The jihad movement is fueled by propaganda. In the earliest days, it was mostly ephemeral— flyers, newsletters, short handouts, and live English translations of speeches by jihadist figures visiting the United States.
Over time, more sophisticated products began to emerge, including Al Jihad magazine from Abdullah Azzam’s Services Bureau, the Al Hussam newsletter, and the Islam Report (see chapter 5). Many of these publications fell by the wayside, due in part to shifting tolerances among American Muslims, as well as the arrest and incarceration of the publishers. By September 11 a significant amount of jihadist propaganda already had moved online; this accelerated after the attack.
For many years jihadists’ use of the Internet and computer technology had tracked closely with the wider world’s. Some specific organizations, including al Qaeda, were early adopters, keeping digitized records on computers and using e-mail to communicate by the mid-1990s.
After September 11 and even more after the invasion of Iraq, terrorists began to use the Internet in increasingly innovative ways. The decentralized nature of the Internet offered terrorist leaders real promise as a way to bypass the media and distribute their message on a global scale, far more affordably than through traditional print media. The Al Hussam newsletter ran upward of $1,000 per month to publish and distribute.1 In contrast, a website might cost only a few hundred dollars per year.
For a time, a number of terrorist and jihadist organizations tried to maintain traditional static websites, but starting around 2003, and corresponding to a rise in social media generally, online message boards and forums became the dominant outlet for jihadist talk and propaganda. When a server was knocked offline, the forum’s database could be restored quickly on a new site.
The forums also had a democratizing effect on the jihad movement, allowing the audience to participate and bring their own thoughts and opinions to the table. Would-be jihadists and curiosity-seekers could interact directly with leaders of terrorist and jihadist organizations, asking questions, having their dreams interpreted, and requesting fatwas to reinforce their intentions.
Some interesting personalities have emerged over the course of the online jihad, and a smaller percentage of these figures have become involved in more than talk. Terrorism expert Jarret Brachman coined the term “jihobbyist” for those who engage in jihad talk online without taking direct action to become involved in violence. But jihobbyism has increasingly emerged as a gateway to violent action.
It’s important to understand the following case studies in context. None of the figures profiled here have a particularly large following or any real credibility as scholars, religious leaders, or fighters. They tend to orbit around more established authority figures, such as Anwar Awlaki or Jamaican cleric Abdullah Al Faisal. They are fringe personalities within American Islam and even within the jihadist movement itself. They are symptoms rather than causes.
But they are not insignificant. They reflect and sometimes amplify and interpret the views of real opinion leaders and are themselves candles around which lesser moths may flit. They are the loudest voices in an angry mob. As such, they help make the mob sound louder and look angrier.
Perhaps most important, they tend to disclose a lot of information about themselves, from which we can learn. They provide a window into what attracts Americans to radical beliefs, and when they move from jihobbyism to jihadism, they leave a trail we can follow.
After September 11, “official” websites for the Taliban and other jihadist outlets in the West were among the first casualties of the war on terror. One of the most prominent, Azzam.com, was shut down and its London-based operator arrested.2
The change in jihad media during the last decade reflects the change in the broader media. Organizational strength has been eroded by Web 2.0—media outlets are more disjointed, and individual voices can be dramatically amplified. Most jihadist organizations online have abandoned static websites in favor of anonymously administrated Web forums that allow for “official” announcements, along with direct user interaction.
Any Internet user with average to high skills can create an online message board quickly and with relative anonymity. Visitors to the site can read messages or register as users to post their own comments, news, or files. A host of jihadist and jihad-accepting forums have sprung up since September 11, most of which are strictly fan sites. A smaller number of these forums operate with the direct involvement of active jihadists such as al Qaeda, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Shabab, the Taliban, Chechen mujahideen, and so on.
In addition to hosting conversations by individuals around the world who are interested in jihad, these officially sanctioned forums—usually run by noncombatants in nonconflict zones—frequently post official communications from their affiliated groups. This allows readers to feel confident that they are reading authentic messages from jihadist figures, who range from the famous to the obscure.
The top-tier forums have password-protected sections that active jihadists can use to communicate and where those who are interested in moving from talk to action can contact jihadists abroad and sometimes arrange to join them.
The most important forums operate mostly in Arabic, but a few have English sections or separate forums for English-language users. The Al Ansar forum, which has Arabic, English and German versions, and the Somali-language forum Al Qimmah, which features an English section, have some of the closest ties to jihadists in the field.
A larger number of English-language forums, static websites, and blogs espouse jihadist thought and encourage radical or extremist conversations but are careful to stay within the limits of American First Amendment protections. The number of these sites is estimated to be between the hundreds and the low thousands.
Within the last couple of years, these English-language outlets have become important incubators for the radicalization of American Muslims. They have also caused fundamental changes in the patterns of radicalization, which, combined with the U.S. war on terrorism, have led to shifts in the profile of American jihadists generally and American terrorists in particular.
IslamicAwakening.com is jihad for beginners. It describes its aim as “correcting” Muslims who have gone astray, fighting off the “ideological onslaught” against Muslims, and “[reviving] the abandoned and forgotten obligations without which the victory to the Ummah remains impossible”—a reference to jihad, which often called the “forgotten duty.”3
The site has an extensive news and commentary section and a lively forum. Much of the discussion is devoted to Islamic life, culture, and jurisprudence, but the most active area by far is the “Politics, Jihad and Current Affairs” forum.4 Participants in the IA forums skirt the edge of legality but rarely cross over. Moderators keep a lid on discussions about committing terrorism or threats of violence. Within those parameters, participants on the site are palpably angry.
One forum topic, which the moderators keep at the top of the first page of posts, is titled “America is a sick place” and consists of links to news stories showing various immoral acts by Americans, such as murder, child abuse, and sexual promiscuity.5 (The fact that Muslim countries such as Yemen and Saudi Arabia have similar problems, including a massive trade in child slaves who are often sexually abused, does not have its own topic.6)
Other topics, selected from a range over time, included
• Fatwas from Anwar Awlaki
• “Are we Muslims or Munafiqeen [hypocrites]?”
