Enemies Within (15 page)

Standing outside the mosque, they made a pact: By summer’s end, they would go to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against American forces. Medunjanin reminded his friends to be careful. Law enforcement was everywhere. He told them to avoid talking about their plans with anyone or putting anything in emails.

They decided to join the Taliban because the group seemed to offer the easiest route to the battlefield. Ahmedzay had heard there was a town called Zormat in eastern Afghanistan where a foreign fighter could find the Taliban at the madrassa, or religious school. The town was only thirty minutes from his wife’s home. Both Zazi and Ahmedzay spoke fluent Pashto, and they could translate for Medunjanin, their Bosnian brother in arms. If anyone asked why they were planning to go to the region, Zazi and Ahmedzay had perfect cover stories: They both had family in Afghanistan, and wives whom they were going to visit. Medunjanin, they would say, was going to marry a cousin of Zazi’s. To their minds, it was foolproof.

To finance their trip, Zazi turned to credit cards. He opened nearly twenty accounts in a space of months, with no intention of paying them back, and burned through about $50,000 on computers, cameras, batteries, and cash advances. Zazi, Ahmedzay, and Medunjanin went to a travel agency in Jackson Heights to buy their tickets, but instead of using Najib’s credit cards, they paid in cash. They booked round-trip
flights on Qatar Airways, changing in Doha, Qatar, even though it was more expensive. They didn’t want the additional scrutiny that came with traveling on one-way tickets, but they had no intention of ever returning to America. Zazi and Ahmedzay got long-stay visas to Pakistan, but Balkan-born Medunjanin was granted only a monthlong stay. They decided to split responsibilities. Medunjanin was going to be in charge until they got to Pakistan. Then Zazi, after visiting his family there, would take over, and Ahmedzay would lead them through Afghanistan.

About two weeks before they were scheduled to fly to Pakistan, they told one person about their plan: another young Afghan born in New York named Zakir Khan, whom they knew at Abu Bakr. Khan had spent many hours with Medunjanin and the others. He had listened to their thoughts on jihad and expressed similar views. Medunjanin put Awlaki lectures on Khan’s iPod. At the mosque, they cornered him and asked if he would be interested in joining them to fight in Afghanistan. Khan said he’d think about it. Rather than worrying he’d spill their secret, the trio encouraged Khan to talk to his family and friends about the idea.

Khan went home, where he helped take care of a little brother with physical and mental disabilities. When he returned to the mosque that same evening to talk to Zazi and Medunjanin, it was with disappointing news. He couldn’t make the trip. The two responded angrily. Zazi showed Khan a verse from the Koran saying that it was his duty. Khan said he’d reconsider, and did discuss it with a family friend. But the next day, he ran into Medunjanin, Zazi, and Ahmedzay outside the mosque. Khan informed them of his decision. No.

•  •  •

On August 28 Zazi’s father gave them a lift to Newark International Airport. There was nothing suspicious for security screeners to find in their bags, just some laptops. Customs officials asked all three separately why they were going to Pakistan They used the cover stories they had
discussed. Medunjanin was carrying $3,000, money that he told customs agents would be the dowry in his marriage to Zazi’s cousin. The trio made it through security, boarded, and settled in for the long flight to Doha and then on to Peshawar.

Peshawar is a sprawling frontier city, centuries old, that sits in a valley outside Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, the far-flung districts where tribal elders hold sway and remain somewhat autonomous from the Pakistani government. For decades, Peshawar has attracted Afghan refugees and Islamist radicals involved in pushing foreign troops—whether Soviet or American—out of nearby Afghanistan. Some 3.5 million people are believed to live in the city and the surrounding district, amid the constant noise of car horns and calls to prayer from numerous mosques. For the three American-raised Muslims, Peshawar’s clogged maze of avenues, streets, and alleys, full of children dodging cars and donkeys, was alive in a way that Flushing had never been.

Zazi’s family greeted them at the airport in Peshawar, trading hugs and kisses with Najib and his new friends. Then they drove their guests to the rented house of Zazi’s uncle Lal Muhammad, fifteen minutes away, where the travelers spent the night. The next day, they split up, partly because Zazi wanted to spend time with his wife and family before heading on to Afghanistan. He urged Medunjanin and Ahmedzay to go ahead to Afghanistan without him.

