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CHAPTER SIX

DEATH TO AMERICA

Early 2000–Spring 2002

After negotiation with the Danish authorities, I returned home to serve my delayed sentence in early 2000. I had only one condition: I would not return to a prison where any Bandidos were held. The prison service ignored the agreement and I thought I would have to fight for my life – but discovered that other Muslims in the prison in Nyborg had formed a gang for mutual protection.

I served my penance, spending the time weightlifting and running, but it was a time of frustration. I was desperate to return to Yemen but I had to make money. And to make money I had to gain some sort of qualification. With the help of counsellors who worked with released prisoners, I signed up for business studies at a college in Odense (which included a monthly stipend for living expenses from the Danish state) and began worshipping at the Wakf mosque. It was a lively place full of Somalis, Palestinians and Syrians that would degenerate into violence over theological disputes. During one Friday prayers I grabbed the microphone from a preacher whom I thought misguided – he had the temerity to wear his trousers below the ankles, a practice scorned by Salafis.

‘Don’t listen to him. He’s an innovator who belongs to one of the seventy-two sects destined for hellfire!’ I yelled.

Odense is the home-town of Hans Christian Andersen, and its old streets and quaint gabled houses would fit neatly into a children’s story. It is a model of Danish progressiveness – bicycle paths, pedestrianized streets, green spaces. But its outskirts are less evocative. Many Muslims – first- and second-generation immigrants – had moved into its less salubrious social housing in the suburb of Vollsmose, and as in London there was a drumbeat of jihadism.

After I was released from prison I learned that Sheikh Muqbil, my mentor at Dammaj, had issued a fatwa calling for Holy War against Christians and Jews in the Moluccan Islands of Indonesia, where sectarian fighting was raging. He urged non-Indonesian Muslims to help establish Islamic law there.

The leader of Laskar Jihad, the al-Qaeda-affiliated group at the centre of the fighting, was Ja’far Umar Thalib. He had been a fellow student at Dammaj. And some of my friends there – including the former American soldier Rashid Barbi – had gone to Indonesia to join the battle.6

I made a trip over to England with a Pakistani friend, Shiraz Tariq7 – to raise money in mosques for the mujahideen in the Moluccas. Once again I was angered by the feeble response of many Salafist imams to this gross assault on our faith.

To me, jihad was still a defensive duty rather than a right to wage offensive warfare against disbelievers. I took the words of the Koran as my guide: ‘Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress, for Allah loves not the transgressor. Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loves not aggressors.’

These words brought an obligation to fight or support the fight – whether in the Balkans, Chechnya or the Moluccan Islands of Indonesia. But jihad without such a foundation was illegitimate.

The boundaries between defensive and offensive jihad were not always clear and would blur further as al-Qaeda began its campaign of global jihad. They were at the heart of animated debates I had with friends in Odense such as Mohammad Zaher, a Syrian-Palestinian immigrant who had a strong Middle Eastern nose, a close-cropped beard and deep-set, solemn eyes.

Zaher like me was unemployed and with time on our hands we often went fishing together. He would bombard me with questions about Dammaj and Sheikh Muqbil. I explained the fatwas he and other imams had issued making jihad lawful in Indonesia, but also stressed that random acts to ‘terrorize the disbelievers’ were not allowed. In evidence I summoned the words of an eminent Saudi cleric who had said that the obligation of jihad ‘must be fulfilled by Muslims at different levels in accordance with their different abilities. Some must help with their bodies, others with their property and others with their minds.’

Zaher seemed ordinary, sympathetic to the idea of jihad but not as extreme as some I knew. Yet again I would be dumbfounded when the ordinary did the extraordinary. In September 2006 he would be arrested for what Danish authorities at the time called the ‘most serious’ plot ever discovered in the country.

I had not forsaken my goal of returning to the Muslim world but as usual was short of cash, trying to complete my studies on a modest stipend. My talents as an enforcer would once more come to the rescue.

Odense had a substantial and volatile Somali community. One afternoon I received a call from a Somali friend asking me to intervene at a local wedding where a row had broken out.