• “Long live the Mujahideen!”
• “Atrocities of the real terrorists” (meaning Americans)
• “Israel using nude female soldiers to seduce Palestinian youth”
• “Where to find jihad videos?”
• “Fatwa on jihad in Chechnya”
Some of this material is repurposed from other, more aggressive jihadist sites; other topics are based on news stories. In some cases, topics reprint individual letters and e-mails from jihadist clerics such as Anwar Awlaki or from Muslim prisoners accused or convicted of terrorism.
The overall effect of all this posting by users based mostly in the United Kingdom and the United States is to create a giant echo chamber of complaints of Muslim victimization, as well as explicit jihadist incitement, including overt examples and “precursor” rhetoric such as comments on the misdeeds of Americans, both individually and collectively. Disliking America does not make one a jihadist sympathizer, but virtually all jihadist sympathizers dislike America.
The forum boasts of such celebrity members as the American founders of the radical website Revolution Muslim, al Qaeda propagandist Samir Khan, and would-be jihadists Zach Chesser, Daniel Maldonado, and Tarek Mehanna.
When you widen the circle out from the members of the Islamic Awakening forum, it doesn’t take long to arrive at Revolution Muslim.
Spun off from a British extremist group, Revolution Muslim and its lesser-known offline affiliate, the Islamic Thinkers Society (ITS), are based in and around New York City, with supporters and members scattered throughout the country.7 The core group is usually fewer than twenty people, and the names often change, due to vicious “office politics” and backbiting among key members.8 Adherents and fans are believed to number in the thousands.9
Both groups claim to be nonviolent political organizations that oppose U.S. policies and corrupt Arab regimes, while promulgating an aggressive version of Islam. Both have been widely condemned by mainstream Muslims. And both organizations are predominantly American.
“We’re all just regular kids in New York City,’’ said Ariful Islam, a spokesman for ITS, in 2005. “We grew up here.’’10
ITS is the original group, operating in New York as early as 1986. Revolution Muslim is a more recent and wide-reaching spin-off, centered around an active and controversial blog that promotes English-speaking jihadist ideologues such as Syrian Omar Bakri Muhammad, American citizen Anwar Awlaki, and Abdullah Al Faisal, a Jamaican-born cleric. All of them have large followings in the West.11
Faisal plays a direct role in counseling the site’s operators and takes part in regular online chats with Revolution Muslim’s readers. He was convicted in the UK in 2003 of inciting racial hatred and soliciting murder for speeches in which he told adherents that they would go to heaven for killing non-Muslims. After serving four years in prison, he was deported back to Jamaica.12
RM was founded by Yousef Al Khattab, a Brooklyn Jew turned Muslim convert who was born in 1968 with the name Joseph Cohen, and Younus Abdullah Muhammad, a younger Caucasian American born Jesse Morton.
Deeply engaged with his Judaism, Cohen turned to Orthodoxy in his twenties and moved to Israel with his wife and children in 1998, but he became frustrated with the complexity and inconsistency of competing rabbinical interpretations of the religion.
Like many converts, he found simplicity in Islam. “In the Koran, it says not to ask so many questions,” he explained to a reporter in 2003.13 Many converts to Islam are attracted to an impression of simplicity and absolutism, although in reality the history of disputation and interpretation in Islam is at least comparable to that of other religions.14
Revolution Muslim’s content is mostly tedious. Postings alternate between pedestrian news items that describe—or can be interpreted as describing—the persecution of Muslims in various contexts, and discussions of Islamic law and tradition that range from esoteric to obscurantist, in an effort to establish the site’s religious credibility.15
The site enjoyed bursts of notoriety for praising terrorists. Khattab famously told CNN that he “loved Osama bin Laden,” a video clip that was replayed endlessly as Revolution Muslim and its associates became more and more known for their extremism.16 In 2009 Khattab wrote a post praising Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, shortly after the attack.
An officer and a gentleman was injured while partaking in a pre-emptive attack. Get well soon Major Nidal. We love you. [ … ] Rest assured the slain terrorists at Fort Hood are in the eternal hellfire.17
Khattab dropped out of the organization in 2009, when he moved from the United States to Morocco with his family and, by his account, experienced a change of heart regarding the use of violence in Islam—at least up to a point. According to Khattab, he had come around to the view that Muslims should use “the democratic process” to advance the spread of Islam. According to a post on his personal blog,
I denounce my previous misunderstanding that the rulers and tyrants that reign over the Muslim lands should be killed. I prefer less bloodshed and establishment of Islam via schools, media, and medical facilities etc. This does NOT mean I love the rulers, no it means that I will try to hold the higher moral ground & change by example rather than by bloodshed.18
Khattab passed the baton to another Revolution Muslim blogger, who was subsequently forced out by cofounder Younus Abdullah Muhammad, to Khattab’s displeasure. The two founders had a very public falling out, with Khattab accusing Muhammad of luring young Muslims into situations that would lead to their arrest, and Muhammad claiming to have fired Khattab and accusing his former colleague of trying to get him arrested.19
Muhammad became the main public face of Revolution Muslim, appearing as a speaker at its functions and in regularly staged “street dawah” events in New York City. During these events, which are usually videotaped, RM members accost passersby, both Muslim and non-Muslim, with a barrage of anti-American rhetoric. Barack Obama is one of Muhammad’s favorite targets:
As Barack Obama slaughters Muslims in Afghanistan, you remain silent. You are supposed, this is the change we’re supposed to believe in. This is the change that you all believed in. This is the change the imams, the so-called leaders of this community, stood up at the pulpit and told you to go and vote for. This is what you believed in and this is what you got.
