorist training. They were detained by Pakistani authorities only after their parents——as had occurred both with the Somali-American youths from Minnesota and the father of the Christmas Day would-be bomber——alerted authorities to their respective sons’ disappearance. Apparently, a Taliban recruiter had made contact with one of the youths named Ahmed Abdullah Minni, after he posted laudatory comments on You Tube about videos showing attacks on U.S. troops.

The Threat From Within

While all the preceding evidence some form of “homegrown terrorism” or domestic radicalization, there were three additional cases of an even more alarming character, also previously discussed by inSITE. New information has come to light that significantly fleshes out all three. The first involves Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born, U.S. resident; the second involves David Headley (who changed his name from Daood Sayed Gilani in 2006), the son of a Pakistani man and American woman, age 49; and Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a 48 year-old Pakistani-born Canadian; and, the third, a Long Island, New York native of Latino heritage named Bryant Neal Vinas.

On 22 February 2010, Zazi——also known as “Salahuddin”——pleaded guilty to a three-count superseding indictment charging him with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction (explosive bombs) against persons or property in the United States; conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country; and, providing material support to al-Qaeda.[8] Zazi, a New York City pushcart vendor, and other persons not named in the criminal complaint, allegedly left the U.S. in the summer of 2008 with the intention of joining the Taliban and fighting against U.S. and coalition military forces in Afghanistan. After arriving in Peshawar, Pakistan, however, Zazi and his companions were recruited by al-Qaeda operatives and brought to the Wazirstan region of Pakistan where they were provided with terrorist training. The group was then asked by senior al-Qaeda leaders to return to the United States and conduct suicide terrorist operations. They agreed. After receiving further training in the fabrication of homemade explosive devices, federal prosecutors assert that Zazi allegedly discussed with his al-Qaeda handlers potential targets in New York, including the New York City subway. He also admitted to procuring computers and money for al-Qaeda before returning to the U.S. in January 2009.

Upon his return, Zazi re-located from New York to Denver but made repeated trips back east to meet with his confederates to discuss the attack plan and make the necessary logistical preparations. Between July and August 2009, prosecutors maintain, he purchased large quantities of the components necessary to produce the homemade explosive triacetone triperoxide (TATP), a World War I-era explosive compound long favored by Palestinian terrorist groups for suicide attacks. On 10 September 2009, Zazi returned to New York City for what he planned would be the final time. His intention was to gather the other members of his operational team, arm their homemade explosive devices and implement a series of simultaneous suicide attacks on Manhattan subway lines as close in time as possible to the anniversary of the September 11th 2001 attacks. It is believed that he had planned the operations for either 14, 15 or 16 September 2009.

Zazi aborted the plot after learning that he and his cell were under surveillance. He then allegedly discarded the explosives and other bomb-making materials. He was arrested on Sept. 19, 2009. “This was one of the most serious terrorist threats to our nation since September 11th, 2001,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder explained, “and were it not for the combined efforts of the law enforcement and intelligence communities, it could have been devastating. This attempted attack on our homeland was real, it was in motion, and it would have been deadly.”[9]

The second case involves the indictment last October of two Chicago men of Pakistani heritage on charges of assisting in the plotting terrorist attacks against targets outside the U.S., including the facilities and employees of the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. This is the newspaper that published cartoons in 2005 of the Prophet that many Muslims consider as derogatory. The indictment revealed that the two men had links with two of al-Qaeda’s key Pakistani jihadi allies: Lashkar-e-Toiba (“Army of the Pure,” or LeT), the group responsible for the November 2008 suicide terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India; and, Harakat ul-Jihad (“Islamic Struggle Movement,” or HuJI). Headley was also implicated in the Mumbai suicide assault that was perpetrated by the LeT. He allegedly carried out reconnaissance efforts for the group that may have been pivotal to the operation’s success.

The Headley and Rana indictments are troubling for another, significant reason. The operating assumption among American intelligence and law enforcement had long been that if a foreign terrorist entity was ever able to recruit a U.S.-based asset, that person would be used to carry out attacks in the U.S. itself. The fact that Headley and Ranna were tasked with overseas missions may suggest that foreign terrorist groups may have sufficient——or even a surfeit of——assets already residing in the U.S. that can be used for attacks here thus freeing up other operatives for overseas missions.

