When he was in high school, Dennis Philips fronted a rock band emulating Jimi Hendrix.
Philips was Jamaican by birth, but his Protestant parents had moved to Canada when he was very young, and that was the culture he knew. Caught up in the turmoil of the sixties, Philips dropped out of college and began to travel through America, bouncing around the drug scene and toying with communism and Black Nationalism, before converting to Islam in the early 1970s and taking on the name Bilal.
He had encountered Islam several times in his travels, but the book that won him over was Islam, the Misunderstood Religion, penned by the younger brother of Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb. Muhammad Qutb served a crucial role in widening the appeal of his brother’s ideas by massaging them into a less overtly incendiary form.1
In his quest to understand his new religion better, Philips went to study Islam at the University of Medina in Saudi Arabia and afterward earned a master’s in Islamic theology in Riyadh. He began to write and teach about Islam, viewing every engagement as dawah—an opportunity to call his students to Islam.2
In 1992 U.S. forces deployed to Saudi Arabia to defend the country against Saddam Hussein, whose army had seized neighboring Kuwait and was menacing Islam’s heartland.
The Saudi government saw an opportunity in the deployment. In an open field next to the main U.S. encampment, an impromptu bazaar had sprung up. The Saudi military requested permission from the U.S. military to set up a “Cultural Information Tent” on the site so that the troops could learn more about Saudi culture.3
Although Saudi officials assured U.S. commanders that the program was a simple introduction to Arab culture, it was in reality an epic-scale evangelical effort.4 Leading this revival was Bilal Philips, now a member of the Saudi Air Force’s religion brigade. As Philips recalled it, the intent of the program was simply to provide information about Islam.
In the course of time, a number of people after listening decided to accept Islam, and that number started to increase and increase ’til we were averaging something around twenty converts per day. And, uh, the tent quickly became to be known amongst the chaplains as the Conversion Tent. Although this was not specifically our intention, was not necessarily to convert them but to convey information.
But it just so happened that the number of those who were interested or those who had come and got information, either they had previously investigated something about Islam and, you know, this further information just completed what they were looking for and this convinced or they came and were open-minded enough, they heard this and felt this is what they believed or something closer or made more sense to them or whatever.5
That was how Philips remembered the program in 2010 during an interview with the author. In 2003 he had told a somewhat different story to an Arabic-language newspaper based in London.
[A Saudi official] had a strong urge to convert U.S. soldiers into Islam. But, he did not speak English well. So he sought my help in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain. Since that date, I began giving religious lectures to U.S. soldiers on Islam.6
Philips helped assemble a team that spoke English fluently. The Camp for Cultural Information operated twenty-four hours a day for nearly six months, with imams living on-site and working a rotating schedule.
“At first we prepared the soldiers mentally,” Philips said in the 2003 interview. One of the team’s members “with experience in broadcasting and American psychology” addressed groups of 200 to 250 soldiers at a time, preparing the ground.7
The team also arranged for soldiers to visit Saudi families and witness group prayers in Saudi mosques. Some were even taken to see government-sanctioned beheadings (part of the Saudi criminal system). All of this activity was made possible by a standing order from one of the U.S. base’s commanders that allowed Muslim soldiers—including the newly converted—to take a four-day pass to visit Mecca through the program. Expenses were covered by the Saudi government.8
During one of these field trips, Philips ran into an African American Muslim named Tahir who “just happened” to be in Mecca performing the Umrah, a lesser pilgrimage to the Grand Mosque. Tahir was a Vietnam veteran who later fought alongside jihadists in Afghanistan and had a natural affinity for his fellows in the military.9 Tahir joined the Saudi camp and helped preach about Islam to the soldiers.
The program was a resounding success. By Philips’s account, the team converted about three thousand U.S. soldiers to Islam, collecting names and addresses of converts and steering them toward Islamic centers back in the United States.10 Other sources pegged the number at sixteen hundred.11 It was an impressive tally either way.
In 1992 Philips was asked to deploy his U.S. military contacts for an “off the books” mission on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia who had become embroiled in a civil war.
