Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [50]
In many cases, details are sketchy. A Caucasian American named Abu Man-sour was sighted by a few Bosnian mujahideen, one of whom said that he hailed from the Virginia area. Two African Americans named Abu Khalid and Abu Aysha were also seen. The former was killed fighting the Serbs; the latter came late to the conflict and didn’t stay long. An American named Abu Musa had come to Bosnia as part of Bilal Philips’s recruitment program and stayed until at least 1993, taking part in raids in Serbian territory.23
One who stayed was an African American named Clevin Holt, who became a bit of a legend in intelligence circles. In 2010 Holt was spotlighted in American Jihadist, a riveting documentary by journalists Mark Claywell and Jody Jenkins, who spent years researching Holt’s story and captured hours of interviews with the fighter himself.
Raised in a Washington, D.C., household tense with chaos and abuse, Holt joined the U.S. Army as an underage teenager to fight in Vietnam but was eventually forced out after becoming involved in a race riot on an army base; his true age was revealed during the investigation.
Full of anger and despair, Holt returned to Washington. He considered going on a killing spree, then turned his gun on himself, he told Claywell and Jenkins. Yet before he could pull the trigger, Holt said, he saw a vision of an angel, which caught him up short. Three days later he met an African American Muslim convert who introduced him to Islam. Holt converted, changing his name to Isa Abdullah Ali; he aligned himself with Shi’a Islam and joined an American Islamic group sponsored by the Iranian intelligence service. As he related the change in American Jihadist,
I was greatly influenced by the words of Ayatollah Khomeini. A lot of what he said in the past, matched everything that I ever thought, ever felt, and even some of the things I would verbalize. In my learning experience through Islam, the answers started becoming more and more clear.24
Although his angel had stopped him from embarking on a campaign of indiscriminate killing, Ali felt that his military training was all that he had in the world. He left to fight in Afghanistan for one month in 1980, making him one of the very first true American jihadists—Ali arrived on the scene before virtually any other foreign fighters, let alone Americans.25
Soon after that, he joined the Shi’ite Amal Militia in Lebanon, where he fought during the civil war, earning another rare distinction—American mujahideen have almost never fought Israelis directly. He came to Lebanon strapped for war and packing ordinance, including military-grade explosives. In Lebanon he trained Hezbollah and Amal fighters (even women) and took part in combat, killing at least nine Israelis by his own account.26
“When advice is needed, I give it. When it’s not, I’m a sniper,” Ali told the Washington Post in 1982. During the same interview, he described his wish to see death in battle:
I’m quite sure that sooner or later I’m going to get killed. Where the end is only my God knows. When the Iranians reach [Jerusalem], I ask my God to give me martyrdom. Once Palestine is free, I have no desire to stay in this life any longer.27
Ali considered himself a “professional soldier of Islam” who was trying to achieve martyrdom, but he was too good at the former to accomplish the latter. In American Jihadist, he remembered:
I started talking to the angel of death. And I told him, straight up, look, you need to get inside of me. You know, and take all these human characteristics away from me … I actually stopped counting in 1981. I stopped counting the number of the persons I had killed. I had stopped at that time at 173. There are countless numbers that I don’t even know, to this day.
“He was special. He had high training skills,” said Hamzah akl Hamieh, a military leader of the Amal Militia at the time. “He put makeup