The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (18 page)

Twenty-two-year-old Specialist Hasan Edmonds was an Army National Guardsman, but his true allegiance lay elsewhere: “I am already in the American kafir [unbeliever] army,” he declared in January 2015, “and now I wish only to serve in the army of Allah alongside my true brothers.”
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Edmonds began trying to devise ways to travel to the Islamic State. “I know several Muslims have been caught attempting the Turkey route,” he said to a fellow plotter, “so tell me why not many Americans take the Egypt route. I am open to either way.”
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He added: “InshAllah [Allah willing] we will complete our task or be grants [sic] shahada [martyrdom] I look forward to the training.”
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Hasan Edmonds was arrested at Chicago Midway International Airport on March 25, 2015; he had planned to go to Egypt and make his way from there into the Islamic State. His cousin, Yunus Edmonds, wanted to go as well, saying: “Number one on my list is Mosul.” Specialist Edmonds was caught trying to leave the country for jihad overseas, but he and his cousin had also planned a jihad mass murder plot inside the United States: “If I find myself stuck here,” said Yunus, “I intend to take advantage of being so close to the kuffar [unbeliever].”
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Hasan agreed: “Honestly we would love to do something like the brother in Paris did.”
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The “brother in Paris” was most likely Amedy Coulibaly—or possibly the transcript missed the terminal
s
and Hasan was referring to the Kouachi brothers.

The cousins concocted a plan: after Hasan traveled to the Islamic State, Yunus would wear his uniform and storm the Joliet Armory, where Hasan had trained for the National Guard.
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Yunus, thinking big, said that he “anticipated a body count of 100 to 150.” Hasan gave him a list of Joliet Armory officers and told him: “Kill the head.”
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Yunus would have done so, but the fellow plotter to whom the cousins had divulged all their plans was actually an informant, and the plot was foiled.

The Army Recruit: “Getting Ready to Be Killed in Jihad Is a HUGE Adrenaline Rush!!”

Also attempting to carry out the Islamic State’s call to kill U.S. military personnel was a U.S. Army recruit named John Thomas Booker Jr., also known as Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, who was arrested in April 2015
for a plot to set off a weapon of mass destruction in a jihad martyrdom suicide attack at Fort Riley in Kansas.
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Hassan had been the object of a manhunt a year before that, after he posted on Facebook (spelling and punctuation as in original):

           
Oh those of the ummah [community] of the Prophet Muhammad(S). I will soon be leaving you forever so goodbye! I am going to wage jihad and hopes that i die. I want to be with my lord so bad that I cry but I will miss you guys I am not going to lie. I wish I could give you guys more but I am just a guy who is so very poor.

                
I am telling you I am so broke that my pockets are sore:) I cannot wait to go the Prophet Muhammad’s(S) door and prank Isa bin Maryam [Jesus Christ] and party so hard that it will rock Jannah to its core. Only Allah knows what the future has in store so that should make you fear Allah much much more.
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Shortly after writing that, Booker added that “getting ready to be killed in jihad is a HUGE adrenaline rush!!”
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He had planned to murder as many of his fellow soldiers as possible during basic training, intending to concentrate on murdering not just “privates,” but “someone with power.”
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FBI agents questioned him but decided that he didn’t pose any danger, and that was that—and Hassan never did get into the Army. He did, however, maintain his dreams of jihad, and late in 2014 he began plotting to commit a jihad attack in service of the Islamic State. He began to formulate his plot against Fort Riley, while saying that he really wanted to attack “the White House right now.”
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Booker had, however, been telling all this to an informant. His jihad would not come to fruition.

The “Real Bad Bitches”

On April 2, 2015, healthcare worker Noelle Velentzas and preschool teacher Asia Siddiqui, two Muslim women in Queens, were arrested for plotting jihad attacks in the U.S. At one point Velentzas had asked Siddiqui, “Why can’t we be some real bad bitches?” They set out to accomplish that goal by plotting to build a jihad bomb and murder Americans for the Islamic State.
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According to Loretta Lynch, then the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, “the defendants in this case carefully studied how to construct an explosive device to launch an attack on the homeland.”
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Studying how earlier terrorist attacks had been carried out, Velentzas and Siddiqui began assembling the ingredients of the types of bombs that had been used in the 1993 World Trade Center jihad bombing, the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, and the 2013 Boston Marathon jihad bombing.
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Velentzas told Siddiqui that people should think of them both as “citizens of the Islamic State.” But she didn’t feel any need to make the trip all the way over there: a citizen of the Islamic State, she said, could “make history” by “pleasing Allah” right here in the United States.
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Velentzas and Siddiqui had wanted to be a part of the global jihad for a long time. Velentzas loved Osama bin Laden and even had a photo of him as the featured image on her cell phone. She once said, “Killing a police officer is easier than buying food, because sometimes one has to wait in line to buy food.”
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She said that to a man who she thought was a fellow Islamic State sympathizer but who turned out to be an undercover agent.