I was approached by a couple of military people and asked if I knew of any of the troops that had accepted Islam, gone back to the States and had left the American military, you know, who might be willing to go to Bosnia to help train the Bosnians. What they said they were looking for was something like an A-Team of specialists who would then go and train them to help them in resisting the Serbian slaughter.12
That request marked the start of a program that would soon spiral out of control, embroiling U.S. military veterans in a jihadist circle with links to al Qaeda and to a stunningly ambitious homegrown plot to kill thousands of innocent victims in New York City.
Bosnia-Herzegovina had a long and storied relationship with Islam, going back to its conquest by the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. The official religion of the empire was Sunni Islam, which was broadly adopted, but Bosnian Jews and Christians were permitted to maintain their practices, resulting in a cosmopolitan mix of religions that worked successfully for centuries.
After the fall of the Ottomans, religion and ethnicity became hot issues. A Bosnian Serb, motivated by ethnic nationalism, fired the shot that started World War I. As part of Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia during World War II, Croatian Catholics and Bosnian Muslims took part in the extermination of Jews and Romany populations.
After World War II, Yugoslavia was united in large part by force of will—a cult of personality built around Communist strongman Josip Broz Tito, who suppressed religious expression and raised a generation of secular Slavs for whom the word “Muslim” was mainly an ethnic identifier.
The Muslims of Yugoslavia became perhaps the world’s most secular. They drank—a lot. They smoked—a lot. They gambled, ate pork, neglected prayers, and charged interest at their banks. Men’s faces were clean shaven, and women’s clothes were low cut.
For more than three decades, Tito’s iron grip held Yugoslavia together. His death in 1980 was the start of a long and agonizing collapse. In 1991 Croatia and Slovenia peeled away from Yugoslavia, while Serbia and Montenegro maintained most of the infrastructure of the former state under a new flag.
All of these machinations left Bosnia with a mixed population that rapidly and violently separated along “ethnic” lines, even though members of the three main groups—Croats, Serbs, and Muslims—had intermarried, spoke the same language, and looked alike.
There were a few who had kept the Islamic flame alive despite severe state repression. After Tito’s fall, longtime Islamic activist Alija Izetbegovic took over the presidency of Bosnia on behalf of the Muslim-controlled Party of Democratic Action (SDA in the Bosnian language) after the country’s first multiparty election in 1990.
Izetbegovic hadn’t won the election. The actual winner was a charismatic businessman named Fikret Abdic whose appeal cut across ethnic lines. Abdic declined to take the presidency as the result of political machinations that have never been disclosed. Izetbegovic—perceived by many Western leaders as a moderate and secular Muslim—later commissioned a fatwa against Abdic, declaring him an infidel and offering the rewards of martyrdom to anyone who was killed fighting his supporters.13
Izetbegovic’s personal beliefs are unclear—he was a cipher to his closest associates, as well as to international intelligence agencies—but his actions soon demonstrated that he had no problem wrapping himself in Islam if it provided some benefit.
The new president and his cabinet were unusually well connected in the Muslim world, keeping up strong ties in both Saudi Arabia and Iran despite the sectarian antagonism between the two countries. As civic chaos gave way to a three-way civil war among Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, these international connections came into play.
The Iranians chipped in with direct shipments of arms and elite intelligence operatives to assist the Muslims. The Saudis provided copious funds from the kingdom’s coffers but also used their religious leverage to internationalize the conflict.
As part of the latter effort, Izetbegovic was obliged to accept an influx of mujahideen fighters. Between 1,000 and 2,000 foreign fighters took part during the course of the conflict, and they led about 3,000 Bosnians who opted to fight as mujahideen rather than as part of the regular army.14
The most prominent leaders of the Bosnian mujahideen were Egyptians associated with Omar Abdel Rahman’s Islamic Group and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.15 Bosnian president Izetbegovic was allied with these leaders, even consenting to be videotaped during a grip-and-grin meeting with fighters closely tied to Osama bin Laden and Omar Abdel Rahman.16
Bin Laden sent several al Qaeda members to Bosnia in an effort to exploit the conflict. The mastermind of September 11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, also traveled to Bosnia looking for recruits he could turn from military jihad to terrorism, and two of the 9/11 hijackers fought in Bosnia. However, the majority of the mujahideen were not overtly connected to al Qaeda (see chapter 5).17
The Saudi government had invested tremendous resources into shaping the opinions and the organizations of American Muslims. Its most overt tool for this purpose was the New York office of the Muslim World League.
