On July 26, a former Washington cab driver
and resident of Gwynn Oak, Maryland, was sentenced
to 15 years in federal prison for providing
material support to a terrorist group.
Ohio-born Mahmud Faruq Brent, 32, admitted
to attending training camps run by Lashkar-e-Taiba
(LeT, Army of the Pure) in 2002, a Pakistan-based
jihadist group established during the 1980s
campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
After training at various locations in
Pakistan, Brent returned to
the
United States, residing in Baltimore when he was
arrested in August 2005. Brent told Tarik Shah -
who pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide
material support to al-Qaeda - that he had been up
in the mountains training with the mujahideen. [1]
Through Shah, Brent's training is linked
to other cases of Americans who attended LeT-run
camps in Pakistan. After Shah's arrest, he agreed
to record conversations with Brent in cooperation
with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
In Shah's cellular telephone, along with
Mahmud al-Mutazzim, another name Brent used, was
the contact information for Seifullah Chapman, who
also knew Brent. Chapman, a former marine, was
part of the "Virginia Jihad Group", another
informal network convicted of terrorism-related
charges stemming from their training in Pakistan.
He was sentenced in 2005 to a 65-year prison term.
As disturbing as these cases are
individually, collectively they demonstrate an
even more troubling trend of radicalized American
Muslims - bound by Salafi ideology - receiving
training overseas and returning to the United
States for potential future operations.
The Virginia Jihad Group Based
out of Falls Church, Virginia, the informal
Virginia Jihad Group was led by Ali al-Timimi. A
US citizen, Timimi was sentenced to life in prison
for soliciting others to levy war against the
United States. Eleven people were charged in the
case, and the prosecutors successfully argued that
the network was part of the jihadist threat akin
to al-Qaeda.
Timimi was born in
Washington, his father a lawyer for the Iraqi
Embassy. At age 15, he moved with his family to
Saudi Arabia. While there, he grew interested in
Islam, inevitably the Salafi variety that is
espoused by the Saudi religious establishment.
After returning to the US, he received a PhD in
computational biology from George Mason University
in Virginia.
In addition to his academic
pursuits, Timimi was an Islamic teacher in the
northern Virginia area. Yet he was also involved
with the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA),
a group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that
receives funding from the Saudis to promote Salafi
Islam in the US, especially in the prison system.
Naturally, Timimi's scholarly ties, more
than anything, reveal his ideological
proclivities. Establishing a center for Islamic
education, Timimi contacted the well-known
Egyptian-born Salafi Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Khaliq
and translated his works into English. Abd
al-Khaliq openly promoted the Salafi Islam
prominent in the Persian Gulf region, and
privately encouraged more militant Salafism among
his followers, telling them that US troops were
legitimate targets of the jihad.
Ties
to Salafi organizations Timimi's work for
IANA - which included leading a five-person
delegation to Beijing in 1995, where he defended
female circumcision at an international women's
conference - ties him into a much broader circle
of Salafis, such as those in the Saudi Salafi
establishment.
Like many others who have
been a part of that movement, he sought more
militant teachings that condoned violence against
Americans. Yet the path to militancy often begins
with seemingly benign teachings at austere mosques
and Islamic centers. Commonly called Wahhabi, they
call themselves Salafi, but for purposes of
da'wa (proselytizing) and education, they
do not emphasize their denomination. It is simply
presented as "pure" Islam, and theirs is a
purification movement.
A former chairman
of IANA, Muhammad al-Ahmari, told the New York
Times that as of 2001, roughly half of his
organization's funding came from the Saudi
government, with the remainder primarily coming
from private individual donations from the Gulf
region. IANA received at least US$3 million from
1995 through 2002, which funded the distribution
of 530 packages containing Korans, tapes, lectures
and other instructional Salafi educational
material to prisoners in the US. Part of the
funds, however, also went to disseminating what is
among the most militant Salafi material to date in
the US.
