by Cina, Joshua A. Perper, Stephen J. ; Cina, Joshua A. Perper, Stephen J.
Physicians on the Front Lines
It is quite rare to find physicians who directly perform terrorist acts. Nevertheless, in 2007 Great Britain was greatly dismayed when it uncovered an alleged eight-member Islamic terror group consisting of four physicians, a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, two medical students, and a medical technician. Several of the suspects were related to each other and most were employed in hospitals run by Britain’s National Health Service. The Service did (and still does) rely on foreign doctors to meet staffing shortfalls. In fact, of the almost 240,000 British doctors registered with the General Medical Council, more than a third of them trained in countries other than England including many thousands from Islamic countries.
Dr. Bilal Talal Abdulla, a 27-year-old British physician, was at the center of the alleged conspiracy. He was born in Aylesbury, a pleasant city in Buckinghamshire not far from London. He spent his formative years, however, in the swarming streets of Baghdad where he was taught to intensely hate the West. He came from an ultra-conservative Muslim family that practiced Sharia law, the stringent Physicians on the Front Lines
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Islamic rules dating back to the sixth century. Abdulla’s views were so extreme that his mother did not dare to take her scarf off in his presence even when he was just a schoolboy. By the time he had graduated from medical school in 2004, his extremist views had sharpened considerably. He was incensed by the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq and the subsequent Western occupation of his country. One of his professors, Ahmed Ali, of the University of Baghdad College of Medicine said that Abdulla was one of his most vociferous students. “He didn’t care about his studies. He only cared about the resistance,” he recalled, “many times in class he interrupted to talk about the Mujahedeen. I thought he was crazy. But we couldn’t do anything in 2003 and 2004 because the resistance was controlling everything, including the university.” Abdulla graduated as a physician in Iraq in 2004 and qualified to work in Britain in August 2006. As he had extended family members in Cambridge, Abdulla completed part of his training at the city’s renowned Addenbrooke Hospital.
Abdulla was a “strictly observant Muslim” known for being knowledgeable about the Koran and his ability to read Arabic. During his time in Cambridge he was also linked to the radical Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahir. Shiraz Maher, a former member of the group, said: “He was certainly very angry about what was happening in Iraq. He supported the insurgency. He loudly cheered the deaths of British and American troops. But to say it was just all about Iraq or foreign policy is mistaken.
It feeds off a much wider ideological infrastructure.” Abdulla reportedly once berated a Muslim roommate for not being devout enough and allegedly showed him a gruesome video of a beheading, warning him that the same fate could befall him if he was not more committed to his faith. He allegedly had a number of videos of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, who recently was killed in a gunfight with American troops.
Years earlier in Jordan, the young Abdulla had met Mohammed Asha, a Saudi Arabian national, who was to become a skilled brain surgeon and his closest friend.
When recruited into the terrorist plot, Asha allegedly joined Abdulla’s group.
Abdulla had also become close to Dr. Kafeel Ahmed, an Indian physician who willingly joined the conspiracy. A few other extremists rounded out the cadre. The attack plan was developed by Dr. Abdulla, Dr. Kafeel Ahmed, and mechanical engineer Mohammed Asha in 2004–2005 at the Islamic Academy Charitable Trust in Cambridge. The three decided to carry out terror attacks out of revenge and as a
“punishment” for the British Middle East policy of “persecution of Muslims” and for Britain’s role in the war in Iraq. Abdulla and Ahmed rented a house in Houston, a pretty village in Renfrewshire, 5 minutes from the Glasgow airport which was to be one of their targets. On May 28, 2007 Abdulla traveled to Heathrow Airport to meet Ahmed, who had flown in from Mumbai (former Bombay), India. The two men drove in a rental car to Asha’s home in Newcastle-under-Lyme for further discussion and refinement of their plans. Potential targets in London included the Old Bailey, the center of town, and the West End. On June 2–3, the conspirators bought three Mercedes, a BMW and a Jeep via Auto Trader magazine from different sellers in five different cities in order to avoid raising suspicions. A few days later Abdulla and Ahmed bought gas canisters, nails, gas cans and mobile phones 138
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to use in car bombs from several different shops in Glasgow, Leeds, Preston, Dunfermline, Edinburgh and Blackburn.
On June 28, 2007, Abdulla and Ahmed drove to London in two brand new Mercedes sedans armed with car bombs consisting of gas cylinders and nails concealed under duvets and pillows. They parked the cars, one blue the other green, near the “Tiger Tiger” nightclub in the West End of London. The club was packed at the time with more than 500 people, mostly young revelers. The two men, who had stopped to fill their cars with “as much fuel as possible” on the way, opened the valves on the gas cylinders and retreated to “a safe distance.” Although this was a well thought out plan, as everyone knows, perfect planning does not always result in perfect execution (literally). At around 1:30 AM on June 29, 2007 the two men tried to detonate the car bombs by calling the mobile phones inside the cars which had been rigged up to home-made detonators. Fortunately for the intended victims, the car bombs failed to detonate and the two terrorists decided to abandon their non-cooperative vehicles. After dumping the cars the two men fled by catching separate rickshaws before rendezvousing and returning to Scotland. The car bombs were discovered smoking but intact several hours after the botched attempt. A responding fireman, Andrew Shaw, unlocked the driver’s door and put his head inside and saw a large gas canister wedged behind a seat.
