Jihad Joe

by J. M. Berger

  “When advice is needed, I give it. When it’s not, I’m a sniper,” Ali told the Washington Post in 1982. During the same interview, he described his wish to see death in battle:

  I’m quite sure that sooner or later I’m going to get killed. Where the end is only my God knows. When the Iranians reach [Jerusalem], I ask my God to give me martyrdom. Once Palestine is free, I have no desire to stay in this life any longer.27

  Ali considered himself a “professional soldier of Islam” who was trying to achieve martyrdom, but he was too good at the former to accomplish the latter. In American Jihadist, he remembered:

  I started talking to the angel of death. And I told him, straight up, look, you need to get inside of me. You know, and take all these human characteristics away from me … I actually stopped counting in 1981. I stopped counting the number of the persons I had killed. I had stopped at that time at 173. There are countless numbers that I don’t even know, to this day.

  “He was special. He had high training skills,” said Hamzah akl Hamieh, a military leader of the Amal Militia at the time. “He put makeup on his face for an undercover operation. All of this attracted the guys. He was that violent phenomena for them. And he trained a lot of them.”28

  In 1983, Ali was spotted outside a U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, not long before the installation was bombed by militants believed to be connected to Hezbollah. At 6′3″ and 250 pounds, with a shaved head and decked out in full combat gear, he was hard to miss. Yet he was never charged or directly accused in the attack. Soon afterward, dismayed by the growing presence of terrorist tactics in Lebanon’s Shi’ite factions, Ali broke with the groups, which resulted in an assassination attempt that he barely survived.

  He returned to the United States but found little satisfaction in ordinary life. In the mid-1990s, he was taken by media reports about atrocities against Muslims in Bosnia.

  I heard a television interview with [Karadzic], a Bosnian Serb political official. And the thing was that he made a statement that during the time of war here that he was doing Europe a favor by ridding Europe of the Islamic presence. As a result of that, I began to think, OK, here I am sitting in Washington, D.C., and this man is making that statement. And I said, well, I’m going to be fortunate that I can be sitting here. And had I been sitting in Bosnia at this moment probably more likely I would be one amongst many who would suffer these various types of problems in Islam.29

  In Bosnia, he joined the 7th Muslim Corps, a unit of mujahideen, bringing a host of military hardware and his long experience as a soldier to the conflict. After the war, he married a Bosnian woman who had served in the regular Bosnian army.

  When asked to explain his motives for taking part in jihadist causes, Ali sounded like many other jihadists of the 1980s and 1990s. He said he was motivated by a desire to help other Muslims who were being oppressed and victimized.

  In Islam, there’s a saying. We are like one body. And when one part of the body hurts, the rest of the body’s going to feel the pain. So that’s what happened to me. I felt the pain. [ … ]

  The highest level of faith is when you see a wrong being committed, that you stop it with your presence, with your hands. The second level is to speak out against it with your words. The lowest degree of faith is to hate it in your heart and continue about your way. [ … ]

  I kill only when it’s necessary. And the rest of the world is standing by, you know, giving lip service and no action, and I see that it is necessary for me to commit myself to such a time and a place, I’ll go and help those people, whoever they may be.30

  Ali’s story was, in many ways, atypical. Relatively few Americans came to jihad through Shi’a Islam. Ali had joined the fight long before most Americans and even before many Arabs. On the face of it, his justifications were compelling. On Bosnia, for instance, he insisted,

  I’m not a terrorist, I’m not an aggressor, I’m not a war junkie. I didn’t think I was coming here like the savior of the world. I just wanted to be part of what was taking place here, and to show that they were not alone. And for them to know that they weren’t forgotten.31

  In other comments, however, it seemed as if his inner demons may ultimately have driven him more than ideology. Ali’s account of a sniper attack in Lebanon was chilling:

  I saw this guy coming down the road. And first I sighted in on him. And I’m looking at him, and I can see on his epaulet that he’s an officer. So then I followed this guy, and then suddenly I just started think, I said, wow, this guy looks like he’s a family man. And I’m sure he has a mother and a father. Wife and children. And then I said, they’re gonna miss him. And I just said, “fuck it,” and I put that lead on him, and pow, that was it. I didn’t feel anything except the recoil from my rifle.32

  Watching Ali speak in American Jihadist, one gets the impression that he sees himself fundamentally as a killer and that Islam provided a framework for him to indulge that impulse in a way that he viewed as morally acceptable. “I felt like I was part of death,” he said at one point. “It was a serious drug. It was a serious ‘get high’ situation.”

  Despite his jihadist path, Ali did not adopt the typical life of a strict Islamic fundamentalist. He is a Muslim in the Bosnian mold: he smokes, curses, and dresses like an American. Unlike Mohammed Zaki, who longed for the maidens of paradise as he lay dying, Ali speaks of leaving this life in weary, nihilistic terms. During the assassination attempt in Lebanon, he was clinically dead at the hospital before medical workers revived him.

  That was like a really beautiful, peaceful moment. Being between this life and that life, and then you’re seeing into eternity, and that was like one of the most peaceful moments I have ever seen. There, all the madness, all the insanity of what I had seen over the years and even before [going to Lebanon], I knew that I was going to be free from this life. But that wasn’t the plan of the creator…. As far as death, or anything is concerned, I welcome that. Because this life is shit. To me. Maybe not to everybody else, but to me it is.33

  For many reasons Isa Ali was an exceptional case, but his stated justifications fell in line with what other American jihadists were feeling. Whether he was driven by his own experience and a personal rage, in jihad he found a hook on which to hang his darker impulses, perhaps even to redeem them. Ali now lives in Bosnia with his family and travels freely back to the land of his birth. American authorities have no apparent interest in prosecuting him.

  As with Afghanistan in the 1980s, the plight of Bosnian Muslims had received a sympathetic hearing from the U.S. media and political establishment. This opened up the pool of recruits to a much wider range of American Muslims, some of whom did not share the rabid anti-Americanism of ideologues such as Omar Abdel Rahman. They saw no conflict between being an American and helping Bosnian Muslims.

  One of these relatively mainstream combatants was a young Caucasian convert named Ismail Royer. Born Randy Royer, his American experience couldn’t have been more different than that of Isa Ali’s, yet Royer too found his way to Bosnia as a combatant and eventually as a resident.

  Royer grew up in a stable, loving family. His father was a photographer, his mother a former Roman Catholic nun turned public school teacher. They lived in St. Louis, where, encouraged by his parents, young Randy grew up with a keen sense of compassion and social awareness. He and his father sometimes volunteered together in homeless shelters.34

  Randy was a voracious reader whose intense ability to focus seemed to evaporate when it came to schoolwork. “He was very intelligent, very smart,” his father Ray recalled. “And unfortunately, he thought he knew more than the teachers. Which is true, he did.”35

  By the time Randy reached college, he had straightened up, majoring in political science and producing a string of As. He especially enjoyed philosophy and music.

  After reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Royer became interested in Islam. He was moved in part by Islam’s commitment to social justice and its diversity, which stood in stark
contrast to rising racial tensions in the United States at the time. A deciding moment came when he visited a mosque shortly after race riots in Los Angeles (provoked by the beating of Rodney King) grabbed headlines.

  It was me and this guy, who was white, and a guy who was black. And then an Arab and a Pakistani guy came, and we were all there talking. And I was like, “This is amazing. We’re all talking. There are no barriers between us.” It was really amazing to me how that could be. I just felt something.36

  Royer began to explore the religion with Muslim friends. He remembered one conversation in a park, where a bird was singing, that marked a turning point in his acceptance of Islam.