The group's webmaster, Sami Omar
Hussayen, was a graduate student in Idaho when he
posted two fatwas from Saudi Salafi-Jihadis
Salman al-Awda and Safar al-Hawali, which incited
jihad against Americans. Sami's uncle, Saleh
Hussayen, is a high-ranking Saudi minister who
gave at least $100,000 to IANA. He was also a
director of a northern Virginia organization (the
Safa Group) with, the US government contends,
about 100 front companies operating under it to
launder money to al-Qaeda through Isle of Man and
Swiss bank accounts.
Those raids, which
took place in late 2001 and early 2002, have not
yet come to trial. More inexplicable yet, Hussayen
also came under scrutiny for a trip to the US,
where, on September 10, 2001, he stayed at the
same Marriott Residence Inn near the Washington
area's Dulles Airport as three of the Saudi
hijackers who crashed Flight 77 into the Pentagon
the following day.
Hussayen was questioned
by the FBI, but there was no evidence he actually
met or interacted with the hijackers. He was said
to feign a seizure during the interview and taken
to the hospital, where he was declared to be in
good health. He returned to Saudi Arabia and to
his post as minister of religious endowments,
overseeing the two holy mosques in Mecca and
Medina.
From ideology to
action After conducting numerous case
studies at the Combating Terrorism Center at West
Point, New York, research has demonstrated a
pattern for radicalization among Americans who
embrace jihad, whether foreign or US-born. The
cases of the Lackawanna Six, the Portland Seven,
and the Virginia Jihad Group as well as John
Walker Lindh, Adam Gadahn and others demonstrate
the need to travel overseas to receive training.
In all of the above cases, the individuals
traveled, or attempted to travel, to Pakistan or
Afghanistan. As the base of al-Qaeda's leadership
and the site of the first jihad, the area
continues to be one of the primary destinations
for mujahideen seeking training.
These
individuals and others from the US may have
arrived at LeT camps, rather than at the Farouq
camp or others that have been under Osama bin
Laden and al-Qaeda, because they enjoy far less
scrutiny. Founded shortly after 1986 as the
military wing of the Center for Da'wa and
Guidance, LeT initially helped Pakistani
mujahideen enter the Afghan jihad against the
Soviet Union. In the 1990s, they focused their
efforts on Kashmir and have two of their training
camps in Muzaffarabad, the capital of the
Pakistan-administered section of the disputed
province.
LeT also claims to have trained
thousands of combatants to join the mujahideen in
Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Chechnya, Kosovo and the Philippines. Clearly,
among American Muslims radicalized by militant
Salafi Islam, LeT camps in Pakistan became a
center for incoming mujahideen, as did bin Laden's
guesthouse in Peshawar two decades ago.
Conclusion These cases all
suggest that ideology, above anything else, is the
common identity among group members. Their belief
and commitment to the Salafi movement and its aims
to purify Islam, which is the foundation on which
bin Laden and other jihadist leaders have built
their platforms, was the common factor that bound
together these diverse individuals with various
ethnic, national and linguistic backgrounds.
Even a cursory look at the Brent case
reveals ties to members of Ali al-Timimi's
northern Virginia jihadist group and, through
them, a much larger world of official Saudi
funding and militant Salafi influence. For nearly
all the terrorism cases involving radical Islam,
the subjects began their journey with the Salafi
Islam offered by the Saudi establishment, its
leading scholars, and its prestigious institutions
in Mecca and Medina.
Although they are
clearly responsible for a portion of the
radicalized Muslims now on a course for militancy,
whether headed for a jihadist front in Iraq,
Somalia or Lebanon or in the United States or the
United Kingdom, those same individuals who have
committed themselves to the cause cannot be
effective without adequate training. Such
individuals are encouraged - by Ali al-Timimi and
Abu Musab al-Suri alike - to seek training in a
place such as Pakistan as an essential stage in
their path to truly serving the jihad.
Chris Heffelfinger is an
independent researcher affiliated with the
Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military
Academy, West Point, New York.
Note 1. See the criminal
complaint "United States of America v Mahmud Faruq
Brent, aka Mahmud al-Mutazzim", filed in the US
District Court, Southern District of New York,
August 3, 2005.
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