This is what you got. The change that the Muslim must believe in must be Islam, it must be shariah. It must be jihad fe sabeelillah [military jihad, that is, violence]. This is the change for the Muslims. And only if Barack Obama adheres to these terms of peace will there be peace. Anything else will be his destruction by the hands of the Muslims.20
It’s difficult to pin down Muhammad’s views, because they shift with the wind. Under media or government scrutiny, Muhammad backs away from his more extreme statements and attempts to recast himself as the victim of distortion. Yet in event after event, as well as on the site, Muhammad clearly works the jihadist side of the aisle.
All over the Muslim world, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, everywhere, that are waging jihad fe sabeelillah against the American occupiers should be supported. Why will they not tell you to support the mujahideen? Why will they tell you that jihad does not mean to fight, that jihad means to go to university, so you can get jobs living in their system supporting the promotion of American empire?21
In 2010 Younus Abdullah Muhammad was the latest casualty of Revolution Muslim’s infighting, apparently pushed aside as a wave of British extremists took center stage. The new crew used Revolution Muslim’s American mailing address in an effort to avoid British laws against inciting violence. It didn’t work; its Internet service provider shut down the site after new blogger Bilal Ahmed posted a “hit list” of British parliament members who had voted to go to war in Iraq. Ahmed himself was arrested.
In the meantime Muhammad had started a new site, Islampolicy.com, which he said would work to develop a blueprint for new Islamic states rather than promote jihad. The commitment to nonviolence was short lived. Days after Revolu-tionMuslim.com went offline, Muhammed posted that Islam Policy was the old site’s “new home” and soon reverted to form, featuring communiqués from Osama bin Laden, Anwar Awlaki, and other al Qaeda leaders. Revolution Muslim’s website might have been dead, but its media operation continued with barely a hiccup.22
Despite the problems that plagued Revolution Muslim—infighting, inconsistency, and relative lack of religious sophistication—the group and its members have proved capable of radicalizing American Muslims.
Mahmood Alessa, a Palestinian American born in the United States, and Carlos Eduardo Almonte, a naturalized citizen of Dominican descent, were seen at several Revolution Muslim events in the company of Younus Abdullah Muhammad. At one event, Almonte (not the sharpest knife in the drawer) brandished a sign that read “Death to all Zionist Juice.”23
Alessa and Almonte were fans of Anwar Awlaki who devoured jihadist content online and trained in combat techniques with an eye toward joining Al Shabab in Somalia. Of course, if that didn’t work out, they were prepared to settle. Alessa was recorded by the FBI while holding forth on his philosophy:
I’m gonna get a gun. I’m the type of person to use it at any time. But, if I would’ve had a gun, I can’t—I can’t even I’ll, I’ll have more bodies on it than—than the than the hairs on my beard. You know what I’m saying? It’s already enough, you don’t worship Allah, so, that’s a reason for you to die. [W]e’re being pushed by every corner of the earth, [meaning], they only fear you when you have a gun and when you—when you start killing them, and when you—when you take their head, and you go like this, and you behead it on camera, and you—you have to be ruthless, bro.
I swear to God, bro. Enough of this punk shit. It’s that everyone has to be ruthless to—with these people. We’ll start doing killing here, if I can’t do it over there. I’m gonna get locked up in the airport? Then you’re gonna die here, then. That’s how it is. Freaking Major-Nidal-shaved-face-Palestiniancrazy guy, he’s not better than me. I’ll do twice what he did.24
The FBI recorded hours of such scintillating conversation, placing an informant near the two and arresting them before they could do any damage. People become involved with jihadism for many reasons, among them a simple predisposition toward violence. Alessa and Almonte may not have been the most sophisticated followers of Revolution Muslim and the Islamic Thinkers Society, but others would surpass them.
Bryant Vinas was a Latino American from Long Island. He was raised Catholic, but his life was thrown into chaos when his parents divorced shortly before he entered high school. He became so unruly that his exasperated mother sent him to live with his father. When he left high school, he enrolled in the military but washed out of boot camp. A friend’s brother introduced him to Islam.
During the next couple of years, Vinas drifted into the orbit of the Islamic Thinkers Society and met Revolution Muslim cofounder Yousef Al Khattab on several occasions.
In Afghanistan during the 1980s and later in Bosnia, many jihadists were drawn in by specific acts of aggression. Vinas was attracted by the paradigm that had been spreading like wildfire since the September 11 attacks—that America was at war with Islam. Vinas went further still, believing that America was behind the September 11 attacks and that FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) was building concentration camps for Muslims.25
But Vinas was not like Alessa. He was smart and engaged with ideology, eventually coming to define himself as a Salafi, part of a strict movement that seeks to emulate the early days of Islam.26 Many jihadists call themselves Salafis, but not all Salafis are jihadists.
Friends said his anger simmered and finally began to dominate his personality.27 He explored the jihadist Internet, increasingly frustrated with the ITS, which he believed was all talk. With assistance from a friend at ITS, Vinas decided to act. He went to Lahore and met with Pakistani militants in the porous border region with Afghanistan.28 Vinas later said that someone in New York helped arrange an introduction.29
Vinas volunteered to be a suicide bomber. He was trained, but he washed out when his handlers decided that he wasn’t up to the task and recommended additional religious training. There is only one case of an American suicide bomber in the public record, possibly due to cultural predispositions, but also because U.S. citizens—and their passports—are extremely valuable to terrorist networks.
Disappointed with his progress, Vinas decided to separate from the Pakistani group and seek out al Qaeda by wandering the wild, lawless region of Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan, where the terrorist group’s top leaders are believed to be hiding.
