History > 2015 > USA > Terrorism (I)

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California Attack

Has U.S. Rethinking Strategy

on Homegrown Terror

DEC. 5, 2015

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The day before Thanksgiving, President Obama reassured Americans there was “no specific and credible intelligence indicating a plot on the homeland.” Seven days later came an explosion of gunfire and the deadliest terrorist attack in America since Sept. 11, 2001.

What may be most disturbing is not that Mr. Obama was wrong, but that apparently he was right. By all accounts so far, the government had no concrete intelligence warning of the assault on Wednesday that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif.

Swift, ruthless and deadly, the attack appeared to reflect an evolution of the terrorist threat that Mr. Obama and federal officials have long dreaded: homegrown, self-radicalized individuals operating undetected before striking one of many soft targets that can never be fully protected in a country as sprawling as the United States.

“We have moved to an entirely new phase in the global terrorist threat and in our homeland security efforts,” Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, said in an interview on Saturday. Terrorists have “in effect outsourced attempts to attack our homeland. We’ve seen this not just here but in other places. This requires a whole new approach, in my view.”

The White House announced that Mr. Obama would address the nation on Sunday night about the nature of the terrorist threat and steps the administration is taking to protect the United States. Mr. Johnson said the government should continue to augment airline security by placing more agents in overseas departure airports and further toughen standards for the visa waiver program that allows visitors from certain friendly nations easy entry into the country. He and other officials said the government needed to reach out even more to Muslim communities to help identify threats that might otherwise escape notice.

Unable to curb the availability of guns at home or extremist propaganda from overseas, the authorities may have to rely more on encouraging Americans to watch one another and report suspicions. Federal and local governments already have programs urging friends, families and neighbors to identify people targeted for recruitment.

The attack may reignite the privacy-versus-security debate about encryption software sold by private-sector providers over government objections. And some administration officials said they needed to escalate efforts to stimulate contrary Muslim voices to counter extremist propaganda by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

“We can work with the private sector to get additional messengers with alternative voices out there,” said Lisa Monaco, the president’s counterterrorism adviser. “Frankly, we’ve got to do a better job of approaching this in a way that allows us to — the phrase has been used — break the brand of ISIL’s message.”

The San Bernardino attack has already inflamed the political debate less than two months before the first voting in the 2016 presidential primaries, and it may reshape Mr. Obama’s last year in office. While Republican candidates denounced the president, politicians were not the only ones asserting that his administration should shift course.

John D. Cohen, a professor at Rutgers University and a senior Homeland Security Department counterterrorism official until last year, said the administration needed to “wake up” to the threat and change an approach that is “ill-suited to deter these kinds of attacks.”

Alberto M. Fernandez, who until earlier this year led the State Department unit that counters militant propaganda, said, “The administration seems to be really flailing and tone deaf to this latest challenge.” He called the San Bernardino attack “D.I.Y. jihad,” and said it “forces the administration to look at where it does not want to go and is weakest, at jihadist ideology and its dissemination.”

Others, however, cautioned against overreaction, warning that the focus on Muslims could lead to the kind of anger and alienation that creates more potential for terrorist recruitment. Some experts urged officials to keep the danger posed by terrorism in perspective.

The death toll from jihadist terrorism on American soil since the Sept. 11 attacks — 45 people — is about the same as the 48 killed in terrorist attacks motivated by white supremacist and other right-wing extremist ideologies, according to New America, a research organization in Washington.

And both tolls are tiny compared with the tally of conventional murders, more than 200,000 over the same period. But the disproportionate focus they draw in the news media and their effect on public fear demand the attention of any administration.

In his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday, Mr. Obama warned of the Islamic State’s efforts to inspire people in Europe and the United States to carry out attacks.

“We know that ISIL and other terrorist groups are actively encouraging people, around the world and in our country, to commit terrible acts of violence, oftentimes as lone-wolf actors,” he said. He urged the country to uphold its values, which administration officials said means not demonizing Muslims.

“We are strong,” the president said. “And we are resilient. And we will not be terrorized.”

Ms. Monaco said the government should be careful not to take actions that feed into the Islamic State’s message of Western persecution of Muslims. “ISIL appeals to that and are doing so through social media,” she said. “If we do things that play into that, that is letting ISIL win.”

Mr. Johnson, who has met with Muslims in New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and elsewhere, said the government needs the Muslim community. “The overarching message to them is, help us help you — help us to identify someone in your community who may be heading in the wrong direction and how can we help you amplify the countermessage to the Islamic State message,” he said.

In the case of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the couple identified as the attackers in San Bernardino, all the usual defenses that presidents and counterterrorism officials have built up since Sept. 11 — airport screenings, expansive surveillance, drone strikes — proved no match for a husband and wife assembling weapons of war in the apartment they lived in with their 6-month-old baby.

Unlike the perpetrators of the attacks in Paris last month, this couple seemed to have been inspired by the Islamic State but were not acting directly on its orders. On Saturday, law enforcement officers searched the home of a friend believed to have sold two of the weapons used in the massacre, seeking information about whether he had prior knowledge of the attack.

If investigators confirm that the attack was inspired by the Islamic State, it will demonstrate the power of the militant group’s message. Through social media, the group can reach past the government’s defenses to the nation’s heart in encouraging supporters to take up arms in cities, suburbs or small towns.

John P. Carlin, the assistant attorney general for national security, said in an interview on Saturday that the Islamic State was adapting. “It’s a different iteration of the threat,” he said. “Al Qaeda really put a premium on large-scale catastrophic attacks with large loss of life. I think ISIL is trying to explore this as well, but this tactic of small-scale attacks that might fail but still inspire terror” is relatively new for the group.

He added that homegrown terrorists were harder to spot, partly because they act with less preparation. “We used to have a long time from flash to bang because Al Qaeda would spend years planning,” he said. “Now we see a much shorter time from flash to bang.”

James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., had warned in recent months that the Islamic State was seeking to “crowdsource” terrorism by inspiring followers in the West. His agents have been tracking people drawn to the group, but they cannot turn off the Internet in the home of every potential militant.

“When you invest in a narrative, a poisonous narrative that resonates with troubled souls, with unmoored people, and you do it in a slick way through social media, you buzz in their pocket 24 hours a day, saying come or kill, come or kill, that has an impact,” Mr. Comey said at a news conference on Friday.

Federal authorities have charged more than 75 people in cases linked to terrorism in the last two years, about three-quarters linked to the Islamic State and almost all with a social media connection, Mr. Carlin said. More than 60 of those were cases related to foreign fighters seeking to join the war in Syria, while about 15 were homegrown extremists. In more than half the cases, the suspects were under 25; in a third of the cases, they were under 21.

What has made the San Bernardino attack all the more alarming is that Mr. Farook and Ms. Malik tripped none of the usual wires that would alert the authorities. They did not fit the model of the Paris attackers, many of whom were raised in France or Belgium, where Muslims are not as well assimilated economically, politically and socially as they are in the United States. While counterterrorism experts never thought that greater Muslim assimilation in this country meant there could not be an attack here, the assumption that the United States was less vulnerable than Europe has been shaken by San Bernardino.

“The couple was not on any radar and had no real connections to terrorist suspects,” said Matthew G. Olsen, a former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “And what’s really troubling is that they appeared to be a well-integrated and stable couple, with a baby and a job.”

While it would be a worrisome intelligence failure if the government missed obvious warning signs, William McCants, a former State Department official who worked on countering violent extremism, said the alternative — that there were no signs at all — would be worse.

“It would mean that ISIS fans are learning to be less vocal in their fandom to avoid detection, making them much harder to identify and stop an attack,” said Mr. McCants, author of “The ISIS Apocalypse,” a new history of the Islamic State.

As a result, the massacre may presage a bitter new reality.

“It’ll gradually dawn on people,” said Bruce Jones, a former United Nations official and the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, “that we’ll be living for a long time with the possibility of low-level attacks that can never be predicted and can rarely be prevented.”

Reporting was contributed by Michael S. Schmidt, Scott Shane, Matt Apuzzo, Mark Mazzetti and Gardiner Harris from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on December 6, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rampage Has U.S. Rethinking How to Stop Attacks.

California Attack Has U.S. Rethinking Strategy on Homegrown Terror,
NYT, DEC. 5, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/us/politics/
california-attack-has-us-rethinking-strategy-on-homegrown-terror.html

Muslims in America

Condemn Extremists

and Fear Anew for Their Lives

DEC. 4, 2015

The New York Times

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Only hours after news broke that a suspect in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., had a Muslim name, the well-practiced organizations that represent American Muslims to the broader public kicked into action, as they routinely do after each terrorist attack attributed to Muslim extremists.

They issued news releases condemning the attacks as inhuman and un-Islamic, posted expressions of grief on Facebook and held news conferences in which Muslim leaders stood flanked by American flags alongside clergy of other faiths and law enforcement officials.

“Groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda,” Salam al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said at a news conference in Los Angeles on Thursday, “are trying to divide our society and to terrorize us. Our message to them is we will not be terrorized and we will not be intimidated,” either by the terrorists or, he said, “by hatemongers who exploit the fear and hysteria that results from incidents like this.”

But the message is apparently not getting through. Muslims and leaders of mosques across the United States say they are experiencing a wave of death threats, assaults and vandalism unlike anything they have experienced since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

They say that they observed an escalation in hateful episodes this fall after anti-Muslim remarks by the Republican presidential candidates Donald J. Trump and Ben Carson. The threats, vandalism and violence grew more frequent and frightening after the attacks by Islamic State militants last month in Paris.

Now, with the F.B.I. saying that one of those responsible for the San Bernardino massacre had expressed Islamic State sympathies on Facebook, American Muslims are bracing for more hate directed their way. Overnight on Friday, vandals broke all the windows at the Islamic Center of Palm Beach in Florida, turned over furniture in the prayer room and left bloody stains throughout the facility. The F.B.I. is investigating death threats left by voice mail at a mosque in Manassas, Va.

The attacks have left American Muslims feeling defensive and vulnerable just as the San Bernardino attack is forcing them to come to grips with the prospect that the threat from terrorists within their midst is very, very real.

The attack in San Bernardino, which left 14 victims dead and 21 injured, was in many ways the nightmare scenario for Muslims trying to gain full acceptance in American society: Syed Rizwan Farook, the husband who committed mass homicide with his wife, was raised in the United States and was an American citizen. He had a college education, a stable job, a comfortable home and a baby, and displayed no outward signs of anger, mental illness or radicalization. He worshiped and was known at several local mosques.

At one of those mosques — Dar al-Uloom al-Islamiyah in San Bernardino, down a long road and surrounded by palm trees — Imam Mahmood Nadvi said he had never detected any warning signs in the few conversations he had had with Mr. Farook, an inspector for the county health department.

“Everyone had an image of him being a successful person,” Imam Nadvi said. “He had a degree. He had a good post.”

The imam called the shooting a shock and a mystery. Mr. Farook, he said, “does not even represent humanity.”

Mahoor Nadvi, a teacher and assistant imam, said the mosque had received threats.

“This all has to do with ignorance,” he said.

In a news conference Friday, lawyers for Mr. Farook’s family cautioned the public against jumping to conclusions about the attackers’ motivations. One lawyer, David Chesley, said the F.B.I.’s claim that Mr. Farook’s wife, Tashfeen Malik, had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook was “nebulous” evidence.

“Until there is absolute, clear evidence, every headline doesn’t have to say ‘Muslim massacre’ or ‘Muslim shooters,’ because it’s going to cause intolerance,” Mr. Chesley said.

However, Muslim Americans are now confronting the fact that to many Americans, Mr. Farook and other terrorists do represent Islam — especially since polls show that most Americans know no Muslims and little about Islam.

“My identity and everything that I am becomes erased every time one of these incidents occurs,” said Nabihah Maqbool, 27, a law student at the University of Chicago. “It all becomes collapsed into these senseless acts of violence being committed by people who are part of my group.”

Like many other Muslim American women, Ms. Maqbool said that she had considered taking off her hijab, or head scarf, out of fear of being victimized. She said that driving back to Chicago after celebrating Thanksgiving with her family, she had decided not to stop and pray on the grassy lawn outside an interstate rest stop, as she usually does.

“I just got so nervous that something could happen to me by any unhinged individual who saw me as someone who deserved violence,” Ms. Maqbool said.

The F.B.I. said it did not yet have data for hate crimes in 2015, and would not comment on whether there had recently been a rise in attacks on Muslims and their houses of worship. A chart provided by Stephen G. Fischer Jr., chief of multimedia productions for the F.B.I.’s criminal justice information service, showed that bias-related hate crimes against Muslims were at a peak in 2001, with 481 reported. In 2014, 154 such crimes were reported.

But in recent weeks, American Muslims have reported a spate of violence and intimidation against them: women wearing head scarves accosted; Muslim children bullied; bullets shot at a mosque in Meriden, Conn.; feces thrown at a mosque in Pflugerville, Tex.

Omair Siddiqi said he had been about to get into his car in the parking lot of a shopping mall in the Dallas suburbs last month when a man came up to him, flashed a gun and said, “If I wanted to, I could kill you right now.”

Mr. Siddiqi said he stayed quiet and the man walked away. Mr. Siddiqi called 911 and is now in the process of getting a concealed-handgun permit. “It’s very scary in times like this,” he said.

In a Dallas suburb, about a dozen protesters congregated outside the Islamic Center of Irving last month, some covering their faces with bandannas and carrying hunting rifles, tactical shotguns and AR-15s. The group that organized the protest posted on Facebook a list of the names and addresses of dozens of Muslims and what they called “Muslim sympathizers.”

Khalid Y. Hamideh, a spokesman for the Islamic Association of North Texas and a Dallas lawyer, called the mosque protest “un-American.”

“It would be unfathomable for that to occur outside a church or synagogue,” he said. “At the same time, we’re realists. We understand what’s going on around the country. We thank God for our friends in law enforcement and our interfaith partners.”

Reporting was contributed by Julie Turkewitz, Ian Lovett, Manny Fernandez and Ryan Schuessler.

A version of this article appears in print on December 5, 2015, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Muslims in America Condemn Extremists and Fear Anew for Their Lives.

Muslims in America Condemn Extremists and Fear Anew for Their Lives,
NYT, DEC. 4, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/us/
muslims-in-america-condemn-extremists-and-fear-anew-for-their-lives.html

F.B.I. Treating San Bernardino Attack

as Terrorism Case

 

DEC. 4, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

WASHINGTON — On the day she and her husband killed 14 people and wounded 21 others in San Bernardino, Calif., a woman pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a Facebook post, officials said Friday, as the F.B.I. announced that it was treating the massacre as an act of terrorism.