She also told him, “If we get arrested, the police will point their guns at us from the back and maybe from the front. If we can get even one of their weapons, we can shoot them. They will probably kill us but we will be martyrs automatically and receive Allah’s blessing.”
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And she called the funeral of the policemen murdered by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, with its huge assemblage of police officers, “an attractive potential target.”
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Time was short: “We are living . . . the last war, the big war before the end of day
starts, in English they call it Armageddon, we are actually living in that time, it’s not a joke, it starts in Syria.”
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Siddiqui, for her part, was in regular touch with jihadis from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In 2009, she even contributed a poem to its magazine, which read in part that there was no “excuse to sit back and wait—for the skies rain martyrdom.”
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Both of the “bad bitches” were active and respected members of the Masjid Al-Hamdulillah (the “Thanks be to Allah Mosque”) in Brooklyn. The mosque’s imam, Charles Aziz Bilal, confirmed that both women were members in good standing—and he was skeptical of the charges against them: “They have been here five years. I have not seen any signs of them being radicalized or promoting radical Islam, none of that stuff.”
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Velentzas, he said, was simply “a mother who took care of her daughter, normal. Very friendly, nothing political, nothing extremist.”
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There was no possibility, the imam insisted, that Velentzas and Siddiqui learned to be “bad bitches” who were “citizens of the Islamic State” at Masjid Al-Hamdulillah. “That’s not what we promote here.” If Velentzas and Siddiqui had really been involved in jihad terror activity, “they were doing it on the down low.”
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But then he cast doubt on even that possibility by praising their families, which would certainly have known if Velentzas or Siddiqui had been involved in jihad plotting: “My observation of the families for the last five years,” he declared, “has been impeccable—when it comes to character; when it comes to integrity—has been impeccable.”
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Of Velentzas and her family he said: “They have been an upright family. Very honest, very sincere, very dedicated family. They’re family-oriented. They have children in the community, born in the mosque. Good religious people.”
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What about those bomb ingredients? The imam insisted that the women had gathered them for innocent reasons: “You go to picnics, right? And what do you have on your [sic] to cook the meat and everything? You have propane tanks, right?”
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Velentzas’s husband of six years, Abu Bakr, echoed this line of defense: “If anyone who had a pressure cooker in their house would be charged for it, a lot of people would be. It’s like having a butter knife.”
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Like their imam, Velentzas’s husband appeared in the media to be dismayed about the charges, saying of his wife: “I know nobody’s perfect, but she is. . . . I want people to see her how I see her—as a mother, a wife, a friend, a confidant, a sister to the community, a daughter to the imam and the elders.”

What, then, of the charges? “I don’t believe any of it, period. We are all shocked, the whole community. That’s not who she is.”
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So was she being framed by the authorities? “Yes, I would say yes they are lying.”
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For what reason, he did not explain. And of Siddiqui: “I can’t say anything bad about her. She never showed anything to us like that. They were good friends—very good friends.”
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Abu Bakr’s credibility took a hit, however, when photos surfaced of him carrying the black flag of jihad at the Muslim Day Parade in New York City in 2007.
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Taqiyya: Lying for Islam

Those photos shed light on a recurring feature of these jihad plot cases. American Muslims often express shock and incomprehension when their family members, friends, and members of their mosques are arrested for plotting jihad attacks. No doubt some of them are genuinely clueless, but there is good reason to believe that others understand exactly why the jihadis in their lives are motivated to plot violence, share the same outlook themselves to one degree or another, and are engaging in deliberate deceit.

The fact is, deceiving non-Muslims isn’t forbidden in Islam—in fact, in some circumstances it may be a religious duty for Muslims. This deceit is justified by Qur’an 3:28, a verse that warns believers not to take unbelievers as friends or helpers “except when taking precaution against them in prudence.” This is the foundation of the idea that believers may legitimately
deceive unbelievers when under pressure. The word used for “taking precaution” in the Arabic is
tuqÄtan,
from the verb
taqiyyatan
—hence the term
taqiyya.

While many Muslim spokesmen today maintain that taqiyya is solely a Shi’ite doctrine, shunned by Sunnis, the great Islamic scholar Ignaz Goldziher has pointed out that while the doctrine of taqiyya was formulated by Shi’ites, “it is accepted as legitimate by other Muslims as well, on the authority of Qur’an 3:28.”
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The fourteenth-century Qur’an commentator Ibn Kathir, whose work is mainstream and still widely read, explains that in that Qur’an verse referred to “those believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers.” Muslims in such a situation were “allowed to show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly.” He quotes a companion of Muhammad saying, “We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them,” and another maintaining that “the
Tuqyah
[taqiyya] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.”
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Christopher Lee Cornell: “You Know We See American Troops as Terrorists”

Another American convert to Islam, Christopher Lee Cornell (who has insisted that trial judges and others address him only by his Muslim name, Raheel Mahrus Ubaydah), was arrested in Ohio in January 15, 2015, after he bought two assault rifles and a healthy supply of ammunition. He had planned to place pipe bombs in the Capitol and shoot various U.S. government officials—including the president.

Cornell called a Cincinnati radio station after his arrest to profess his allegiance to the Islamic State and give vent to his plans and goals.
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If he had not been arrested, he said, he would have taken a gun, and “I would have put it to Obama’s head, I would have pulled the trigger, then I would unleash more bullets on the Senate and House of Representative members, and I would have attacked the Israeli embassy and various other
buildings.”
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Why? Because of the “continued American aggression against our people and the fact that America, specifically President Obama, wants to wage war against Islamic State. . . . They might say I’m a terrorist, but you know we see American troops as terrorists as well, coming to our land, stealing our resources and killing our people, raping our women.”
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Cornell called himself a “lone wolf,” but he had pledged his fealty to the Islamic State, writing to an informant he thought was a fellow Muslim interested in jihad: “I believe that we should just wage jihad under our own orders and plan attacks and everything. I believe we should meet up and make our own group in alliance with the Islamic State here and plan operations ourselves.”
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He claimed that both the Islamic State and jihad mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen in September 2011, had approved of his plot: “we already got a thumbs up from the Brothers over there and Anwar al Awlaki before his martyrdom and many others.”
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