They didn’t get far. Zazi drove them to the bus station, where they rented a car. Ahmedzay was dressed in a traditional Pakistani garb called a
shalwar kameez
, which consists of a long shirt and pajama-like pants, while Medunjanin had on Western-style clothes. On their way out of town, they ran into a Pakistani police checkpoint, where they faced questions: Who are you? Where are you going? Ahmedzay replied in fluent Pashto that they were going to Khyber Agency, an area technically off-limits to foreigners, to see his family. Then Ahmedzay and Medunjanin pulled out their US passports. The police immediately
suspected that the fair-skinned Medunjanin worked for the CIA and assumed that Ahmedzay was his translator. The officers ordered them into the back of a pickup. As the truck pulled away, Medunjanin started to chant from the Koran in Arabic. One officer grew curious, and asked Ahmedzay if Medunjanin was a Muslim. Ahmedzay answered yes. The sympathetic officer told Ahmedzay to tell the police chief they were visiting the area. At the station, they repeated what the officer told them to say, and the chief set them free. Ahmedzay called Zazi, who sent his uncle to fetch them.

The three were going to need help navigating their way across the border. Luckily, Zazi’s cousin Amanullah had connections—and he owed Zazi’s family a favor. In 1999 Mohammed Zazi had filled out paperwork claiming Amanullah as his own son, a lie that could have jeopardized the entire family’s immigration status. He was close to Najibullah in age, and the two were like brothers during the years that Amanullah had spent with the Zazis in Flushing. But Amanullah struggled to adjust. He began smoking pot, his grades suffered, and he started getting into fights. In 2003 his uncle sent him back to Pakistan for six months to pull himself together. But Amanullah kept up his drug habit, and when he returned to Queens, he began drinking heavily and experimenting with cocaine. Fed up, Mohammed Zazi shipped him back to Pakistan in 2004. When Najibullah Zazi and his friends arrived in Peshawar, Amanullah was still doing drugs, but he knew an imam—someone with whom he’d once studied—who was the sort of person the young Americans were looking to meet.

The imam, it turned out, didn’t know anyone from the Taliban. But he told Zazi and his friends that he had contacts with another anti-American mujahideen group. On Amanullah’s reference, the imam introduced the three men to a Pakistani who was in his midtwenties and went by the name Ahmad. On the imam’s recommendation, Ahmad agreed to take Zazi and his friends to a training compound in Waziristan, the tribal region in northwest Pakistan along the Afghan
border that is a beehive of jihadist groups, including the only one with global brand recognition: al-Qaeda. Waziristan was nearly two hundred miles from Peshawar, and the trip would take two days on less-traveled roads. Medunjanin took the battery out of his BlackBerry, believing that the device contained a Global Positioning System that would allow him to be tracked.

It sounded even more thrilling than anything that the three could have imagined back in Queens. Zazi cut short his time with his family, and Ahmedzay postponed visiting his wife in Afghanistan. As they started their journey in a four-door gray Toyota, Ahmad instructed the three friends to begin using aliases. At the first police checkpoint they encountered, Zazi and the other Americans fell silent, fearing a repeat of what had happened to Medunjanin and Ahmedzay a few days earlier. Now, though, they had Ahmad to provide cover. He got out of the car and approached the checkpoint, speaking briefly with the police as Zazi watched nervously. The police walked toward to the car, moved to the back, and opened the trunk. Satisfied with their cursory search, the officers waved them on.

The hours passed. Zazi and Ahmedzay spoke in Urdu with Ahmad, leaving Medunjanin, usually the ringleader, frozen out of the conversation. Ahmad explained that there were many foreign fighters in his group. They believed in global jihad, he explained, not just fighting the Americans in Afghanistan.

Ahmedzay realized that Ahmad was not from any mujahideen outfit. They had landed themselves with a bona fide al-Qaeda operative. Every year, a new crop of American would-be jihadis flies to Pakistan or Afghanistan to try to join al-Qaeda. The organization, wary of infiltration by Western intelligence, maintained networks of screeners whose jobs were to weed through the eager young recruits, looking for moles. Ahmad, apparently, had decided that this motley little group—two Afghans, one by way of Peshawar, and a Bosnian, all thoroughly Americanized in Queens—were for real. For him, it meant bringing his
superiors the prize that al-Qaeda most valued: assets who could move freely in the West, especially in America, without attracting the notice of intelligence and security services.