As the war in Bosnia heated up, the English-language MWL Journal placed the conflict front and center, with dozens of articles and cover stories focusing on the Muslims’ disadvantages in terms of arms and training, compared to the Serbs and the Croats.
The journal also chronicled the impotent rage of the Islamic Conference states over a UN arms embargo that covered the conflict zone. The embargo was widely perceived by Muslims and non-Muslims alike to provide a devastating advantage to Bosnian Serbs by preventing Muslims from defending themselves.
The Muslim States and communities have been patient. For months on, they have been watching with their hands on their hearts Bosnian Muslims being mercilessly butchered and their children and women being ruthlessly evicted from their homes and farms as Serbia occupies more land and gains more ground.18
Others were steering the narrative in American policy circles. Abdurrahman Alamoudi was a player who had over the years worked for several mainstream U.S. Muslim organizations before founding the American Muslim Council in 1990. He was also wired into the Muslim underground. According to an informant, he carried regular payments of $5,000 from Osama bin Laden to Omar Abdel Rahman in New York to cover the cost of Rahman’s rent and expensive international phone bills.19
Articulate and media-savvy, Alamoudi was a regular presence on television and in newspapers, always ready to provide a quote or a sound bite when journalists needed someone to represent the voice of mainstream American Islam. Alamoudi was an advocate of U.S. intervention in Bosnia, staging protests and rallies for the cameras and writing op-eds for both Muslim and mainstream publications:
Candidate Clinton called for increased U.S. involvement in the Balkans designed to halt Serb aggression and violations of human rights. President Clinton, however, has dithered and drifted, abdicating his responsibilities as leader of the free world and ignoring the considerable powers of his office.20
These lobbying efforts were helped by a combination of pragmatism and idealism on the part of the mainstream media. Pragmatically, it was extremely unsafe to report firsthand on the unfolding war, so journalists frequently relied on official pronouncements from Bosnian Muslim officials as to what exactly was going on. Idealism was an even more powerful force—CNN’s Christiane Amanpour flatly stated that attempts to report on the conflict from a neutral perspective would have made reporters “complicit in genocide.”21
Few other reporters would go that far in public, but most Western coverage clearly favored the Muslim side in the war. And in many important respects, the narrative was correct—the Muslims were, by and large, the victims of Serbian aggression, and they endured horrifying war crimes in Bosnia. Nevertheless, most reporting tended to neglect important complexities, such as atrocities and war crimes committed by Bosnian Muslim factions, including the mujahideen, about whom little was known.
On the policy side, things were no better. Top administration officials were either oblivious to the mujahideen or dismissive of their importance. Although Clinton could not be moved to overturn or violate the UN embargo directly, his administration quietly opted to turn a blind eye toward illegal arms shipments to the Bosnian government from Muslim countries, including Iran and Turkey.22
As the crisis dragged on, Alamoudi rallied a diverse, media-friendly collection of religious leaders to join his “American Task Force on Bosnia.” Despite his support for radicals such as the blind sheikh, Alamoudi won strong backing from American Jews, in part thanks to frequent comparisons between the actions of Bosnian Serbs and the Holocaust:
Our children and their children will not forgive this generation, will not forgive us, all of mankind, for allowing this genocide—and if I may respectfully call it the second Holocaust of this century. The mass rape, the destruction that went on for more than a year must not be forgiven. We have allowed the destruction not only of life, of property, but of cherished principles of international law, the bedrock of the United Nations itself.23
The comparison was profoundly ironic, given that Izetbegovic reportedly collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.24
In American mosques, Friday khutbas (sermons) increasingly concerned the slaughter of Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, and speakers recounted lurid reports of atrocities—especially allegations about the rape of Muslim women, a frequent theme in jihadist propaganda.
Under the influence of the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, the Al Kifah operations in Brooklyn and Boston had also started to focus heavily on Bosnia. Al Kifah’s newsletter, which was personally supervised by Rahman, exhorted readers to provide both “money and men,” ruling that jihad in Bosnia was obligatory for all Muslims:
We help the mujahideen in Bosnia so the [infidels] won’t spread in the region. [ … ] We help the mujahideen in Bosnia just to protect this Ummah [the community of Muslims] and to return the torturing of the enemy after the backing off of many of the Muslim leaders and their begging the United States to lift the weapon embargo.25
Rahman himself echoed these sentiments in extravagant speeches around the New York area.