It is a testament to both his determination and his capabilities that he succeeded in this task without getting killed. In early 2008 Vinas was inducted into al Qaeda as a formal member, swearing bayat, the Islamic oath of allegiance.30
Housed with other Western recruits, he lobbied to fight U.S. forces on the front lines in Afghanistan and was sent on a few unsuccessful missions during which he fired rockets at American troops. Yet despite his failure to destroy the target, he had proved his commitment, and it was time for the next phase. Under the watchful eye of senior al Qaeda leaders—including Mustafa Abu Al Yazid, one of the group’s founders—Vinas was taught assassination techniques and how to build bombs, including suicide belts.31
Vinas briefed his supervisors on the Long Island Rail Road, which he had ridden as a young man, and an operation to bomb the commuter hub was initiated, although it remained in the planning stages. During this process Vinas made a trip to Peshawar to use the Internet, buy supplies, and look for a wife. By this time
U.S. intelligence services were looking for him. Vinas was arrested by Pakistani authorities and extradited to the United States.32 Like many captured jihadists, Vinas began to talk, giving rare and extensive intelligence on al Qaeda’s reconfiguration after the invasion of Afghanistan.
“For informing on the people that are fighting in Afghanistan, I call him a coward,” said Revolution Muslim’s cofounder Yousef Al Khattab.33 Unfortunately for Revolution Muslim, Vinas would not be the only collaborator.
Zach Chesser was born in Virginia in 1989. Much of his youth was unremarkable, at least on the surface. He played football and basketball and later signed up for crew.34 He was a joiner, jumping from obsession to obsession, whether it was Marilyn Manson or breakdancing.35
There were other Muslims at his high school, but he didn’t embrace Islam until his senior year.36 It didn’t take him long to discover the jihadist Web. With all the enthusiasm and arrogance of a new convert, he christened himself Abu Talha Al Amrikee and began to dispatch unsolicited advice to his fellow Muslims and to the seniors of the jihadist movement as a self-appointed expert in everything from economics to espionage.
In many ways, Abu Talha was the epitome of a jihobbyist. Armed with virtually no real knowledge of Islam, the history of the theological schools that he promoted, or the practical aspects of terrorism, Chesser became a ubiquitous Web presence, tirelessly aping the online propaganda he consumed voraciously while jumping from theme to theme and project to project in a manner suggestive of attention deficit disorder. Yousef Al Khattab described his output as “Tourette’s Dawa [preaching].”37
Chesser went through a series of platforms, including a YouTube account and a blog, along with an active membership on the Islamic Awakening forum. Then he joined Revolution Muslim, where he posted for a few months, spending time with the site’s cofounder Younus Abdullah Muhammad.38 Chesser next moved on to official jihadist forums such as Al Fallujah and Al Qimmah, a Somali jihadist site linked to the Al Shabab militia.
Abu Talha may have lacked focus and knowledge, but like many bloggers both inside and out of the jihad subculture, he tried to make up for these lapses with self-confidence, enthusiasm, and sheer volume. A typical post featured Chesser—who had been a Muslim for less than two years—hectoring other Muslims about their failure to do right by the mujahideen.
Are you doing your part to support your Brothers and Sisters in Somalia? Have you given d’ua [prayers] for brothers like Abu Mansour Al Amriki and other brothers lately? It may be time brothers and sisters to not only agree with the actions of The Lions of Tawheed [Monotheism], but also do something to support your brothers in Somalia and other places where Al Islam is being attacked. This is a call to action and a call to fulfill your obligation as a Muslim to defend your brothers and sisters. As your brothers and sister in Somalia are raped and killed by the Ethiopian Puppets from Addis Ababa and the Somalia slaves of the United States, will you be like Brother Mohamoud Hassan or Brother Abu Mansour [two Americans who fought in Somalia] and answer the call to Jihad? For Allah (SWT) knows best and will reward those who sacrificed on the Day of Judgment.39
Chesser described his motivations in a June 2010 interview with Aaron Y. Zelin, then a graduate student in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University, who runs the Jihadology blog. Although Chesser wasn’t above playing the classic Muslim victimization card (as in the previous excerpt), his ideological bent and interest in jihad were mostly on the broadest level:
I hope to take part in the creation of an Islamic state where the shariah is applied inshallah [God willing] with no exceptions of general matters of which there is a consensus. That is the bare minimum. After that I would hope that it is a just society where the law is applied and where the people are treated fairly.40
For most of his career, Chesser’s ruminations on jihad were strictly “inside baseball,” of interest primarily to a handful of terrorism and jihadism researchers whose attention he virtually demanded. For instance, a series of blog postings on “Counter-Counter-Terrorism” proposed luring terrorism researchers (including the author of this book) into political arguments with each other in order to create divisions. Other entries in the series focused on law enforcement, suggesting that jihadist sympathizers should create a flood of false reports of suspicious packages so that authorities would be lulled when a real bomb was left on a street corner.41
Yet in April 2010, he managed to stumble into the big time with a post on Revolution Muslim about the Comedy Central animated TV show South Park, which was scheduled to air an episode satirizing the controversy over depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
Beneath a picture of the dead body of Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch film director who was killed after producing a film critical of Islam, Chesser posted address information for South Park producers Matt Stone and Trey Parker, writing,
We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.42
Of course, it was a threat, no matter how finely Chesser tried to parse his definitions in the interests of staying out of jail. A follow-up posting featured audio of Anwar Awlaki explaining that mockery of Mohammed was punishable by death. The threats garnered an avalanche of national attention, putting scrutiny on Revolution Muslim, sparking general outrage, and ultimately resulting in the episode being censored by its distributor Comedy Central.43 Chesser and his family received death threats, and his parents stopped speaking to him.44
Overwhelmed by the attention, Chesser went silent after the South Park incident, but he was not idle. He started to make preparations to travel to Somalia and join the al Qaeda–linked Al Shabab militia, which had already hosted a number of American fighters (see chapter 10).