Finally, in January 2009 26 year old Bryant Neal Vinas pleaded guilty to federal charges that he trained with al-Qaeda in Pakistan for fourteen months during 2007 and 2008. He was apprehended by Pakistani authorities in 2008 and extradited back to the U.S. to stand trial. Vinas admitted helping al-Qaeda to plan an attack that never transpired against a Long Island Railroad train in New York’s Pennsylvania Station and also to participating in two al-Qaeda rocket attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan in September 2008.

A Bad Start To A New Year

Only three months into the new year and already there are three more cases of homegrown terrorist recruitment in the U.S. The first, already discussed, again involved another Somali-American indicted in a New York district of the federal court. The second, involves a New Jersey man whose mother is Somali but who hooked up with AQAP in Yemen; and the third is a somewhat peculiar cases involving two female would-be jihadis respectively from Pennsylvania and Colorado.

On 11 March 2010 Yemeni authorities announced that a 26 year-old man named Sharif Mobley had been arrested in that country in early March as part of a police round-up of suspected AQAP operatives. He was being treated at a hospital in San’a, the capital, when he allegedly seized a weapon from a security guard during an attempted escape. In the ensuing gun battle, one Yemeni police officer was killed and another wounded. Mobley, a karate black belt, former high school wrestler and maintenance worker at two nuclear power plants, grew up in the rural southern New Jersey town of Buena be­fore moving to Philadelphia and Newark, Delaware. He was described by his mother as “an excellent person who’s never been in trouble” and as a “good Muslim.” His father told a reporter, “I can tell you this: he’s no terrorist.”[10] Mobley was last employed organizing religious pilgrimages (the haj) to the Middle East for other Muslims. Like Hassan and Abdulmuttalabl, he was also in e-mail contact with al-Awlaki——the senior AQAP operative and firebrand cleric now based in Yemen.

Finally, we have the case of Colleen LaRose, reported by SITE on 9 March 2010,[11] and allegedly of Jamie Paulin-Ramirez. LaRose, a petite, blue-eyed, blonde high school dropout who converted to Islam, and used the aliases “Fatima La Rose” and “JihadJane” in Internet communications, has been charged with having “recruited men on the Internet to wage violent jihad in South Asia and Europe, and recruited women on the Internet who had passports and the ability to gravel to and around Europe in support of violent jihad.” She is also accused of having “received a direct order to kill a citizen and resident of Sweden, and to do so in a way that would frighten ‘the whole Kufar [non-believer] world’.”[12] Prosecutors further maintain that LaRose provided material support to terrorists and herself traveled to Sweden in order to plan an attack on an article named Lars Vilk who had drawn a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad on the body of a dog.

LaRose seems an unlikely recruit to jihad. Twice married, she had spent more of her in recent years caring for her boyfriend’s elderly, infirm parents. She boasted in e-mails how, given her appearance, she would “blend in with many people” and also attempted to recruit other Western women who looked like her. According to prosecutors, a man identified as LaRose’s fiancé instructed her to “go to Sweden . . . find location of” Vilk and “kill him . . . this is what i say to you [sic].” LaRose allegedly replied that it would be “an honour & great pleasure to die or kill” for her fiancé, reportedly declaring that “only death will stop me here that I am so close to the target.” Upon her return to the U.S. from Sweden, she was arrested. David Kris, an assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, was quoted stating that a suburban American woman accused of conspiring to support terrorists who traveled overseas to implement the plot “underscores the evolving nature of the threat we face.”[13]

Acting on information provided by U.S. authorities, Irish police subsequently arrested four men and three women who had been under electronic surveillance by American and Swedish police in connection with the planned assassination of Vilks. The group included three Algerians, a Croatian, a Palestinian, a Libyan and a U.S. citizen——Paulin-Ramirez, a 31 year-old mother of a six year old son from Leadville, Colorado who had previously worked as a medical assistant and had converted to Islam last year.[14]