Where’s virtue? Where is loyalty which remained with the Muslims? … They find the women as their honors were violated, and the Bosnian women ask in some conferences what do we do with our pregnancies what do we do? And what should we do? They ask while they are crying…. Have the eyes cried? Have the tears shed? Have the hearts been broken? For what is happening to our sisters there? While their honors are violated and they became pregnant out of wedlock, no one lifts a finger.26
Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, a bespectacled Sudanese immigrant who worked as Omar Abdel Rahman’s translator in New York, echoed his spiritual leader’s outrage in speeches around New York.
We cannot announce and pronounce [Koranic verses about] Jihad, even when we come to America here, because we are still afraid that the CIA or the FBI or the authorities of countries are going to be behind us. Therefore, we still have to stay in our shells, and not come out and confront the idea or confront the disease, confront the humiliation, confront the oppression, and confront the [infidels] who has taken our own sisters, our brothers, as slaves in Bosnia.27
Siddig should have taken the threat of FBI surveillance more seriously, as will become clear.
Thanks to these public sympathies and his excellent social network, Bilal Philips was making rapid strides in his program to recruit U.S. soldiers who could help train Bosnia’s besieged fighters in their efforts against the Serbs. The first step was to secure financing and support for the plan, so Philips flew to Switzerland to meet with a representative of the Bosnian government.
Hasan Cengic was an imam, an official in the Bosnian army, and a notorious gunrunner. Cengic and Izetbegovic had served time in prison together under Tito for their Islamic activism. A trusted confidant, Cengic had been appointed to help manage the torrent of donations flowing to Bosnia’s Muslims from around the world, especially from Saudi Arabia.28
Izetbegovic and Cengic funneled the donations through a fake charity called the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), which was for all meaningful purposes a branch of the Bosnian government. The organization’s titular head was a Sudanese national named Fatih El Hassanein, whom one al Qaeda informant called “Osama bin Laden’s man in Bosnia.” Cengic ran the day-to-day operations, deciding how the money would be spent.29
“Cengic was a very interesting guy that we followed for a long time, but we really couldn’t put a nail into him,” recalled Mike Scheuer, who led the CIA’s Sunni extremist analysis team during the Bosnian war. “But he was clearly able to supply an awful lot of guns into Bosnia. He was a very important gunrunner.”
As the Saudis aimed their substantial financial resources at Bosnia, Izetbegovic charged Cengic with receiving the money through TWRA and transforming it into weapons, in defiance of the UN embargo. During the course of the war, TWRA would take in at least $300 million in funds, raised mostly by Saudi citizens and royals.
Although TWRA does appear to have carried out some actual charity work, it spent far more of its cash on illicit activities. It was, at its core, a criminal organization. TWRA employees—including some of Bosnia’s most notorious and violent mobsters—dealt drugs and committed murder, in addition to purchasing weapons and ammunition for the Bosnian army. Much of the money collected had simply disappeared by the time the war ended.30
The charity supported Islamic extremism with whatever was left over after lining the pockets of its principals. Omar Abdel Rahman was closely tied to TWRA, which distributed his sermons on tape in Europe. In at least one instance, Rahman appears to have sent a New York–based operative to Bosnia through TWRA’s office in Austria (the operative was turned away at the border). Later, investigators would be told by an informant that TWRA was a front for Osama bin Laden. There appears to be some truth in this claim, although the full scope of the linkage is unclear.31
Cengic agreed to provide Philips with funds to recruit military veterans who would come to Bosnia in what would end up being a largely futile effort to give the mujahideen a dose of U.S. military professionalism. TWRA funds would be used to pay for the vets’ travel and expenses. Although the mission was said to be strictly for training, Cengic also agreed to compensate the families back home should any of the volunteers be killed.32
After the meeting, Philips started to canvass his military friends back in the United States. Two proved exceptionally helpful. One was Tahir, the Vietnam vet who had helped convert U.S. soldiers back in Riyadh. His connection to that program meant he had strong ties to new Muslim converts with military experience who could be swayed to help the Bosnians. Now living in the New York area, Tahir quickly took charge of the initial recruitment program and helped prepare the Muslim trainers with equipment such as rifle scopes and night-vision goggles.33
The second contact was an African American convert to Islam named Archie Barnes, who had changed his name to Qaseem Ali Uqdah. A marine since 1975 and a Muslim since his teenage years, Uqdah held the rank of gunnery sergeant when he retired around 1991 and became executive director of Muslim Military Members (MMM), an organization that arranged access to literature and places of worship for Muslim soldiers around the United States.34 Philips had been involved in MMM from its inception.