“The bottom of it was facing me and the nozzle and valve would be in the middle of the car,” he testified later, “I tried to get it out but I couldn’t.” He eventually yanked it out with brute force only then discovering a mass of nails and other shrapnel in the bottom of the car. “It was one of those moments when everything falls in to place in a matter of seconds,” he stated, “I was a little bit annoyed with myself that it didn’t occur to me sooner … On the centre console there was at least one, possibly two, mobile phones and wires coming from the phone and at that point it doesn’t take long for the penny to drop.” The device was soon defused by a Metropolitan Police explosives officers and an intense investigation was immediately started.
It was clear to the conspirators that they had little time left before the police would be able to trace the cars back to them but they were deeply committed not to fail again. On June 30 Abdulla and Ahmed drove back to Glasgow and attempted to carry out a car bomb suicide attack on Glasgow Airport by ramming their Jeep Cherokee into the main doors of the terminal building. The vehicle was later described as a “mobile fire bomb” packed with ten gas containers, four oil containers and a number of glass bottles, some with wicks attached to create “Molotov cocktails.” True to form for the amateur terrorists, the Jeep got stuck in the door of the airport prior to causing any significant damage. Undeterred, Kafeel Ahmed then reversed the car and with the engine revving and tires screeching made a number of further attempts to crash through the doors. He repeatedly struck the pillars or door frame until the vehicle became inextricably trapped. These guys may have been brain surgeons but they weren’t rocket scientists.
Despite their entrapment, the men continued to shout “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) throughout the assault. They smashed the gas-filled bottles in the vehicle in an effort to detonate the mobile bomb to no avail. The car did eventually burst into The Fort Hood Massacre
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flames but did not explode. Ahmed got out of the vehicle but was immediately engulfed in flames. Police and members of the public tried to extinguish the fire but Ahmed, though himself alight, tried to obstruct them by punching and kicking at them. He was eventually handcuffed and arrested after being tear-
gassed. He died days later with burns over 90% of his head and body at the Royal Alexandra Hospital where he had worked for the prior 3 months. Abdulla survived with no serious injuries. When police later searched the home of Mohammed Asha they reportedly found a poem written in the first person amounting to a pledge of allegiance to “Osama”, presumably bin Laden.
The surviving alleged ringleaders of the conspiracy, Abdulla and Asha, were arrested and put on trial but plead not guilty. Abdulla claimed he never intended to kill or injure anyone but was simply taking part in a protest, a defense dismissed as
“ludicrous” by the prosecution. Asha, a senior house officer in the neurology department of University Hospital of North Staffordshire, was not accused of being directly involved in either attack but was indicted for supplying money to buy the cars and bomb components and providing “spiritual and ideological guidance.”
After describing in great detail the unfolding of the attacks, the prosecutor, Jonathan Laidlaw QC (Queen’s Counsel) stated at the trial that “these men were intent on committing murder on an indiscriminate and a whole scale level.” Laidlaw emphasized that the most shocking aspect of the case was that the plot was carried out by two physicians. “Apart from the shocking nature of the activity these two defendants were engaged in, the extraordinary thing about this case is that both men are doctors,” Mr. Laidlaw said. He continued, that these two well trained practitioners had “… turned their attention away from the treating of illness to the planning of murder.” On December 16, 2008, Abdulla was sentenced to at least 32 years of imprisonment. Asha was found “not guilty” on all counts.
The British experience with terrorist doctors was not an isolated event. In September 2005, Coalition forces in Iraq captured Anis ‘Abd-al-Razaq’ Ali Muhammad, also known as Dr. Sa’ad or Dr. Anis. Dr. Sa’ad was a senior member of al-Qaeda in Baghdad as well as one of the terrorist organization’s key “physicians.” He was a pharmacist by training who was also acting as a medical doctor, treating wounded terrorists in and around the Baghdad area. Coalition forces also captured Mazen Mahdi Salih Mahdi Khudayr, also known as Dr. Mazen or Dr. Layth. In addition to being a leading arms dealer for the terrorist group, this physician was also attempting to open a clinic to treat wounded terrorists in Iraq.
Additional doctors are still working for al-Qaeda.
The Fort Hood Massacre
In the early afternoon of November 5, 2009, Dr. Nidal Hasan, a 39 year-old psychiatrist and active duty major in the U.S. Army, conducted a terrorist attack on Fort Hood, Texas. Unprovoked and shouting in Arabic “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great”), he began shooting fellow soldiers in a crowded medical processing 140
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center with two concealed guns which he had smuggled on post. Before being wounded by two brave, civilian police officers, he succeeded in killing 13 people and wounding another 29 innocent souls. This terrorist attack shocked the nation; the crime was committed on U.S. soil (a major Army post no less!) by an Army officer. And a doctor.