The Bad News Worsened

Given this litany of incidents involving homegrown radicals, lone wolves, and trained terrorist recruits, the U.S. is arguably now little different from Europe in terms of having a domestic terrorist problem involving immigrant and indigenous Muslims as well as converts to Islam. The diversity of these latest foot soldiers in the wars of terrorism being waged against the U.S., the West, and other countries, underscores how irrelevant the conventional wisdom about terrorists and terrorism has become and how anachronistic the stereotype of the typical terrorist has been rendered. In the past year alone we have seen suburban white bread Americans and the progeny of hard-working immigrants gravitate to terrorism. Persons of color and Caucasians have done so as well. Women along with men. Good students and well educated individuals and high school drop-outs and jail birds. Persons born in the U.S. or variously in Somalia, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Teenaged boys pumped up with testosterone and middle-aged divorcees. The only common denominator appears to be a new found hatred for their native or adopted country; a degree of dangerous malleability; and a religious fervor justifying or legitimizing violence that impels these very impressionable and perhaps easily influence individuals towards potentially highly lethal acts of violence.

The diversity of this array of recent terrorist recruits presents new challenges for intelligence and law enforcement agencies that are already over-stressed and inundated with information and leads, to run these new threats to ground. There seems no longer any clear profile of a terrorist. Moreover, the means through which many of these persons were radicalized over the Internet, suggests that these days you can become a terrorist in the comfort or your own bedroom. This was something unheard of as recently as ten years ago——and can only bode ill for the future.

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[1] See for example “America’s Muslims after 9/11,” VOANews.com, 10 September 2006 accessed at: http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/news-analysis/a-13-Muslims2006-09-10-voa17.html; “Overview of Muslims in America,” PBS series, “The Muslims in America,” accessed at: http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/about/ show_muslim_americans.html#top; and, “Pew Study Sees Muslim Americans Assimilating,” Barbara Bradley Hagerty, National Public Radio, “All Things Considered,” 22 May 2007 accessed at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10330400

[2] Al-Shabaab is also known as: al Shabab;, Shabaab; the Youth; Mujahidin al-Shabaab Movement; Mujahideen Youth Movement; Mujahidin Youth Moveent; MYM; Harakat Shabab al-Mujahidin; Hizbul Shabaab; Hisb’ul Shabaab; al-Shabaab al-Islamiya; Youth Wing; al-Shabaab al-Islaam; al-Shabaab al-Jihaad; and, the Unity of Islamic Youth.

[3] U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, United States Of America v. Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, a/k/a “Talha,” 10 CRIM. 131, 8 March 2010.

[4] Quoted in Ibid.

[5] Quoted in Andrea Elliott, “The Jihadist Next Door,” New York Times (Sunday) Magazine, 31 January 2010.

[6] Quoted in Dina Temple-Raston, “Terrorism Recruits No Longer All Fit The Mold,” National Public Radio, “Morning Edition,” 11 March 2010 accessed at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124549992&ft=3&f=11209543

[7] Ibid.

[8] United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, Superseding Information, Cr. No. 09-663 (S-1) (RJD), United States of America against Najibul­lah Zazi, 22 February 2010.

[9] USDOJ-Office of Public Affairs, “Najibullah Zazi Pleads Guilty To Conspiracy To Use Explosives Against Persons or Property In U.S., Conspiracy To Murder Aboard And Providing Material Support To Al-Qaeda,” 22 February 2010

[10] Quoted in “New Jersey Man Held In Yemen After Al-Qaida Sweep,” Associated Press, 11 March 2010. See also, “Friend: Suspected US Al-Qaida Member Grew Radical,” Associated Press, 12 March 2010.

[11] “American Online Jihadist Indicted for Material Support to Terrorists,” SITE Intelligence Group, 9 March 2010.

[12] Quoted in Ibid.

[13] Quoted in Carrie Johnson, “JihadJane, an American woman, faces ter­rorism charges,” Washington Post, 10 March 2010.

[14] Vanessa O’Connell, Stephanie Simon, and Evan Perez, “For the love of Islam: A Second American Woman Is Arrested in Cartoonist Case,’ Wall Street Journal (New York), 13-14 March 2010.