Uqdah maintained a roster of the names of U.S. servicemen who had converted to Islam during the Gulf War. His younger brother was one of them. The former marine helped Philips identify Muslim soldiers who were close to finishing their obligation to the U.S. armed forces—newly minted veterans who would form the core of the Bosnia training brigade.35
According to Philips, about a dozen soldiers were recruited through the end of 1992, including several Special Forces veterans. Tahir personally escorted the vets to Bosnia in two groups of five or six people at a time. The American trainers did not go unnoticed in Bosnia, although the secret of how they got there was known to only a few.36
The Americans set up shop outside of Tuzla, the third largest city in Bosnia and home to a retired airfield used during the communist era to train fighter pilots, one of the few usable airstrips remaining in the country. Most of the trainers apparently left after instructing a small group of mujahideen, but some stayed to fight.37
In the fall of 1992, Philips and Tahir were trying to gather a third group of American military veterans to make the journey, but Tahir had to drop out. His reasons are unknown, but the next stop on his journey is not. He showed up on the doorstep of Osama bin Laden.
Tahir was believed to be a member of al Qaeda. He had gone to Afghanistan originally under the aegis of Mustafa Shalabi and trained in an al Qaeda camp. He was soon promoted to be a trainer himself, instructing recruits in weapons and close-quarters combat, according to an al Qaeda informant. Bin Laden had sent him to Bosnia on a scouting mission.38 In New York, Tahir had been responsible for targeting African American Muslims on behalf of al Qaeda, in response to bin Laden’s strong interest in recruiting U.S. citizens.39
Sometime after Tahir left the Bosnia training project, he showed up in Sudan with his children in tow, according to the informant. He believed— correctly—that he was under investigation in the United States and that he could not safely return. He was promptly escorted into a meeting with Osama bin Laden and Abu Ubaidah al Banshiri, who was al Qaeda’s military commander at the time.
Tahir was rumored to have been involved in Al Qaeda’s first official terrorist attack, a hotel bombing in Aden, Yemen, in December 1992, not long after he left the Bosnia project. Al Qaeda subsequently sent him to Somalia, the informant said, in response to an American humanitarian mission that would go disastrously wrong, thanks in part to the terrorist group’s intervention (see chapter 6). Bilal Philips, interviewed in 2010, strongly disputed the informant’s claim that Tahir was a member of al Qaeda.
From what I understand, people who, I’ve heard, had links or whatever, there’s a mindset you know, an approach to life and the role of Muslims, and jihad, and this kind of thing. And I never heard Tahir speaking that way. So, I don’t believe so. Because, see, when you’re locked into that, you know, then it’s gonna come out in your conversation.
You know, you feel close to somebody, somebody you can trust, and we were fairly close. I mean, for that limited period of time. So, I think that if this was the idea, I think they were involved in recruiting people. So I would think that he would have tried to recruit me, if that were the case. And there was nothing, nothing of that nature at all. So I think that is really a red herring.40
Intelligence sources are sometimes weak, sometimes strong. The intelligence connecting Tahir to al Qaeda was strong. In 1996 U.S. prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald went to meet the aforementioned al Qaeda informant with a book full of photographs. The informant identified Tahir from one of the photographs and provided biographical details that matched information from other sources. A source familiar with the case confirmed that the man described in the debriefing was the same man who worked on the Bosnia project with Philips.41 In 2010 I developed a possible lead on Tahir’s whereabouts, but several efforts to reach him through intermediaries were unsuccessful.
