Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [19]
Ominously, Mohamed predicted that the mujahideen would not stay inside Afghanistan. They would spread around the world, take the war to Russia on its own soil, and transform strategic parts of the Middle East into Islamic states where Christians and Jews would be tolerated but “without power.”
[In Egypt], the religious people, they are calling and they [are] trying to change the system now. And most is the young people. Most is a new generation. They left the country. They are fighting, especially in Afghanistan. So the experiment will repeat again a hundred percent, maybe in Egypt and Algeria.
All of this was happening in plain sight. The underground aspect of Mohamed’s activities was even more damaging. It’s not clear whether Mohamed actually saw combat during his trip to Afghanistan, but we do know now what he didn’t tell his commanding officer then—Mohamed had been providing professionalized, American-style military training to the mujahideen during his trip at camps affiliated with Abdullah Azzam that would soon become the property of al Qaeda.36
It was the start of an illustrious terrorist career, which would span at least three continents and encompass some of al Qaeda’s most deadly terrorist attacks— the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the East African Embassy bombings, and perhaps even September 11.
Several Americans were present at the camps during the time that Mohamed was there. Among them were Abdullah Rashid, the African American from Brooklyn who nearly lost his leg during combat, and Fawaz Damra, the imam at Brooklyn’s Al Farook mosque.
Perhaps the most important figure in Afghanistan around the time that Mohamed was working in the training camps was Mustafa Shalabi, a fellow member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who had been personally recruited by Zawahiri. Now a naturalized American citizen (through fraud), Shalabi answered to Azzam, at least on paper, and ran the Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn on his behalf.37
If Mohamed and Shalabi hadn’t met before Afghanistan, they certainly knew each other afterward. Shortly after they returned to the country, Shalabi invited Mohamed to bring his training skills to the New York area. Mohamed handed out copies of the maps, the training manuals, and the documents he had stolen from Fort Bragg, which served as the foundation for the world’s most dangerous book, the Encyclopedia of Jihad, a terrorist training manual without parallel.
Mohamed began work on the Encyclopedia by translating the stolen army training manuals into Arabic, then enhancing them with his own specialized knowledge. He carefully redrew illustrations of U.S. soldiers handling heavy arms, replacing the Western figures with cartoonish mujahideen fighters. Sometimes he simply inserted a page from a U.S. army manual and added annotations in Arabic. Mohamed’s diagrams showed how to field-strip weapons, create improvised explosives, operate rocket-propelled grenades, and target Soviet tanks.38
He also added material not found in any army manual, such as instructions on how to create terrorist cells, surveillance and the selection of terrorist targets, how to create deadly poisons and other methods of assassination, and how to manipulate authorities if arrested. The book grew over the years, existing first on paper and later in electronic formats. The core text still exists today and circulates on the Internet. Copies of the book were captured in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2003.39
Mohamed took copies of both his edited manuals and the army originals to Brooklyn and Jersey City, where they were made available as part of the library at the Al Kifah Center and the As-Salaam mosque.40 He wasn’t only providing reference works, however. By early 1989 Mohamed was traveling on weekends from Fort Bragg to New Jersey to conduct hands-on