Or rather, he put on a show of making preparations. Although Chesser went through the motions of trying to get to Somalia, something always seemed to get in the way. His first effort failed when he lost his very first battle in the jihad— convincing his mother-in-law to return his wife’s passport, which she had hidden to keep her daughter from leaving the country. Chesser tried again in July 2010, with his infant son in his arms. He figured that U.S. authorities wouldn’t believe he was taking his baby into a war zone. It wasn’t clear what he planned to do with the child once he arrived in Somalia.
He was turned away by airport security because his name had been added to a no-fly list. Rather than keep trying, he called the FBI and said he wanted to provide information on Al Shabab. News of a Shabab suicide bombing in Uganda had prompted another one of his now-famous changes of heart, he explained, to the growing exasperation of the FBI.45 Perhaps simply to shut him up, FBI agents arrested Chesser in July and charged him with material support for terrorism in relation to his efforts to join Al Shabab.46
When a Western jihadist is arrested, the jihobbyists tend to circle the wagons, lining up to show support on the forums and “make dua” (pray) for the person arrested. It is a sign of Chesser’s polarizing character that very few stepped up to post on his behalf. Revolution Muslim never even bothered to acknowledge the arrest. On the forums, some noted that “the brother [had] loose lips.”
Yousef Al Khattab, the Revolution Muslim founder who by this point claimed to have abandoned his commitment to al Qaeda and violent jihad, offered a particularly harsh critique.
Just because we are Muslim or their [sic] is no [Islamic caliphate] does not give us a carte blanche to behave like pre Islamic barbarians and give unconditional support to those that dig their own graves.47
Like Zach Chesser, Samir Khan was another young American Muslim with an attitude and Internet access. Khan was born in Saudi Arabia, and his parents were moderate Muslims who moved the family to Queens when he was seven.
Khan began blogging as a teenager, shortly after attending a Muslim summer camp sponsored by a little-known fundamentalist group called the Islamic Organization of North America that was devoted to the nonviolent establishment of the Islamic way of life in America.48 Soon after, Khan discovered the Islamic Thinkers Society.
Although his early blog entries didn’t address the issue of jihad, they were unquestionably conservative. He wrote about the need to purify American society and signs of the End Days and generally presented a fairly chipper vision of a devout, intense Muslim who was not in the mainstream but perhaps not far from it either.
Humanity is in need of a Just Social Order; a way of life that protects men and women from the deceptions that this world can trap one into. In order to truly bring about this “Renaissance” within the fixed area of man’s existence [sic], we must turn to the root of the different philosophies that man offered to the world; from there do we then choose the revolution which will bring about this great change. For this reason, I am in complete agreement with the Islamic Revolution brought about by Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). With his revolution, was the human changed not only externally, but also internally; it was the absolute greatest internal revolution which led to the spreading of Islam, not by the sword, but by the hearts! Conquering a land is easy, but conquering a heart … well, you will need one heck of a philosophy!49
The warning sign, if there was one, was to be found in Khan’s username, “inshallahshaheed”—“God willing, a martyr.” With the advent and escalation of the war in Iraq, Khan became increasingly militant. He celebrated the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and dismissed their grieving families as “people of hellfire.” His blog linked to al Qaeda videos, and he justified the Islamic doctrine of takfir (which attempts to justify the killing of moderate Muslims) while celebrating the writings of Omar Abdel Rahman, Ayman Al Zawahiri, and Anwar Awlaki.50
Khan encountered challenges in keeping his blog online due to its controversial content, which violated most Internet service providers’ rules on hate speech and the incitement of violence. If one Googles “inshallahshaheed,” the result is page after page announcing that the blog has found a new server. All the links are dead.51 There were other complications as well. On at least one occasion, Khan’s parents—in whose basement he lived—cut off his Internet access.52
In 2009 Khan upped the ante, producing an online magazine in PDF format called Jihad Recollections. The magazine was overproduced—slick but too busy and at times unreadable, loosely inspired by popular American magazines. Its content consisted of a series of articles that included transcriptions of speeches and communiqués by al Qaeda leaders and original pieces by Khan and members of his social circle, such as Revolution Muslim cofounder Younus Abdullah Muhammad. The magazine was distributed through a wide variety of English-language jihadist forums and websites.
Khan published four issues of Jihad Recollections, which featured such stories as “The Men behind 9/11 and the Motives That Bound Them,” “The Emphasis for an Identity in the Storm of Kufr [apostasy]” and “The Science behind Night Vision Technology.” An article titled “Staying in Shape without Weights” was penned by a teenager from Oregon named Mohamed Mohamud, who would be arrested in 2010 for trying to bomb a family-oriented Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland. Jihad Recollections also included historical and religious pieces, such as a biography of a recently killed al Qaeda trainer and an adaptation of an Anwar Awlaki lecture on one of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions.53
The final issue of Jihad Recollections was published in September 2009. That’s when Samir Khan got the call to join the big leagues. In October he left the United States for Yemen, where he met with Awlaki. In November Nidal Hasan went on his killing spree at Fort Hood, and the backlash forced Awlaki underground.