Before he left the United States, Tahir handed the Bosnia project over to a trusted friend whom he had met during his time in Afghanistan: Abdullah Rashid, the mujahid from Brooklyn who had nearly lost his leg fighting the Soviets.
Rashid had been watching the developments in Bosnia with great interest. Afghanistan was being “squashed” by intra-Muslim warfare, in his opinion. Bosnia was the new front for Islam and a clear moral imperative, in his view.
I think it was a disgrace in the sight of humanity that these people was under the heading of ethnic cleansing, setting up rape camps, raping women and killing, killing children, and I looked at it in the same form of genocide that was going on with the Germans that killed the Jews, that people would kill the Africans that came here, before they came here and any other form of genocide, what happened in Afghanistan and everything else. So I thought it was my duty to try to do something as an individual.42
In August Rashid was offered an opportunity to act by Tahir. At first, Tahir tried to recruit Rashid into the program as a trainer himself. Rashid’s spirit was willing, but his injured leg was weak. Instead, they agreed, he could serve the cause by training others before they left U.S. soil.
When Tahir left the United States in late 1992, he asked Rashid to take over. In December he called Rashid and sent him to Washington, D.C., to meet Bilal Philips and receive further instructions.
When Rashid arrived in Washington, he was met by a U.S. Marine sergeant roughly matching Qaseem Uqdah’s description. Rashid would not reveal the man’s real name, but Philips confirmed that Uqdah was part of the project in a role similar to that described by Rashid. Uqdah refused to be interviewed for this book but did not deny his involvement in the program when given the opportunity (see details at the end of this chapter).43
As Rashid told the story, the two men drove to the embassy of Saudi Arabia, where they were searched twice before being escorted inside to meet with Philips and a Saudi prince. Philips did not recall this event and felt that it was unlikely to have happened, given the nature of the program, which he said had no official sanction.44
According to Rashid, he chatted with the prince for a while, then Philips entered the room and explained the project. After the meeting, Rashid visited the marine’s home. The soldier gave him army training manuals on combat, sniper techniques, and machine gunnery. The next day the marine showed Rashid around Fort Belvoir.
As Rashid described it, the marine’s role in the project was to obtain the names of U.S. soldiers who would be leaving the military soon and could be approached to go on the next mission to Bosnia, corresponding to the role Philips described for former marine Uqdah.45
Rashid returned to New York with an agenda and a promise of financing to come. He also had help from another former marine named Abu Ubaidah Yahya, whom Tahir had recommended.
But there were obstacles ahead.
Despite significant bureaucratic hurdles, the Joint Terrorism Task Force was by now actively circling the group of radicals who had gathered around Omar Abdel Rahman. And Rashid was at the center of the storm.
“The name of Abdul Rashid had come up to us, ‘Doctor’ Rashid,” recalled Tom Corrigan, an NYPD detective on the JTTF. “We went out to our sources, the people knew him, but we couldn’t get an address on him or a location or a phone number on him. He was kind of famous in the community because any time you mentioned that name, the first thing that came up was he’s a guy who fought overseas. He went overseas, he had been wounded overseas.”
On his return to New York, Rashid reached out to Garrett Wilson, an imposingly large veteran who worked as a Defense Department police officer by day and a security consultant and trainer by night. Unfortunately for Rashid, Wilson was also a government informant.
Wilson had become concerned about the paramilitary nature of the requests he was receiving from Black Muslim clients in New York and elsewhere. He started running his business contacts past the Naval Intelligence Service, which eventually loaned him out to the JTTF in New York.
The JTTF team had been trying to penetrate the intrigues whirling around the Al Kifah Center. Wilson arranged a meeting with Rashid in late December 1992—a watershed moment because Rashid left his home phone number on Wilson’s pager. With that number, the JTTF investigators discovered Rashid’s real name and his address, opening the door on new leads and enabling more aggressive surveillance.
Ubaidah and Rashid met with Wilson because they wanted to buy untraceable handguns and shotguns. They wanted training in how to neutralize guards, how to escape surveillance, rappelling, the construction of booby traps, and the use of chemical weapons. Rashid also asked for bomb detonators.
