Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

40. “Martyrdom Is Why We Came Here, My Brother”

YEMEN, 2009–2010—Early on in his stay in Yemen, Samir Khan lost his mobile phone. Such things happen to tourists and students the world over. But the stakes were higher for Khan. His phone was his only way of communicating with the people he had come to Yemen to find: the mujahedeen. Khan had the mobile number of a man he had been told could put him in touch with AQAP, and the two men had been texting and making plans to meet when Khan’s phone went missing. The young Pakistani American panicked. “He was heartbroken, as this was the only means of communication between him and the mujahideen,” recalled his friend Abu Yazeed, a self-professed jihadist. “Despite that, he never thought about turning back.” Khan went to mosques hoping to find someone who could reconnect him. One night he was performing Ishaa, the evening prayer, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. “Are you Samir?” the man asked him. Khan nodded. “I am the brother to whom you have been texting,” the man told him. Soon thereafter, Khan was packing his bags, leaving behind Sana’a and any pretense that he was there to teach English or study Arabic at one of its universities. He was on his way to study jihad with mujahedeen, who would embrace him as one of their muhajireen, or emigrants.

Khan felt he had been in the car “for what seemed like years,” heading over the rough roads that one must cross to get from Sana’a to southern Yemen. The driver dispatched to take Khan to a mujahedeen camp had a nashid, a hymn, playing on repeat. It was called “Sir Ya Bin Laden.” Khan had heard the homage to bin Laden before, but now that he was on his way to meet the warriors from AQAP, it had taken on a new significance. “Something had struck me at that moment. The nashid repeated lines pertaining to fighting the tyrants of the world for the purpose of giving victory to the Islamic nation. But it also reminded the listener that Shaykh Usama bin Ladin is the leader of this global fight,” Khan recalled in an essay he wrote several months later. “I looked out the window at the tall mud houses below the beautiful sky and closed my eyes as the wind blew through my hair. I took a deep breath to let it all out.” He thought, “I am an individual convinced that Islam’s claim to power in the modern world is not going to be as easy as walking down a red carpet or driving through a green light. I am acutely aware that body parts have to be torn apart, skulls have to be crushed and blood has to be spilled in order for this to be a reality. Anyone who says otherwise is an individual who is not prepared to make sacrifices that heroes and champions make.”

As they got closer to the camp, Khan gazed out the window at the rural landscape. “As my eyes passed over the mysterious twirls of the sand dunes, I was reminded of the enigma of jihad in the contemporary world. It’s just absolutely enthralling to know that guerrillas can fight off global superpowers with the bare minimum resulting in great enemy losses, drainage of the enemy’s economy and a rising popular support for the mujahidin.”

Back in North Carolina, FBI agents showed up at Khan’s house. “They came to know that Samir had left for Yemen,” recalled his mother, Sarah Khan. “And they were asking how he went there and things like that, and if we have any contact with him. They were questioning us about [Samir] going to Yemen.” The agents asked the Khans “whom he’s been in contact with over there and stuff like that. We had been seeing different situations that had been appearing in the news, online and the papers about how the FBI has been keeping a tab on Muslims, so, we thought it was just one of those things.” Sarah Khan had watched the news about the US cruise missile strikes in Yemen and the “underwear bomb” plot. As a parent with a son they believed was studying in Yemen, she told me, “of course it was very scary. It was a very scary moment for us.” But, she reasoned, “Samir was at the university, so we didn’t think that he was in any danger.” But Samir was not at the university anymore. He was heading straight into the heart of an expanding US war against AQAP.

People don’t just show up at an al Qaeda camp in Yemen and be greeted with open arms. There is a vetting process. But Khan was already a known quantity through his blogs and web magazine, and AQAP’s leadership welcomed the prospect of an American jihadi among their ranks. Khan went through training in rural Yemen and was eager to see battle. “Samir’s love for Martyrdom in Allah’s sake was extraordinary,” his friend recalled. Khan once sent him a text message that read: “Martyrdom is why we came here, my brother. We won’t leave until we get what we came for.” AQAP would eventually publish photos of Khan wielding weapons and practicing hand-to-hand combat, but the mujahedeen believed that Khan’s greatest possible contribution to their cause lay in his role as a propagandist. When he eventually made it to an AQAP base, the Yemeni and Saudi jihadists he met listened to his stories of FBI surveillance and harassment by the US government. They reviewed his writings and previous work on his online magazines.

“I realized that he traveled [a] very long distance under very difficult circumstances, not to mention the fact that he was being wanted and hunted by the CIA,” recalled Abu Yazeed. “His weapons to defend Islam were very simple; a laptop and a camera. However, he was loaded with ammunition. That ammunition was the creed of jihad in Allah’s path.” Khan’s new friends found his broad, toothy smile infectious and would often ask him to laugh “in English.” They “considered him a motivation and an inspiration for them since he crossed the ocean to support Islam’s cause.”