“The investigation so far has developed indications of radicalization by the killers, and of potential inspiration by foreign terrorist organizations,” the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said at a news conference here. But he said that investigators had not found evidence that the killers were part of a larger group or terrorist cell. The couple died in a shootout with the police on Wednesday.

“There’s no indication that they are part of a network,” he said.

The woman, Tashfeen Malik, declared allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook at roughly the time of the shooting on Wednesday, according to a Facebook spokesman. At a news conference in San Bernardino, David Bowdich, the F.B.I. assistant director in charge of the Los Angeles office, said he was aware of the post, which was taken down by Facebook on Wednesday, but he would not elaborate.

“There’s a number of pieces of evidence which has essentially pushed us off the cliff to say we are considering this an act of terrorism,” he said.

The attack could prove to be the deadliest Islamic State-inspired attack on American soil. Al Qaeda and other groups have carried out — or inspired — lethal assaults in the United States, but the Islamic State, which has a base of operations in Syria and Iraq, and carried out the attack on Paris that killed 130 people last month, has turned into a leading terrorism threat with spreading influence around the world.

What began as a local police response to gunfire in San Bernardino turned into a global investigation into the deadliest terrorist assault in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, an inquiry being headed by the F.B.I. and stretching from California to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It is also the nation’s worst mass shooting in almost three years, since the slaughter at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

Early this year, the Islamic State shifted tactics, and instead of just trying to persuade followers to travel to Syria to join the group, it began calling on sympathizers in the West to commit acts of violence at home. The F.B.I. has refocused its resources on that threat of so-called homegrown, self-radicalized extremists who might be inspired by Islamic State propaganda. Even before the Paris attacks, the bureau had heavy surveillance on at least three dozen people who the authorities feared might commit violence in the Islamic State’s name.

The exact motives of Ms. Malik, 29, and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, remain unknown, and law enforcement officials say the couple had not been suspected of posing a danger. But after two days of insisting that terrorism was just one of many possibilities, the F.B.I.’s statements on that prospect grew much stronger on Friday. Officials pointed to evidence like the Facebook post and what they described as a bomb-making workshop at the couple’s home, where they found 12 completed pipe bombs and a stockpile of thousands of rounds of ammunition. Officials say that weaponry could indicate that the couple were planning more attacks.

Among the components investigators seized from the couple’s house were items common to the manufacture of pipe bombs but also “miniature Christmas tree lamps.” A recent issue of Inspire, an online magazine published by an arm of Al Qaeda, included an article, “Designing a Timed Hand Grenade,” with step-by-step instructions for making a delayed igniter with a Christmas tree lamp.

Investigators have also found evidence that in their final days, Mr. Farook and Ms. Malik tried to erase their electronic footprints, another sign of premeditation. They destroyed several electronic devices, including two smashed cellphones found in a trash can near their home, and erased emails, officials said.

When they were killed, Ms. Malik had what investigators believe might have been a “burner phone,” meant to be used for a short time and discarded, with no social media apps or other identifying information on it. Despite their efforts, the couple’s computers, phones and other electronics provide the best hope for reconstructing their communications and motives.

“We are going through a very large volume of electronic evidence,” Mr. Comey said. “This is electronic evidence that these killers tried to destroy and tried to conceal from us.”

On Wednesday morning, law enforcement officials say, Mr. Farook and Ms. Malik walked into a conference center at the Inland Regional Center, a social services center, and gunned down people at a combination training session and holiday lunch held by the county health department. Most of the victims were co-workers of Mr. Farook, who worked for the department as a health inspector. The couple wore masks and military-style vests, carried assault rifles and semiautomatic handguns, and left behind a bomb that failed to explode.

Law enforcement officials have noted that the case defies typical patterns for mass shootings or terrorist attacks. “A number of things in this case don’t make sense,” Mr. Comey said.

The Facebook posting provides one of the first significant clues to the role that Ms. Malik played in the attacks.

She was born in Pakistan, according to officials there, who added that intelligence officials were in the area on Friday, searching for her relatives. Those officials, and Mustafa H. Kuko, director of the Islamic Center of Riverside, which Mr. Farook attended for a few years, said the family moved when she was a child to Saudi Arabia, and she grew up mostly in that country.

“They were living in Saudi Arabia, but they were Pakistanis,” Mr. Kuko said. “They had been in Saudi Arabia for a long time. She grew up in the city of Jidda.”

American officials have not confirmed that, but a person close to the Saudi government confirmed that Ms. Malik had spent time in Saudi Arabia over the years, staying with her father. That person said that Saudi intelligence agencies had no information that she had any ties to militant groups, and that she was not on any terrorism watch lists.

Ms. Malik returned to Pakistan for college, graduating in 2012 with a degree in pharmacy from Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, a major city in Punjab. Pakistani officials consider the area a center of support for extremist jihadist groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba. A Pakistani intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation, said security officials were looking into Ms. Malik’s time in Pakistan, as well as travel there by Mr. Farook.

Mr. Farook was a United States citizen, born in Illinois, whose parents were from Pakistan, and he earned a degree in environmental health from California State University, San Bernardino, in 2010. Officials said that not only had he never been a criminal suspect, but that he was also never mentioned by anyone interviewed by the F.B.I.

The bureau has uncovered evidence that he had contact, a few years ago, with five people whom the F.B.I. had investigated, but not charged, on suspicion of links to terrorism. Mr. Comey said the F.B.I. was re-examining those contacts, but he added, “I would urge you not to make too much of that.”

Mr. Farook had posted profiles on Muslim dating websites, and the family’s lawyers said the couple met online. American and Saudi officials have confirmed that he spent more than a week in Saudi Arabia in July 2014 and returned with Ms. Malik, flying from Jidda to Chicago, via London. She traveled on a Pakistani passport and an American K-1 visa, the type that allows people to come to the country to marry American citizens.

Mr. Farook applied for a permanent resident green card for Ms. Malik on Sept. 20, 2014, and she was granted a conditional green card in July 2015. As a routine matter, to obtain the green card the couple had to prove that their marriage was legitimate, and Ms. Malik had to pass criminal and national security background checks that used F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security databases.

In a news conference Friday afternoon, two lawyers for the Farook family said the couple’s family were shocked by the massacre. One of the lawyers, David Chesley, also questioned whether the Facebook post was actually by Ms. Malik.

“We all want an answer,” Mr. Chesley said. “We all are angry. We’re all frustrated. We’re all sad. We want justice. But unfortunately some things in life aren’t as clear-cut as that.”

Mr. Chesley said Mr. Farook’s mother, who lived with the couple, “stayed to herself” upstairs and was “not aware of what was taking place in the rest of the house.” Law enforcement officials said the couple turned part of the house into a bomb-making factory.

Mr. Chesley added that just before the massacre, Mr. Farook told his mother that he was taking Ms. Malik to the doctor and then left their 6-month-old daughter in her care. The mother has been interviewed by investigators for seven hours, the lawyer said. And the baby is with child protective services.

A second lawyer, Mohammad Abuershaid, described Ms. Malik as a “caring” and “soft-spoken” housewife who spoke Urdu and broken English. She prayed five times a day, he said, and did not drive. He added that male relatives of Mr. Farook had never seen her face because she always kept it covered in their presence.

“She was a very, very private person,” Mr. Abuershaid said. “She kept herself pretty isolated.”

The two assault rifles the attackers used, variants of the .223-caliber AR-15 rifle, both showed signs of having been illegally modified in an effort to make them more lethal, said Meredith Davis, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Los Angeles. One had been altered to allow a larger magazine than the 10-round maximum allowed under California law, and someone had made an unsuccessful attempt to convert the other from semiautomatic to a fully automatic machine gun.

The bureau has stated that all of the couple’s guns were originally bought legally. Mr. Farook was the original purchaser of the two 9-millimeter handguns. The original buyer of the assault rifles was a person who has been interviewed, officials said, and is not considered a suspect; it was not clear how Mr. Farook and Ms. Malik obtained them, or whether that transaction was legal.

After searching the couple’s townhouse, the F.B.I. left behind a long list of items it had confiscated. Reporters were able to see the list when the landlord opened the home to them. It included a .22-caliber rifle purchased by Mr. Farook, boxes of ammunition, holsters, a cellphone SIM card, a laptop, a wireless router and a variety of tools and hardware.

The Islamic State has not released an official statement on the San Bernardino attack, but the Amaq News Agency, which intelligence officials believe is run by Islamic State supporters, released a statement claiming that the killings had been carried out by “supporters of the Islamic State,” according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group.

Michael S. Schmidt reported from Washington, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Reporting was contributed by Julie Turkewitz, Ian Lovett and Rick Rojas from San Bernardino, Calif.; Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti from Washington; Rukmini Callimachi, Julia Preston, Mike McIntire, John Corrales and Alan Schwarz from New York; Waqar Gillani from Lahore, Pakistan; Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan; and C. J. Chivers.

A version of this article appears in print on December 5, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: F.B.I. Is Treating Rampage as Act of Terrorism.

F.B.I. Treating San Bernardino Attack as Terrorism Case,
NYT, DEC. 4, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/us/tashfeen-malik-islamic-state.html

Jihadist From Tunisia

Died in Strike in Libya,

U.S. Official Says

 

JULY 2, 2015

The New York Times

By CARLOTTA GALL

and ERIC SCHMITT

TUNIS — Tunisia’s most wanted jihadist, who masterminded a campaign of assassinations and terrorist attacks, including one against the United States Embassy in Tunis, was killed in an American airstrike in Libya in mid-June that had targeted another Al Qaeda leader, a senior United States official said on Thursday.

The jihadist, Seifallah Ben Hassine, also known as Abu Ayadh, was one of Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants and the leader of the outlawed group Ansar al-Shariah in Tunisia. He had been based in Libya since 2013, according to reports, and ran training camps and a network of militant cells across the region.

His death, if confirmed, would be an important victory for Tunisia in its struggle to contain a persistent insurgency in its western border region and a growing threat to its urban centers. Just last Friday, 38 people, most of them British, were massacred at a beach resort in the town of Sousse. In March, 21 people were killed when militants attacked the national museum.

The government has attributed many of the attacks to sleeper cells established by Mr. Ben Hassine when he founded Ansar al-Shariah after Tunisia’s revolution in 2011.

The news that he had been killed in the airstrike was first reported by the Tunisian station Radio Mosaique and was confirmed by a senior American official in Washington. Officials delayed revealing the information while hoping for DNA confirmation, the radio station said.

The American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential military assessment, confirmed the Tunisian report that Mr. Ben Hassine was believed to have died last month in the same attack by Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle jets that targeted Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Algerian and the leader of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

“All indicators are that he was killed,” the official said of Mr. Ben Hassine. The official acknowledged that the United States did not have conclusive proof, like DNA evidence. But after reviewing surveillance and intelligence reports, including online chatter from jihadist fighters, analysts have come to believe that he was killed.

Mr. Ben Hassine, who was in his 40s, joined Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1990s. By 2001, he had risen to become one of Bin Laden’s top 10 lieutenants and the commander of the Tunisian Combat Group, according to a Tunisian lawyer who has followed his career closely and asked not to be named for security reasons.

Mr. Ben Hassine supplied the two Tunisian suicide bombers who assassinated the prominent Afghan commander Ahmed Shah Massoud. The assassination, two days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, has been seen as a pre-emptive strike by Al Qaeda against its Afghan opponents who were allied with the United States.

Mr. Ben Hassine fought alongside Bin Laden at Tora Bora in Afghanistan in 2001 before escaping to Pakistan and later Turkey.

He was arrested in Turkey, extradited to Tunisia in 2003 and imprisoned for terrorist activities under President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. He was released under an amnesty that benefited hundreds of Islamist political prisoners after the revolution that overthrew Mr. Ben Ali.

He founded Ansar al-Shariah, focusing on preaching, charity and the recruitment of young people. Despite his renown as a jihadist, Mr. Ben Hassine said it was not the time for jihad in Tunisia.

Nevertheless, he soon turned to violence. In September 2012, three days after the American Mission in Benghazi, Libya, was sacked and burned and four people, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed, Mr. Ben Hassine led a similar operation against the American Embassy in Tunis. Protesters burned cars and looted an American school beside the embassy, and two demonstrators were killed in clashes with the police.

Two leftist politicians were assassinated in the months that followed, attacks that Tunisian officials have said were masterminded by Mr. Ben Hassine. After the Tunisian and American governments named Ansar al-Shariah a terrorist organization, Mr. Ben Hassine fled the country.

Al Qaeda’s North African branch has denied that Mr. Belmokhtar was killed in the airstrike last month.

Carlotta Gall reported from Tunis, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on July 3, 2015, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Official Says Jihadist From Tunisia Died in Strike.

Jihadist From Tunisia Died in Strike in Libya, U.S. Official Says,
NYT, JULY 2, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/world/africa/
jihadist-from-tunisia-died-in-strike-in-libya-us-official-says.html

Tally of Attacks in U.S.

Challenges Perceptions

of Top Terror Threat

JUNE 24, 2015

The New York Times

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — In the 14 years since Al Qaeda carried out attacks on New York and the Pentagon, extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal assaults in the United States, explaining their motives in online manifestoes or social media rants.

But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.

The slaying of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last week, with an avowed white supremacist charged with their murders, was a particularly savage case. But it is only the latest in a string of lethal attacks by people espousing racial hatred, hostility to government and theories such as those of the “sovereign citizen” movement, which denies the legitimacy of most statutory law. The assaults have taken the lives of police officers, members of racial or religious minorities and random civilians.

Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period.

If such numbers are new to the public, they are familiar to police officers. A survey to be published this week asked 382 police and sheriff’s departments nationwide to rank the three biggest threats from violent extremism in their jurisdiction. About 74 percent listed antigovernment violence, while 39 percent listed “Al Qaeda-inspired” violence, according to the researchers, Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina and David Schanzer of Duke University.

“Law enforcement agencies around the country have told us the threat from Muslim extremists is not as great as the threat from right-wing extremists,” said Dr. Kurzman, whose study is to be published by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security and the Police Executive Research Forum.

John G. Horgan, who studies terrorism at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said the mismatch between public perceptions and actual cases has become steadily more obvious to scholars.

“There’s an acceptance now of the idea that the threat from jihadi terrorism in the United States has been overblown,” Dr. Horgan said. “And there’s a belief that the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has been underestimated.”