  I said, “Wow, that’s a very beautiful bird.” And he said, “In Islam, that bird is Muslim, because the bird follows God’s laws and can do nothing but follow God’s laws. And if you see how beautiful and peaceful that bird is, that’s the kind of peace that human beings can achieve if they follow God’s laws.”37

  At age nineteen he converted, taking the name Ismail, just as the war in Bosnia was beginning. Royer’s local mosque was helping resettle refugees from the war, and Ismail volunteered to help. His work with the refugees led him to start following the news coverage. “I was struck by footage of emaciated civilians in Serbian concentration camps and news of rape camps and massacres,” Royer recalled.38

  Information flowing in from both mainstream media reports and Muslim sources also touched on familiar themes that had led many others before him to the fields of jihad—atrocities against Muslims in general and Muslim women in particular.

  I just kept seeing on the news about women in rape camps and pregnant women having their children carved out of their womb and it was really disturbing to me, and I saw that no one was really helping them anywhere in the world.39

  Stirred to action, he decided he had to act. He told his father he was going to Bosnia.

  “I said, ‘There’s a war going on, Randy. Don’t you understand there’s a war going on?’And at that point, I thought I better sit down, and relax a bit,” his father recalled in a 2008 interview. “And, I figured well, he’s old enough to determine what he wanted to do in life.”40

  Although Royer told his father he was going to work with a relief organization, he instead signed up with a unit of mujahideen and spent six weeks in combat. “I engaged in firefights to help repel Serbian forces from villages full of innocent women and children whom they sought to ethnically cleanse,” Royer wrote later.41

  After his stint with the mujahideen, he worked in Sarajevo for a while, where he witnessed an infamous marketplace massacre in February 1994 that was one of the worst atrocities in the war up to that point.42 It reinforced his commitment to the cause. Royer traveled back and forth to Bosnia several times during and immediately after the war. Like Isa Ali, he eventually married a Bosnian woman before moving back to the United States in the late 1990s.

  If Isa Ali is a nihilist, Ismail Royer is a idealist. Yet both cite the same general principles in support of jihadist intervention. In 2002 Royer wrote,

  The only difference between a “political” event and a “personal” event is the difference in scale and geographic proximity to the event. Thus I never understood why if my neighbor or relative is raped, God forbid, it’s considered a “personal” event, but if many women are raped in Bosnia or Indonesia in the course of a war, it’s a “political” event, and therefore I should somehow not be as concerned. Only someone lacking in humanity would make a distinction between two equivalent events that differ only in location.43

  Yet Royer also presents a far more sanitized version of the jihadist experience. Consider his account of his time with the mujahideen, which depicts the fighters as noble warriors following a strict code of conduct:

  I never witnessed or heard tell of any deliberate killings of civilians by my unit or anyone else in the Bosnian army. In fact, the parent brigade of my unit issued a field manual laying down the rules and ethics of warfare in Islam as provided for in the Koran and words of the Prophet: no harming civilians or clergymen, no targeting of houses of worship, no harming animals or even cutting down trees and crops.

  Those I encountered seemed to understand that the only legitimate reason for warfare in Islam is self-defense or removal of oppression. [ … ] Unlike extremists, at no time was I ever motivated by a desire to impose my religion on others, to “kill the infidel,” or to battle America or “the West,” nor did I hear any such sentiments from my compatriots or superiors in Bosnia.

  Royer’s account of the Bosnian mujahideen stands in stark contrast to the evidence, including videos and photos produced by the mujahideen themselves during the war. One video shows mujahideen fighters playing soccer with the decapitated head of an executed captive. Photographs show Bosnian members of the mujahideen standing with their boots on a bucket full of decapitated heads, among which was at least one noncombatant. Civilians were also tortured and killed for nonmilitary offenses, such as a Serb who was tortured to death in public for the transgression of marrying a Muslim woman. Royer may not have personally witnessed these events, but it’s hard to believe he was totally oblivious to them.44

  There is also the question of al Qaeda’s role in Bosnia. Royer denied in a letter to the author and in other forums that al Qaeda played any role in the war or with the mujahideen—at least, as far as his direct knowledge.