Although Khan was enthusiastic about getting weapons training, the leadership of AQAP assigned him to its media division. They wanted his help in creating an English-language publication that could spread their message to the Muslim diaspora. It was to be a glossy, well-produced magazine called Inspire. Khan had studied Internet technology during his stint in community college back in North Carolina and had already created several of his own websites, as well as an online magazine much like the one envisioned by AQAP. “After some time passed in the company of the mujahidin, I quickly acknowledged that success does not rely upon the job you undertake from nine to five, nor does it rely upon the wealth that you have accumulated, nor does it rely upon how far you have taken your studies in college. All of these things are respectable, but by being with the mujahidin, it helped open my eyes that our reason in life has nothing to do with any of these things,” Khan remembered. “The only thing in the entire world that matters to me, more than ever before, is the condition of my heart when I die.”

As Khan settled into life with AQAP, his main role would become “connecting and facilitating disparate groups of individuals online,” said Aaron Zelin, a scholar who has studied and written about AQAP extensively. “He was [such] an important connective tissue and node that without him it is likely recruitment would have been more difficult, especially after Awlaki’s site went down. He also understood how to connect with youth in the West without having pretension and as being a co-equal to show, ‘Look, I’m an average guy, not even a religious scholar and I made it to the fields of jihad to fight the apostates and Zionist-Crusaders: so can you.’”

As the first issue of Inspire went into production, Khan did graphic design and editing, as well as some translation. He adopted more than one nom de guerre, among them al Qaqa al Amiriki and Abu Shidah, the Father of Harshness. “He—as I understood—wanted to choose the toughest of nicknames in order to terrorize the enemies of Islam,” Abu Yazeed recalled. Khan poured himself into work on Inspire and studied the Arabic language with a passion. When colleagues tried to practice their English with him, Khan would respond in Arabic. “I cannot remember a time that we met except that he asked me something related to Arabic vocabulary,” his friend remembered. “Every time I met him, I would realize an improvement in his Arabic. Over the time he stayed, he progressed a lot in the Arabic language to the point that you couldn’t easily tell if he was an English speaking brother.”

Khan became involved with AQAP at the very moment that it was ringing massive alarm bells in Washington. AQAP intended Inspire to promote its mission to an English-speaking audience and to encourage “lone wolf” jihadists in the West to conduct attacks, but it also played into the US propaganda campaign aimed at presenting AQAP as a grave threat. In English, AQAP’s agenda was laid out for all to see. And, from the first issue, Anwar Awlaki would be a prominent commentator and religious analyst in the pages of Inspire.

There was very little published in Inspire that had not already been said much earlier in AQAP’s Arabic-language publication, Sada al-Malahim. Now personnel at US intelligence agencies, which had a limited number of analysts fluent in Arabic, could read its statements in English. “By the time the first issue of Inspire came out, AQAP had already released thirteen issues of its Arabic-language magazine, which had far richer content on AQAP,” said Zelin. Inspire’s publication, he told me, coincided “with AQAP pursuing its global ambitions more thoroughly in light of the Christmas Day plot. AQAP always wanted to hit the US. Inspire was a way to rally the Western sympathizers and to try and further bolster its roster so they can more easily plan attacks against the West.”

The first issue of the magazine was released online, but it was hardly a smashing success. The sixty-seven-page issue only contained four actual pages of the magazine. The other sixty-three contained a computer code that, when deciphered, turned out to be cupcake recipes featured on the popular US daytime talk show Ellen, hosted by gay comedian Ellen DeGeneres. It is unclear how the file was corrupted, though some reports suggested it was a cyberattack by anti-AQAP hackers, MI-6 or the CIA itself.

Regardless, issue one of Inspire eventually hit the Web in uncorrupted format in June 2010. “Allah says: ‘And inspire the believers to fight,’” read the opening line of the letter from Inspire’s unnamed editor. “It is from this verse that we derive the name of our new magazine.” Inspire, the editor wrote, was “the first magazine to be issued by the al-Qaeda Organization in the English language. In the West; in East, West and South Africa; in South and Southeast Asia and elsewhere are millions of Muslims whose first or second language is English. It is our intent for this magazine to be a platform to present the important issues facing the ummah today to the wide and dispersed English speaking Muslim readership.”

The issue of Inspire featured an “exclusive” interview with the head of AQAP, Nasir al Wuhayshi, also known as Abu Basir, as well as translated works from bin Laden and Zawahiri. It also included an essay praising Abdulmutallab, the failed underwear bomber. The magazine was well produced, with a layout that resembled a typical US teen magazine, though without fashionably dressed women and celebrities. Instead, it featured photos of children alleged to have been killed in US missile strikes and pictures of armed, masked jihadis. An article written under the byline AQ Chef and titled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” provided instructions on how to manufacture explosive devices from basic household goods. Another article gave detailed directions on how to download military-grade encryption software for sending e-mails and text messages.

Perhaps most disturbing, the magazine contained a “Hit List” of people who it alleged had created “blasphemous caricatures” of the Prophet Muhammad. In late 2005, Jyllands-Posten—the Danish newspaper that would later publish Morten Storm’s story—commissioned a dozen cartoons of the Prophet, ostensibly to contribute to a debate about self-censorship within Islam. It had enraged Muslims across the world at the time, sparked massive protests and resulted in death threats and bomb threats against the newspaper. The hit list published by Inspire included magazine editors, anti-Muslim pundits who had defended the cartoons, as well as the novelist Salman Rushdie. But it also included Molly Norris, a Seattle-based cartoonist who initiated “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” Norris said she did it in response to the US Comedy Central network’s decision to edit out a scene in its popular animated program South Park that addressed the controversy, after receiving a threat.