Counting terrorism cases is a notoriously subjective enterprise, relying on shifting definitions and judgment calls.

If terrorism is defined as ideological violence, for instance, should an attacker who has merely ranted about religion, politics or race be considered a terrorist? A man in Chapel Hill, N.C., who was charged with fatally shooting three young Muslim neighbors had posted angry critiques of religion, but he also had a history of outbursts over parking issues. (New America does not include this attack in its count.)

Likewise, what about mass killings in which no ideological motive is evident, such as those at a Colorado movie theater and a Connecticut elementary school in 2012? The criteria used by New America and most other research organizations exclude such attacks, which have cost more lives than those clearly tied to ideology.

Some killings by non-Muslims that most experts would categorize as terrorism have drawn only fleeting news media coverage, never jelling in the public memory. But to revisit some of the episodes is to wonder why.

In 2012, a neo-Nazi named Wade Michael Page entered a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and opened fire, killing six people and seriously wounding three others. Mr. Page, who died at the scene, was a member of a white supremacist group called the Northern Hammerskins.

In another case, in June 2014, Jerad and Amanda Miller, a married couple with radical antigovernment and neo-Nazi views, entered a Las Vegas pizza restaurant and fatally shot two police officers who were eating lunch. On the bodies, they left a swastika, a flag inscribed with the slogan “Don’t tread on me” and a note saying, “This is the start of the revolution.” Then they killed a third person in a nearby Walmart.

And, as in the case of jihadist plots, there have been sobering close calls. In November 2014 in Austin, Tex., a man named Larry McQuilliams fired more than 100 rounds at government buildings that included the Police Headquarters and the Mexican Consulate. Remarkably, his shooting spree hit no one, and he was killed by an officer before he could try to detonate propane cylinders he had driven to the scene.

Some Muslim advocates complain that when the perpetrator of an attack is not Muslim, media commentators quickly focus on the question of mental illness.

“With non-Muslims, the media bends over backward to identify some psychological traits that may have pushed them over the edge,” said Abdul Cader Asmal, a retired physician and a longtime spokesman for Boston’s Muslim community. “Whereas if it’s a Muslim, the assumption is that they must have done it because of their religion.”

On several occasions since President Obama took office, efforts by government agencies to conduct research on right-wing extremism have run into resistance from Republicans, who suspected an attempt to smear conservatives.

A 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security, which warned that an ailing economy and the election of the first black president might prompt a violent reaction from white supremacists, was withdrawn in the face of conservative criticism. Its main author, Daryl Johnson, later accused the department of “gutting” its staffing for such research.

William Braniff, the executive director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, said the outsize fear of jihadist violence reflects memories of Sept. 11, the daunting scale of sectarian conflict overseas and wariness of a strain of Islam that seems alien to many Americans.

“We understand white supremacists,” he said. “We don’t really feel like we understand Al Qaeda, which seems too complex and foreign to grasp.”

The contentious question of biased perceptions of terrorist threats dates back at least two decades, to the truck bombing that tore apart the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Some early media speculation about the attack assumed that it had been carried out by Muslim militants. The arrest of Timothy McVeigh, an antigovernment extremist, quickly put an end to such theories.

The bombing, which killed 168 people, including 19 children, remains the second-deadliest terrorist attack in American history, though its toll was dwarfed by the roughly 3,000 killed on Sept 11.

“If there’s one lesson we seem to have forgotten 20 years after Oklahoma City, it’s that extremist violence comes in all shapes and sizes,” said Dr. Horgan, the University of Massachusetts scholar. “And very often it comes from someplace you’re least suspecting.”

Tally of Attacks in U.S. Challenges Perceptions of Top Terror Threat,
NYT, JUNE 24, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/
tally-of-attacks-in-us-challenges-perceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html

Gunman in Texas Shooting

Was F.B.I. Suspect in Jihad Inquiry

 

MAY 4, 2015

The New York Times

By MANNY FERNANDEZ,

RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

and FERNANDA SANTOS

GARLAND, Tex. — One was an extrovert drawn to basketball as well as to Islam, who had been identified by the F.B.I. as a jihadist terrorism suspect and was once a regular at Friday Prayer at a mosque near his Phoenix apartment. The other was more quiet, ran a carpet cleaning business in Phoenix and often prayed at the same mosque, sometimes accompanied by his young son.

It is still not entirely clear what led the two men — Elton Simpson, 30, and Nadir Hamid Soofi, 34, who lived in the same apartment complex in Phoenix — to come to this Dallas suburb and open fire Sunday outside a gathering that showcased artwork and cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

The shootout — during which Mr. Simpson and Mr. Soofi, dressed in body armor, fired assault rifles at police officers — left both of them dead.

What has become clear, however, is that what took place in a suburban Texas parking lot near a Walmart has pointed up the volatile tensions between the West’s embrace of free expression and the insistence of many Muslims that depiction of the Prophet Muhammad is a sacrilege. It served as a grim reminder of the attack 16 weeks ago on the Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper.

In this case, unlike in the massacre of journalists and cartoonists in Paris in January, only the gunmen were killed. Mr. Simpson and Mr. Soofi were shot to death by a Garland traffic officer who was part of a beefed-up security presence outside the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest, where artists were offered a $10,000 top prize for the best caricature of the prophet.

It immediately set off a heated debate over art and activism as organizers of the art exhibit said they intended to celebrate free speech. Pamela Geller, an organizer of the event, said it was held at Curtis Culwell Center here because members had heard that a Muslim group had a conference in the same room after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office.

She described Sunday’s event as pro-free speech, and said that Muslims had become a “special class” that Americans were no longer allowed to offend.

Muslim and religious advocates, while denouncing the violence, called the show an offensive effort to insult Muslims. “The so-called ‘Muslim Art Exhibit’ where the shooting took place is an event deserving of criticism even absent yesterday’s violence,” said Rabbi Jack Moline, executive director of the Interfaith Alliance in Washington.

The two men who opened fire seemed to embody the contradictions of radical Islam and suburban America. Mr. Soofi once owned a pizza and hot-wings restaurant called Cleopatra, and he drifted away from the mosque while trying to run it.

Mr. Simpson, an American-born convert to Islam who was adored by the young men who frequented the Islamic Community Center in northwest Phoenix, was convicted in 2011 of lying to F.B.I. agents — denying that he had made plans to travel to Somalia when in fact he had. Federal prosecutors charged that he wanted to go “for the purpose of engaging in violent jihad,” but a judge ruled that the government had not proved that part of the charge, and sentenced him to three years’ probation.

The F.B.I. and the police in Phoenix opened a new investigation into Mr. Simpson several months ago after he began posting on social media about the Islamic State, the extremist group also known as ISIS or ISIL, according to law enforcement officials. As part of that inquiry, the authorities monitored his online postings and occasionally put him under surveillance, but they had no indication that he planned to launch the attack in Garland, the officials said.

The F.B.I. had not previously investigated Mr. Soofi, they said. Police officers and federal agents raided an apartment in Phoenix early Monday that neighbors identified as Mr. Simpson’s home; public records show Mr. Soofi living in the same apartment complex, but it was not clear if they lived together.

About the time of the attack Sunday, on a Twitter account with the name “Shariah is Light” that has since been suspended, someone posted using the hashtag #texasattack. The profile picture on the account is of Anwar al-Awlaki, a militant imam killed in a 2011 American drone strike in Yemen.

Mr. Awlaki repeatedly called for violence against cartoonists who, in his view, insulted the Prophet Muhammad. The Twitter post says that the writer and the man with him have “given bay’ah,” or pledged loyalty, “to Amirul Mu’mineen,” a title meaning commander of the faithful that was used by early Muslim rulers and has been claimed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State. “May Allah accept us as mujahedeen.”

The nonprofit Middle East Media Research Institute identified the account as belonging to one of the two gunmen, and said that some of his social media contacts were known supporters of the Islamic State.

Asked whether the Twitter account was Mr. Simpson’s, a senior law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said, “That’s certainly what we believe at this point.” The official, who spoke about the investigation on condition of anonymity, said there was no evidence so far that the attack had been directed or planned by a foreign terrorist group, though sorting out the communications between the attackers and militants using social media and other means would take some time.

In Washington, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement on Monday that law enforcement authorities continued to investigate the suspects’ motives.

“While all the facts are not in yet, last night’s attack serves as a reminder that free and protected speech, no matter how offensive to some, never justifies violence of any sort,” Mr. Johnson said.

In Phoenix, Usama Shami, president of the Islamic Community Center, a mosque three miles south of where Mr. Simpson and Mr. Soofi lived, described Mr. Simpson as well liked among the young men of the mosque.

Joe Harn, a Garland Police Department spokesman, discussed the shooting on Sunday outside an event in Texas that featured cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. By Associated Press on Publish Date May 4, 2015. Photo by Brandon Wade/Associated Press.

Mr. Simpson had converted to Islam while in high school and adopted the Muslim name Ibrahim, Mr. Shami said. Mr. Simpson was focused on the basic issues about his faith, grounded in questions young converts ask about fasting and the rules of courtship and marriage, Mr. Shami said.

Mr. Simpson never engaged in radical speech at the mosque, never questioned the pacifist message sermons were built around, Mr. Shami said.

But Mr. Shami said Mr. Simpson seemed changed after his federal case. He would show up only occasionally on Fridays. “There were no flashes of anger or radicalization, just an absence of happiness,” Mr. Shami said.

In a statement, relatives of Mr. Simpson called the shooting an “act of senseless violence.”

“As a family we do not condone violence and proudly support the men and women of our law enforcement agencies,” read the statement, which was released by the Phoenix law firm Osborn Maledon. “We are sure many people in this country are curious to know if we had any idea of Elton’s plans. To that we say, without question, we did not.”

A Facebook page that appears to be Mr. Soofi’s says he graduated from the International School of Islamabad, in Pakistan, in 1998, but a first cousin of his said he was born in the United States. The page also says he attended the University of Utah.

“We’re all devastated,” the cousin, who did not want to be identified, said of Mr. Soofi’s relatives. “We just barely found out just now on CNN.”

Some years ago, Mr. Soofi sold his Phoenix pizza restaurant, which was struggling. Mr. Soofi had moved to Arizona from Texas, and he and Mr. Simpson seemed to have struck a friendship, but to Mr. Shami, it was nothing that seemed out of the ordinary.

On Sunday, the art exhibit and contest unfolded without incident for nearly two hours beginning about 5 p.m. inside the Culwell center, which is run by the Garland Independent School District. About 200 men and women were in attendance.

Weeks ago, Garland police commanders, assisted by city and school district officials, came up with a security plan shortly after the district agreed to rent the facility to the organizers, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, a New York-based group that also uses the name Stop Islamization of America.

The group paid an additional $10,000 for security at the event that included scores of uniformed officers, a bomb squad and a police SWAT team in military fatigues, the authorities said.

About 6:50 p.m., shortly before the contest was scheduled to end, Mr. Simpson and Mr. Soofi, in a dark-colored sedan, approached a police patrol car that had blocked their entrance to the event.

Inside the patrol car at the west entrance to the parking lot were a Garland traffic officer and a school district security officer, and they were exiting their vehicle as the sedan drove toward them, the authorities said.

Mr. Simpson and Mr. Soofi stopped their sedan, stepped from their vehicle and opened fire on the officers, using the back of the car as cover. In a matter of seconds, the Garland traffic officer shot and killed both gunmen with his service pistol, officials said.

Officer Joe Harn, a spokesman for the Garland Police Department, said that both suspects died in the parking lot next to the sedan. The school officer, who was unarmed, was shot in the lower leg, but was later treated and released from a hospital.

Manny Fernandez reported from Garland, Richard Pérez-Peña from New York, and Fernanda Santos from Phoenix. Reporting was contributed by Michael S. Schmidt and Scott Shane from Washington; Rebekah Zemansky from Phoenix; and Timothy Williams, Liam Stack and Ashley Southall from New York. Susan Beachy contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on May 5, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Gunman in Texas Was F.B.I. Suspect in Jihad Inquiry.

Gunman in Texas Shooting Was F.B.I. Suspect in Jihad Inquiry,
NYT, MAY 4, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/us/
garland-texas-shooting-muhammad-cartoons.html

Terrorism Case

Renews Debate Over Drone Hits

 

APRIL 12, 2015

The New York Times

By MARK MAZZETTI

and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — A Texas-born man suspected of being an operative for Al Qaeda stood before a federal judge in Brooklyn this month. Two years earlier, his government debated whether he should be killed by a drone strike in Pakistan.

The denouement in the hunt for the man, Mohanad Mahmoud Al Farekh, who was arrested last year in Pakistan based on intelligence provided by the United States, came after a yearslong debate inside the government about whether to kill an American citizen overseas without trial — an extraordinary step taken only once before, when the Central Intelligence Agency killed the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.

Mr. Farekh’s court appearance also came as the Obama administration was struggling to fashion new guidelines for targeted killings. The decision to use an allied intelligence service to arrest Mr. Farekh has bolstered a case made by some that capturing — rather than killing — militant suspects, even in some of the world’s most remote places, is more feasible than the orders for hundreds of drone strikes might indicate.

“This is an example that capturing can be done,” said Micah Zenko, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies counterterrorism strikes.

The Obama administration’s discussions about the fate of Mr. Farekh, who used the nom de guerre Abdullah al-Shami, began in earnest in 2012, and in the months that followed the C.I.A. and the Pentagon ramped up surveillance of his movements around Pakistani tribal areas.

Drones spotted him several times in the early months of 2013, and spy agencies used a warrant issued by the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor his communications. The Pentagon nominated Mr. Farekh to be placed on a so-called kill list for terrorism suspects; C.I.A. officials also pushed for the White House to authorize his killing.

But the Justice Department, particularly Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., was skeptical of the intelligence dossier on Mr. Farekh, questioning whether he posed an imminent threat to the United States and whether he was as significant a player in Al Qaeda as the Pentagon and the C.I.A. described. Mr. Holder and his aides also thought it might be possible to capture Mr. Farekh and bring him to trial.

The discussions took place less than two years after the 2011 targeted killing of Mr. Awlaki, and Justice Department officials were sensitive to the criticism leveled against the department for approving that strike.

“Because he was an American citizen, we needed more information,” said one former senior official. “Post-Awlaki, there was a lot of nervousness about this.”

Another complicating factor emerged in May 2013, when the president imposed new rules for targeted killings and announced some of the rules in a speech at National Defense University.