Although Ubaidah told Wilson that the training and the supplies were for Bosnia, Corrigan and other JTTF members were alarmed by the urban warfare element in Rashid’s requests and suspected that a campaign of domestic terrorism was in the works.
Many of the requests were, in fact, consistent with operations being staged in Bosnia, a real-life urban war zone. Rappelling, for instance, was prominently featured in propaganda videotapes produced in Bosnia, and there were reports of chemical weapons being used on the ground by both sides.
The guns and the detonators were a different matter. Corrigan’s sense of urgency was merited. Just how much would soon become clear.
Rashid returned from the Washington, D.C., meeting with new energy and a packed schedule, but his efforts to replicate Tahir’s program ran into trouble. Although he had received several leads on veterans who might be able to serve as trainers, he wasn’t able to close the deal and put together a team.
Rashid called Philips with a counterproposal—he would train nonveteran Muslim volunteers in the United States, then send the trainees along to Bosnia. Philips agreed and provided him with money to get started. “It was left for him to handle,” Philips said.46
That may not have been the wisest decision. Rashid’s first step was to open a martial arts dojo in a windowless, decrepit Brooklyn studio. With more enthusiasm than pragmatism, he lined the walls with exotic weapons: crossbows, ninja throwing stars, swords, blowguns, and nunchucks.
Out of sight, behind the flashy toys, he stockpiled rifle and shotgun ammunition and equipment for detonating explosives—but no guns or assembled bombs. He also kept a library of military manuals, including those that the marine had provided in Washington.
The search for recruits began. Siddig Ali was a skinny, fired-up Sudanese immigrant who worked as a translator for Omar Abdel Rahman. In late 1992 Siddig had been tapped to give a speech about jihad to area Muslims. After the speech, he was approached by Saffet Catovic, an American citizen of Bosnian descent with ties to Hasan Cengic. Through Catovic, Siddig was introduced to another Bosnian, who brought him to meet Rashid.47
With Siddig’s help, Rashid organized a training camp in rural Pennsylvania, where recruits from New York and Philadelphia practiced for several weekends in the frigid winter air. The group was a mix of immigrants and Americans, and they trained in martial arts, rappelling, and light weapons, including grenades and assault rifles. There were about forty members to start, which Rashid and Siddig winnowed down to ten men sufficiently fit and competent to go to Bosnia.
Although Rashid was the nominal head of the program, most of the trainees answered to Siddig Ali and also had individual allegiances to Omar Abdel Rahman—which is not to say that the sheikh was particularly pleased about the program.
Rahman grumbled to one of the trainees that he didn’t trust Siddig’s religion or his money. Unhappy about being upstaged by Rashid’s wealthy Saudi patrons, Rahman encouraged his followers to stay away from the program, without success. He also expressed skepticism that Siddig—or anyone else—was actually going to Bosnia.48
Rahman’s suspicions on the last point were well founded. Although Siddig talked about Bosnia obsessively, he was planning to take action closer to home.
Regardless, thanks to Rashid’s influence, the training was intensely focused on Bosnia at every turn. Lectures discussed the challenges of warfare on Bosnian terrain and what the trainers imagined might be useful skills over there. In one exercise, the trainees practiced storming a “Serbian” power plant, using a local facility.
“He gets his training, he goes to Bosnia, I mean he relies on Allah and see, Allah may improve it for the Muslims through them,” Siddig said on a surveillance tape. “He who will be a martyr, thank Allah the Lord of the universe and he who stays alive, he still will be trained!”49
Rashid’s top trainer, Abu Ubaidah, ran some of the sessions. Rashid himself was often absent, although he had arranged the location and outfitted the participants with guns and other military supplies.
Unbeknownst to Siddig and his friends, others were in attendance for the camp’s inaugural session: a five-man FBI surveillance team tracking the group. The surveillance was short-lived, terminated due to a lack of support from headquarters—an unfortunate decision.50 On a subsequent trip, Siddig carried out a little “experiment” for a friend named Mahmud Abouhalima—a key player in the World Trade Center bombing, which was still in the planning stages.