  The evidence again stands in contrast. U.S. intelligence and phone calls intercepted by the Bosnian government show communication between the Bosnian mujahideen and al Qaeda commanders, and several individual mujahideen were connected to al Qaeda.45 In addition, Osama bin Laden sent resources and financially interacted with the Bosnian mujahideen.46

  Royer has a tendency to dismiss views that conflict with his as uninformed, superficial, dishonest, or a combination of all three. His denials may simply be self-serving, but it is also possible that he did not have direct contact with anyone he knew to be part of al Qaeda.47

  AL QAEDA IN BOSNIA

  The connections between the Bosnian mujahideen and al Qaeda were not widely known at the foot-soldier level, even to insiders with both groups. One former fighter, who was involved with both al Qaeda and the Bosnian mujahideen at different times, told me that “not a single member of al Qaeda at that time joined the fight,” although he said that many Bosnian volunteers became affiliated with al Qaeda after the war.48

  Nevertheless, in addition to Tahir, the American al Qaeda member described in Chapter 4, the record shows that a few active members of al Qaeda did take part in the war.

  One of them was Christopher Paul, an African American who converted to Islam, changing his name to “Abdul Malek Kenyatta.” Around the end of 1990, Kenyatta traveled to Pakistan seeking to sign up for jihad. He ended up in an al Qaeda guesthouse in Peshawar. He met several members of al Qaeda and eventually attended a training camp in Afghanistan, where he learned to use assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and mastered other military techniques. A few months later, he was selected for advanced training in military tactics and the construction of improvised explosives.

  As al Qaeda began the process of moving to Sudan in the early 1990s, Kenyatta bristled at the prospect that his time in combat might be coming to an end. After a brief return to the United States, where he trained aspiring Ohio jihadists in martial arts, he flew to Europe and made his way into Bosnia, where he took part in combat. After Bosnia, he continued to work for al Qaeda, training would-be terrorists in Ohio and Germany in bomb making, with the aim of killing Americans at home and abroad. That eventually formed the basis for his prosecution in 2008, which ended with a guilty plea and a twenty-year prison sentence.49

  Al Qaeda also had financial ties to the war in Bosnia, many of which ran through the United States and involved American citizens. One of the most significant charities providing support to the Bosnian mujahideen was the Benevolence International Foundation.

  Spawned from a Pakistan-based organization active at the end
of the Soviet jihad, a substantial part of the Benevolence operation was moved to the United States in the early 1990s by Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian who had fought alongside Osama bin Laden and later oversaw logistics for some of al Qaeda’s early camps in Afghanistan. Arnaout was joined there by Loay Bayazid, the Kansas City mujahid who had been present at the founding of al Qaeda.50

  Benevolence had operations in major conflict zones around the world, with a strong focus on Bosnia and Chechnya. Like many charitable organizations linked to terrorism, it really did perform charity work, but a substantial sum of money was reserved for the mujahideen. Benevolence bought uniforms and equipment for fighters in both Bosnia and Chechnya and produced propaganda videos on their behalf.

  More important, the charity made travel possible for jihadists, helping at least nine people move from Afghanistan to Bosnia, including senior al Qaeda leaders. Sometimes Benevolence’s leadership knew the people and their purpose in traveling, but it wasn’t always formal. If someone was known to the charity or came with an introduction, this person would get help, no questions asked, usually in the form of papers stating that the traveler worked for Benevolence, which could then be used to obtain a work visa at the desired destination.51

  Overseas, Benevolence served as an intelligence hub for al Qaeda, in addition to its other functions. The Benevolence office in Sarajevo archived and digitized a massive collection of al Qaeda documents, including records of the organization’s founding and personnel. It also created detailed reports on the activities of the mujahideen and their relationships with one another and with suspected American intelligence agents.52