At the time of the speech, the White House also announced that four American citizens had been killed in drone strikes during Mr. Obama’s time in office — but that only Mr. Awlaki had been specifically targeted. The three others had been killed in strikes aimed at others.

In a classified order finalized at the time of Mr. Obama’s speech, the White House directed that the Pentagon, rather than the C.I.A., should conduct lethal strikes against American citizens suspected of terrorism. That provision was designed, at least in theory, to allow government officials to speak more freely about any operation after it had occurred.

But the Pentagon has long been banned from conducting drone strikes in Pakistan, part of a 2004 deal with Pakistan that all such attacks be carried out by the C.I.A. under its authority to take covert action — allowing Pakistan to publicly deny any knowledge of the strikes and American officials to remain silent.

This account is based in part on interviews with more than a half-dozen current and former senior American law enforcement, intelligence, military and counterterrorism officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the pending criminal case. Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the C.I.A. declined to comment, as did Pakistani officials.

Ned Price, a White House spokesman, said: “As a general matter, the administration has made the long arm of American justice clear time and again. And the fact that the accused was successfully detained overseas and brought back to the United States to face trial is a testament to our persistence when it comes to pursuing those who would seek to harm the United States and its interests.”

The debate over what to do about Mr. Farekh stalled, infuriating members of Congress. During a closed-door hearing of the House Intelligence Committee in July 2013, lawmakers grilled military and intelligence officials about why Mr. Farekh had not been killed.

“We’ve never seen a bigger mess,” said Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who was the committee’s chairman at the time, according to one person who attended the meeting.

Mr. Farekh’s eventual arrest has given ammunition to legal experts who say that capturing suspects is a far more preferable option.

Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the secret meetings about whether to kill an American citizen “chilling.” Mr. Jaffer, who has sued the Obama administration to make public the legal arguments underpinning its targeted killing program, said it was “telling” that parts of the government advocated for the killing of Mr. Farekh even though capture turned out to be possible.

“Senior intelligence officials have assured the public that drone killings are a last resort,” Mr. Jaffer said. “But the C.I.A. and Pentagon don’t appear to have internalized that principle.”

But many counterterrorism specialists say capturing terrorism suspects often hinges on unreliable allies. "It’s a gamble to rely on a partner service to pick up the target," said Philip Mudd, a former senior F.B.I. and C.I.A. official.

Mr. Farekh, with a beard and pensive expression, was arraigned in federal court on April 2, but few details about his background are available publicly. American officials said he left Texas with his family when he was a young boy and spent most of his early life in Jordan.

A Justice Department complaint unsealed on the day he appeared in court said he had studied at the University of Manitoba. The complaint said he was radicalized in part by the online sermons of Mr. Awlaki before he and friends departed for Pakistan in March 2007.

Once in Pakistan, Mr. Farekh appears to have worked his way up the ranks of Al Qaeda, his ascent aided by marrying the daughter of a top Qaeda leader.

American officials said he became one of the terrorist network’s planners for operations outside Pakistan, a position that included work on the production and distribution of roadside bombs used against American troops in Afghanistan.

Some published reports have said that Mr. Farekh held the third-highest position in Al Qaeda, but Americans officials said the reports were exaggerated.

His level in the Qaeda hierarchy remains a matter of some dispute. Several American officials said that the criminal complaint against him underplayed his significance inside the terrorist group, but that the complaint — based on the testimony of several cooperating witnesses — was based only on what federal prosecutors believed they could prove during a trial.

Mr. Farekh was arrested late last year by Pakistani security forces acting on intelligence provided by American spy agencies, United States officials said. The location of his capture is unclear, but Pakistani officials held him secretly for months, with American operatives occasionally feeding questions to his Pakistani interrogators.

Eventually, he was handed over to the United States and examined by the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, a team that questions terrorism suspects. He was then formally charged with conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism.

On the day Mr. Farekh appeared in court, Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney, released a statement saying, “We will continue to use every tool at our disposal to bring such individuals to justice.”
 

Matt Apuzzo and Scott Shane contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Considered Killing a Citizen Now Facing Trial.

Terrorism Case Renews Debate Over Drone Hits, NYT,
APRIL 12, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/us/
terrorism-case-renews-debate-over-drone-hits.html

In the Boston Marathon Bombing,

a Verdict, but Few Answers

APRIL 8, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

It took more than three months from start to verdict in the Boston Marathon bombing trial. It will most likely take another couple of months for the government and the defense to lay out, respectively, the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and for the jury to determine whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of all 30 charges on Wednesday, gets the death penalty, or life without parole. The trial has been an astoundingly time-consuming and expensive undertaking, but it has not given the public what it needs and wants most: the fullest possible understanding of what happened.

The two sides offered distinct visions of Mr. Tsarnaev’s motives. The prosecution claimed that he and his older brother, Tamerlan, were equal partners in crime and were “self-radicalized.” The defense argued that the younger brother was brainwashed and dominated by the older.

The problem with these narratives is the very premise of radicalization — the idea that people become terrorists as a result of being indoctrinated by an organization or, as the newly coined term “self-radicalization” would suggest, indoctrinating themselves. This idea has little basis in fact or scholarship. A close examination would shed light on the lure of terrorism, which gives the disenfranchised a chance to become part of something greater. An even closer examination would show that the “war on terror” has contributed to the mythology of international Islamic terrorism as a mighty and glorious entity.

Even worse, two critical questions have not been answered. Where were the bombs built? Investigators have testified that they were not built at the older brother’s apartment or in the younger brother’s dorm room. Were they built in someone else’s apartment, house or garage? If so, who, and was he a knowing accomplice? Did he help in any other way?

The other big question is: Why did the F.B.I. fail to identify Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother, who had been fingered as a potential terrorist risk two years before the bombing and interviewed by field agents? Within 24 hours of the bombing, on April 15, 2013, investigators focused on images of the brothers in surveillance tapes recovered from the scene. Yet they had no names — and more than two days later they released the photos to the public, asking for help with identifying the suspects. How is it possible that someone who had been interviewed by a member of the local Joint Terrorism Task Force could not be identified from the pictures?

There are other questions, big and small. But these two are clearly essential to understanding what went wrong in Boston two years ago. Yet in the course of the trial they were barely discussed.

Arguably, they shouldn’t have been. An American criminal trial is designed to assess guilt and administer justice, not to look for truth — and truth and justice are not synonymous.

Sadly, other authorities have also failed to fully account for what happened or what can be done to prevent it from happening again.

Last week the Commonwealth of Massachusetts released its long-awaited “After Action Report” on the response to the marathon bombing. It contained some criticism of the haphazard nature of the police response but nothing on where the bombs were built, much less the F.B.I.’s failures.

As for the F.B.I., Congress has so far neglected its oversight role. In March 2014 the House Committee on Homeland Security released its report on the bombing. It was nearly useless: It contained less information than what was widely available from news reports. What it did include were complaints of various unnamed federal agencies’ failures to cooperate in the research leading to the report. In the course of this research, several members of Congress traveled to Russia; their trip culminated with a briefing at the United States Embassy in Moscow that included Steven Seagal, a washed-up action-movie star who has been acting as a kind of Kremlin P.R. flak specializing in Chechnya. The only reason this congressional trip did not become a source of embarrassment was that virtually no journalists covered it.

The inspectors general of the intelligence community, the C.I.A., the Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security issued a brief report in April 2014. It blamed the Russian security agencies for not sharing more information on Tamerlan Tsarnaev with their American counterparts.

In short, not a single government agency has told Americans how someone who had once been fingered as a terrorism suspect could hatch a bombing plot and carry it out; how he managed to escape identification; and who helped the brothers carry out their plan.

Unlike some other people who have touched this case, the lawyers in federal court in Boston have done their jobs remarkably well. The prosecution laid out a meticulously timed and skillfully scripted case, leaving the jury with a clear picture of unspeakable carnage and cruelty. The defense wisely refrained from challenging the testimony of any victims or witnesses. It cross-examined only F.B.I. agents and experts — and, tellingly, some of them sounded unprepared and underinformed when questioned. The sole job of the defense now is to make sure Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lives. The prosecution’s task is to persuade the jury to sentence him to death. That means that, riveting as the next phase of the Boston bombing trial may be, these proceedings cannot and will not move us closer to the truth.
 

Masha Gessen, a contributing opinion writer, is the author, most recently, of “The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy.”

In the Boston Marathon Bombing, a Verdict, but Few Answers,
NYT, APRIL 8, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/opinion/in-the-boston-marathon-bombing-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-verdict-but-few-answers.html

Two Queens Women

Charged in Bomb Plot

APRIL 2, 2015

The New York Times

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Two women living in Queens have been charged with planning to build a bomb that they wanted to detonate in the United States.

The women, Noelle Velentzas, 28, and Asia Siddiqui, 31, who until recently were roommates, were named in a complaint unsealed on Thursday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, and were expected to appear in court on Thursday afternoon.

Ms. Velentzas and Ms. Siddiqui, who are American citizens, appeared to be interested in jihad, according to the complaint, which said they had been communicating with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula personnel and had been viewing violent videos made by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

In the complaint, the government said the plot advanced to the point that Ms. Siddiqui bought four propane gas tanks and stored them in a stairwell outside her apartment. Earlier, the women had bought potassium gluconate at a Queens pharmacy, bought the fertilizer Miracle-Gro (which can be used as a bomb component) and read about and discussed bomb-making.

The complaint does not indicate that the women had a specific target. During the probe, investigators deployed an undercover agent, according to the government documents.

In conversations recorded by the government, Ms. Velentzas expressed “a preference for attacking military or government targets, rather than civilian targets,” the complaint said. The women “implied that their goal was to learn how to blow up a bomb from afar rather than conduct a suicide bombing,” it says.

In December, after the funeral of the New York police officer Rafael Ramos, who was killed in his patrol car, Ms. Velentzas seemed to home in on “whether a police funeral was an appropriate terrorist target,” the complaint says.

Ms. Velentzas seemed to see a limited future for herself. “I might get old here and be able to put a lot of people onto wisdom and reason, or I’m going to be in solitary confinement, and get raped or tortured, or I’m going to be killed in the street. That is your future in America,” she said in a conversation recorded in February, adding that her three outcomes were becoming a grandmother, death or solitary confinement.

In 2013, the complaint suggests, an undercover officer began meeting with Ms. Siddiqui and Ms. Velentzas. Those meetings became regular after July 2014, when agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigations questioned Ms. Siddiqui at La Guardia Airport.

Since July 2014, the complaint says, “Velentzas and Siddiqui have discussed constructing an explosive device to be used in a terrorist attack in the United States.”

Ms. Siddiqui and Ms. Velentzas both studied chemistry and other elements of bomb-making, including topics like soldering. In November 2014, they bought potassium gluconate at a pharmacy after reading about it in a chemistry book, the complaint says, then drove to a Home Depot to look at “copper wires, paint containers with the word ‘combustible,’ small and large metal pipes, a bag of sodium chloride, and heater fluid containers” along with manure, which Ms. Velentzas noted was used in the Oklahoma City bombings.

The undercover officer appeared to be quite involved in the plot. In November, the officer told the women that he or she had downloaded “The Anarchist Cookbook,” which lays out how to make homemade bombs, among other topics, and had visited the library to do research on bomb-making.

By late November, Ms. Velentzas seemed to become suspicious of the undercover officer, using her phone to look at pages like “How to Spot Undercover Police,” running searches on the name the undercover officer had given, and researching how to figure out if someone is being bugged.

However, she continued to discuss the plot with the undercover officer, debating the merits of nitroglycerin versus potassium chloride.

Two Queens Women Charged in Bomb Plot,
NYT, APRIL 2, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/03/nyregion/
two-queens-women-charged-in-bomb-plot.html

Guantánamo’s Charade of Justice

MARCH 27, 2015

By MORRIS D. DAVIS

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

LAST week, we learned that, only months into the job, the official in charge of the military courts system at Guantánamo Bay was stepping down, after judges ruled he had interfered in proceedings. The appointment of an interim replacement was the sixth change of leadership for the tribunals since 2003.

This is yet another setback for the military commissions, as they tackle two of their highest-profile cases: the joint trial of the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and four alleged co-conspirators, and the trial of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole.

That’s not all. Besides the revolving door at the convening authority’s office, six military attorneys have served as chief prosecutor for these courts over the same period. (I was the third.)

Think about that for a moment. If a professional football team was on its seventh head coach and sixth quarterback in less than a dozen years, that team would almost certainly be a loser.

On Dec. 31, 2001, the venerable Washington lawyer Lloyd N. Cutler wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal titled “Lessons on Tribunals — From 1942.” Mr. Cutler, a young attorney at the Justice Department in the summer of 1942, served on the team that prosecuted the eight German saboteurs whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered tried before a military commission following their capture on American soil.

While Mr. Cutler noted some shortcomings in the way the military commission had been conducted in 1942 and advised the Bush administration to avoid repeating those mistakes at Guantánamo Bay, he was generally optimistic that after a six-decade respite military commissions could be revived and used in a credible manner.

“But success will depend on the quality of the judges, the prosecutors and the defense lawyers, and their ability to show the world that justice is in fact being done,” he concluded. “In a very real sense, it is the American legal system, not just Al Qaeda’s leaders, that would be on trial.”

So how have Guantánamo’s tribunals performed, more than 13 years on?

Just six detainees have been both convicted and sentenced for war crimes in military commissions since President George W. Bush first authorized them in November 2001.

Charges against three were later dismissed, and five who were convicted were eventually transferred from Guantánamo. Thus we have a legal system where it is more advantageous to be found guilty of a war crime than never to be charged at all and remain imprisoned indefinitely.

About 85 percent of the 779 men ever held at Guantánamo are no longer there. Most left during the Bush administration. While the number of transfers has been much smaller under the Obama administration, the pace accelerated in the latter part of 2014.

Of the 122 men detained, nearly half have been cleared for transfer by unanimous votes of military, intelligence, law enforcement and diplomatic officials who determined that the detainees could not be prosecuted, posed no identifiable threat to the United States and did not need to remain in our custody. Nevertheless, 56 men cleared to leave still remain, at a cost of about $3 million a year per detainee.

As unfortunate as this waste of resources and damage to America’s reputation are, the greatest tragedy is the pain inflicted on the friends and families of the 9/11 and Cole victims. For them, justice has been endlessly delayed.

Rather than showing “the world that justice is in fact being done,” as Mr. Cutler wrote, Guantánamo has come to symbolize torture and indefinite detention, and its court system has been discredited as an opaque and dysfunctional process. The latest reshuffle of personnel will not alter this impression.