When I reached the venue, I saw what was becoming an all too familiar dispute playing out. Against the wishes of the presiding imam, the sexes were mixing and music was blaring from speakers. Such Western practices were anathema to Salafis.

The argument escalated as I intervened and a wedding guest lunged at the imam with a knife. Thankfully, reflexes honed in the clubs of Korsør did not desert me and I knocked the knife out of his hand. What I did not see was his accomplice, who struck me on the back of the head with a bottle. As blood streamed down my neck, the man was dragged away.

Anxious that the disturbance not be reported to the police, community leaders assured me that they would apply Sharia law to my assailant. I was given the options of breaking a bottle over his head, forgiving him or taking blood money of nearly $3,000. I wasn’t inclined to forgive him and did not want to return to prison for breaking a bottle over someone’s head. But the blood money meant that suddenly I could travel again.

I had recently taken to browsing Muslim ‘matrimonial’ sites on the internet, hopeful of finding a suitably religious but also suitably attractive partner. They would never be referred to as dating sites and were rather more prim than their American counterparts. The women who had posted their details had little to say of their personal likes and dislikes, more often promising to be good, obedient and faithful wives. Every one of them wore the hijab and a meek expression. Even so, one living in the Moroccan capital had attracted my attention. Karima spoke English, was well-educated and religiously observant, and had approached me with a simple online question: would I like to marry her?8

Flush with cash thanks to a broken bottle, with a clean Danish passport and my debt to society paid in full, I was soon airborne.

I was met by her brother in Rabat – the vetting committee. Even before I met Karima I went to a couple of the more radical mosques in Salat, a poorer neighbourhood of Rabat. Here too Salafism was thriving: the fact that I had been to Yemen and knew Sheikh Muqbil opened doors. It also impressed Karima’s family.

Karima was petite with olive skin, almond eyes and a demure manner that complemented her deep faith. I found her both attractive and intelligent. She was already thinking about emigrating to Yemen or Afghanistan with me to seek a purer existence. Within days we were married at her family’s house. It may seem ridiculous that two people could marry days after meeting each other, but it was the way dictated by our faith. There was no question of dating, of discreet dinners to explore each other’s thoughts and emotions. Allah would take care of everything.

And the Danish state would take care of relocating me to Yemen. Youth education grants were just one aspect of its overarching social welfare system. I applied to learn Arabic at the CALES language institute in Sana’a and received a grant – no questions asked. Karima remained in Morocco while I set about preparing for our new life in Yemen.

In April 2001 I flew into Sana’a again. It felt strangely like I belonged there. What had been an assault on the senses on my first visit was now pleasantly familiar. The chaos of the streets was welcoming rather than overwhelming; I was excited to catch up with my acquaintances there and spend long evenings on roof terraces talking about faith and the world. And I felt a real affinity for this poor corner of the Arabian Peninsula. This was where the struggle for the soul of my religion was being waged.

The neighbourhood of Sana’a where I settled seemed much more spontaneous than the bland, well-ordered suburbs of Denmark. I smiled to see the battered carts of fruit and vegetables being hauled through the streets by thin young men, the tiny kiosks selling gum and cigarettes, the old men gathered on corners with their prayer beads.

Yemen’s bureaucracy meant it would be several months before Karima could join me in Sana’a. That same bureaucracy was also having trouble keeping up with my former Salafist comrades, who had become even more active and radical in my absence. And it was by now beyond doubt that al-Qaeda saw Yemen as a ‘space’ in which to attack Western interests. A few months before my return, terrorists aboard a skiff had approached the visiting USS Cole in Aden harbour. They saluted the sailors on board before detonating hundreds of pounds of C4 explosives against the Cole’s hull. Seventeen US sailors lost their lives and the ship nearly sank.

Young Abdul, a skinny teenager when I had left, was now a confident young man with a growing jihadist network and much-improved English. He often visited the house I had rented and we fell back into long conversations about religion. He urged me not to read books by Salafis who did not support jihad and we devoured websites that reported on the conflicts in Indonesia and Chechnya.

One evening I went to visit him at his mother’s home – a plain breeze-block house on an unpaved street in Sana’a. Emaciated cats wandered among the piles of garbage as children played football or ran with hoops. Hussein al-Masri, the Egyptian jihadi who had previously offered to get me to bin Laden’s camps, was there when I arrived.

