Jihad Joe (11 page)

The new president and his cabinet were unusually well connected in the Muslim world, keeping up strong ties in both Saudi Arabia and Iran despite the sectarian antagonism between the two countries. As civic chaos gave way to a three-way civil war among Bosnia's Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, these international connections came into play.

The Iranians chipped in with direct shipments of arms and elite intelligence operatives to assist the Muslims. The Saudis provided copious funds from the kingdom's coffers but also used their religious leverage to internationalize the conflict.

As part of the latter effort, Izetbegovic was obliged to accept an influx of mujahideen fighters. Between 1,000 and 2,000 foreign fighters took part during the course of the conflict, and they led about 3,000 Bosnians who opted to fight as mujahideen rather than as part of the regular army.
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The most prominent leaders of the Bosnian mujahideen were Egyptians associated with Omar Abdel Rahman's Islamic Group and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
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Bosnian president Izetbegovic was allied with these leaders, even consenting to be videotaped during a grip-and-grin meeting with fighters closely tied to Osama bin Laden and Omar Abdel Rahman.
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Bin Laden sent several al Qaeda members to Bosnia in an effort to exploit the conflict. The mastermind of September 11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, also traveled to Bosnia looking for recruits he could turn from military jihad to terrorism, and two of the 9/11 hijackers fought in Bosnia. However, the majority of the mujahideen were not overtly connected to al Qaeda (see
chapter 5
).
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The Saudi government had invested tremendous resources into shaping the opinions and the organizations of American Muslims. Its most overt tool for this purpose was the New York office of the Muslim World League.

As the war in Bosnia heated up, the English-language
MWL Journal
placed the conflict front and center, with dozens of articles and cover stories focusing on the Muslims' disadvantages in terms of arms and training, compared to the Serbs and the Croats.

The journal also chronicled the impotent rage of the Islamic Conference states over a UN arms embargo that covered the conflict zone. The embargo was widely perceived by Muslims and non-Muslims alike to provide a devastating advantage to Bosnian Serbs by preventing Muslims from defending themselves.

The Muslim States and communities have been patient. For months on, they have been watching with their hands on their hearts Bosnian Muslims being mercilessly butchered and their children and women being ruthlessly evicted from their homes and farms as Serbia occupies more land and gains more ground.
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Others were steering the narrative in American policy circles. Abdurrahman Alamoudi was a player who had over the years worked for several mainstream U.S. Muslim organizations before founding the American Muslim Council in 1990. He was also wired into the Muslim underground. According to an informant, he carried regular payments of $5,000 from Osama bin Laden to Omar Abdel Rahman in New York to cover the cost of Rahman's rent and expensive international phone bills.
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Articulate and media-savvy, Alamoudi was a regular presence on television and in newspapers, always ready to provide a quote or a sound bite when journalists needed someone to represent the voice of mainstream American Islam. Alamoudi was an advocate of U.S. intervention in Bosnia, staging protests and rallies for the cameras and writing op-eds for both Muslim and mainstream publications:

Candidate Clinton called for increased U.S. involvement in the Balkans designed to halt Serb aggression and violations of human rights. President
Clinton, however, has dithered and drifted, abdicating his responsibilities as leader of the free world and ignoring the considerable powers of his office.
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These lobbying efforts were helped by a combination of pragmatism and idealism on the part of the mainstream media. Pragmatically, it was extremely unsafe to report firsthand on the unfolding war, so journalists frequently relied on official pronouncements from Bosnian Muslim officials as to what exactly was going on. Idealism was an even more powerful force—CNN's Christiane Amanpour flatly stated that attempts to report on the conflict from a neutral perspective would have made reporters “complicit in genocide.”
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Few other reporters would go that far in public, but most Western coverage clearly favored the Muslim side in the war. And in many important respects, the narrative was correct—the Muslims were, by and large, the victims of Serbian aggression, and they endured horrifying war crimes in Bosnia. Nevertheless, most reporting tended to neglect important complexities, such as atrocities and war crimes committed by Bosnian Muslim factions, including the mujahideen, about whom little was known.

On the policy side, things were no better. Top administration officials were either oblivious to the mujahideen or dismissive of their importance. Although Clinton could not be moved to overturn or violate the UN embargo directly, his administration quietly opted to turn a blind eye toward illegal arms shipments to the Bosnian government from Muslim countries, including Iran and Turkey.
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As the crisis dragged on, Alamoudi rallied a diverse, media-friendly collection of religious leaders to join his “American Task Force on Bosnia.” Despite his support for radicals such as the blind sheikh, Alamoudi won strong backing from American Jews, in part thanks to frequent comparisons between the actions of Bosnian Serbs and the Holocaust:

Our children and their children will not forgive this generation, will not forgive us, all of mankind, for allowing this genocide—and if I may respectfully call it the second Holocaust of this century. The mass rape, the destruction that went on for more than a year must not be forgiven. We have allowed the destruction not only of life, of property, but of cherished principles of international law, the bedrock of the United Nations itself.
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The comparison was profoundly ironic, given that Izetbegovic reportedly collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
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In American mosques, Friday
khutbas
(sermons) increasingly concerned the slaughter of Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, and speakers recounted lurid reports of atrocities—especially allegations about the rape of Muslim women, a frequent theme in jihadist propaganda.

Under the influence of the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, the Al Kifah operations in Brooklyn and Boston had also started to focus heavily on Bosnia. Al Kifah's newsletter, which was personally supervised by Rahman, exhorted readers to provide both “money and men,” ruling that jihad in Bosnia was obligatory for all Muslims:

We help the mujahideen in Bosnia so the [infidels] won't spread in the region. [ … ] We help the mujahideen in Bosnia just to protect this
Ummah
[the community of Muslims] and to return the torturing of the enemy after the backing off of many of the Muslim leaders and their begging the United States to lift the weapon embargo.
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Rahman himself echoed these sentiments in extravagant speeches around the New York area.