In November 2013, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. admitted that, had the administration not given up on its plan to try the 9/11 case in federal court, Mr. Mohammed and his colleagues “would be on death row as we speak.” Mr. Holder blamed partisan politics for the revival of the military commissions.

In the 16 months since, those observations have received further validation. While Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law Sulaiman Abu Ghaith and the radical cleric Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, also known as Abu Hamza al-Masri, were convicted and sentenced to life in prison by federal courts, the tribunals at Guantánamo stumbled from one mishap to another.

We need to set politics aside and end this litany of failure. We have competent and credible federal courts that can provide justice — and finally a measure of closure for the thousands of our fellow citizens who have had to wait far too long.
 

Morris D. Davis, a retired Air Force colonel, was the chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay from September 2005 until October 2007.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 28, 2015, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Guantánamo’s Charade of Justice.

Guantánamo’s Charade of Justice, NYT, MARCH 27, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/28/opinion/guantanamos-charade-of-justice.html

C.I.A. Cash

Ended Up in Coffers of Al Qaeda

 

MARCH 14, 2015

The New York Times

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

WASHINGTON — In the spring of 2010, Afghan officials struck a deal to free an Afghan diplomat held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the price was steep — $5 million — and senior security officials were scrambling to come up with the money.

They first turned to a secret fund that the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul, according to several Afghan officials involved in the episode. The Afghan government, they said, had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund.

Within weeks, that money and $4 million more provided from other countries was handed over to Al Qaeda, replenishing its coffers after a relentless C.I.A. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan had decimated the militant network’s upper ranks.

“God blessed us with a good amount of money this month,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the group’s general manager, wrote in a letter to Osama bin Laden in June 2010, noting that the cash would be used for weapons and other operational needs.

Bin Laden urged caution, fearing the Americans knew about the payment and had laced the cash with radiation or poison, or were tracking it. “There is a possibility — not a very strong one — that the Americans are aware of the money delivery,” he wrote back, “and that they accepted the arrangement of the payment on the basis that the money will be moving under air surveillance.”

The C.I.A.’s contribution to Qaeda’s bottom line, though, was no well-laid trap. It was just another in a long list of examples of how the United States, largely because of poor oversight and loose financial controls, has sometimes inadvertently financed the very militants it is fighting.

While refusing to pay ransoms for Americans kidnapped by Al Qaeda, the Taliban or, more recently, the Islamic State, the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last decade at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of which has been siphoned off to enemy fighters.

The letters about the 2010 ransom were included in correspondence between Bin Laden and Mr. Rahman that was submitted as evidence by federal prosecutors at the Brooklyn trial of Abid Naseer, a Pakistani Qaeda operative who was convicted this month of supporting terrorism and conspiring to bomb a British shopping center.

The letters were unearthed from the cache of computers and documents seized by Navy SEALs during the 2011 raid in which Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and had been classified until introduced as evidence at the trial.

Details of the C.I.A.’s previously unreported contribution to the ransom demanded by Al Qaeda were drawn from the letters and from interviews with Afghan and Western officials speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The C.I.A. declined to comment.

The diplomat freed in exchange for the cash, Abdul Khaliq Farahi, was serving as the Afghan consul general in Peshawar, Pakistan, when he was kidnapped in September 2008 as he drove to work. He had been weeks away from taking up his new job as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan.

Afghan and Pakistani insurgents had grabbed Mr. Farahi, but within days they turned him over to Qaeda members. He was held for more than two years.

The Afghan government had no direct contact with Al Qaeda, stymieing negotiations until the Haqqani network, an Afghan insurgent faction with close ties to Al Qaeda, stepped in to mediate.

Qaeda leaders wanted some captive militants released, and from the letters it appeared that they calibrated their offer, asking only for men held by Afghan authorities, not those imprisoned by the Americans, who would refuse the demand as a matter of policy. But the Afghans refused to release any prisoners, “so we decided to proceed with a financial exchange,” Mr. Rahman wrote in the June 2010 letter. “The amount we agreed on in the deal was $5 million.”

The first $2 million was delivered shortly before that letter was written. In it, Mr. Rahman asked Bin Laden if he needed money, and said “we have also designated a fair amount to strengthen the organization militarily by stockpiling good weapons.” (The Qaeda leaders named in the letters were identified by aliases. Bin Laden, for instance, signed his letters Zamray; Mr. Rahman, who was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan in August 2011, went by the alias Mahmud.)

The cash would also be used to aid the families of Qaeda fighters held prisoner in Afghanistan, and some was given to Ayman al-Zawahri, who would succeed Bin Laden as the Qaeda leader and was identified in the letters under the alias Abu-Muhammad, Mr. Rahman said.

Other militant groups had already heard about the ransom payment and had their hands out, Mr. Rahman reported. “As you know, you cannot control the news,” he wrote. “They are asking us to give them money, may God help us.”

But Bin Laden was clearly worried that the payout was an American ruse intended to reveal the locations of senior Qaeda leaders. “It seems a bit strange somewhat because in a country like Afghanistan, usually they would not pay this kind of money to free one of their men,” he wrote.

“Is any of his relatives a big official?” he continued, referring to Mr. Farahi, the diplomat. It was a prescient question: Mr. Farahi was the son-in-law of a man who had served as a mentor to then-President Hamid Karzai.

Advocating caution, Bin Laden advised Mr. Rahman to change the money into a different currency at one bank, and then go to another and exchange the money again into whatever currency was preferred. “The reason for doing that is to be on the safe side in case harmful substances or radiation is put on paper money,” Bin Laden wrote.

Neither of the two men appeared to have known where the money actually came from. Aside from the C.I.A. money, Afghan officials said that Pakistan contributed nearly half the ransom in an effort to end what it viewed as a disruptive sideshow in its relations with Afghanistan. The remainder came from Iran and Persian Gulf states, which had also contributed to the Afghan president’s secret fund.

In a letter dated Nov. 23, 2010, Mr. Rahman reported to Bin Laden that the remaining $3 million had been received and that Mr. Farahi had been released.

The C.I.A., meanwhile, continued dropping off bags of cash — ranging each time from a few hundred thousand dollars to more than $1 million — at the presidential palace every month until last year, when Mr. Karzai stepped down.

The money was used to buy the loyalty of warlords, legislators and other prominent — and potentially troublesome — Afghans, helping the palace finance a vast patronage network that secured Mr. Karzai’s power base. It was also used to cover expenses that needed to be kept off the books, such as clandestine diplomatic trips, and for more mundane costs, including rent payments for the guesthouses where some senior officials lived.

The cash flow has slowed since a new president, Ashraf Ghani, assumed office in September, Afghan officials said, refusing to elaborate. But they added that cash was still coming in, and that it was not clear how robust any current American constraints on it are.

“It’s cash,” said a former Afghan security official. “Once it’s at the palace, they can’t do a thing about how it gets spent.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on March 15, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cash From C.I.A. Ends Up as Part of Qaeda Funds.

C.I.A. Cash Ended Up in Coffers of Al Qaeda, NYT,
MARCH 14, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/world/asia/cia-funds-found-their-way-into-al-qaeda-coffers.html

ISIS Onslaught

Engulfs Assyrian Christians

as Militants Destroy Ancient Art

 

FEB. 26, 2015

The New York Times

By ANNE BARNARD

ISTANBUL — The reports are like something out of a distant era of ancient conquests: entire villages emptied, with hundreds taken prisoner, others kept as slaves; the destruction of irreplaceable works of art; a tax on religious minorities, payable in gold.

A rampage reminiscent of Tamerlane or Genghis Khan, perhaps, but in reality, according to reports by residents, activist groups and the assailants themselves, a description of the modus operandi of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate this week. The militants have prosecuted a relentless campaign in Iraq and Syria against what have historically been religiously and ethnically diverse areas with traces of civilizations dating to ancient Mesopotamia.

The latest to face the militants’ onslaught are the Assyrian Christians of northeastern Syria, one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, some speaking a modern version of Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

Assyrian leaders have counted 287 people taken captive, including 30 children and several dozen women, along with civilian men and fighters from Christian militias, said Dawoud Dawoud, an Assyrian political activist who had just toured the area, in the vicinity of the Syrian city of Qamishli. Thirty villages had been emptied, he said.

The Syriac Military Council, a local Assyrian militia, put the number of those taken at 350.

Reached in Qamishli, Adul Ahad Nissan, 48, an accountant and music composer who fled his village before the brunt of the fighting, said a close friend and his wife had been captured.

“I used to call them every other day. Now their mobile is off,” he said. “I tried and tried. It’s so painful not to see your friends again.”

Members of the Assyrian diaspora have called for international intervention, and on Thursday, warplanes of the United States-led coalition struck targets in the area, suggesting that the threat to a minority enclave had galvanized a reaction, as a similar threat did in the Kurdish city of Kobani last year.

The assault on the Assyrian communities comes amid battles for a key crossroads in the area. But to residents, it also seems to be part of the latest effort by the Islamic State militants to eradicate or subordinate anyone and anything that does not comport with their vision of Islamic rule — whether a minority sect that has survived centuries of conquerors and massacres or, as the world was reminded on Thursday, the archaeological traces of pre-Islamic antiquity.

An Islamic State video showed the militants smashing statues with sledgehammers inside the Mosul Museum, in northern Iraq, that showcases recent archaeological finds from the ancient Assyrian empire. The relics include items from the palace of King Sennacherib, who in the Byron poem “came down like the wolf on the fold” to destroy his enemies.

“A tragedy and catastrophic loss for Iraqi history and archaeology beyond comprehension,” Amr al-Azm, the Syrian anthropologist and historian, called the destruction on his Facebook page.

“These are some of the most wonderful examples of Assyrian art, and they’re part of the great history of Iraq, and of Mesopotamia,” he said in an interview. “The whole world has lost this.”

Islamic State militants seized the museum — which had not yet opened to the public — when they took over Mosul in June and have repeatedly threatened to destroy its collection.

In the video, put out by the Islamic State’s media office for Nineveh Province — named for an ancient Assyrian city — a man explains, “The monuments that you can see behind me are but statues and idols of people from previous centuries, which they used to worship instead of God.”

A message flashing on the screen read: “Those statues and idols weren’t there at the time of the Prophet nor his companions. They have been excavated by Satanists.”

The men, some bearded and in traditional Islamic dress, others clean-shaven in jeans and T-shirts, were filmed toppling and destroying artifacts. One is using a power tool to deface a winged lion much like a pair on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has presented itself as a modern-day equivalent of the conquering invaders of Sennacherib’s day, or as Islamic zealots smashing relics out of religious conviction.

Yet in the past, the militants have veered between ideology and pragmatism in their relationship to antiquity — destroying historic mosques, tombs and artifacts that they consider forms of idolatry, but also selling more portable objects to fill their coffers.

The latest eye-catching destruction could have a more strategic aim, said Mr. Azm, who closely follows the Syrian conflict and opposes both the Islamic State and the government.

“It’s all a provocation,” he said, aimed at accelerating a planned effort, led by Iraqi forces and backed by United States warplanes, to take back Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

“They want a fight with the West because that’s how they gain credibility and recruits,” Mr. Azm said. “They want boots on the ground. They want another Falluja,” a reference to the 2004 battle in which United States Marines, in the largest ground engagement since Vietnam, took that Iraqi city from Qaeda-linked insurgents whose organization would eventually give birth to the Islamic State.

The Islamic State has been all-inclusive in its violence against the modern diversity of Iraq and Syria. It considers Shiite Muslims apostates, and has destroyed Shiite shrines and massacred more than 1,000 Shiite Iraqi soldiers. It has demanded that Christians living in its territories pay the jizya, a tax on religious minorities dating to early Islamic rule.

Islamic State militants have also slaughtered fellow Sunni Muslims who reject their rule, killing hundreds of members of the Shueitat tribe in eastern Syria in one clash alone. They have also massacred and enslaved members of the Yazidi sect in Iraq.

The latest to face its wrath, the Assyrian Christians, consider themselves the descendants of the ancient Assyrians and have survived often bloody Arab, Mongolian and Ottoman conquests, living in modern times as a small minority community periodically under threat. Thousands fled northern Iraq last year as Islamic State militants swept into Nineveh Province.

Early in February, according to Assyrian groups inside and outside Syria, came a declaration from the Islamic State that Christians in a string of villages along the Khabur River in Syrian Hasaka Province would have to take down their crosses and pay the jizya, traditionally paid in gold.

That prompted some to flee, and others to take a more active part in fighting ISIS alongside Kurdish militias, helping take back some territory.

Islamic State militants hit back, hard, driving more than 1,000 Assyrian Christians from their homes, some crossing the Khabur River, a tributary of the Euphrates, in small boats by night.

Local Assyrian leaders were negotiating with the Islamic State through mediators, said Mr. Dawoud, the deputy president of the Assyrian Democratic Organization. The Assyrian International News Agency, a website sharing community news, said Arab tribal leaders were mediating talks to exchange the prisoners for captured Islamic State fighters and that the Islamic State had agreed to free Christian civilians but not fighters.

Mr. Nissan, the accountant, described how he and others crammed into a truck, paying exorbitant rates, to escape. Earlier, he said, Nusra Front fighters and other Syrian insurgents had looted the village without harming anyone, but he feared ISIS more because “they consider us infidels.”

“I made a vow, when I return I want to kiss the soil of my village and pray in the church,” he said, adding that he had composed a song for the residents of Nineveh Province when they were displaced a few months ago.

“I called it ‘Greetings from Khabur to Nineveh,’ “ he said. “Now we’re facing the same scenario.”
 

Hwaida Saad and Maher Samaan contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and Karen Zraick from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on February 27, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: ISIS Onslaught Overruns Assyrians and Wrecks Art.

ISIS Onslaught Engulfs Assyrian Christians as Militants Destroy Ancient Art, NYT,
FEB. 26, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/world/middleeast/more-assyrian-christians-captured-as-isis-attacks-villages-in-syria.html

‘Jihadi John’ in ISIS Videos

Is Identified as Mohammed Emwazi

of London

 

FEB. 26, 2015

The New York Times

By STEVEN ERLANGER

LONDON — The man in the black balaclava who has apparently beheaded several hostages of the Islamic State in gruesome propaganda videos has been identified by British security services as Mohammed Emwazi, a British citizen.

Known in the news media as “Jihadi John,” Mr. Emwazi is said to have been born in Kuwait and raised in London. He traveled to Syria in 2012. His name was first published on Thursday on the website of The Washington Post.