Although Siddig and Abouhalima moved in many of the same circles, they were pursuing their projects independently. In early 1993 Abouhalima asked Siddig for a favor: would he test-explode a bomb design Abouhalima was working on? After consulting with Rashid, Siddig agreed to conduct the experiment, and some of the Pennsylvania trainees may have detonated the test bomb in January 1993.51
The bomb’s design came from Ramzi Yousef. While the JTTF was working on the visible fringes of the New York jihad operation, Yousef, Abouhalima, and at least five other coconspirators were quietly planning a terrorist attack that would shake the nation.
When Yousef’s bomb went off on February 26, 1993, it had a dramatic effect on the Project Bosnia jihadists. Siddig and Abouhalima were friends, if not partners. Both men were devoted to Sayyid Nosair, and both were egged on in their ambitions during visits with Nosair in prison. Rashid also knew both Abouhalima and Nosair from the Calverton training in 1989.
After the Trade Center bombing, Abouhalima turned to Siddig for help getting away. When he explained what he had done, Siddig hugged him and exclaimed, “God is greatest and thanks to God. God is greatest, my God, my God, my God, God is greatest.”
Siddig gave Abouhalima letters of introduction to friends overseas who would help him hide and drove him to the airport for his flight out of the country. All of this assistance was for nothing; Abouhalima was arrested in Egypt a few weeks later.
After Abouhalima left, Siddig was emboldened to put his own plans into action. For months, he had been talking with Nosair about possible terrorist plots that he could execute, sometimes using Bosnia as a pretext and other times citing more abstracted Islamic rationalizations.
Among the plans that were discussed and discarded, there was the bombing of a dozen “Jewish” locations in New York and the kidnapping of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (whose policies Nosair and Siddig obscurely blamed for the troubles in Bosnia). Siddig consulted Omar Abdel Rahman at various stages in these discussions. The blind sheikh was not troubled by the idea of a terrorist campaign but suggested that he hit military, rather than civilian, targets.52
“Siddig was like a one-man jihad machine,” recalled the JTTF’s Corrigan. “He’d be driving a taxi cab, and he would think about, here’s an airport, if a plane came in here, you’d be able to shoot it. This is a building that has an open front in order to meet.”
In late 1992 and early 1993, Siddig began to finalize his list of targets and select a team, which included Abdullah Rashid, some of the Pennsylvania trainees, and various other people he knew, including Victor Alvarez, a Latino American who had converted to Islam after dabbling in Santeria, as well as three Sudanese immigrants who had not yet attained citizenship.
The scope of the plan was staggering. Siddig and his team would drive cars and trucks laden with bombs into the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, set the detonators on timers, then flee. There would be other simultaneous attacks—car bombings in underground parking garages below the United Nations and the FBI’s New York field office.
“Siddig Ali was buoyed by the fact that a successful plot had taken place, but the competitor aspect of his nature was that he wanted to outdo the other guys,” recalled former FBI agent Chris Voss, who also served on the JTTF. “And he felt bad that he had been left out, so he wanted to create a plot that was bigger and better, he had to outdo them.”
In order to upstage the World Trade Center plotters, Siddig Ali had decided to kill thousands of New Yorkers in a single “Day of Terror.” All he had to do was avoid getting caught.
While Siddig was narrowing his focus to the home front, Abdullah Rashid was becoming more and more international.
A typical day at the Third World Relief Agency involved people going in and out of the offices with bags full of cash. At one point, aides to Bosnian president Izetbegovic began to worry that their boss was gay, after he locked himself in an apartment for days on end with Fatih El Hassanein, the charity’s titular head. They voiced their concerns to Bosnia’s ambassador to the UK, Muhammad Filipovic, who reassured them. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “They are counting the money.”53
Bilal Philips summoned Rashid to Austria to meet with El Hassanein’s brother, Sukarno, the number-three man at TWRA, under Hasan Cengic.
Rashid was a typical customer: he left with a lot of cash. He went back to New York with $20,000: $10,000 in his pocket and another $10,000 hidden in his pants, in order to evade the need for a Customs declaration. He made more trips, and so did Abu Ubaidah. Eventually the two brought back between $80,000 and $100,000 in cash for Project Bosnia.54
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.
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 in 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.
And so their romantic dream failed—but they were still angry. Because every day the news brought reports of yet another massacre, and every Friday, the imam was still talking about Bosnia.
And the “far enemy” began to look like the realistic enemy. The enemy next door.