Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

30. Samir Khan: An Unlikely Foot Soldier

THE UNITED STATES AND YEMEN, 2001–2009—In retrospect, the path to Yemen’s becoming a major counterterrorism concern for the Obama administration in late 2009 seems remarkably clear. By November, Yemen was all over the news and seemingly connected to every new alleged terror plot against the United States—with Anwar Awlaki’s tentacles touching every incident. But for many Americans, it seemed to pop out of nowhere.

The Yemen media frenzy kicked off on November 5, 2009, when the young US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan—who had written a series of e-mails to Awlaki—walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center in Fort Hood, Texas, shouted, “Allah u Akbar,” and opened fire on his fellow soldiers, killing thirteen people and wounding forty-three others before being shot and paralyzed. By most accounts, Hasan was motivated by a combination of factors centering on his work in treating soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. He had reportedly sought to have some of the patients he saw prosecuted for war crimes after they disclosed their actions on the battlefield to him, but those requests were rejected. Hasan had complained to friends and relatives that fellow soldiers had harassed him because of his religion. They said he tried to get out of the military as he struggled increasingly to reconcile his faith with his work for an armed force waging war in Muslim lands.

In a 2007 PowerPoint presentation Hasan gave before a gathering of army doctors, he 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.” Hasan advocated for conscientious objector status for Muslims to ward off what he termed could be “adverse events.” At the time of the shooting, Hasan was facing an imminent deployment to Afghanistan. Soon after the shooting, the media began reporting that he had been in contact with Awlaki, adding that Hasan had attended Awlaki’s Virginia mosque in 2001, though the fact that Awlaki had only met him once was not reported. That the two men exchanged at least eighteen e-mails beginning in December 2008 became a major focus of attention and hype from journalists and politicians. But when US counterterror officials reviewed the e-mails, they determined them to be innocuous. According to the New York Times, “a counterterrorism analyst who examined the messages shortly after they were sent decided that they were consistent with authorized research Major Hasan was conducting and did not alert his military superiors.” Awlaki later told a Yemeni journalist that Hasan had reached out to him and primarily asked him religious questions. Awlaki claimed he neither “ordered nor pressured” Hasan to carry out any attacks, a contention supported by the e-mails once they were made public. But Awlaki’s reaction to the shooting made such details irrelevant in the eyes of the US public and government.

A few days after the Fort Hood shootings, Awlaki published a blog post with the not-so-subtle title: “Nidal Hasan Did the Right Thing.” Hasan, Awlaki wrote, “is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn’t exist.” Hasan “opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? In fact the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.” Awlaki called on other Muslims within the US Army to carry out similar operations. “Nidal Hassan was not recruited by Al-Qaida,” Awlaki later said. “Nidal Hassan was recruited by American crimes, and this is what America refuses to admit.” It was the last blog post Awlaki would publish.

The morning after the shooting, President Obama met with his top military and intelligence commanders “and ordered them to undertake a full review of the sequence of events that led up to the shootings.” In his weekly address following the shooting, Obama said, “We must compile every piece of information that was known about the gunman, and we must learn what was done with that information. Once we have those facts, we must act upon them.” He added: “Our government must be able to act swiftly and surely when it has threatening information. And our troops must have the security that they deserve.”

Although there was no actual evidence presented to tie Awlaki to the planning of the Fort Hood shootings and investigators determined Hasan was not part of a broader terrorist conspiracy, the alleged connection to Awlaki became a major part of the story and became fodder for those agitating for more aggressive action by the Obama administration in Yemen. On November 18, Senator Joseph Lieberman called the shooting the “most destructive terrorist attack on America since 9/11.” A month later Lieberman would call for preemptive strikes against Yemen.

Awlaki monitored the news from his hideout in Shabwah. He scoured news reports and his “Google Alerts” on his name started pinging every few minutes. He may have been famous before among English-speaking Muslims, but now his name was truly global. Whether Awlaki had played any role in Hasan’s murderous rampage became irrelevant in the United States. The fact that he had openly and gleefully praised it became a media obsession. Awlaki was presented in the media as the “9/11 Imam,” with new stories coming out every day examining his life history. The prostitution arrests, his alleged contacts with the 9/11 hijackers, his past speeches on jihad and his blog all were woven together to make it seem as though Awlaki had been plotting acts of terror against the United States his whole life. Terror “experts” on television opined on his ability to recruit Western jihadists for al Qaeda’s cause.

Not long after the Fort Hood shootings, Awlaki’s days as a blogger came to an abrupt end. The United States took down his website, whose URL was registered through Wild West Domains, a company based in Scottsdale, Arizona. “They shut down my website following Nidal Hasan’s operation,” Awlaki recalled. “Then I read in the Washington Post that they were monitoring my communications. So I was forced to stop these communications.” Awlaki saw the media attention being focused on him as an ominous sign: he had to change locations and erase any digital trail that could lead the Americans to him. He knew they wanted him arrested—but now he feared that Obama wanted him dead.