The identification was confirmed by a senior British security official, who said that the British government had identified Mr. Emwazi some time ago but had not disclosed his name for operational reasons. The identification was also confirmed in Washington by a senior United States military intelligence official.

Mr. Emwazi, 26, grew up in a trim housing estate on Lancefield Street in West London and graduated from the University of Westminster with a degree in computer programming.

He first showed up in Islamic State videos in August, when he appeared to behead the American journalist James Foley and delivered threats against the West. The actual execution was not included in the video.

The same man appeared in the videos of the beheadings of a second American journalist, Steven J. Sotloff; the British aid worker David Cawthorne Haines; the British taxi driver Alan Henning; and the American aid worker Peter Kassig. Last month, he appeared in a video with Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto, both Japanese hostages, shortly before they were killed.

Scotland Yard refused to confirm the identification of Mr. Emwazi, and the prime minister’s office had no comment.

“We are not going to confirm the identity of anyone at this stage or give an update on the progress of this live counterterrorism investigation,” said Richard Walton of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said that he has viewed the videos with horror. Speaking in November, he said, “You should be in no doubt that I want Jihadi John to face justice for the appalling acts that have been carried out in Syria.”

Mr. Emwazi apparently was set on the path to radicalization after being detained by the authorities on a visit to Tanzania in 2009 for a safari after graduation. He was accused by British intelligence officers of trying to make his way to Somalia.

Friends of Mr. Emwazi told The Washington Post that he and two other friends — a German convert to Islam named Omar and another man, Abu Talib — never made it to the safari. On landing in Dar es Salaam, the Tanzanian capital, in May 2009, they were detained by the police and held overnight and eventually deported, they said. Later, Mr. Emwazi said that an officer from MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, had tried to recruit him.

Asim Qureshi, a research director at CAGE, a British advocacy organization opposed to the “war on terror,” civil rights abuses and erosion of due process, met with Mr. Emwazi in the fall of 2009. “Mohammed was quite incensed by his treatment, that he had been very unfairly treated,” Mr. Qureshi told The Post.

But in a statement on Thursday, Mr. Qureshi repeated that he could not identify Jihadi John as Mr. Emwazi with complete certainty. Mr. Qureshi said that two years of communications with Mr. Emwazi highlighted “interference by the U.K. security agencies as he sought to find redress within the system.”

Mr. Emwazi moved to Kuwait, his birthplace, shortly after his detention to work for a computer company, and he returned to London at least twice, Mr. Qureshi said. British counterterrorism officials detained Mr. Emwazi in June 2010, fingerprinting him and searching his belongings. In July of that year, Mr. Qureshi said, Mr. Emwazi was not allowed to return to Kuwait, which had apparently refused to renew his visa and blamed it on the British government.

“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” he wrote in a 2010 email to Mr. Qureshi. “But now I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person imprisoned & controlled by security servicemen, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace & my country, Kuwait.”

In his statement, Mr. Qureshi said he last heard from Mr. Emwazi in January 2012. “He desperately wanted to use the system to change his situation, but the system ultimately rejected him,” he said of Mr. Emwazi.

Shiraz Maher, a senior fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, at King’s College London, said on Twitter that Mr. Emwazi, “middle class & educated, demonstrates again that radicalization is not necessarily driven by poverty or social deprivation.”

In an interview, Mr. Maher noted that the conflict in Syria in 2012 was different from what it is now, with more varied groupings. He suggested that Mr. Emwazi joined Islamic State later, noting that most jihadists from West London “are of North African and Arab origin, so it matches him broadly.”

The neighborhood where Mr. Emwazi grew up is not middle class but marked by public housing. It is predominantly Muslim, with immigrants from various parts of South Asia and the Middle East and is said by residents to have a problem with youth gangs and drugs. There is a small Bangladeshi mosque in what used to be a post office.

Nicole, 22, a young mother, who has lived in the area all her life, said on Thursday that she was shocked to think that “Jihadi John” lived less than 100 yards away. She turned to her partner and said, “It’s that crazy terrorist who cut those heads off. I’m shocked that he was at our doorstep. I must have passed him in the street. He’s not back, is he?”

She did not want her surname published and said that there are a lot of idle youth in the area. “There’s nothing for anyone here to do, there’s a park but it’s full of drunks,” she said. “There’s nothing for kids to do but sit in the street causing trouble.”

British officials estimate that there are at least 500 homegrown militants fighting in Syria and Iraq, some of whom have returned to Britain.

Hostages gave Mr. Emwazi the name John, in reference to a member of the Beatles, as he and other Britons had been nicknamed; another of their captors was called George. They were said by hostages to be part of a team guarding Western hostages, first in Idlib, Syria, and then in Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic State.

Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura contributed reporting.

‘Jihadi John’ in ISIS Videos Is Identified as Mohammed Emwazi of London, NYT,
FEB. 26, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/world/europe/jihadi-john-mohammed-emwazi-identified.html

For Brooklyn Men,

Plans to Aid ISIS

Were Recorded Online and in Private

 

FEB. 26, 2015

The New York Times

By MARC SANTORA,

STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and AL BAKER

Like countless 19-year-olds, Akhror Saidakhmetov lived much of his life online.

But it was some of the darkest corners of the Internet that most compelled him, according to the authorities. On websites sympathetic to the Islamic State, he could find videos of the group’s beheadings, mass executions and crucifixions, carried out in a campaign to seize territory in Iraq and Syria and establish a fundamentalist Muslim caliphate.

In recent months, according to the authorities, Mr. Saidakhmetov had made up his mind to go to the killing fields and join the fight.

But before he could go off to wage war, he needed to get his passport back from his mother.

Mr. Saidakhmetov was arrested on Wednesday, along with two other Brooklyn men, Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev, 24, and Abror Habibov, 30. They were charged with providing support to the Islamic State, the allegations outlined in a 23-page affidavit prepared by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and filed in court by the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn.

The case marks the first time that terrorism charges have been brought publicly against someone in New York City for plotting to travel overseas to fight for the terrorist group, and it intensified concerns about the global threat posed by the organization.

In recent months, the Islamic State has been able to draw on a wide range of sympathizers, from adolescent girls in London to disaffected young men in Arab nations.

The three New York men arrested do not seem to fit easily into a “type.” They did not stand out in their neighborhood and dressed in western attire. But privately they raged at what they saw as wicked behavior around them. The authorities did not reveal any prior criminal records for the men, but online and in recorded conversations, the men seemed to take pleasure in dreaming up bloody massacres.

While the violence they watched being played out in Syria and Iraq was deadly real, their own plots seemed more fantastical.

At one point, Mr. Saidakhmetov, despairing that he might not be able to get his passport back from his mother, spoke about joining the army so he could help gather information for the Islamic State. If that failed, he could just shoot other soldiers, he said in a conversation recorded by federal agents.

At their arraignments on Wednesday, Mr. Juraboev and Mr. Saidakhmetov looked remarkably young as they were led into the courtroom.

Both had shaggy brown hair and broad faces. Mr. Saidakhmetov wore a kelly-green hooded sweatshirt, jeans and red high-top sneakers, and Mr. Juraboev a pistachio-colored knit cap, gray hooded sweatshirt and jeans.

Mr. Juraboev, a citizen of Uzbekistan, and Mr. Saidakhmetov, a citizen of Kazakhstan, had been living in the United States for several years, and both had permanent resident status.

They shared an apartment leased to the mother of Mr. Saidakhmetov.

In past terrorism cases, one law enforcement official noted, suspects would often try to blend in to their surroundings. That was the case for the Sept. 11 hijackers, the official said, noting that for “the purposes of developing cover, they went to restaurants and strip bars and to Las Vegas.”

“These guys were for not doing much,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing. “They were spending a lot of time online, spending a lot of time at work, and that was it.”

Mr. Saidakhmetov’s lawyer, Adam D. Perlmutter, said on Wednesday that the government’s reliance on a paid confidential informant was a concern.

“He was worked over extensively by a confidential informant, according to the complaint,” Mr. Perlmutter said. “He’s a kid. He’s obviously scared. He’s frightened. The ham-fisted tactics of the federal government are in play here, as usual.”

While the men worshiped at several mosques and met the government’s confidential informant at one of those mosques, officials said that there was no evidence that the teachings at any of those places drove their desire to join the Islamic State.

“There was zero indication that any mosque had to do with any radicalization,” the official said. “The mosques had nothing to do with it, other than being houses of worship for these guys.”

The men held jobs, but the jobs did not seem to be of great interest beyond a paycheck.

Mr. Juraboev worked at a Gyro King, earning about $2,000 a month.

Mr. Saidakhmetov, who had bounced between jobs, most recently was working at a mall kiosk repairing cellphones, earning about $1,500 a month.

Mr. Saidakhmetov was employed by the third defendant, Mr. Habibov, whom he had worked for in the past at mall kiosks in Philadelphia; Savannah, Ga.; and Chesapeake, Va., according to court documents.

Mr. Habibov, who was arrested in Florida, is accused of financing the plot to travel to Syria and offering encouragement. An Uzbeki citizen, he arrived in the United States in 2006, but his visa had expired.

Farhod Sulton, the president of the Vatandosh Uzbek-American Federation, which operates a cultural center, a mosque and a newspaper in Gravesend, Brooklyn, knew Mr. Habibov a little bit.

“I met him. He is a religious guy. He was kind of lost. He had no education, in Uzbekistan or in religion or in America,” he said. “He is just one blind follower.”

Mr. Juraboev came to the United States in 2011, and Mr. Saidakhmetov arrived in 2012. They appear to have made few connections since coming to Brooklyn.

By August, according to court documents, they had become enamored with the Islamic State.

On Aug. 8, Mr. Juraboev posted a message on a website sympathetic with the group:

“Greetings. We wanted to pledge our allegiance and commit ourselves while not present there, I am in USA now but we don’t have any arms. But is it possible to commit ourselves as dedicated martyrs anyway while here.”

That posting came to the attention of federal agents, who visited Mr. Juraboev. According to court documents, he confessed that he made the posting, identified Mr. Saidakhmetov as someone who felt the same way he did, and even went so far as to tell the agents that he would kill President Obama if told to by the Islamic State.

After two visits to his apartment, the agents did not directly approach Mr. Juraboev again, instead choosing to monitor him and his associates.

Mr. Juraboev was aware that he was being watched, changing some of his behavior and worrying that it would be hard to evade detection when leaving the country, but his goal remained the same, according to the authorities. He wanted to join the Islamic State.

He posted online musings about his increasing discomfort at home and wondered how he could live a pure, Islamic life.

“My parents, in Uzbekistan, sometimes they worship and practice Islam, sometimes they do idolatry,” Mr. Juraboev wrote to an online administrator who the authorities said was a representative of the Islamic State based in Iraq. “My sisters are uncovered, lack knowledge of religion. I wish they knew at least how to cover themselves up. What should I do? I need to sneak out of here with extreme caution without being noticed by them.”

His friend, Mr. Saidakhmetov, had similar worries, especially after his mother grew suspicious of his behavior and took away his passport.

In December, just before Christmas, Mr. Saidakhmetov’s mother visited the apartment and asked how much longer Mr. Juraboev intended to live there.

Mr. Juraboev told her he was leaving in March, according to court records. When she asked where he was going, he said Uzbekistan, but later confided to the confidential informant that he really planned to use the trip to Uzbekistan as a cover for going to Syria.

Mr. Juraboev and Mr. Saidakhmetov purchased tickets — planning to travel to Turkey and then sneak into Syria — and as the date of their departure neared, they seemed almost eager.

But Mr. Saidakhmetov still needed his passport, and on Feb. 19 he called his mother. In a conversation recorded by federal agents, he asked for his passport back. She asked him where he was going. He said to join the Islamic State.

“If a person has a chance to join the Islamic State and does not go there, on judgment day he will be asked why, and it is a sin to live in the land of infidels,” he reportedly told her, according to court documents.

She hung up the phone. It is unclear if he managed to get his passport back later.

But the government’s confidential informant helped Mr. Saidakhmetov secure travel documents. In the days before he left, he told the informant that he felt that his soul was already on its way to paradise.

He stated that when he arrived in Syria he would tear up his documents, ready to start a new life.

On Wednesday morning, federal agents were waiting for him at Kennedy International Airport and arrested him as he made his way down the jetway.

Reporting was contributed by Stuart Miller.

For Brooklyn Men, Plans to Aid ISIS Were Recorded Online and in Private, NYT,
FEB. 26, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/nyregion/isis-plot-brooklyn-men.html

A Twist of Faith in Brutal Captivity

 

FEB. 21, 2015

The New York Times

By JIM YARDLEY

VATICAN CITY — The Islamic State’s beheading in August of the journalist James Foley stirred global outrage, fury and despair. But for many of his fellow Roman Catholics, Mr. Foley’s death in Syria transformed him into a symbol of faith under the most brutal of conditions.

One Catholic essayist compared him to St. Bartholomew, who died for his Christian faith. Others were drawn to Mr. Foley’s account of praying the rosary during an earlier captivity in Libya. Even Pope Francis, in a condolence call to Mr. Foley’s parents, described him as a martyr, according to the family.

Then came an unexpected twist: It turned out that Mr. Foley was among several hostages in Syria who had converted to Islam in captivity, according to some freed captives. What had been among some Catholics a theological discussion of faith and heroic resistance quickly shifted to a different set of questions:

Is any conversion under such duress a legitimate one? Why would a man who had spoken so openly about his Catholic faith turn to Islam? Given his circumstances, is it even surprising if he did?

“How do we assess that?” asked the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large of the Catholic magazine America, who described Mr. Foley as “a good and holy man” and expressed doubts about the genuineness of his conversion. “The answer is we can’t assess it. We cannot look at what is in someone’s soul.”

Religious faith is often described as a deeply sustaining force for people in captivity, providing comfort, strength and hope. The family of Kayla Mueller, who died this month while being held hostage by the Islamic State in Syria, recently released a letter Ms. Mueller had written in captivity in which she described surrendering herself to God and feeling “tenderly cradled in free-fall.”

Faith can also be a practical force, experts say, in that prayer or reading religious texts can provide order and discipline to days otherwise defined by fear or brutality, or even just boredom. And practical, also, as a means of survival: Some freed hostages describe converting to Islam as a tactic to win favor and sympathy from their captors.

For many Catholics, issues such as religious persecution, forced conversion and martyrdom are distressingly current. Pope Francis has frequently inveighed against the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, where militants with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, have ordered some Christians to convert or face death.