As we sat on the floor, drinking tea, it became clear Abdul had been busy while I’d been in London. He told me in hushed tones but with unmistakable pride that he had travelled to Afghanistan, spent time in al-Qaeda’s camps and even – he claimed – met Osama bin Laden.

‘He is doing Allah’s work,’ Abdul said. ‘The attack on the American warship and on the embassies is just the beginning,’ he continued, referring to al-Qaeda’s bombing of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998. ‘There are good Muslims from all over the world who are now in Kandahar and Jalalabad.’ He and al-Masri told me they could get me to Afghanistan to help build the promised land. I sometimes wondered whether Abdul was embellishing his exploits and encounters, but he certainly displayed first-hand knowledge of Afghanistan and none of the al-Qaeda members I subsequently met contradicted his account.

I was tempted to go myself. My religious views were certainly no longer an obstacle. Once back in Yemen, encouraged by Abdul, I had devoured books by pro-jihadist Islamic scholars – even translating some into Danish. I had forsaken my Salafi purism to view preparation for jihad as a necessity.

It was not religious fervour alone that tempted me to head to Afghanistan. One of my circle in London – a half-Barbadian, half-­Englishman – had told stories of training in Afghanistan, stimulating the sense of adventure that always itched within me. He spoke of roaming the majestic mountains, weapons training and an intense fellowship among the fighters.

‘I might be going back soon,’ Abdul said. ‘The Sheikh said that people like you should come,’ he added, referring to bin Laden. He showed me a video from Afghanistan with scenes of al-Qaeda recruits training on monkey bars and firing rockets, footage which later became iconic.

‘I would like to go,’ I said. I could not restrain my excitement about being with the mujahideen in the mountains of Afghanistan. My new wife was soon to join me in Sana’a, but training for jihad was all I could think about.

‘We can arrange a plane ticket to Karachi, from where you’ll be picked up and driven over to Afghanistan,’ Abdul said.

Karima arrived in the height of summer, but I was now in a quandary. I felt I could not just leave her in Sana’a while I disappeared to the Hindu Kush – even though she accepted it was my religious duty to prepare for jihad. She knew nobody in Sana’a.

I sought an audience with Mohammed al-Hazmi, one of the radical clerics I had encountered during my previous stay in Sana’a.

‘I want to train with the mujahideen in Afghanistan,’ I told him.

‘Masha’Allah, this is good. According to Sharia you can’t leave your wife unless she is with a responsible family member: a father, brother or uncle. But for jihad there is an exception. Your wife can stay in your residence in Sana’a and the landlord can take her as family.’

There seemed a lot of flexibility in the rules as applied to Holy War.

Abdul, just back from Afghanistan, had different advice, telling me that if I travelled there I should take my wife with me, so that we could make hijra – emigrate to a Muslim land. He was relaying Osama bin Laden’s appeal for jihadis to bring their families. Many did: when al-Qaeda’s last redoubt at Tora Bora was cleared later that year, women and children were among those killed or put to flight.

I decided against taking Karima, a decision that seemed all the more realistic when she told me she was pregnant in August. Despite this, she still agreed to my imminent departure.

One morning after returning from prayers, I caught a glimpse of her as she struggled down the stairs. She was suffering in the heat – debilitated with morning sickness and back pain. She looked pale and tired and my instinct to protect her – and my unborn child – smothered my dream of becoming a trained warrior for Allah, at least for the time being.

‘I am staying here with you,’ I told her. ‘You can’t remain alone here – pregnant and penniless in a strange city, supposedly under the protection of a landlord.’

She began to weep. I felt less than chivalrous for even contemplating leaving her. And the prospect of fatherhood dulled the disappointment of not being able to travel to Afghanistan.

Instead of going there I returned to Dammaj for a short visit. Sheikh Muqbil, the great Salafi religious guide, had passed away in July while receiving treatment for liver disease in Saudi Arabia. His funeral took place in Mecca, but the seminary was holding a memorial. Hundreds of his former pupils gathered from around the Arab world, many of them weeping during prayers. There seemed to be a vacuum without him. My friend the American convert Clifford Newman and his son, Abdullah, were among the mourners. Clifford showed me an Uzi machine gun he had acquired for their protection from the Shia tribes in the area.