IN OCTOBER 2009, a young Pakistani American named Samir Khan landed in Sana’a. Like hundreds of other Muslims from across the globe who come to Yemen each year, Khan was there to study Islam and Arabic at the country’s famous ancient universities. At least that was what he told his family and friends back home. In the decade leading up to his flight into Yemen, Khan had grown increasingly militant in his politics and his interpretation of Islam. Like Awlaki, the events of 9/11 and the crackdown on Muslims in the United States had a profound impact on him. Khan was born in 1985 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to Pakistani parents, one of whom was a US citizen. “He’s a Christmas child,” recalled his mother Sarah Khan, “born on Christmas day.” When Samir was seven, they immigrated to the United States and settled into Samir’s grandparents’ house in Queens, New York. His relatives were conservative Muslims, but they also considered themselves patriotic Americans. “We actually wanted to have a better future for the children,” Sarah told me. “We had great hopes for this country.” Khan’s high school classmates recalled a slightly awkward boy in baggy jeans, a junior varsity football player despite his shyness, with an enthusiasm for hip-hop and the school newspaper. “He was always interested in sports,” Samir’s mom recalled. “He would always tell me that he wants to be in the NFL.”

Samir’s interests began to change in August 2001, when at age fifteen, he attended a weeklong summer camp at a mosque in Queens, sponsored by IONA (Islamic Organization of North America), a prominent conservative Islamist organization tied to the Pakistani Tanzeem-e-Islami organization. In an interview years later, Khan said the camp was a formative experience for him and that he returned to school that year knowing “what I wanted to do with my life: be a firm Muslim, a strong Muslim, a practicing Muslim.” He ditched the baggy pants and the rap music, making an exception only for the now disbanded hip-hop group called Soldiers of Allah. He became involved with the Islamic Thinkers Society, a Jackson Heights–based group that used nonviolent activism such as “street dawahs (invitations)” to call for an Islamic Caliphate. When 9/11 happened, Khan made no effort to hide his new attitudes toward religion and politics from his friends and family. He refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and got into debates with classmates over his contention that Americans had deserved the attack.

“Before 9/11, people still saw his change but didn’t make much of it,” said one classmate. “But afterwards, more people decided to question his ideology and be, like, ‘Is he trying to be like them [the September 11 terrorists]? Does he think like them?’” Another classmate said Khan would sometimes be the target of ethnic slurs. In tenth grade, Khan was wearing a kufi hat to school every day.

Samir Khan’s father noticed that his son had begun to frequent jihadist websites, and staged the first of several interventions. In his high school yearbook, Khan referred to himself as a “mujahid” and wrote that his future plans included going “overseas [to] study Islamic Law and other subjects that dealt with Islam.” He also included a word of advice: “If you give Satan an inch, he’ll be a ruler.”

By 2003, the year Khan graduated from high school and the United States invaded Iraq, he had taken up a staunchly radical view on US foreign policy. The family relocated to North Carolina, where Khan’s father, Zafar, took a job as an information technology executive. Samir enrolled in a community college and had a job on the side selling kitchen knives and other household items. He attended a mosque and would get into debates with fellow attendees about what he perceived as the spinelessness of religious leaders in the face of America’s spreading wars.

He also began spending much of his time on the Internet, seeking out like-minded Muslims. He blogged and aggregated news of the jihad abroad, often writing under the tag “Inshallahshaheed,” or “a martyr if God wills.” Khan operated multiple blogs out of his parents’ house, several times retiring blogs and switching servers when his vitriolic content came under attack or was taken down by server administrators.

Khan eventually found a home at Muslimpad, run by Islamic Network (one time employer of Daniel Maldonado, who was convicted for traveling to ICU training camps in Somalia). One of his blogs, also called Inshallahshaheed, was started in 2005 and had become wildly popular by 2007, ranking among the top 1 percent of 100 million websites in the world by the traffic counter Alexa.com. His other blogs went by names such as Human Liberation–An Islamic Renaissance and Revival. On his blogs, Khan would extol the victories and virtues of al Qaeda central and its affiliated militants, but his writings also helped to popularize a broader ideological movement that included radical sheikhs and scholars many Americans would not have known about. A later blog featured in its “About” section a list of men he described as “scholars of Islam…who we take knowledge from,” and included Abu Musab al Zarqawi, Abu Layth Libi, and Anwar Awlaki.

One of the contributors to Khan’s Inshallahshaheed blog was Zachary Chesser, an American who would be arrested in 2010 for attempting to travel to Somalia and join al Shabab. On his various websites, Khan would celebrate attacks against US soldiers in Iraq, promote the writings of bin Laden and call for victory of jihadists over US and Israeli forces across the globe.