Khan resurfaced in July 2010, when al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released Inspire, an English-language jihadist magazine whose design relationship to Jihad Recollections was unmistakable. Everyone who had read Recollections immediately concluded that the new magazine was the work of Samir Khan, and media reports soon confirmed it.54
The new magazine was nearly identical in format and content to the old one, with the exception of its official imprimatur and an original article written by Awlaki especially for Inspire. A page collecting memorable quotes featured Revolution Muslim cofounder Yousef Al Khattab and a quote by a counterterrorism analyst about the effectiveness of the Islamic Thinkers Society.55
As of this writing, Inspire had published two more issues, one very similar to the first, and a “special edition” commemorating an AQAP attempt to bomb two cargo planes bound for the United States. The special edition, which included a detailed description of the plot and its objectives, commanded notice from U.S. intelligence and terrorism analysts as conclusive evidence that Khan—and likely Awlaki—had direct access to AQAP’s operational team, and perhaps even full membership.56
Tarek Mehanna was an American Muslim of Egyptian descent. He earned a doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston and subsequently moved to nearby Sudbury, where he attended the Islamic Center of New England mosque in Sharon, Massachusetts.57
After September 11 Mehanna obsessively surfed the Internet looking for material related to the al Qaeda attack, referring to the hijackers as the “19 martyrs.” He shared videos and propaganda with friends, both online and in the real world. One of his childhood friends was particularly receptive. Ahmad Abousamra was the son of a local doctor and a Syrian American born and raised in Massachusetts.58
They tried to find other Muslims in the Boston area who would support their jihadist cause, but few were interested. Despite these frustrations, they kept trying and drew potential recruits aside for one-on-one talks, slipping them CDs with copies of al Qaeda recruitment videos.59
They had some successes amid many failures. Abousamra met a recent white convert to Islam from northern Massachusetts named Daniel Maldonado, whom he introduced to Mehanna.60
A friend recalled later, “I met Danny the week he converted. He was cool. He dressed in T-shirts and jeans and didn’t hide any of his tattoos. His hair was in dreadlocks. He was eager, and he had a lot of questions.”
Soon after his conversion, Maldonado became decidedly less cool. He adopted an increasingly strict view of Islam and, like many converts who become jihadist recruits, began to affect an Arab style of dress. His wife began to wear a full burka, and they covered the head of their baby daughter (which is not required in Islam).61
Mehanna and Abousamra filled Maldonado’s head with jihadist ideology, including justifications for killing civilians and suicide bombings, and the three would get together to devour hours of jihadist video propaganda found online.
Mehanna and Maldonado participated robustly in online jihadist communities, such as the Islamic Awakening forums, where both men were well known. Maldonado was also heavily involved with other sites, including the Islamic Network and Clear Guidance. They followed popular jihadist clerics such as Muhammad Al Maqdisi of Jordan and Anwar Awlaki.
The three young men talked incessantly about seeking out military training in Pakistan so that they could join the jihad overseas. But unlike many online jihobbyists, they took concrete steps to translate talk into reality, contacting an associate with connections for information about how to find and enroll in a training program.62
In 2002 Abousamra was the first to make a go of it. With a few hundred dollars given to him by a sympathetic friend, he traveled to Pakistan in 2002 and again in 2003, looking for training to join Afghan insurgents in battle against U.S. forces. He tried unsuccessfully to enlist with Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. Then he tried the Taliban, which also refused his assistance (supposedly due to his “lack of experience”).63 Rebuffed, he returned to the United States to seek more advice.
So desperate was Abousamra to make the trip that he shelled out $5,000 to someone he thought could make an introduction. Abousamra and Maldonado were itching to see combat; Mehanna seemed less enthused, but he went through the motions. In 2004 Mehanna, Abousamra, and a childhood friend of Mehanna’s flew to Yemen for training, this time with the intention of continuing on to fight
U.S. forces in Iraq.64
They had set a high bar for themselves. For reasons that are not clear, almost no Americans had managed to enter Iraq and join the jihadists fighting U.S. forces there.65 Once again, the young hopefuls failed to find a training camp. Everyone was either in jail or in hiding.66 Discouraged, Mehanna returned to the United States after two weeks.67
But Abousamra was committed. He went on to Fallujah and became the only American clearly documented as reaching Iraq to take part in jihad. He remained there for about fifteen days. He told a friend that he had met with insurgents during the trip but said they would not allow him to participate because he was an American.68
Maldonado too felt the call of jihad, packing up his family and moving first to Egypt and then to Somalia in 2006. Like Zach Chesser, Maldonado described a desire to be part of a political movement. Although Maldonado had a tendency to alter his story depending on his audience, the fixation on an Islamic state is consistent in all of his accounts. In a letter posted to jihadist forums, Maldonado wrote,
Once my wife (may Allah accept her) and I found out that an Islamic State was established in Somalia, especially after the taking of Mogadishu, we decided to go and make Hijra (migration) from Egypt.69
Yet in a handwritten letter filled with spelling mistakes submitted in court after his arrest, he tried to recast his migration as the result of persecution in America and Egypt.
[I] moved my family to Somalia because I wished to live as a Muslim without a problem with the way I or my family practice our religion (beard, veil, going to mosque much, wearing Islamic garb and so on). After September 11, the U.S. was a hard place to live as a Muslim, and I felt that I should not have to change my looks or way I practice ’cause some other Muslims did wrong. [ … ] It seemed that if they really made a true Islamic state that was practicing Islam as the law, it would be the perfect place for a family like mine.70
It’s extremely difficult to credit Maldonado’s claim that practicing Islam in America was so difficult that it would be easier in an active war zone. Elsewhere in the court letter, he claimed he had heard “business was booming” in Somalia. One day after his first letter to the court, Maldonado wrote a second letter in which he admitted to “many dishonest statements.”
In the new letter, he claimed he had been eying jihad all along. The decision to go to Somalia had emerged during discussions with a friend named Omar Hammami, who was married to a Somali woman. They “talked about possibly joining the jihad if we went. We decided that he would go first and I would go later with my family.” He also admitted that he had sought out and participated in jihadist training, including instruction on how to build improvised explosive devices.71
There were al Qaeda members among the jihadists. When Maldonado arrived, the primary Islamic faction fighting to take control of Somalia was the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Maldonado observed that the al Qaeda members he met received more respect than the ICU fighters. Soon after Maldonado’s departure, many of the more extreme members of the ICU—including Maldonado’s American friend Omar Hammami—would break away to join the even more militant Al Shabab militia (see chapter 10).