My drift towards full-blooded militancy was brought into focus on 11 September 2001. Late in the afternoon I went to a barber’s shop in Sana’a. The Arabic news channel, Al Jazeera, was blaring in the corner. Soon after I arrived, it began airing live footage from New York. Smoke was drifting from the upper storeys of the World Trade Center. The breathless commentary soon made clear that a terrorist attack had occurred.

I rushed home and turned on the radio as further details of the attacks came in. Until that day, the name Osama bin Laden had meant little to the average Salafi. He was respected for giving up the trappings of wealth and fighting in Afghanistan to establish an Islamic state there. But of al-Qaeda’s growing capabilities and ambitions little was known. Despite the attacks on the US embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole, no one I knew had expected al-Qaeda to take its war to the US homeland. Some regarded it as misguided, others as wrong because it targeted civilians. But among most of my acquaintances in Sana’a – especially those who flocked to Sheikh Mohammed al-Hazmi’s mosque that evening – euphoria drowned out any more sober perspective on the attacks.

Al-Hazmi was popular among young militant Muslims in Sana’a. Addressing an overflowing congregation in the stifling heat that evening, he was unequivocal.

‘What has happened is just retribution for American oppression of Muslims and the occupation of Muslim lands,’ he said – a reference to the continuing presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf.

The congregation prostrated themselves in gratitude to Allah. At that point I was unsure who had committed the attacks and had heard that as many as 20,000 people might have died. I had seen few pictures and was unsure how to respond to such an act – even if it had been carried out by fellow Muslims as an act of jihad. I had so many questions. Did Islam permit a suicide attack? Was targeting civilians in a far-off country justifiable?

Many Salafis, even in Sana’a, were critical of the 9/11 attacks – ­saying they had no justification in Islam. But for me the theological answer came a few days later and helped cement a sense of obligation to make jihad. A Saudi cleric, Sheikh Humud bin Uqla, published a long fatwa in support of 9/11, saying it was permissible to kill civilians when they were ‘mixed up’ with fighters and drawing a comparison with a US military strike in 1998 on an alleged al-Qaeda facility in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.

‘When America attacked a pharmaceutical firm in Sudan, using its planes and bombs, destroying it and killing everybody in it, staff and labourers, what was this called? Shouldn’t the action of America in the Sudanese firm be considered as an act of terrorism?’ the Sheikh asked.

I devoured the fatwa, even as Sheikh bin Uqla was condemned by other clerics. A prominent supporter of the Taliban before 9/11, he was constantly under attack by the Saudi religious establishment. But his arguments, in those feverish days after 9/11, were what I wanted to hear.

Ultimately I accepted that in this clash of civilizations I was a Muslim. Weeks after 9/11, as the United States embarked on its invasion of Afghanistan, President George W. Bush would say, ‘You are either with us or with the terrorists.’ That left me no option; I could not side with the kuffar. Osama bin Laden was pure; he was a hero. President Bush did not believe in Allah or accept Mohammed as His messenger. His was a crusade against Islam; he had even used the word – and that pushed many doubters into the camp of the mujahideen.

In the debate over how Muslims should respond I lost a lot of friends who were Salafis. To me they were cowards; they had turned their backs on fellow Muslims. But I gained many other friends and they were jihadis. Many of them left for Afghanistan. Some militants I knew expected a US invasion of Yemen any day; I even told Karima that she would be safer back in Morocco.

Abdul and I had many discussions about the way forward.

‘I have something to tell you, Murad,’ he said one evening. ‘I have been travelling around for Sheikh Osama. I’ve been delivering messages for him. You know the training video I showed you? I myself smuggled that out of Afghanistan.’

‘Masha’Allah!’ I replied. It was frowned upon to praise someone directly. Everything had to come from God.

‘You can see one of the hijackers in the video – he’s the guy filmed from behind firing the anti-aircraft gun. I met him while I was over there. But nobody told me what was being planned.’

