Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [67]
Zindani was linked to both the Muslim Brotherhood and the MWL.19 He was renowned as a scholar and a warrior, having cut his teeth in battle alongside Osama bin Laden during the Afghan jihad and in the Afghan civil war that followed. In the postwar era, he became known as a recruiter for the war in Bosnia and later for al Qaeda. His nephew, Abdul Wali Zindani, ran the Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn after the murder of Mustafa Shalabi during the 1990s.20
If Awlaki was looking for a mentor in extremism, he couldn’t have found a better man. The Charitable Society for Social Welfare was Zindani’s vehicle in the United States during the 1990s, with offices in several locations, including Brooklyn and San Diego.21
CSSW was the subject of an al Qaeda financing investigation code-named “Black Bear,” but the charity was never formally designated a terrorist financier. Although it subsequently shuttered its American operations, the charity nevertheless received millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars as recently as 2010 as part of a partnership to fight child labor overseas.22
Around the same time, Awlaki was approached by an al Qaeda facilitator named Ziyad Khaleel. Khaleel was, in the words of one acquaintance, “obnoxious.” He had been vice president of Awlaki’s Denver Islamic Society some years earlier, when the men probably first met. Now he was a fund-raiser for the Islamic American Relief Agency, which was linked to CSSW. IARA was later named by the U.S. government as an al Qaeda financing vehicle. In his spare time, Khaleel helped acquire and maintain a satellite phone account for Osama bin Laden.23
In light of these suspicious connections, the FBI opened a file on Awlaki. The investigation began some months after he took the job with CSSW and ended in March 2000. The agent who closed the case wrote that Awlaki had been “fully identified and does not meet the criterion for [further] investigation.”24 It was an evaluation he or she would live to regret.
At the mosque Awlaki was beginning to attract devotees. His followers numbered roughly two hundred to three hundred and were—according to Awlaki— “very religious and simple.”25
Omar Al Bayoumi, a Saudi national who had moved to the United States in 1994 to learn English and attend college, was one of Awlaki’s admirers. Bayoumi earned an MBA in 1997 and went on to study accounting in graduate school, but the subject bored him, and he dropped out.26 His education was financed by his employer, a Saudi government agency responsible for overseeing aviation in the kingdom. Despite his employer’s generosity—his salary topped out at more than $6,000 per month—he performed no clearly identifiable work related to aviation during his time in America.
When he wasn’t attending his children’s football games, Bayoumi was very involved with local mosques, including a Kurdish mosque in the San Diego area, where he helped arrange financing to acquire a building. Although he claimed that he held no formal position with the mosque, Bayoumi maintained an office on the premises and helped settle disputes.27
Bayoumi enjoyed talking about religion, and one of his discussion partners was Anwar Awlaki. Beyond their direct contacts, Bayoumi befriended some of Awlaki’s most fervent disciples. Among them was a young Saudi named Omer Bakarbashat, who lived in an apartment complex in a cul-de-sac around the corner from the Ribat mosque and worked at a local Texaco station that had become a hangout for Arabic-speaking Muslims in the neighborhood.
Bakarbashat was shy but not too shy to pursue one of his female coworkers, even proposing marriage to her at one point. (She declined.) He viewed Awlaki as “almost a god.”28 According to Bayoumi, Bakarbashat was fat and delusional, allegedly believing himself to be possessed by demons.29
One day in 2000 Bakarbashat met two Saudis, friends of Bayoumi who had come to Ar-Ribat to attend one of Awlaki’s services. Their