Despite his stated dream of taking part in an Islamic state, Maldonado’s trip quickly turned dark. At one point, he took part in the interrogation of a supposed spy—a flight attendant who had the temerity to take a picture of jihadists arriving in Somalia by plane. The man was beaten. Maldonado pointed a gun at the man’s head and threatened to kill him if he didn’t talk. The flight attendant—almost certainly an innocent bystander—ended up dead.72
Maldonado’s accounts of his trip to Somalia were telling but divergent:
Internet Letter
Knowing that the Ethiopians were coming and the women were about to leave, [my wife] thought that there was a great possibility I would be killed. So we had a nice, long beautiful talk as she prepared. We expressed our love and admiration for each other. She thanked me by saying: “You are the greatest teacher I have ever had! You are the only man who has stuck around in my life! [ … ] You are a real man! I love you so much!”73
First Court Letter
[My wife and I] went to a house. We were told that we could rest in an empty room. We woke up the next day to be told we would not be able to go to the border together, [because] I am white and very obvious to anyone that may wish harm. They said that many things were getting out of hand. I told them that they could give me a gun, and I would go..[ … ] I wanted to be with my family. They explained it would be much harm and that no one would hurt a woman, especially seeing that my wife is black. [ … ] I finally agreed.74
His letter to his coreligionists online described a valiant battle, followed by a powerful survival ordeal in the jungle. His letter to the court described a man trying desperately to flee Somalia. Both stories ended the same way—with Maldonado getting arrested by the Kenyan military while trying to escape in early 2007.75 While he was going through this process, his wife died of malaria. Maldonado considered her a martyr.76
Meanwhile, Tarek Mehanna’s childhood friend—who had gone with him to Yemen—had started informing to the FBI about the circle of jihadists. At the end of 2006, the FBI showed up on Mehanna’s doorstep, asking about Maldonado. Mehanna said he had no idea where his friend was, although the two had stayed in contact over the phone.
Maldonado had urged Mehanna to join him in Somalia, but Mehanna continued to hedge.77 He had been slower than his peers to translate his ideology into fighting, but he had not been idle. On his blog, Mehanna translated a blizzard of jihadist propaganda, from the writings of Abdullah Azzam to poems and historical Islamic texts. Nearly all of this material pertained to extremely conservative interpretations of Islam, and much of it dealt with jihad.78
It was relatively unusual for Mehanna to contribute material he had written himself, although he posted regularly to the forums, poking here and there at examples that he felt showed the victimization of Muslims.79
He also indulged in the occasional outburst of poetry. One of his efforts, titled “Make Martyrdom What You Seek,” invoked the traditional jihadist’s reward of seventy-two virgins:
You turn and behold! The voices are singing
Coming from Maidens so fair and enchanting,
These are the [Houris] with round and firm chests
Pure untouched virgins, they’re better than the best,
Seventy-two in all, with large eyes of dark hue
Each one created especially for you.
Mehanna’s friends had surpassed him in their commitment to physically taking part in jihad, but Mehanna had an ugly, voyeuristic obsession with violence that often seemed to be a greater inspiration than his interest in Islam. He joked with a friend that New York was no longer the “Land of the Two Towers” (a play on a jihadist reference to Iraq, the “Land of the Two Rivers”). Instead, he suggested that it be called the “land of rape.” With friends in tow, Mehanna visited Ground Zero. A photo taken at the site shows him grinning and pointing at the sky.
He circulated videos depicting the mutilation of the body of an American soldier in Iraq, referring to it as “Texas BBQ.” (The soldier was supposedly killed as retaliation for the alleged rape of a Muslim woman by a U.S. serviceman.)80 In online chat sessions with a friend, he joked about beheadings. In a chat with Abousamra, he suggested that a female Muslim leader who had spoken out against extremism “needs to be raped with a broomstick.” Referring to Mahdi Bray, a leader of the Muslim American Society, Mehanna said, “I wish I could [ … ] cut off his testicles.”81
In short, Tarek Mehanna was a nasty piece of work. He was arrested in 2009 for lying to the FBI about Maldonado then indicted for material support of terrorism. Abousamra was also indicted, but he had already fled the country after he was interrogated by the FBI in 2006. He is today believed to be living in Syria, where he has family ties.82
Despite the ugliness of his private rhetoric, Mehanna became a cause célèbre, both within the local community in Boston and online, particularly on the Islamic Awakening forum. Mehanna’s letters from prison, including poems and drawings, were posted online by IA members who knew him before his arrest. Campaigns were organized through the forum to write letters and provide other shows of support, including a savvy social networking effort mounted by Mehanna’s brother.83
All of these efforts together have built a mythic picture of Mehanna as a political prisoner, drowning out the sordid details that were laid out in page after page of court documents. At the time of this writing, his case had not yet gone to trial, but it seems unlikely that further revelations will make a dent in the narrative created by his defenders, especially given the absence of overt violence in the charges against him. The most serious allegation was that he had appointed himself the “media wing” of al Qaeda in Iraq, but as of this writing, no evidence had emerged to suggest he had a direct connection to the terrorist organization.84
Evaluating the threat posed by jihobbyists online is a game that journalists often play to extremes. Either they ignore it, or they hype it to the skies. For example, Revolution Muslim has been around for years but garnered only sporadic coverage until the South Park incident, which inspired an explosion of stories lacking context.
The release of Samir Khan’s Inspire in July 2010 prompted an incredible wave of hysterical and wildly inaccurate coverage from normally responsible news outlets, including stories claiming that the magazine was a website (it wasn’t), that it had been published on glossy paper (it wasn’t), and that it was the first English-language publication targeting Western recruits (it wasn’t). None of the reporters and few quoted analysts had even heard of Al Hussam or the four issues of Jihad Reflections published just months earlier. In fact almost none of the reporters had even read Inspire—the PDF was corrupted when it was first uploaded, prompting jihadists and journalists alike to panic and assume that the file contained a virus (it didn’t).85
Given the series of setbacks and failures described in this chapter, it might be tempting to dismiss the online jihad as a comedy of errors, a gang that couldn’t shoot straight. It’s easy enough to underestimate the significance of the jihadist Web, especially when so many of its celebrities are young and inept like Zach Chesser, or when they don’t appear to be taking direct action toward violence, as in the case of Tarek Mehanna. But there are several levels on which these forums and websites are fundamentally transforming the face of American jihadists.