During this period, Khan began to receive attention from the press, notably the New York Times, which first profiled him in 2007, describing the American as an “unlikely foot soldier in what Al Qaeda calls ‘Islamic jihadi media.’” In the United States, Khan became a new face of the emergent and diversifying digital militant culture, which had started with grainy video uploads of Zarqawi severing heads in Iraq and had found full expression in what the Times called a “constellation of apparently independent media operators who are broadcasting the message of Al Qaeda and other groups,” to people all over the world, including, increasingly, the West.

Khan told the New York Times that a video of a suicide bomber hitting a US outpost in Iraq “brought great happiness to me.” Of the American families who had relatives serving in Iraq, he said, “Whatever happens to their sons and daughters is none of my concern,” calling them “people of hellfire.”

Although he denied links to terrorist groups and told a local news station that he was not actively recruiting American fighters, Khan hinted that he might go on to wage violent jihad himself one day, but he stopped just shy of directly inciting violence. He even hired a lawyer to counsel him on the parameters of protected speech before the launch of his first blog. Sure enough, the authorities barely touched him, though he had certainly gotten their attention: Homeland Security agents, as well as analysts at the Combating Terrorism Center, were following him closely. Sue Myrick, a Republican representative from North Carolina, later told the Washington Post that she had been involved in efforts to “shut [Khan] down through the FBI,” which were ultimately unsuccessful, “because he was not inciting violence, he was simply putting out information, and because he kept changing his server.”

Khan believed the authorities were doing more than reading his blogs. “Back in NC, the FBI dispatched a spy on me who pretended to convert to Islam,” Khan later wrote. On several occasions, FBI agents visited the Khan home in an attempt to get Samir’s parents to encourage him to stop blogging. According to Sarah Khan, the FBI agents told the family that Samir was not breaking any laws and was engaged in free speech, but that they were concerned about the direction he appeared to be heading. Samir’s father, Zafar, had gone as far as to disconnect the home’s Internet connection and attempted more rounds of interventions. He invited an imam, Mustapha Elturk, to try to persuade Samir to reconsider his radicalism. Elturk knew Samir’s father as “a moderate Muslim devoted to his faith.” He said Zafar “tried whatever he could within his means to talk to his son and also [to] have him meet with imams and Muslim scholars to persuade” Samir that “the ideology of violence is not the right course.” Samir “became very much convinced that America is an imperialist country that supports dictators and supports Israel blindly….He had the opinion that the use of indiscriminate killing was justified,” Elturk recalled. “I tried to bring arguments from the Koran and scholars, and said, ‘Whatever you are thinking it is not true.’”

Samir was unmoved and continued with his work. The fruit of his final months in the United States was Jihad Recollections, an online PDF magazine, overrelying on graphics and featuring translations of al Qaeda speeches as well as original pieces by Khan and other contributors. By late 2009, Samir had made a decision to leave the United States. As he saw it, the FBI was watching him around the clock and he was sick of being around Muslims he considered to be co-opted by American culture.

Khan put out the fourth and final issue of Jihad Recollections in September 2009. “I knew the real truth wouldn’t be able to reach the masses unless and until I was above the law,” he later wrote. Khan left for Yemen the following month, under the pretense of studying Arabic and teaching English. Terror analysts in the United States speculated that he had already received an invitation from Awlaki to come to Yemen and help lead the “media jihad.” But according to Sarah Khan, Yemen was not Samir’s first choice. He had looked at schools in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, but the Yemen paperwork came through first. “We knew his desire to learn Arabic, and he was searching to find proper schools that would teach him the Arabic language as well as where he could learn more about Islam and understand the Koran better,” she recalled. When Samir told his parents he was leaving for Yemen, Sarah was worried but thought “he will be fine, he’s grown up. He needs to probably look around, see the world for himself.”

But Khan was going through a very different thought process than his parents understood. He had decided he was finished with what he regarded as the banality and sins of suburban America. The Internet had been his best classroom, where he found the preaching of Muslim leaders who inspired him. He had watched the horrors of the post-9/11 wars and invasions and concluded that it was his obligation to join other Muslims in fighting against forces he perceived as Crusaders. “After my faith took a 180-degree turn, I knew I could no longer reside in America as a compliant citizen. My beliefs had turned me into a rebel of Washington’s imperialism,” he later wrote. “How could anyone claim sanity and remain sitting on their hands? For me, it wasn’t possible. My guilty [conscience] became my mode of thinking; I could never imagine myself as one who left the opportunity of a lifetime, to save the Islamic nation from its plight.”

