Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [72]
Awlaki was landing at Reagan National Airport around the time that the hijackers were boarding their flight at the nearby Washington Dulles International Airport. The timing was extraordinarily tight. Awlaki heard news of the hijackings during his cab ride home.
Awlaki rushed to the mosque. After a consultation, the facility’s leaders decided to close the facility for the rest of the day, citing security concerns, and issued a press release condemning the attacks. That night, they called the police after someone drove up to the mosque and started shouting at the people huddled inside.
ABDULLAH RASHID
The African American mujahid from Brooklyn was a long way from his glory days in Afghanistan. For the last eight years, Abdullah Rashid had been living in a series of prisons. Since 1999 his home had been the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana.8
Not long after the planes hit, Rashid was taken out of his cell and moved to death row.
“They said it was the safest point in the prison,” his wife, Alia, recalled. “I said, ‘That’s bull.’”
Alia believed that they wanted to “get him outta their face. [ … ] He was gettin’ on their nerves real bad, and they fixed him.”9
Rashid remained on death row for more than a year. After that, it was on to another prison.
JOHN WALKER LINDH
On a morning when the rest of America was waking up to the reality of war, John Walker Lindh was already there—in a foxhole in Afghanistan, fighting on behalf of the Taliban.
It had been a long, unlikely path that brought him to this point. He had spent his adolescence in Marin County, the heart of American liberalism. Lindh had been named after John Lennon. He was called quiet and sweet, a sickly child, homeschooled for a time, then educated at a progressive California school.10
Lindh had converted to Islam as a teenager, drawn to the religion after watching Spike Lee’s film about Malcolm X. One year later he traveled to Yemen to study the Arabic language. He landed at the Al Iman University in Sanaa, headed by Abdel Majid Al Zindani, a close ally of al Qaeda and mentor to Anwar Awlaki.11
From Yemen, he went to Pakistan, where he enrolled in a madrassa with the intention of memorizing the Koran. There he was exposed to the Taliban, and in the spring of 2001, he traveled to Afghanistan to fight on their behalf against the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban militia and an enemy of al Qaeda.12
In June 2001 he trained for combat at al Qaeda’s Al Farooq camp, where he heard rumors about suicide attacks in the works against the United States. He even met Osama bin Laden, who thanked him for taking part in jihad.13
Lindh was fighting with a foreign fighter unit on behalf of the Taliban on September 11. News of the attack traveled quickly, even in this remote, rugged terrain. Word came down that al Qaeda personnel were being deployed to face the inevitable U.S. response. Lindh stayed with his unit.
In November Lindh’s unit was captured by the Northern Alliance, which was now fighting the Taliban and allied with the United States. The detainees staged an escape, during which a CIA agent was killed.
Lindh was quickly recaptured. He was hiding in a tunnel with other Taliban when it was flooded by U.S. forces. He emerged, muddy and tattered. Photos of his capture would be splashed over every newspaper and television broadcast in the world under the words “American Taliban.”14
ADNAN SHUKRIJUMAH
From Pakistan, near the border, Adnan Shukrijumah called his mother in Florida.
“Did you hear what happened?” he asked her. “They’re putting it on the Muslims.”
She told him not to come home. They were arresting all of the Muslims, she said.
“‘No, I didn’t do nothing,” he replied. “I will come, don’t worry about this.”
But he never came.15
ISMAIL ROYER
He had fought and trained as a jihadist in Bosnia and Kashmir, and now Ismail Royer was the