This month, Francis invoked the death of John the Baptist as the model of Christian sacrifice, citing the “men, women, children who are being persecuted, hated, driven out of their homes, tortured, massacred.”

Martyrdom, he added, “is not a thing of the past: This is happening right now.”

To many Catholics, Mr. Foley’s death seemed infused with religious overtones. A former altar boy who grew up in a Catholic family, Mr. Foley had volunteered in low-income schools while attending Marquette University in Milwaukee, and then joined Teach for America. Shifting to photojournalism, he immersed himself in conflict reporting, working as a freelancer in Iraq and Afghanistan and then covering the Libyan civil war in 2011.

Pushing to the chaotic front lines, Mr. Foley and three other journalists were ambushed by forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, then Libya’s ruler. A photographer, Anton Hammerl, was killed. Mr. Foley and the other two surviving journalists were taken hostage and spent 44 days in captivity as family members and former classmates at Marquette campaigned for his freedom and organized prayer vigils on his behalf.

Upon his release, Mr. Foley wrote a letter of thanks to Marquette in which he also described the importance of his Catholic faith during his captivity. He and a cellmate prayed aloud “to speak our weaknesses and hopes together, as if in a conversation with God,” he said, and he also prayed the rosary to connect with his mother.

“I prayed I could communicate through some cosmic reach of the universe to her,” he wrote. “I began to pray the rosary. It was what my mother and grandmother would have prayed.”

His open discussion of his spirituality would resurface after Mr. Foley was taken captive again in 2012, in Syria, and then after his grisly death last August. On social media, many Catholics found inspiration in his earlier words and in accounts by freed captives describing Mr. Foley as someone who often gave away his food or blanket to others but never buckled to his captors.

Some Catholic commentators suggested Mr. Foley might be a candidate for Catholic martyrdom, a complicated process that involves determining if a person was killed because of his or her faith. Others praised him but questioned whether such talk was appropriate and whether his killers’ motivation had been more political than religious.

Then, in October, an article in The New York Times detailed the brutality endured by Mr. Foley and others in captivity, while also quoting freed hostages as saying Mr. Foley and others had converted to Islam. Mr. Foley was described as particularly devout and as a fervent reader of the Quran. In an interview earlier this month, one freed captive, Nicolas Hénin, said Mr. Foley seemed the most interested of the group in learning about Islam and that his conversion appeared genuine, even if Mr. Hénin could not be certain.

“I was not inside his mind,” he said.

Some Catholics were startled. But for Mr. Foley’s mother, Diane, the disclosure was not new. She said that she had spoken months earlier with Jejoen Bontinck, a Belgian former captive who is Muslim, after his release, and that he had described her son’s conversion as a genuine act. Then, after French and Spanish captives were released, Ms. Foley said she received a somewhat different version of events.

“What the hostages had told me was that by saying that he had converted to Islam, he would be left alone five times a day, without being beaten, so that he could pray,” she said in an interview.

Like others, Ms. Foley, who is a Eucharistic minister at her parish in New Hampshire, described her son as deeply interested in spirituality and the faiths of other people. But she still strongly believes that her son died as a Christian and that his conversion was an act of practicality.

“Only God and Jim know what was going on in his heart,” she said. “I think the Lord used Jim in a magnificent way in the last two years of his life. He gave hope to his fellow captives.”

The issue also arose after Mr. Foley’s captivity in Libya. In a series of articles in Global Post, as well as during an appearance at Marquette, Mr. Foley described how he had agreed to pray with his Muslim cellmates, jailed as enemies of the Qaddafi government. He was surprised when, after he had washed himself, they declared him converted.

“So, from then on out, I prayed with them five times a day,” he said at Marquette. “It was so powerful, and it was something I needed to do to commune with these guys who were relying on their faith in Allah. But it was difficult. I was thinking, ‘Jesus, am I praying to Allah? Am I violating my belief in you?’ ”

“I don’t have an answer to that,” he continued. “I just know that I was authentically with them, and I was authentically praying to Jesus. I don’t know theologically. But I thought I was being authentic.”

His family said his Syrian captivity was much the same.

“I believe, much like in Libya, Jim ‘converted’ for the purpose of surviving and being close to some of the others there, and to have some discipline,” said Michael Foley, one of his brothers, adding, “I’ll bet you and I would strongly explore ‘converting’ in that situation.”

At the Vatican, Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, said he was unaware of any discussion of martyrdom for Mr. Foley, noting that such a process can take decades or centuries. But he did say that any religious conversion “not done freely does not indicate a conversion.”

“You can’t condemn people who are afraid of dying and so don’t show themselves as Catholic,” Cardinal Amato said. “A Christian is not obliged to be a martyr.”

Nicole Tung, a photographer who worked closely with Mr. Foley in Syria, described his faith as “deep within him” and said he knew the Bible so well that he often had broad discussions with Syrians comparing Christianity with Islam.

But Ms. Tung said she thought Mr. Foley would be uncomfortable with being considered a martyr. She described his journalism as commingled with a powerful compassion: He helped raise $14,000 to buy an ambulance for children in Aleppo, Syria, just as he helped organize an earlier fund-raiser for the family of Mr. Hammerl, the photographer who was killed in Libya.

“As a humanitarian and as a journalist,” Ms. Tung said, “was really how he conducted himself.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 2015, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: A Test of Faith in Brutal Captivity.

A Twist of Faith in Brutal Captivity, NYT,
FEB. 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/world/europe/keeping-the-faith-in-brutal-captivity.html

Obama Urges Global United Front

Against Extremist Groups Like ISIS

 

FEB. 18, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

WASHINGTON — President Obama called on Americans and more than 60 nations on Wednesday to join the fight against violent extremism, saying they had to counter the ideology of the Islamic State and other groups making increasingly sophisticated appeals to young people around the world.

On the second day of a three-day meeting that comes after a wave of terrorist attacks in Paris, Sydney, Copenhagen and Ottawa, Mr. Obama said undercutting the Sunni militant group’s message and blunting its dark appeal was a “generational challenge” that would require cooperation from mainstream Muslims as well as governments, communities, religious leaders and educators.

“We have to confront squarely and honestly the twisted ideologies that these terrorist groups use to incite people to violence,” Mr. Obama told an auditorium full of community activists, religious leaders and law enforcement officials — some of them skeptical about his message — gathered at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. “We need to find new ways to amplify the voices of peace and tolerance and inclusion, and we especially need to do it online.”

Key points in the terrorist group’s rapid growth and the slowing of its advance as it faces international airstrikes and local resistance.

But, Mr. Obama said, “we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”

White House officials cast the conference as a rallying cry and progress report after Mr. Obama’s speech on terrorism to the United Nations General Assembly in September, and said it signaled Mr. Obama’s desire to play the leading role in assembling an international coalition to fight an ideological war against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. They said the battle was just as important as the military campaign Mr. Obama launched against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria last summer, which has shown mixed results.

Despite the president’s call to arms, many of the leaders and officials attending the conference expressed doubt about the ability of the Obama administration to counter extremist messages, particularly from the Islamic State, which has a reach and agility in social media that far outstrips that of the American government.

“We’re being outdone both in terms of content, quality and quantity, and in terms of amplification strategies,” said Sasha Havlicek of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based research organization, in a presentation at the meeting. She used a diagram of a small and large megaphone to illustrate the “monumental gap” between the Islamic State, which uses social media services like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and other groups and governments, including the Obama administration.

“The problem is that governments are ill placed to lead in the battle of ideas,” Ms. Havlicek said as she called for private companies to become involved in what she called “the communications problem of our time.”

Administration officials acknowledged the problems they face. “You could hypothetically eliminate the entire ISIL safe haven, but still face a threat from the kind of propaganda they disseminate over social media,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser. “It’s an undervalued part of how you prevent terror attacks in the United States.”
Continue reading the main story

At the same time, human rights activists at the conference said they had grave concerns about domestic efforts to counter violent extremism, known inside the government by the acronym C.V.E. They said that programs to spot potential homegrown terrorists could morph into fearmongering closet surveillance efforts that trample on civil rights and privacy, and that the administration could also be giving tacit approval to foreign governments that abuse human rights in the name of countering terrorism.

A coalition of advocacy groups wrote to the White House on Tuesday raising their concerns, and some Muslim-American community groups boycotted the meeting.

“The government must behave in a way so that victims of hate crimes and violent extremism know that government agencies are there to protect their rights and safety, not just monitor their religious and political expression,” said Samer Khalaf, the president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “This focus solely on attacks committed by Arabs or Muslims reinforces the stereotype of Arab- and Muslim-Americans as security threats, and thus perpetuates hate of the respected communities.”

American intelligence officials have long believed that the greatest terrorist threat in the United States is no longer from meticulously plotted events like the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that originate overseas, but from American citizens who become radicalized on their own or by a foreign terrorist organization.

In his remarks, Mr. Obama said that other countries had a responsibility to help.

“If we’re going to prevent people from being susceptible to the false promises of extremism, then the international community has to offer something better,” Mr. Obama said, adding that the United States would “do its part” by promoting economic growth and development, fighting corruption and encouraging other countries to devote more resources to education, including for girls and women.

“When governments oppress their people, deny human rights, stifle dissent or marginalize ethnic and religious groups, or favor certain religious groups over others, it sows the seeds of extremism and violence,” Mr. Obama said. “It makes those communities more vulnerable to recruitment.”

Part of the business of the conference on Wednesday was to bring together leaders from Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Boston, where federal pilot programs underway are aimed at helping target disaffected young people who might be susceptible to extremist messages.

The president said it was crucial that such efforts include input from Muslim-Americans, who he said have sometimes felt “unfairly targeted” by government antiterrorism efforts.

“We have to make sure that abuses stop, are not repeated, that we do not stigmatize entire communities,” Mr. Obama said. “Engagement with communities can’t be a cover for surveillance.”

Among the participants on Wednesday was Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, who said the attacks in her city had prompted her to ask herself, “What did we not do to prevent that?”

Hans Bonte, the mayor of Vilvoorde, Belgium, said that his town of 4,200 had been beset by Islamic State recruitment efforts and that 28 young people had gone to Iraq and Syria. He said another 40, including a number of under-age girls, were preparing to depart or “marked as potential leavers.”

“We are facing a global problem, but we have to act locally,” Mr. Bonte said, criticizing what he called some European countries’ “ostrich policy” of saying they do not have a problem.

One surprise participant in State Department sessions for the meeting on Wednesday was the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the post-Soviet K.G.B.

The State Department said it had been notified Tuesday night that Aleksandr V. Bortnikov would be attending the conference as part of an expanded Russian delegation. The visit would be unusual under the best of circumstances, but it comes at a moment of heightened tensions over the Kremlin’s support for separatists in eastern Ukraine and the role of Russian troops in the fighting there.

“Violent extremism and terrorism are problems that affect communities around the world, including Russia,” said Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman.

The European Union has put Mr. Bortnikov on its sanctions list because of the Ukraine crisis, but he is not subject to American sanctions. On Thursday, Mr. Obama will address foreign leaders gathered at the State Department to talk about their countries’ programs.

Vitaly I. Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, questioned the effectiveness of a United States-led global effort to counter terrorism, which he said would be counterproductive. “It’s only going to attract extremists,” he said Wednesday evening at an event at the Harvard Club in New York.
 

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Washington, and Somini Sengupta from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on February 19, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Against Radicals, Obama Urges Global United Front.

Obama Urges Global United Front Against Extremist Groups Like ISIS, NYT,
FEB. 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/us/obama-to-outline-nonmilitary-plans-to-counter-groups-like-isis.html

The Spreading Rage at ISIS

FEB. 5, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Terrorism has long had a gruesome role in conflicts, often among revolutionary groups so fanatically certain of their ends that they readily justify the most barbaric of means. But it can also turn with a vengeance against those who inflict it, as the Islamic State is learning with its most recently publicized atrocity — murdering a Jordanian air force pilot by burning him alive. The video of the killing was meant to dissuade Arabs from participating in the Western coalition against the group; instead, it has succeeded in fostering rage and revulsion against the jihadists throughout the Arab world.

The Islamic State, the group also known as ISIS or ISIL, or “Daesh” among Arabs, has achieved a low in the annals of terrorism through its use of the Internet to post videos and images of executions, most by beheading, of bound, kneeling hostages — including, lately, two Japanese men. Although ISIS has inflicted death and inhumane torture on Arabs in its areas of operation in Syria and Iraq, feelings toward the group within various parts of the Arab world had been mixed, with many Arabs professing either indifference or varying degrees of sympathy for the jihadists. Jordan, a strong ally of the United States in the fight against ISIS, was also the largest source of recruits for the group.

That changed after ISIS posted a video on Tuesday of the captured Jordanian pilot, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh, being burned alive in a cage. The killing had apparently taken place in early January, though ISIS cynically continued proposing to swap him for prisoners in Jordan until negotiations broke down after Jordan demanded proof that the pilot was alive. The Middle East erupted in fury at the video of the execution. The Islamic prohibition against immolation may have been a factor in the outpouring of anger among Arabs.

King Abdullah II of Jordan promptly ordered the execution of two jihadists already sentenced to death in Jordan, and was welcomed by cheering crowds on his return from a visit to Washington. On Thursday, Jordanian planes responded by bombing Islamic State targets. Leaders in other nations condemned the murder of the pilot, and a grand imam in Cairo called for ISIS leaders themselves to face medieval-style executions.

While Lieutenant Kasasbeh was still alive, or thought to be alive, many Jordanians, including his father, questioned their country’s participation in the campaign against ISIS. Now, ISIS faces potent censure and opposition from people across the region, and even among many who tolerated or ignored its past atrocities.

If the outrage on display in the Middle East translates into a broader fight against barbaric jihadism, and a deeper commitment to eradicating it, Lieutenant Kasasbeh’s cruel death may prove not to have been in vain.
 

A version of this editorial appears in print on February 6, 2015, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: The Spreading Rage at ISIS.

The Spreading Rage at ISIS,
FEB 5, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/opinion/the-spreading-rage-at-isis.html

Moussaoui Calls Saudi Princes

Patrons of Al Qaeda

 

FEB. 3, 2015

The New York Times

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — In highly unusual testimony inside the federal supermax prison, a former operative for Al Qaeda has described prominent members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family as major donors to the terrorist network in the late 1990s and claimed that he discussed a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a Stinger missile with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

The Qaeda member, Zacarias Moussaoui, wrote last year to Judge George B. Daniels of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, who is presiding over a lawsuit filed against Saudi Arabia by relatives of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He said he wanted to testify in the case, and after lengthy negotiations with Justice Department officials and the federal Bureau of Prisons, a team of lawyers was permitted to enter the prison and question him for two days last October.