Where's virtue? Where is loyalty which remained with the Muslims? … They find the women as their honors were violated, and the Bosnian women ask in some conferences what do we do with our pregnancies what do we do? And what should we do? They ask while they are crying…. Have the eyes cried? Have the tears shed? Have the hearts been broken? For what is happening to our sisters there? While their honors are violated and they became pregnant out of wedlock, no one lifts a finger.
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Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, a bespectacled Sudanese immigrant who worked as Omar Abdel Rahman's translator in New York, echoed his spiritual leader's outrage in speeches around New York.

We cannot announce and pronounce [Koranic verses about] Jihad, even when we come to America here, because we are still afraid that the CIA or
the FBI or the authorities of countries are going to be behind us. Therefore, we still have to stay in our shells, and not come out and confront the idea or confront the disease, confront the humiliation, confront the oppression, and confront the [infidels] who has taken our own sisters, our brothers, as slaves in Bosnia.
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Siddig should have taken the threat of FBI surveillance more seriously, as will become clear.

Thanks to these public sympathies and his excellent social network, Bilal Philips was making rapid strides in his program to recruit U.S. soldiers who could help train Bosnia's besieged fighters in their efforts against the Serbs. The first step was to secure financing and support for the plan, so Philips flew to Switzerland to meet with a representative of the Bosnian government.

Hasan Cengic was an imam, an official in the Bosnian army, and a notorious gunrunner. Cengic and Izetbegovic had served time in prison together under Tito for their Islamic activism. A trusted confidant, Cengic had been appointed to help manage the torrent of donations flowing to Bosnia's Muslims from around the world, especially from Saudi Arabia.
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Izetbegovic and Cengic funneled the donations through a fake charity called the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), which was for all meaningful purposes a branch of the Bosnian government. The organization's titular head was a Sudanese national named Fatih El Hassanein, whom one al Qaeda informant called “Osama bin Laden's man in Bosnia.” Cengic ran the day-to-day operations, deciding how the money would be spent.
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“Cengic was a very interesting guy that we followed for a long time, but we really couldn't put a nail into him,” recalled Mike Scheuer, who led the CIA's Sunni extremist analysis team during the Bosnian war. “But he was clearly able to supply an awful lot of guns into Bosnia. He was a very important gunrunner.”

As the Saudis aimed their substantial financial resources at Bosnia, Izetbegovic charged Cengic with receiving the money through TWRA and transforming it into weapons, in defiance of the UN embargo. During the course of the war, TWRA would take in at least $300 million in funds, raised mostly by Saudi citizens and royals.

Although TWRA does appear to have carried out some actual charity work, it spent far more of its cash on illicit activities. It was, at its core, a criminal organization. TWRA employees—including some of Bosnia's most notorious and violent mobsters—dealt drugs and committed murder, in addition to purchasing weapons and ammunition for the Bosnian army. Much of the money collected had simply disappeared by the time the war ended.
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The charity supported Islamic extremism with whatever was left over after lining the pockets of its principals. Omar Abdel Rahman was closely tied to TWRA, which distributed his sermons on tape in Europe. In at least one instance, Rahman appears to have sent a New York–based operative to Bosnia through TWRA's office in Austria (the operative was turned away at the border). Later, investigators would be told by an informant that TWRA was a front for Osama bin Laden. There appears to be some truth in this claim, although the full scope of the linkage is unclear.
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Cengic agreed to provide Philips with funds to recruit military veterans who would come to Bosnia in what would end up being a largely futile effort to give the mujahideen a dose of U.S. military professionalism. TWRA funds would be used to pay for the vets' travel and expenses. Although the mission was said to be strictly for training, Cengic also agreed to compensate the families back home should any of the volunteers be killed.
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After the meeting, Philips started to canvass his military friends back in the United States. Two proved exceptionally helpful. One was Tahir, the Vietnam vet who had helped convert U.S. soldiers back in Riyadh. His connection to that program meant he had strong ties to new Muslim converts with military experience who could be swayed to help the Bosnians. Now living in the New York area, Tahir quickly took charge of the initial recruitment program and helped prepare the Muslim trainers with equipment such as rifle scopes and night-vision goggles.
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The second contact was an African American convert to Islam named Archie Barnes, who had changed his name to Qaseem Ali Uqdah. A marine since 1975 and a Muslim since his teenage years, Uqdah held the rank of gunnery sergeant when he retired around 1991 and became executive director of Muslim Military Members (MMM), an organization that arranged access to literature and places of worship for Muslim soldiers around the United States.
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Philips had been involved in MMM from its inception.

Uqdah maintained a roster of the names of U.S. servicemen who had converted to Islam during the Gulf War. His younger brother was one of them. The former marine helped Philips identify Muslim soldiers who were close to finishing their obligation to the U.S. armed forces—newly minted veterans who would form the core of the Bosnia training brigade.
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According to Philips, about a dozen soldiers were recruited through the end of 1992, including several Special Forces veterans. Tahir personally escorted the vets to Bosnia in two groups of five or six people at a time. The American trainers did not go unnoticed in Bosnia, although the secret of how they got there was known to only a few.
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The Americans set up shop outside of Tuzla, the third largest city in Bosnia and home to a retired airfield used during the communist era to train fighter pilots, one of the few usable airstrips remaining in the country. Most of the trainers apparently left after instructing a small group of mujahideen, but some stayed to fight.
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In the fall of 1992, Philips and Tahir were trying to gather a third group of American military veterans to make the journey, but Tahir had to drop out. His reasons are unknown, but the next stop on his journey is not. He showed up on the doorstep of Osama bin Laden.