•  •  •

At the end of their second day on the road, the group reached Miram Shah, the town that had become al-Qaeda’s de facto headquarters since the terrorist group fled Afghanistan. Perched high in the mountains southwest of Peshawar, it was originally built in 1905 by the British as a fort from which they could manage Waziristan. Today it is in one of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and is a frequent target for American drone strikes.

Ahmad deposited his charges at a guesthouse in a residential area, where they stayed for two days. There were about a half-dozen rooms surrounding a brick courtyard. The friends were comfortable as they waited to see what happened next. Soon a group of al-Qaeda operatives came to inspect the Americans. The first introduced himself as Ibrahim. He had a slight build, an olive complexion, and a beard. Zazi had no idea at the time that he was talking to Rashid Rauf. A dual citizen of Britain and Pakistan, Rauf had played a role in a failed 2006 plot to bring down as many as ten airliners over the Atlantic Ocean. In the wake of its disruption, he had been arrested by the Pakistanis but escaped to Waziristan. The other man who appeared with Rauf was a tall, slender black man who wore a paramilitary vest and carried an AK-47 slung over his back. He introduced himself as Abdul Hafeez, and the three Americans could tell that he was important.

Hafeez and Rauf watched these American strangers cautiously. Were they working for the CIA? Paranoia pulsed through the terrorist group. Over the years since the American invasion of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s ranks had been thinned because of traitors who supplied information to the CIA. Then the drones came. These men weren’t inclined to trust strangers.

They all sat on the floor of the ramshackle guesthouse and made small talk in English. Zazi, Ahmedzay, and Medunjanin said they were from New York. Hafeez inquired why the three had come to Pakistan. Zazi explained that they wanted to fight against the Americans in Afghanistan and kill as many as possible. He was careful to describe his countrymen as “the enemy.” They had grown up hearing stories about their native land suffering under the scourge of foreign power, and they wanted to hasten the day when, once again, Afghanistan’s oppressors were vanquished. Hafeez was impressed. It wasn’t easy to make it here and find them, he said. These guys had guts and had already evaded US intelligence.

Before the meeting, Hafeez had already decided that these young men would not be wasted fighting the United States in Afghanistan. Pakistan had no lack of young men who could be served up as cannon fodder for the American howitzers and F-15 fighter jets. The men now sitting in front of Hafeez were unusual. They had American passports, they were not under suspicion by the US authorities, and they were apparently willing to die. Hafeez told the trio that he would like them to go back to America on a special mission. They had valuable assets, like their ability to speak English and blend in, Hafeez said. Zazi and the others knew what this meant. The three had been tapped to be suicide bombers.

Once Hafeez finished his pitch, Rauf recited a story about the Prophet Muhammad. “There was once a man who came to the Prophet from the opposing side and told him he wanted to help him, join his ranks. And the Prophet told him, ‘You’re just one man, and you don’t really add to our numbers. You should go back and do something on the other side.’ ”
¹⁰
You should follow the words of the Prophet, Rauf concluded. Then Hafeez and Rauf asked the men if they had made their decision. Would they be suicide bombers? Startled, Zazi turned to his friends and, almost without thinking, replied, “No.”

Hafeez responded with gentle persuasion. Think about it, he told them. He then asked the three New Yorkers to hand over their passports.
Hafeez and Rauf left the house, leaving their impressionable young guests to mull over the situation. Carrying out a suicide bombing was the ultimate sacrifice, and Hafeez knew that he couldn’t force them into taking on the role—not if he wanted whatever plans he’d laid for them to succeed. Hafeez had been down this path before with others. Hafeez and Rauf told the Americans they would come back.

Anxious and alone, the friends huddled at the house, unsure of what might happen next. They had told two representatives of al-Qaeda, the most feared terrorist group on earth, “No thanks.” Who lives to tell that story? Al-Qaeda could behead them and bury their bodies, and nobody would ever know. But none of the three friends thought martyrdom by suicide sounded appealing, even though they had come all the way to Southwest Asia hoping to die fighting under a Taliban banner. This wasn’t what they had signed up for when they talked big outside their mosque in Queens. So what if al-Qaeda thought they were cowards? They’d stick to their plan and go fight in Afghanistan, assuming that they made it out of there alive.