Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [16]
After this, the recruits were formally part of the organization. Following a brief leave in Peshawar, Al Fadl was sent to a succession of camps for additional training. He was always on the move and adjusting to new environments while being fed a constant diet of religious indoctrination and being trained in improvised explosives, booby traps, and advanced weaponry.
Al Qaeda’s young army of volunteer jihadists came from everywhere in the world, including the United States. Many American volunteers were first- or second-generation immigrants of Arab descent, but not all of them.
Daniel Boyd was one of the recruits who stood out from the crowd, a tall, white American with a baby face and a lion’s mane of blond hair, looking otherworldly in traditional Arab dress and taking the name “Saifullah.”20 Boyd arrived at the tail end of the jihad against the Soviets and managed to log some combat hours before it was over, including an attack on a Russian plane.21
“Man, it hit the ground. It was an ammunition plane,” he told a government informant in 2009. “Son, you had to see the explosion on that thing. Everybody getting down. [ … ] Now that explosion filled the horizon. [ … ] I was high, high, higher.”22
Boyd stayed on for advanced training, spending about three years in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The jihadists he spent time with were closely linked to al Qaeda. He returned home to North Carolina after a run-in with the law in Pakistan, where he had been robbing banks. Although outwardly he seemed to resume a normal life, he was quietly raising a family inculcated with his strict, militaristic reading of Islam, stocking his home with weapons and ammunition for what he saw as his inevitable return to jihad.
“One day, inshallah [God willing], Allah’s going to put me back. I saw the deen [Islamic way of life in practice],” he told some friends, years later. “I saw the deen.”23
Another dabbler in jihad was Khaled Ibrahim, an Egyptian-American living in Newark. Ibrahim was moved to join the armed struggle in Afghanistan after hearing a speech by Azzam, but he wanted to be trained before he left. Ibrahim signed up for firearms instruction after seeing a poster at the As-Salaam mosque in Jersey City. That decision brought him into contact with one of the most dangerous operatives in the history of terrorism—Ali Abdelsaoud Mohamed, the most formidable of al Qaeda’s Americans.
Mohamed had been an Egyptian army officer during the early 1980s. As part of his military training, he had been selected to take part in a joint exercise that brought Egyptian commandos to Fort Bragg for the same unconventional warfare drills practiced by the U.S. Army’s elite Green Berets.24 Around this time, Mohamed was recruited into the hard-core radical group known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) by its emir, Ayman Al Zawahiri.25
Linked to the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, EIJ was hell-bent on overthrowing the secular Egyptian government and replacing it with an Islamic state. Zawahiri was a cell leader in EIJ at the time, and he had recruited a number of members from the military, with the idea of staging a coup. That idea failed, but Sadat was ultimately assassinated by military officers connected to EIJ. Zawahiri and hundreds of others were indicted for conspiracy in the killing. Zawahiri was released after three years and fled Egypt for Afghanistan, where he set up an EIJ operation in exile, contributing valuable military expertise to the Arab mujahideen gathered by Azzam.26
There, Zawahiri met Osama bin Laden and forged an alliance that continues until this day. Zawahiri was deeply involved in al Qaeda operations from day one. EIJ was nominally a distinct organization under Zawahiri’s leadership, but for most practical purposes, al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad were one and the same. They shared payroll, personnel, and facilities, and sworn