Despite the surveillance, Khan had little trouble leaving the United States. “It took thirty minutes extra to get my boarding pass in North Carolina since, as the receptionist told me, I was being watched,” Khan later wrote, admitting surprise that his exit went almost totally unremarked. Khan spent some time in Sana’a teaching English before he made plans to head south to seek out the mujahedeen. “I was about to officially become a traitor of the country I grew up in for most of my life,” he recalled. “I thought about many of the possible effects it could have on my life; but whatever they were, I was ready for it.”

MORTEN STORM says he first met Anwar Awlaki in Sana’a in 2006, shortly before Awlaki was tossed in a Yemeni prison for eighteen months at Washington’s request. Storm was a former motorcycle gang member and a convicted criminal who converted to Islam. In the late 1990s, the Denmark native began running in radical Islamist circles under the name Murad Storm. He’d had a troubled childhood, committing his first armed robbery at the age of thirteen, and circulated in and out of jail as a teen. Storm eventually fell in with the Bandidos biker gang. In 1997, however, he renounced his life of drugs and crime, telling friends and family that he had converted to Islam. He moved to Yemen, where he married a Moroccan woman in 2000. Two years later they had a son. They named him Osama.

A video from 2005 shows Storm attending a speech given by radical Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed in London. Storm claimed he met Awlaki a year later in Sana’a. At the time Storm was a student at Iman University, where Awlaki was taking classes and delivering lectures. Storm claimed he and Awlaki “talked freely to each other” in the months that led up to Awlaki’s arrest and developed a friendship. While Awlaki was imprisoned, Storm said he began to have a change of heart about the version of Islam he was practicing: “I found out that what I believed in was, unfortunately, not what I thought it was.” Storm claimed he approached the Danish Intelligence Service, PET, and offered his assistance. He said he was introduced to British intelligence representatives and the CIA. The PET, he claimed, assigned him a handler.

When Awlaki was released from prison, Storm became a potentially important asset for the CIA. The CIA and the PET “knew that Anwar saw me as his friend and confidant. They knew that I could reach him, and find out where he stayed,” Storm said in an interview with Denmark’s second-largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Storm claimed that Danish intelligence officials provided him with money “to bring materials and electronic equipment” to Awlaki. According to Storm, the CIA wanted to install a tracking device in the equipment he was providing to Awlaki, making it possible for the Americans to monitor and potentially kill the cleric with a drone strike.

In September 2009, Storm returned to Yemen and traveled to Shabwah Province, where Awlaki was in hiding. Storm said he stayed at the home of someone he described as an al Qaeda sympathizer in Shabwah. Storm alleged that when he met with Awlaki, he asked Storm to get hold of some solar panels or a transportable refrigerator, materials he could use to cool explosives parts. “We also discussed the terrorist attacks. He had some plans that would hit large shopping centers in the West or elsewhere with many people with poison attacks,” Storm alleged. Storm’s claims cannot be independently verified, but he definitely passed them on to the CIA at a time when the United States was building a case against Awlaki.

I asked Awlaki’s father about Storm’s allegations. “I don’t believe many things he said about Anwar,” Nasser said. “I think this man was part of a conspiracy to get Anwar—the man and the character—in order to reduce or eliminate his influence on Muslim men and women around the world. So, America and Denmark found a guy who was all his life an evil man and committed an armed robbery when he was only thirteen years old. Anwar, during his forty years in this life, never was involved in any act of violence against any person or group.”

What is indisputable is that Awlaki asked Storm to find him an additional wife. Awlaki had married a second Yemeni wife while he was on the run and had a daughter with her. But this time, he specifically wanted a white Muslim convert to act as his “companion in hiding,” Storm claimed. “He asked if I knew a woman from the West he could marry. I think that he lacked someone who could better understand his Western mindset,” Storm told the Danish paper. Storm agreed to help. “There are two things that I would like to stress,” Awlaki allegedly wrote Storm in a late 2009 e-mail, which he asked Storm to relay to a potential bride. “The first is that I don’t live in a fixed location. Therefore my living conditions vary widely. Sometimes I even live in a tent. Second, because of my security situation I sometimes have to seclude myself, which means me and my family would not meet with any persons for extended periods. If you can live in difficult conditions, do not mind loneliness and can live with restrictions on your communications with others then alhamdulillah [thanks be to God] that is great.”

When Storm returned to Copenhagen, he met with CIA and PET officials. He said he was shown satellite images of the area where he had been in Shabwah and he identified the home where he had stayed. Yemeni forces launched an assault on the house a short time later, but Awlaki had already moved on. The owner of the home was killed. Storm had also told them about Awlaki’s desire to find a Western wife. In that request, the CIA saw opportunity. The American agents, he said, were “overjoyed.” Along with agents from the PET, Storm claimed, the CIA came up with a plan. “The idea was to find someone who shared [Awlaki’s] ideology and mentality so that both of them would be killed in an American drone attack,” Storm said. “I helped the CIA and PET track Anwar so the Americans could send a drone after him. That was the plan.”