American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us by Steven Emerson Page A

photographs in which Hekmatyar, Rabbani, and Azzam stood with their arms locked in Islamic brotherhood. “We knew them only as mujahideen,” he said. “Now they are statesmen.”
    Hudaifa, Abu Adil, and the immediate family were all jovial and lighthearted, in contrast to some of the other fundamentalists we met earlier that day at another mujahid home in Peshawar. They were dour and tense, exuding unrelenting distrust and hostility. They even slept with their Kalashnikovs. We sensed how rudderless the group had become without Azzam. Whenever we brought up the name of another potential leader with Hudaifa, he immediately dismissed him. The others always agreed. Only two names struck a positive chord: Osama bin Laden and Wa’il Jalaidan. Bin Laden was in Khartoum at the time. Jalaidan, another Saudi, was nearby in Islamabad. He had been put in charge of the Pakistan office of the Muslim World League, a worldwide Islamist organization richly funded by the Saudis. When we expressed interest in Jalaidan, Hudaifa promised a meeting the next day, before our plane left for Syria. But in the end he was unable to arrange it.
    Jalaidan has since been described by U.S. authorities as “one of the founders of al Qaeda along with Osama bin Laden” and as “the logistics chief of Bin Laden’s organization.” He remains essential to the organization. 1 When the American-led coalition attacked al Qaeda in 2001, graffiti in Pakistan on Islamic schools proclaimed, “Kill one Osama, 100 other Osamas will take his place.” Jalaidan would be a possible candidate. Ironically, prior to his indoctrination into the jihad leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Jalaidan lived and worked at the Islamic Center of Tucson. Eight years ago in Islamabad, we barely missed meeting him.
     
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    Saturday morning just before we flew out, Khalid visited the Bosnian embassy to call on the parents of Bosnian prime minister Haris Silajdzic, with whom he had lived in Sarajevo in the 1950s. It was an emotional reunion. The old man, Hafiz Kamil Silajdzic, was once the imam of Bosnia’s biggest mosque. The elder Silajdzic represented Islam at its best. This venerable tradition has no more relevance to Islamic fundamentalism than the ranting of Hitler had to the traditions of Western civilization. Both are totalitarian corruptions of a proud heritage. To the militant fundamentalists, Islam’s long history of learning and community is as alien and as irrelevant as American TV.

Chapter Five
     

Chapter Six
     

Chapter Seven
     

Osama bin Laden, Sheikh
Abdullah Azzam, and
the Birth of al Qaeda
     
     
    E VERYONE KNOWS THE STORY of Osama bin Laden—how he went to Afghanistan to fight the Russians and ended up waging jihad against the entire Western world. But how many know of his predecessor Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian refugee who first preached worldwide jihad and laid the groundwork for bin Laden’s rise to power? In fact it was Azzam’s spellbinding oratory that inspired the 24-year-old Osama bin Laden to leave the comfort of his Saudi Arabian family empire in 1985 and move to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. Moreover, Azzam’s Alkhifa network—originally a fund-raiser for the Afghan mujahideen—eventually metamorphosed into bin Laden’s al Qaeda (“The Base”), which is now terrorizing the world.
    Most important is how both Azzam and bin Laden were able to use Islamic organizations in the United States to build their networks. It was the records of Azzam’s Alkhifa organization that we spirited out of the Brooklyn basement when they had been moved there from the Al-Farook Mosque after the first World Trade Center bombing. It was in the United States that Azzam did much of his early fund-raising. It is through Islamic networks in the U.S. that bin Laden has shopped for much of the high-tech gear that runs his worldwide network. Indeed, after Hamas, al Qaeda has achieved a greater penetration on American soil than any