Inspire’s hit list was accompanied by an essay penned by Awlaki encouraging Muslims to attack those who defame the image of Muhammad. “I would like to express my thanks to my brothers at Inspire for inviting me to write the main article for the first issue of their new magazine. I would also like to commend them for having this subject, the defense of the Messenger of Allah, as the main focus of this issue,” Awlaki wrote. He then laid out a defense for assassinating those who engaged in blasphemy of Muhammad. “The large number of participants makes it easier for us because there are more targets to choose from in addition to the difficulty of the government offering all of them special protection.” He continued:

When Inspire was published, some within the US intelligence community panicked. The first concern was protecting the people who had been identified as targets for assassination. The FBI took immediate precautions to guard the Seattle cartoonist, whom they feared could be murdered. She eventually changed her name and moved. Law enforcement agencies in other countries took similar measures.

The “Hit List” embodied the fears that Awlaki would incite young Western Muslims to commit “lone wolf” acts of terror. Inspire magazine would become one of the primary US sources of intelligence on AQAP and Awlaki, with intelligence analysts scouring each new issue for clues about his whereabouts or potential new plots. “The more the US talked about Inspire and Anwar al-Awlaki, the more the media focused on the magazine and the man, which then resulted in AQAP promoting them more and more, essentially taking advantage of free advertising,” recalled Gregory Johnsen, the Princeton University Yemen scholar. “It was a bit of a shock to see the US government’s reaction to Inspire, as AQAP had been saying many of the same things for years—only they had been saying it in Arabic in the pages of Sada al-Malahim. When Inspire was first published, a lot of people in the US government who didn’t have the tools to read Sada al-Malahim suddenly found out what AQAP had been saying, which, coming in the months after the attempted Christmas Day bombing in 2009, led to an overreaction and a sense of panic within certain agencies.”

Awlaki and Khan seemed to take great pride in the reaction of the US government to Inspire. In subsequent issues, Inspire would highlight quotes from US officials condemning the magazine and reacting to the various threats published in its pages. Samir Khan was suddenly a star figure in the international jihadi scene. “Khan is widely believed by all serious scholars to be the editor of Inspire magazine. This is not only because of his articles being published in it, but because of the similarity between it and Khan’s previous Jihad Recollections publication, which he edited and posted online prior to his trip to Yemen,” said Zelin. In Yemen, Khan began to develop a close relationship with Awlaki, a man he had long admired from afar. “Khan is someone who clearly idolized Awlaki both for his preaching and for the stance he took with his life,” said Johnsen. Eventually, he added, Khan would become a “sort of executive aide” to Awlaki. And Anwar Awlaki was putting himself out front in a clear alliance with AQAP. His connections to previous plots had been vague. Now he was openly encouraging assassinations of specific people around the world.

AQAP leader Nasir al Wuhayshi clearly saw value in the US obsession with Awlaki. So much so that he actually sent a message to Osama bin Laden proposing that he name Awlaki as the new head of AQAP. On August 27, 2010, bin Laden ordered his deputy Shaykh Mahmud, also known as Atiya Abdul Rahman, to relay a message to Wuhayshi. Bin Laden seemed to view Awlaki as an ally and a potentially valuable asset to al Qaeda’s goals. The problem, bin Laden explained, was that Awlaki was an unknown quantity to al Qaeda central, a man who had yet to prove his mettle in actual jihad. “The presence of some of the characteristics by our brother Anwar… is a good thing, in order to serve Jihad,” bin Laden wrote, adding that he wanted “a chance to be introduced to him more.” Bin Laden explained, “Over here, we are generally assured after people go to the battlefield and are tested there.” He asked Wuhayshi for “the resumé, in detail and lengthy, of the brother Anwar al-Awlaki,” as well as a written statement from Awlaki himself explaining his “vision in detail.” Wuhayshi, bin Laden asserted, should “remain in his position where he is qualified and capable of running the matter in Yemen.”

Samir Khan relished his newfound fame and penned numerous essays holding up his own experience as an example for other young Westerners to join the jihad. “I am a traitor to America because my religion requires me to be one. A traitor can either be praiseworthy or despicable. The good and bad are defined by a certain political agenda in the eyes of someone,” Khan wrote. “I am proud to be a traitor in America’s eyes just as much as I am proud to be a Muslim; and I take this opportunity to accentuate my oath of allegiance (bai’yah) and the mujahidin of the Arabian Peninsula’s bai’yah to the ferocious lion, the champion of jihad, the humble servant of God, my beloved Shaykh, Usama bin Ladin, may Allah protect him. Verily, he is the man that has shook the thrones of the tyrants of the world. We pledge to wage jihad for the rest of our lives until either we implant Islam all over the world or meet our Lord as bearers of Islam. And how reputable, adventurous and pleasurable is such a life compared to those who remain sitting, working from nine to five?”