It’s not simply a question of volume, at least not yet. Although the data set is sketchy, it appears the number of American jihadists and jihad sympathizers in 2010 is not exponentially higher than it was at the end of the 1980s. The perception of an increase is due, in part, to the fact that Americans are paying more attention now than they were then. And the jihadists themselves are far more visible to outsiders, thanks to the Internet.
There are also considerably more Muslims in America today than there were in 1990. Reliable figures on the number of U.S. Muslims are hard to come by, but even the most conservative estimate (1.3 million, almost certainly too low) shows the Muslim population more than doubled from 1990 to 2008.
That creates a bigger pool from which jihadists can recruit, but it doesn’t mean that the number of jihadists, as a percentage of the American Muslim population, has increased by leaps and bounds. It should be stressed that only a tiny percentage of American Muslims are drawn into violent extremism, but it should also be recognized that Muslims represent the pool in which jihadists cast their lines. Based on the admittedly incomplete data, it appears likely that the percentage of American Muslims drawn into jihadist activity has increased somewhat but is not dramatically higher than it was in 1990.
The odds of developing credible data covering the last thirty years are slim, so the numbers game becomes something of a dead end. But we can observe, much more directly, that the Internet is creating a significant change in the patterns of radicalization and the types of people who make the decision to go from talk to action.
During the 1980s and the 1990s, recruits for jihad overseas most often entered combat from the perspective of defending Muslims from fairly unambiguous acts of aggression by non-Muslims, and they tended to be selected by recruiters or self-selected on the basis that they would be good in a fight—for instance, if they had military training. Candidates were usually filtered through a network of recruiters who helped screen volunteers and direct them to settings where they could be most useful.
For many, perhaps most, of these first-phase recruits, sophisticated ideological structures came only after they had decided to become combatants. When they arrived at the camps, itching for combat, they were instead subjected to days or weeks of religious indoctrination before they were allowed to take part in military training, let alone fight.
That’s not to say that pre-9/11 recruits were oblivious to more advanced jihadist ideas—for instance, the ambition to create Islamic states or takfiri ideas about killing infidels (even when the infidels were Muslims). Some were preconditioned with these ideas, through exposure to ideologues such as Omar Abdel Rahman, but others were simply attracted to the miracles described by Abdullah Azzam or moved by mainstream media reporting about atrocities in Bosnia. Even those who had a more thorough grounding in abstract jihadist theology were absorbing those lessons through a relatively limited number of sources.
Religious indoctrination at the camps was tightly controlled by al Qaeda and a handful of loosely related organizations working from more or less the same playbook, including Lashar-e-Tayyiba and the Islamic Group. Instruction was delivered within a controlled environment, where cultlike indoctrination techniques such as dislocation and isolation helped reinforce the message. This more structured environment created jihadists who were, generally speaking, more formidable and more consistent in their beliefs.
In the post-9/11 era, two major changes worked together to dramatically alter the model. First, the invasion of Afghanistan virtually destroyed the existing network of al Qaeda training camps and drove non-Qaeda camps deep underground. It became much harder (though far from impossible) to travel to the fields of jihad and receive a decent education. The reconstituted camps in Pakistan operated under a cloak of extreme secrecy in a much more restrictive environment than before. In the United States, the environment for recruiters deteriorated in a corresponding manner, with mosques clamping down on the public airing of extremist rhetoric.
At the same time, the use of the Internet launched a decade of sustained and often explosive growth, not only for jihadists but for everyone. Internet access became ubiquitous, costs came down, and software and websites became easier to use. The advent of Web 2.0 led to a proliferation of blogs and message boards, and e-mail became the preferred method of communication. All these tools spread within the jihadist community at much the same pace that they did in the general population.
The chief effect of these two changes was to reverse the old paradigm. With the rise of the jihadist Web, religious indoctrination now tends to come first, and the decision to take part in combat comes second, if at all.
Would-be jihadists are today able to immerse themselves in a dizzying array of radical Islamic literature. They can feast on hundreds or thousands of hours of video and audio lectures by established clerics, as well as enthusiastic amateurs.
Among the amateurs, many lack a sophisticated Islamic outlook, but they excel at the Wikipedia approach to expertise. Anyone armed with Google can convince himself (and a certain number of others) that he is an expert in nearly any topic with a few weeks of concerted effort. Islamic jurisprudence may be especially vulnerable to this cut-and-paste mentality, due to its dense complexity and lack of a central religious authority to settle disputes.
Eventually, aspiring jihadists convince themselves that they too are experts, capable of deciding religious questions that have life-and-death consequences. All this can happen before the jihobbyist steps one foot overseas, as it did with Samir Khan and Zach Chesser.
Where the jihobbyists start to run into trouble is when they attempt to make the transition from talk to action. The clear passages to physical jihad are long gone, and those who wish to fight are left to their own devices.
Some succeed, but many more fail. Bryant Vinas nearly got himself killed trying to reach al Qaeda. In late 2009 five young men from the Washington, D.C., area demonstrated that not everyone is as lucky or competent as Vinas. They got arrested about a week after getting off the plane.86
Before 9/11 someone who selected himself for jihad usually did so because he was pretty damn tough. After 9/11 someone who selected himself was more likely to be a voracious reader.
When you’re fighting a war, you need foot soldiers more than poets. Whether through lack of aptitude or lack of desire, many jihobbyists simply don’t make it to the front lines. Tarek Mehanna never found a connection, if he was even trying. Ahmed Abousamra managed to get to Iraq only to return after two weeks. Yousef Al Khattab apparently just dropped out. Zach Chesser couldn’t even make it onto a plane.