Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [31]
Yousef took command of Salameh’s cell. The conspirators included Abouhalima, Ayyad, and Abdul Rahman Yasin, an American citizen of Iraqi descent born in Bloomington, Indiana, and raised in Iraq. He returned to the United States in 1992 to join family members living in New Jersey. Yasin had been living on welfare when he encountered Yousef, who was renting an apartment downstairs from him. Eyad Ismoil, a Jordanian in the United States on a visa, joined the plot late, as a driver.67
With Yousef’s arrival, the plans rapidly moved into high gear. Under Yousef’s expert supervision, the crew built a devastating and sophisticated truck bomb. Salameh rented the truck, and Ismoil drove it into position—a parking garage under the World Trade Center. Shortly after noon on February 26, 1993, Yousef used a cigarette lighter to ignite a simple fuse. It took twelve minutes to burn down.
The explosion left a crater one hundred feet wide, gouging a hole in the building several stories deep and several more high. The epicenter was the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Flames and fumes shot up through the building. People who weren’t trapped soon poured out of the building, panicstricken and covered in soot. More than a thousand people were injured, some seriously, with crushed limbs, fractured skulls, burns, and bleeding wounds. Six died almost instantly.
It was a stunning act of terrorism and mass murder but less than Yousef had desired. His plan was that the explosion would topple one of the towers onto the other, killing thousands.68
Ajaj, who had traveled to the United States with Yousef, was already in prison on immigration charges. Salameh was arrested when he tried to recover the deposit on the rental truck used in the attack. Ayyad was next. Yousef, Yasin, and Abouhalima fled the country. Abouhalima was soon captured in Egypt and returned to the United States for trial. Yousef would remain free for two years before being captured in Pakistan. Yasin was detained in Iraq for years. His current whereabouts are unknown. Except for Yasin, everyone in the cell was eventually convicted for the bombing, and all are in prison today.69
Investigators knew that Salameh and Ayyad were followers of Omar Abdel Rahman, and they began to increase their scrutiny of the blind sheikh’s other followers. What they found was a second wave in the making, an even more ambitious plan to wreak havoc on New York, camouflaged by the jihadists’ new cause: the genocidal war raging in Bosnia.
4
Project Bosnia
When he was in high school, Dennis Philips fronted a rock band emulating Jimi Hendrix.
Philips was Jamaican by birth, but his Protestant parents had moved to Canada when he was very young, and that was the culture he knew. Caught up in the turmoil of the sixties, Philips dropped out of college and began to travel through America, bouncing around the drug scene and toying with communism and Black Nationalism, before converting to Islam in the early 1970s and taking on the name Bilal.
He had encountered Islam several times in his travels, but the book that won him over was Islam, the Misunderstood Religion, penned by the younger brother of Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb. Muhammad Qutb served a crucial role in widening the appeal of his brother’s ideas by massaging them into a less overtly incendiary form.1
In his quest to understand his new religion better, Philips went to study Islam at the University of Medina in Saudi Arabia and afterward earned a master’s in Islamic theology in Riyadh. He began to write and teach about Islam, viewing every engagement as dawah—an opportunity to call his students to Islam.2
In 1992 U.S. forces deployed to Saudi Arabia to defend the country against Saddam Hussein, whose army had seized neighboring