In a statement Monday night, the Saudi Embassy said that the national Sept. 11 commission had rejected allegations that the Saudi government or Saudi officials had funded Al Qaeda.

“Moussaoui is a deranged criminal whose own lawyers presented evidence that he was mentally incompetent,” the statement said. “His words have no credibility.”

Mr. Moussaoui received a diagnosis of mental illness by a psychologist who testified on his behalf, but he was found competent to stand trial on terrorism charges. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2006 and is held in the most secure prison in the federal system, in Florence, Colo. Mr. Moussaoui’s accusations could not be verified.

The allegations from Mr. Moussaoui come at a sensitive time in Saudi-American relations, less than two weeks after the death of the country’s longtime monarch, King Abdullah, and the succession of his brother, King Salman.

There has often been tension between Saudi leaders and the Obama administration since the Arab uprisings of 2011 and the efforts to manage the region’s resulting turmoil. Mr. Moussaoui describes meeting in Saudi Arabia with Salman, then the crown prince, and other Saudi royals while delivering them letters from Osama bin Laden.

There has long been evidence that wealthy Saudis provided support for bin Laden, the son of a Saudi construction magnate, and Al Qaeda before the 2001 attacks. Saudi Arabia had worked closely with the United States to finance Islamic militants fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Al Qaeda drew its members from those militant fighters.

But the extent and nature of Saudi involvement in Al Qaeda, and whether it extended to the planning and financing of the Sept. 11 attacks, has long been a subject of dispute.

Mr. Moussaoui’s testimony, if judged credible, provides new details of the extent and nature of that support in the pre-9/11 period. In more than 100 pages of testimony, filed in federal court in New York on Monday, he comes across as calm and largely coherent, though the plaintiffs’ lawyers questioning him do not challenge his statements.

“My impression was that he was of completely sound mind — focused and thoughtful,” said Sean P. Carter, a Philadelphia lawyer with Cozen O’Connor who participated in the deposition on behalf of the plaintiffs. He said that the lawyers needed to get a special exemption from the “special administrative measures” that keep many convicted terrorists in federal prisons from communicating with outsiders.

The French-born Mr. Moussaoui was detained weeks before Sept. 11 on immigration charges in Minnesota, so he was incarcerated at the time of the attacks. Earlier in 2001, he had taken flying lessons and was wired $14,000 by a Qaeda cell in Germany, evidence that he might have been preparing to become one of the hijackers.

He said in the prison deposition that he was directed in 1998 or 1999 by Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan to create a digital database of donors to the group. Among those he said he recalled listing in the database were Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States; Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent billionaire investor; and many of the country’s leading clerics.

“Sheikh Osama wanted to keep a record who give money,” he said in imperfect English — “who is to be listened to or who contributed to the jihad.”

Mr. Moussaoui said he acted as a courier for Bin Laden, carrying personal messages to prominent Saudi princes and clerics. And he described his training in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

He helped conduct a trial explosion of a 750-kilogram bomb as a trial run for a planned truck-bomb attack on the American Embassy in London, he said, using the same weapon used in the Qaeda attacks in 1998 on the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He also studied the possibility of staging attacks with crop-dusting aircraft.

In addition, Mr. Moussaoui said, “We talk about the feasibility of shooting Air Force One.”

Specifically, he said, he had met an official of the Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi Embassy in Washington when the Saudi official visited Kandahar. “I was supposed to go to Washington and go with him” to “find a location where it may be suitable to launch a Stinger attack and then, after, be able to escape,” he said.

He said he was arrested before being able to carry out the reconnaissance mission.

Mr. Moussaoui’s behavior at his trial in 2006 was sometimes erratic. He tried to fire his own lawyers, who presented evidence that he suffered from serious mental illness. But Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who presided, declared that she was “fully satisfied that Mr. Moussaoui is completely competent” and called him “an extremely intelligent man.”

“He has actually a better understanding of the legal system than some lawyers I’ve seen in court,” she said.

Also filed on Monday in the survivors’ lawsuit were affidavits from former Senators Bob Graham of Florida and Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and the former Navy secretary John Lehman, arguing that more investigation was needed into Saudi ties to the 9/11 plot. Mr. Graham was co-chairman of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the attacks, and Mr. Kerrey and Mr. Lehman served on the 9/11 Commission.

“I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia,” wrote Mr. Graham, who has long demanded the release of 28 pages of the congressional report on the attacks that explore Saudi connections and remain classified.

Mr. Kerrey said in the affidavit that it was “fundamentally inaccurate and misleading” to argue, as lawyers for Saudi Arabia have, that the 9/11 Commission exonerated the Saudi government.

The three former officials’ statements did not address Mr. Moussaoui’s testimony.

The 9/11 lawsuit was initially filed in 2002 but has faced years of legal obstacles. It was dismissed in 2005 on the grounds that Saudi Arabia enjoyed “sovereign immunity,” and the dismissal was upheld on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

But the same appellate court later reversed itself, ordering that the lawsuit be reinstated. The Saudi government appealed to the Supreme Court, but it declined to hear the case, so it was sent back to Federal District Court in Manhattan. The filing on Monday was in opposition to the latest motion by Saudi Arabia to have the case dismissed.

Mr. Carter, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said that he and his colleagues hoped to return to the Colorado prison to conduct additional questioning of Mr. Moussaoui and that they had been told by prison officials that they would be allowed to do so. “We are confident he has more to say,” Mr. Carter said.
 

A version of this article appears in print on February 4, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Terrorist Calls Saudi Princes Qaeda Patrons.

Moussaoui Calls Saudi Princes Patrons of Al Qaeda,
FEB 3, 2015, NYT,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/us/zacarias-moussaoui-calls-saudi-princes-patrons-of-al-qaeda.html

From Inside Prison,

a Terrorism Suspect Shares His Diary

‘Guantánamo Diary’

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

JAN. 25, 2015

The New York Times

Scott Shane

There’s a revealing moment in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s gripping and depressing “Guantánamo Diary” when a new interrogator is assigned to question him. By this point, Mr. Slahi has been asked the same questions and given the same answers for years. But the new military interrogator, a woman he describes as “quiet and polite,” surprises him with a novel inquiry about what he knows of another terrorism suspect’s travel to Iraq in 2003.

The problem, as Mr. Slahi gently points out to his questioner, is that he has been locked up since 2001 and held at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since 2002, so there is no chance that he could have such information. The interrogator smiles and explains that she asked anyway, because “I have the question in my request” from her bosses.

Much of the attention accorded to Mr. Slahi’s extraordinary memoir has justifiably gone to his excruciating account of his suffering during a “special interrogation” that lasted for months in 2003 and was personally approved by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense. By Mr. Slahi’s account, which is corroborated by multiple government investigations, his treatment involved extended sleep deprivation, loud music, shackling for days in a freezing cell, dousing with ice water, beatings, threats that he could be made to disappear and that his mother would be arrested and gang-raped.
Photo

But another overwhelming impression from his book, published after a seven-year legal battle and with heavy redactions from military censors, is of the woeful incompetence of some of the government’s efforts to keep the country safe from terrorism. That is no surprise to students of bureaucracy. When it comes to the military and intelligence agencies, however, secrecy makes blunders far easier to hide, and outspoken foes of big government give it a pass as soon as fears of terrorism are invoked.

The torture methods approved for Mr. Slahi, for instance, mimicked those used by America’s Communist adversaries in the Cold War, which were famous for producing false confessions. Predictably, Mr. Slahi describes how, desperate to stop the brutal treatment, he finally decided to tell the interrogators whatever he thought they wanted to hear, fabricating plots and implicating others in nonexistent crimes. Some interrogators, though, doubted his confessions and asked for a polygraph test. He denied plotting terrorism or supporting Al Qaeda, and the test results variously showed “no deception” or “no opinion,” undermining his supposed admissions.

Even the book’s redactions are a tedious reminder of the government’s frequent haplessness. Much black ink was expended, for instance, to try to keep readers from learning that some of Mr. Slahi’s Guantánamo interrogators were women. Why the censors decided their gender should be secret is anybody’s guess. Still, they missed enough feminine pronouns that their efforts at cover-up were undone.

Another dubious redaction draws a rare outburst of sarcasm from Larry Siems, who edited the book and lays out the facts of Mr. Slahi’s case dispassionately in his introduction and many footnotes. When a guard tells him not to worry because he’ll soon be home with his family, Mr. Slahi writes, “I couldn’t help breaking in [redacted].” Mr. Siems comments in a footnote, “It seems possible, if incredible, that the U.S. government may have here redacted the word ‘tears.’ ”

To be sure, Mr. Slahi’s pre-Guantánamo résumé cried out for scrutiny, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Born in Mauritania, he had joined Al Qaeda in 1990 to fight Afghanistan’s Communist government alongside Osama bin Laden. A cousin, also Mr. Slahi’s brother-in-law, was an aide to Bin Laden. In Germany, Mr. Slahi had once crossed paths with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, later a planner of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Slahi had lived in Montreal and prayed at the same mosque as Ahmed Ressam, arrested in 1999 on charges of trying to bring explosives into the United States for the failed “millennium plot.”

Based on that history, the government concluded that Mr. Slahi was a “senior recruiter” for Al Qaeda and for a time, listed him as the most dangerous terrorist at Guantánamo. But it has never formally charged him. Mr. Slahi says he left Al Qaeda in 1992, long before it began to target America. His encounter with Mr. Bin al-Shibh lasted one evening and involved no discussion of anti-American plotting, he claims. And Mr. Ressam had left Montreal before Mr. Slahi arrived, and by his account, they never met.

A federal judge who reviewed Mr. Slahi’s habeas petition in 2010, James Robertson, concluded that the government’s evidence was “so attenuated, or so tainted by coercion and mistreatment, or so classified, that it cannot support a criminal prosecution.” The judge said the government’s fear that Mr. Slahi could rejoin Al Qaeda if freed “may indeed be well founded,” but that such concerns did not justify his continued imprisonment. Judge Robertson ordered his release. Despite President Obama’s vow to close the prison, his administration challenged that decision. An appeals court overturned the release order, and Mr. Slahi, now 44, remains in limbo at Guantánamo, where he has been held without trial for more than 12 years.

Mr. Slahi emerges from the pages of his diary, handwritten in 2005, as a curious and generous personality, observant, witty and devout, but by no means fanatical. In the imperfect but vivid English he learned as a fourth language after being sent to Guantánamo, he writes enthusiastically of reading the Bible (several times), “Fermat’s Last Theorem” and “The Catcher in the Rye,” which he says “made me laugh until my stomach hurt.” He came to consider Guantánamo and its staff members his “new home and family,” developing friendships with numerous guards and interrogators, discussing religion, playing chess and watching movies with them. He expresses empathy even for some of his tormentors, saying that “many people in the Army come from poor families, and that’s why the Army sometimes gives them the dirtiest job.”

Though it was written nearly a decade ago, “Guantánamo Diary” arrives at a relevant moment. In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama renewed his pledge to close the Guantánamo prison before leaving office. But the recent attacks in Paris, after the beheadings by militants in Syria, have reignited the anxieties that have kept that prison going for so long.

In such an atmosphere, some Americans may worry: What if Mr. Slahi is simply a clever liar who has successfully hidden his past crimes for 12 years? His book quite effectively undercuts that notion. More important, “Guantánamo Diary” forces us to consider why the United States has set aside the cherished idea that a timely trial is the best way to determine who deserves to be in prison. The overwhelming majority of the remaining 122 detainees have not been charged.

“So has the American democracy passed the test it was subjected to with the 2001 terrorist attacks?” Mr. Slahi asks at the end of his book. “I leave this judgment to the reader,” he adds, noting that “the United States and its people are still facing the dilemma of the Cuban detainees.” Nearly a decade after he wrote those words, the dilemma has not been resolved.
 

GUANTáNAMO DIARY

By Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Edited by Larry Siems. Illustrated. 379 pages. Little, Brown and Company. $29.

A version of this review appears in print on January 26, 2015, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: From Inside Prison, a Terrorism Suspect Shares His Diary.

From Inside Prison,
a Terrorism Suspect Shares His Diary,
JAN 25, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/arts/guantanamo-diary-by-mohamedou-ould-slahi.html

Qaeda Suspect Facing Trial in New York

Dies in Custody

JAN. 3, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

HONOLULU — A suspected leader of Al Qaeda who was to go on trial in New York this month in the 1998 bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa died in government custody on Friday night after complications from longstanding medical problems, federal prosecutors said.

The man, Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, also known as Abu Anas al-Libi, had liver cancer. On Wednesday, he was taken to a hospital in New York from the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he had been held since shortly after American commandos captured him in Libya in October 2013.

“We write now to inform the court that despite the care provided at the hospital, his condition deteriorated rapidly,” the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, said in a letter to the judge overseeing the case.

Mr. Bharara said that federal marshals had been in regular contact with Mr. Ruqai’s lawyer, who he said was with Mr. Ruqai throughout the day Friday, as was an imam.

Mr. Ruqai, 50, had a $5 million bounty on his head until his capture in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, ended a 15-year manhunt. He was taken peacefully into custody and interrogated before being moved to New York to stand trial.

According to an indictment filed in 2000 by prosecutors in New York, Mr. Ruqai helped conduct “visual and photographic surveillance” of the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1993 and again in 1995. The August 1998 bombing of that embassy killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans. Ten Tanzanians died in the attack on the embassy in their country on the same morning.

The authorities said that Mr. Ruqai had spoken with other Qaeda leaders about attacking American targets in retaliation for the United States peacekeeping operation in Somalia.

Mr. Ruqai, who was born in Tripoli, joined Al Qaeda in the early 1990s, when it was based in Sudan and led by Osama bin Laden. Several years later, he moved to Britain, claiming political asylum as a Libyan dissident.

It is not clear how he ended up in Libya in 2013. But after the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government in 2011, Libya became a haven for militants, who could move easily throughout the country. Although Mr. Ruqai was thought to have been in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, when militants attacked two American outposts in Benghazi — killing the United States ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other people — he was not believed to have played a role in those attacks.

Coming two years after Bin Laden was killed by American commandos in Pakistan, the capture of Mr. Ruqai was the latest blow to the remnants of Al Qaeda, whose leadership has been largely decimated.

Qaeda Suspect Facing Trial in New York Dies in Custody,
NYT, 3.1.2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/us/politics/
qaeda-suspect-facing-trial-in-new-york-dies-in-custody.html