I was impressed. Abdul, scarcely out of his teens, was moving in ­rarefied jihadist circles.

On 7 October – the day US cruise missiles were launched against Afghanistan, I was with friends at a house in Sana’a. We saw the battle for Afghanistan in very distinct colours. On one side the Taliban, who for all their faults represented Islam; on the other an unholy alliance of America, communists, Tajik warlords and Shi’ites.

I hated the Salafi scholars who refrained from depicting the conflict with the US as a Holy War of defensive jihad. One of the hadith became popular in our circle at the time: ‘When you see that black flags have appeared from Khorasan [Afghanistan] then join them.’ It was as if the Prophet had predicted Operation Enduring Freedom as a war for the future of Islam.

Clifford Newman, my American Salafi friend, felt the same way. In early December he came to my house in an excited state.

‘Murad – have you seen the news?’ he blurted out. ‘The American they captured in Afghanistan who’s all over TV. I was the guy who sent him.’

He was referring to John Walker Lindh, the so-called ‘American Taliban’ who had just been interviewed by CNN in Afghanistan after being captured. Lindh had studied at the CALES language institute in Sana’a the previous year, and flown from there to Pakistan, before travelling into Afghanistan. Newman told me he’d helped Lindh travel.

As far as I was concerned the attack on our Muslim brothers meant that jihad was now obligatory for every Muslim. To play my part I had begun collecting money for the Taliban and fighters hoping to join them, which attracted the attention of the Yemeni intelligence services. I was summoned to meet the committee that ran the mosque I usually attended in Sana’a.

‘Murad,’ said a frail, elderly man, ‘this is a mosque that welcomes all Muslims, and we have a duty to all our congregation. Some are concerned, as we are, that this holy place is receiving the wrong sort of attention. You may have noticed that there are men standing across the street, watching. And they are watching you. We cannot have members of the congregation using this place to raise money for foreign wars.’

He paused and glanced at the rest of the committee.

‘We have been told it would not be good for you to come here any more, for our sake and for your own sake. I hope you understand.’

I began to glance over my shoulder when walking through the streets. More than once I was sure a man had stopped to study a shop window or turned in a different direction. I even started checking my car, in case someone had tampered with the brakes or planted a device. I imagined strange clicks or interference on my phone. Things were becoming unpleasant. It was time to get out of the capital, so in the dying days of 2001 I took Karima south.

The city of Taiz is one of the most historic in Yemen – sitting amid towering mountain ranges halfway between Sana’a and Aden. In the rainy season electric storms illuminate the peaks. Its inhabitants see Sana’a as lazy and backward, and there is certainly a greater sense of industry in Taiz – none of it very picturesque. The outskirts are scarred with hideous cement plants and ramshackle factories that would be condemned in an instant if sited in the West. But its mosques are glorious. Not a few of its young men had embraced the militancy that I had also seen in Sana’a. I attended a mosque that welcomed combat vet­erans of Bosnia and Chechnya as well as several who had trained in bin Laden’s Afghan camps. When they learned that I was being watched by the Yemeni security services they embraced me straight away. Soon I was criss-crossing the city, meeting at the homes of bright-eyed young militants, many of whom were looking for ways to join in the new war.

Among the young men I knew in Taiz were several who would be involved in a suicide attack in October 2002 on a French tanker, the MV Limburg, in the Gulf of Aden.

Karima gave birth a few months after we arrived, in the first week of May 2002; we called our son Osama. When I told my mother of the name she yelled down the phone.

‘No, you cannot give him that name. Are you mad?’

‘Mum,’ I replied, ‘if that’s the case no Western families can call their sons George or Tony. They are the ones who have declared war on Islam.’

We were talking different languages.

6 Barbi eventually returned to North Carolina. The last time I heard from him was around 2009. He had married a Somali woman and was working in a factory.

7 Tariq claimed he had connections to the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar e Taiba and that he had taken several young men to train in Pakistan. He was killed fighting with al-Qaeda-linked jihadists in Syria in late 2013.

8 Karima is a pseudonym. I am not using her real name to protect her identity for security reasons.