American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us by Steven Emerson

new arrivals on the target list, as legitimate a target as Israel or the secular regimes of the Muslim world. Jihad would follow wherever the warriors went.
     
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    The next day, Hudaifa suggested we take a trip to the Khyber Pass. Once again we piled into the Toyota. As it turned out, Hudaifa meant a trip to the Peshawar exit to the Khyber Gate, which is on the border of the tribal areas, only loosely associated with Pakistan. Foreigners needed a special permit to enter there.
    At the checkpoint, Hudaifa, at our behest, tried to rush through over the protests of the militia guards. Using all his broken Pashtu, he played strongman, trying to impress them with his invisible authority. The guards were polite and apologetic but firm. They were only doing their duty and might get in trouble with their superiors. Finally, realizing there was no point in having a confrontation, Khalid pulled their officer aside and explained in Urdu—the government language—that we just wanted to go a few hundred yards to take some photos. He immediately agreed.
    One of the militia accompanied us. Upon learning Hudaifa is Palestinian, he immediately said, “PLO,” to which Hudaifa replied, “No, Hamas!” Surprisingly, the militiaman didn’t seem to recognize Hamas.
    Unable to go as far as Dara, the region’s famous arms bazaar, or Landi Kotal, a smugglers’ paradise where Pakistanis go to buy electrical appliances and other goods, we settled for a small outdoor market near the Khyber Gate. Here it was all in miniature—small shops filled with smuggled clothing and TV sets plus weapons from all of the world, some duplicated by Afghan tribesmen in primitive workshops. Seeing a local manufactured Kalashnikov knock-off, Hudaifa could hardly contain himself. He rented it for a half-hour for the pleasure of firing a few rounds in the air. “I haven’t done that in more than a year,” he exulted. I took photos of this trigger-happy international revolutionary. Then Khalid almost burned himself handling the gun. Hudaifa explained that that was the difference between the local varieties and the real thing; the Russian guns generated much less heat.
    We returned to Peshawar just in time for Friday prayer services at the mosque. The sermon was over but we did catch the prayer. The majority of the faithful at this overcrowded mosque were Pakistani but there were about forty Arabs among them. Most were members of Azzam’s organization. As we left the mosque, two Sudanese passed us, then turned back and shook hands, greeting us in Arabic with special friendliness.
    Hudaifa, now accompanied by his brother Hamza, pulled us into a group of his followers and suggested we visit his uncle, Abu Adil, another important survivor of Azzam’s group. We would have lunch at his house before catching our plane back to Islamabad at five o’clock. When we arrived at the house, however, Hudaifa informed us that his uncle was renting it from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghani fundamentalist then serving as the new prime minister of Afghanistan. Khalid had denounced Hekmatyar many times in the international Islamic press. Several of his friends in Peshawar had actually been killed in retribution by Hekmatyar’s commandos. He was now horrified to realize we would be having lunch in Hekmatyar’s house. “It’s not that I’m afraid,” he confided to me. “But it would be terribly unethical.” But Khalid was trembling.
    As it turned out the food was not ready so we had an excuse for not staying long. The suburban villa was actually an oasis of ease compared with the mud huts that constituted most refugee settlements in and around Peshawar. Squatting on the floor, we asked Abu Adil how he felt about the open warfare that had erupted between Hekmatyar and President Rabbani, who had emerged as his chief rival. (Both sides were using the tanks and artillery left behind by the CIA and KGB to hammer each other.) Abu Adil responded by showing us