Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [46]
And so their romantic dream failed—but they were still angry. Because every day the news brought reports of yet another massacre, and every Friday, the imam was still talking about Bosnia.
And the “far enemy” began to look like the realistic enemy. The enemy next door.
5
Rebuilding the Network
After the twin disasters of the World Trade Center bombing and the subsequent Day of Terror plot, the Al Kifah Center in New York was, for all intents and purposes, finished. But the jihad was heating up, especially in Bosnia, where Western media reporting meshed with the rhetoric of Muslim speakers to create a sense of urgent and growing outrage.
Omar Abdel Rahman had welded his Islamic Group to the Al Kifah brand, and the combined operation dwarfed the remaining handful of independent jihad recruiters. His spectacular fall left the direction of the entire American movement up in the air. As the hammer of federal law enforcement smashed down on Brooklyn, the movement dispersed to satellite centers around the country.
Al Kifah’s office in Boston, established in the early 1990s, emerged from the World Trade Center debacle relatively unscathed. Little more than two weeks after the bombing, the head of the Boston office, Emad Muntasser, changed the name of the Boston office from Al Kifah to CARE International.1
Positioning itself as a nonpolitical charity (at least as far as non-Muslims were concerned), CARE applied for and received a tax exemption from the IRS, but its operations continued as before—supporting jihad overseas with money and men.2
Al Kifah’s Boston operation was leaner and more focused than the Brooklyn office had been. Largely absent were the power struggles and the intrigues, and absent, too, were the angry young men hatching plots to kill Americans on American soil. Jihadists passing through Boston were more likely to be focused on conflicts overseas.
One example was Layth Abu Al Layth, a Moroccan who had moved to the United States in 1990. While working at a Dunkin’ Donuts in the Boston area, he met other local jihadists who inspired him to join the Afghan mujahideen in 1991. Given the timing, that likely meant training with al Qaeda. Abu Layth trained at the camps, then entered combat to “purify” Afghanistan of any lingering non-Islamic influences. In February 1993 he was killed in battle when he stepped on a land mine.3
The main recruiting tool for the Boston office was a newsletter called Al Hussam, which translated as “The Sword.” Published in both English and Arabic, the newsletter was stuffed with short, informative news items from various fronts in the global jihad. Bosnia, the most active theater, took up most of the ink, but updates also flowed in from Chechnya, Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere. The authors tried, with less success, to whip up support for Islamic revolts in Saudi Arabia and Libya.
The issues were filled out with short articles written by local jihad supporters and the occasional reprint of classic tracts by Abdullah Azzam and other jihadist luminaries. The articles urged Americans, in no uncertain terms, to take up the banner of jihad.
Al Hussam’s publication was the next rung in an evolution of tone from the early days of American jihadists. Although the newsletter still occasionally celebrated the “miracles” that Abdullah Azzam had leveraged so effectively, the thrust was more abstractly religious than some of its predecessors, quoting chapter and verse from the Koran and hadith (stories of the life of Mohammed) and waxing on about the need for Islamic solidarity and its attendant religious obligations.4
In part, this was a function of the end of the Soviet war, which was a clearer case of enemy aggression, where the lure of adventure often made complex ideological concepts unnecessary. The end of the Soviet occupation had not ended the need for jihad, the newsletter explained. “There are still many solutions