On March 6, 2005, when many college students were heading south to beaches for spring break, Syed Haris Ahmed was boarding a Greyhound bus headed north to Toronto. At the time, he was a 20-year-old Georgia Tech freshman. He was accompanied only by his friend Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, an 18-year-old from the Atlanta suburb of Roswell. Together, they met with members of a Canadian terrorist cell — the one broken up last June — to discuss “strategic locations in the United States suitable for a terrorist strike, including military bases and oil facilities and refineries,” according to an indictment filed against them in the northern Georgia U.S. district court.
The indictment accuses Ahmed and Sadequee, who were arrested respectively in March and April of this year, of supporting “violent jihad” and charged them on four counts of conspiring to provide or attempting to provide “material support” to terrorists and the Pakistani terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.
According to prosecutors, Ahmed and Sadequee were collaborating with international terrorists. In April 2005, a month after their trip to Toronto, they took a day trip in Ahmed’s pick-up truck to Washington, D.C. Instead of taking typical tourist photos, they allegedly made a casing video of the U.S. Capitol, the World Bank’s headquarters, a fuel storage facility, and the George Washington Masonic Temple in Alexandria, Va. A copy of this video was reportedly found among the possessions of Younis Tsouli, an alleged terrorist arrested in London last October.
The indictment also contends that Ahmed traveled to his native Pakistan for parts of July and August of 2005 — not for a standard study-abroad program, but rather in what has been described as an attempt to be indoctrinated in radical Islam at a madrassa and study the art of jihad at a terrorist training camp. In August 2005, Sadequee departed for Bangladesh, ostensibly to get married, but also to propagate jihad. Before he left the U.S., he was questioned by FBI agents at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York about his trip to Canada, according to an FBI affidavit. (Sadequee was also charged in a New York U.S. District Court for making false statements during this interview.) A map of Washington, D.C. was in his possession, as well as two CD-ROMs, one of hard-core bootlegged pornography and the other an encrypted CD whose contents are unknown. Sadequee was extradited from Bangladesh this spring.
Ahmed’s father, Syed Riaz Ahmed, an assistant professor of math and computer science at North Georgia College and State University, told NRO in an interview that he and his family emigrated from Pakistan in 1997. Twelve years old at the time of his arrival in the United States, Syed Haris Ahmed is now a naturalized citizen. He enrolled at Georgia Tech in the fall of 2004 to major in engineering. After commuting from home during his freshman year, he moved into an off-campus apartment with a middle-aged businessman he met at Al-Farooq Masjid, a mosque near Georgia Tech. “My son has not been involved in any terrorist activities,” insists the elder Ahmed. “He cannot harm even an animal, how can he harm a human being?”
Sadequee was born in Fairfax, Va., in 1986 to Bangladeshi parents, but moved with his family to Georgia in 1988, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. He attended the Institute of Islamic Learning in Ajax, Ontario, from 1999 to 2001, at which point he dropped out after failing to complete a program to memorize the entire Quran. The Institute is located about 30 miles from the town of Mississauga, where many of the 17 Canadian suspects lived, but it is unclear if Sadequee met members of the terrorist cell when he was a student in Canada.
According to Ahmed’s father, Sadequee met Ahmed at the Al-Farooq mosque near Georgia Tech. “Al-Farooq is a peaceful and very educated mosque that does not mix politics and the religion,” says Ahmed’s father. Whether or not the mosque is peaceful and educated, it has mixed politics and religion. For instance, on October 15, 2004, the mosque was used to hold a press conference to denounce the U.S. military’s attacks on insurgents who had taken up positions inside Iraqi mosques. According to an account in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Imam Plemon el-Amin, the leader of another Atlanta mosque, compared U.S. attacks on these insurgents to the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four black girls: “At some point during the 1960s, churches were under attack and the people who actually perpetrated the attack felt that they were justified because that’s where the boycotts and sit-ins were being organized.”
In the weeks following their detention, more information has emerged regarding the paths of Ahmed and Sadequee to militant Islam. The prevailing wisdom of investigators and prosecutors holds that the two got involved with radical Islam, and were connected to the Canadian terrorist cell, exclusively via websites advocating jihad. Ahmed’s father confirmed this supposition in his interview with NRO: “Our son had realized his wrong thinking about the real meaning of Jihad, which he picked up from those chat rooms and websites, who claim that they represent true Islam, which they do not, because Islam is a peace-loving religion.”
Whether it was solely through Internet contacts that these two young men became aspiring terrorists will likely be answered during their trial, for which a date is yet to be determined. But it is not unreasonable to look for other influences that might have pushed Ahmed and Sadequee toward radical Islam. “The Internet alone is not enough to radicalize someone,” says terrorism expert Steve Emerson. “Local environment is absolutely critical. They need people in positions of authority to reinforce their views and comrades to support them.”
Americans have become all too familiar with the danger posed by a radical Islam that preaches terrorism and jihad, but perhaps we have tended to think that such fanaticism would find support only in backwards nations with repressive regimes. Not so. This indictment poses a question that will likely be of vital importance to U.S. security: How did two young U.S. citizens become militant Muslims in the heart of Dixie?
– John McCormack, a student at George Washington University, was this summer’s Collegiate Network intern for NR in Washington, D.C.