Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [15]
El Hage was born into a Catholic family in Lebanon. They moved to Kuwait when he was two. He learned about Islam as a teenager and converted shortly after he moved to the United States to attend the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1978. El Hage had spent three years involved with the jihad against the Soviet, starting in 1982, when he took a job with the Muslim World League’s office in Peshawar. He returned to America in 1985, married an American convert to Islam, and became a U.S. citizen in 1989. After getting married, El Hage took a job directly under Abdullah Azzam in Quetta, Pakistan, starting in 1987.16
In Quetta he met Osama bin Laden, and the following year he applied to join al Qaeda. According to his wife and his attorney, El Hage was never a combatant, and he suffered from a congenitally deformed arm that would have put a crimp in his military aspirations. Nevertheless, his application to join al Qaeda stated that he had been trained on “most types of weapons, mines, explosives and booby traps.”17
Another of Al Qaeda’s early members was Jamal Al Fadl, a young Sudanese man who spent time in Saudi Arabia in his youth but was forced to leave after he narrowly escaped being caught smoking pot. He moved to Brooklyn in 1986, where he worked as a grocery bagger and eventually found Allah at the radical Al Farook mosque.18
Al Fadl began to volunteer in his spare time at Abdullah Azzam’s Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn. At first, he raised money and recruited members locally. Toward the end of 1988, not long after the founding of al Qaeda, Al Kifah’s emir, Mustafa Shalabi, decided it was time for Al Fadl to join the fight. Unlike some other would-be jihadists, Al Fadl got the full ride. Shalabi gave him his ticket and some spending money.
Al Fadl’s experience—recounted in noteworthy detail during the 2001 East African Embassy bombings trial—was typical for new recruits in the early days of al Qaeda and bears a strong, noncoincidental resemblance to a cult indoctrination. When he arrived in Peshawar, Al Fadl and several other recruits were taken to a guesthouse and instructed to give up their money, their personal effects, their passports, and even their names. Al Fadl was rechristened Abu Bakr Al Sudani.
With these indoctrination techniques, al Qaeda removed the trappings of the outside world, physically severing new recruits from their previous lives. The method mentally dislocated the recruits and forced them to reorient in a totally new world. The method had been tested and refined by Azzam’s organization on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fighters who went before Al Fadl during the war against the Soviets.
“I went to Afghanistan with a blank mind and a good heart,” Loay Bayazid told journalist Lawrence Wright many years later. “Everything was totally strange. It was like I was born just now, like I was an infant, and I have to learn everything new. It was not so easy after that to leave and go back to your regular life.”19
At the guesthouse, Al Fadl went through two days of basic indoctrination about the concept of jihad and conditions inside Afghanistan. Then he and his fellow recruits were shipped off to an al Qaeda–controlled training camp in Afghanistan. They started with small arms—including the classic terrorist weapon of choice, the Kalashnikov rifle—and rocket-propelled grenades.
This phase of the training lasted forty-five days, then he was sent to another guesthouse inside Afghanistan for ten more days of religious training, some of which was provided by Osama bin Laden himself, who spoke about the obligatory jihad to defend Muslim lands that had been invaded. According to bin Laden, this obligation eclipsed all other obligations, such as family, business, and school, reinforcing the recruits’ emotional disconnect from the outside world with a religious dimension.
The third phase was combat. Al Fadl and his fellow