Government officials, including President Obama and the high brass of the Army, worried about a possible backlash against American Muslims and Army personnel who practiced Islam. They advised the stunned American public not to jump to conclusions about what may have prompted the cowardly attack. Initially such caution was clearly understandable, but as additional information started to flow in about the assassin, his background and behavior, and the detailed circumstances of the massacre, the motivation of the attacks became quite clear. He was an Islamic extremist who had been in contact with al-Qaeda operatives. And the government may have been aware of this prior to the attack. Let the Senate Hearings begin!
Nidal Malik Hasan was born in Arlington, Virginia on September 8, 1970, the oldest son of a Palestinian immigrant couple who had moved to America from a small West Bank Palestinian town, near Jerusalem. Hasan graduated from Roanoke’s William Fleming High School in 1988 and, soon thereafter enlisted in the U.S. Army over his parents’ objections. The Army subsequently covered the expenses of his college education and he graduated with honors from Virginia Tech with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry.
After graduation, he entered the officer basic training program at Fort Sam Houston in Texas then went on to medical school at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences with taxpayers footing all the bills. He earned an M.D. degree then completed his internship and residency in psychiatry at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC. In 2007 he began a 2-year fellowship in preventive and disaster psychiatry in Bethesda, Maryland, while earning a master’s degree in public health. His teachers described him as being beset with personal and professional problems and requiring quite intensive help. Nevertheless in May 2009, after completing his training, he was promoted from captain to major. Two months later he was transferred to Fort Hood, the Army’s largest active duty military post in the United States, home to more than 50,000 military personnel and another 150,000 family members and other civilians. It is a city unto itself.
Unlike many physicians completing their training, Hasan was not in financial straits when he arrived at Fort Hood. His college and medical school had been paid for by the Army and, rather than earning the pittance offered to residents in civilian training programs, Hasan was paid well as an Army officer while in residency.
Though he did not owe anyone any money for his training, he owed the Army an active duty commitment as payback. It is a very fair deal. Military scholarships allow many people of limited financial means the opportunity to become physicians –
one of the authors of this work can attest to that.
Nonetheless, Hassan wanted out of the Army badly. His motivations to leave the service included his firsthand experience with war casualties as a resident at Walter Reed Hospital, the horror stories he heard from veterans with post-traumatic stress The Fort Hood Massacre
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disorder (PTSD) that he treated, his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his uneasiness about fighting his Muslim brethren, and feelings that he was being harassed by other military members for his religion. As if he wasn’t miserable enough, he was about to enter his personal version of Hell as he was scheduled to deploy to the Middle East in the near future.
Many physicians who serve in the military wish they were civilians. Countless appeals have been made to Congress, the President and God himself to spare physicians of their active duty commitments. Although some military doctors have pulled some outlandish, unethical stunts to get out of the service, none had chosen mass murder as a means of escape. There had to be something different about Nidal that led him to act the way he did. That something may well be Islamic extremism.
Nidal immersed himself in Islam after the death of his parents (his father died in 1998, his mother in 2001). His religious intensity markedly increased and he was a regular in the local mosque. According to his uncle, he spent much of his free time absorbed in the reading of Islamic texts. Hasan was particularly attentive not to miss any of the five daily required Islamic prayers and devotedly attended Mosque services as early as 5:00 in the morning, often in military uniform. When off duty he used to be dressed either in military clothing or in a white Arabic aba, a loose sleeveless outer garment. None of this is a crime and, in fact, this type of devotion to God is admirable.
Hasan sought to meet a mate who shared his religious beliefs, but met with no success. In a form that Nidal filled out in an attempt to find a match, he identified himself as a Palestinian (although he was a born American) and in his list of preferred nationalities for a possible match he listed in descending order a Palestinian Muslim woman, an Arabic one, an Indian or Pakistani lady, a European Muslim and, at the very end of the list, an American woman. This rank order may be indicative of a deep bias against Americanized Islam. Although there was no lack of interested Muslim women willing to meet and marry a doctor, Nabil failed in his quest as none met his exacting religious specifications. In parallel with h
is deep devotion to Islamic religious practices, Hasan apparently drifted toward militant Islamic beliefs and religious extremism.
A former classmate in the master’s degree program recalled that in 2008, Major Hasan gave a rather inappropriate political presentation at Walter Reed Medical Center entitled “Why the War on Terror is a War on Islam.” To say that this was contrary to the official position of the U.S. Army is an understatement. In this lecture he reportedly stated: “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.” In the lecture he also warned the audience of senior Army physicians that in order to avoid “adverse events,” the military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released as conscientious objectors instead of compelling them to fight in wars against other Muslims. A number of students complained to their professors about Nidal’s behavior, including blatantly anti-American statements and his obvious admiration of suicide bombers, but no action was ever taken against him. We now tragically know what Dr. Hasan considers an adverse event.
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In late July 2009, Major Hasan moved into a small, run-down, scantily furnished, one-bedroom apartment in a poor section of Killeen, Texas adjacent to Fort Hood. This part of Texas is great for performing maneuvers in tanks and exploding ordnance –
it is not a great vacation destination. His neighbors described him as being a friendly but rather lonely man who kept very much to himself. Major Hasan’s duties at Fort Hood included the psychiatric assessment of soldiers before deployment.