Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [54]
There is also the question of al Qaeda’s role in Bosnia. Royer denied in a letter to the author and in other forums that al Qaeda played any role in the war or with the mujahideen—at least, as far as his direct knowledge.
The evidence again stands in contrast. U.S. intelligence and phone calls intercepted by the Bosnian government show communication between the Bosnian mujahideen and al Qaeda commanders, and several individual mujahideen were connected to al Qaeda.45 In addition, Osama bin Laden sent resources and financially interacted with the Bosnian mujahideen.46
Royer has a tendency to dismiss views that conflict with his as uninformed, superficial, dishonest, or a combination of all three. His denials may simply be self-serving, but it is also possible that he did not have direct contact with anyone he knew to be part of al Qaeda.47
AL QAEDA IN BOSNIA
The connections between the Bosnian mujahideen and al Qaeda were not widely known at the foot-soldier level, even to insiders with both groups. One former fighter, who was involved with both al Qaeda and the Bosnian mujahideen at different times, told me that “not a single member of al Qaeda at that time joined the fight,” although he said that many Bosnian volunteers became affiliated with al Qaeda after the war.48
Nevertheless, in addition to Tahir, the American al Qaeda member described in Chapter 4, the record shows that a few active members of al Qaeda did take part in the war.
One of them was Christopher Paul, an African American who converted to Islam, changing his name to “Abdul Malek Kenyatta.” Around the end of 1990, Kenyatta traveled to Pakistan seeking to sign up for jihad. He ended up in an al Qaeda guesthouse in Peshawar. He met several members of al Qaeda and eventually attended a training camp in Afghanistan, where he learned to use assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and mastered other military techniques. A few months later, he was selected for advanced training in military tactics and the construction of improvised explosives.
As al Qaeda began the process of moving to Sudan in the early 1990s, Kenyatta bristled at the prospect that his time in combat might be coming to an end. After a brief return to the United States, where he trained aspiring Ohio jihadists in martial arts, he flew to Europe and made his way into Bosnia, where he took part in combat. After Bosnia, he continued to work for al Qaeda, training would-be terrorists in Ohio and Germany in bomb making, with the aim of killing Americans at home and abroad. That eventually formed the basis for his prosecution in 2008, which ended with a guilty plea and a twenty-year prison sentence.49
Al Qaeda also had financial ties to the war in Bosnia, many of which ran through the United States and involved American citizens. One of the most significant charities providing support to the Bosnian mujahideen was the Benevolence International Foundation.
Spawned from a Pakistan-based organization active at the end of the Soviet jihad, a substantial part of the Benevolence operation was moved to the United States in the early 1990s by Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian who had fought alongside Osama bin Laden and later oversaw logistics for some of al Qaeda’s early camps in Afghanistan. Arnaout was joined there by Loay Bayazid, the Kansas City mujahid who had been present at the founding of al Qaeda.50
Benevolence had operations in major conflict zones around the world, with a strong focus on Bosnia and Chechnya. Like many charitable organizations linked to terrorism, it really did perform charity work, but a substantial sum of money was reserved for the mujahideen. Benevolence bought uniforms