Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [24]
Members of Al Fuqra were threaded through the Brooklyn Muslim community, but they stood apart from the hierarchy of scholars and fighters that was, around the same time, crystallizing at the Al Farook Mosque and the Al Kifah Center. A number of news stories during the 1990s, citing multiple anonymous sources, claimed that Abdullah Rashid, the African American mujahid who almost lost his leg in Afghanistan, was closely linked to Al Fuqra.
Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst who tracked Rashid during the early 1990s, said that Rashid and some of his associates were “at least tangentially involved” in the group. But Tom Corrigan, a member of the New York City Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) who investigated Rashid in the United States, said he wasn’t aware of any connection and that Rashid didn’t seem to know what the group was in a conversation between the two men during the mid-1990s.21
AZZAM’S MAN IN NEW YORK
The murder of Rashad Khalifa was eerily echoed in Brooklyn one year later, but this time the victim was one of the radicals’ own—Mustafa Shalabi, the red-headed American citizen from Egypt who headed the Al Kifah Center.22
Shalabi had worked in Brooklyn as an electrical contractor during the 1980s. Like so many other Americans, he had become entranced with the jihad against the Soviets through the writings and speeches of Abdullah Azzam. Shalabi traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight and help raise funds for the mujahideen. He returned to Brooklyn as Azzam’s trusted lieutenant, in charge of the American Al Kifah operation. His deputies included the imam of Al Farook, Fawaz Damra, and another naturalized Egyptian American, Ali Shinawy, who had come to the United States during the 1970s and worked repairing trains for the New York City Transit Authority.23
In addition to providing Azzam with an operating base in the United States, the Al Kifah Center had quickly evolved into a transit station for the jihad, helping would-be jihadists find transportation and secure visas while providing support for those left behind.
Shalabi was an entrepreneur. In order to support Al Kifah’s operations, he employed a number of for-profit criminal enterprises, including gunrunning, arson for hire, and a counterfeiting ring set up in the basement of the jihad office.24
Al Kifah also provided training for jihadists in the United States, nominally as preparation for Afghanistan. The Calverton gun club visits organized by Pittsburgh transplant El Sayyid Nosair were part of this program, as were the advanced training sessions conducted by Ali Mohamed. All of this activity was undertaken in the service of Azzam. As the 1980s wound to a close, Azzam remained the shining star of the jihadi world.
The war against the Soviets was finally coming to an end, largely due to the efforts of the native Afghan mujahideen. Yet in the wider Muslim world, a healthy dose of spin transformed the victory of the Afghan resistance into a victory for pan-Islamic jihad, the confluence of foreign money and imported Muslim fighters, with Azzam at the center, managing, inspiring, and holding the whole effort together.
The end of the war posed a powerful question, however. Azzam was heir apparent to a substantial fund-raising operation and an army of irregulars who hung on his every word. Where would this army go? The battle over direction raged on two fronts: in Pakistan, where Azzam tussled with his fellow war veterans, and in the United States, where it took a different form.
Although Azzam was the most influential figure in the jihad machine, he was not the only one. Another prominent scholar with a significant following in the United States was an Egyptian named Omar Abdel Rahman. Blind since childhood, Rahman had managed to memorize the entire Koran, an impressive act of scholarship even for the