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Posted on 10/23/2001 7:24:06 AM PDT by milestogo

Western-Born, Educated Abdul Rehman
Falls Under Sway of Extreme Islamicism
By MARC CHAMPION
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

LONDON -- Abdul Rehman grew up in a comfortable East London home, the well-educated, soccer-loving son of a Pakistani immigrant who built a successful business as a clothing retailer.

But this past summer, Mr. Rehman says, he attended a military training camp in Afghanistan. He doesn't see any problem with that, despite the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

"Guys here [in Britain] join the Territorial Army, to train to defend their country," says the 26-year-old Briton, who works as a fiber-optic engineer. "We Muslims train to defend our faith. What's the difference?"

Last summer's trip marked the second time Mr. Rehman went to training camp, he says. The first was in Pakistan, where he says he spent three months in 1999 with local mujahedeen preparing to fight for the "liberation" of Kashmir from India. The training, he says, included the use of small arms, artillery and explosives.

"It was very exciting," says Mr. Rehman, who now calls himself Abu Yahya, a Muslim nickname. "Not only was I fulfilling my divine obligation" -- to fight for Islam -- "but I was handling an AK! Who doesn't want to do that?" Mr. Rehman asks, referring to the Russian-designed AK-47 assault rifle.

People like Mr. Rehman present the British government with a dilemma. They are primarily propagandists, and neither learning to use weapons nor spreading propaganda -- no matter how distasteful it may be to the majority of the population -- is against British law. Yet under Britain's new Terrorism Act, it is a crime to raise funds or recruit for banned organizations. Determining where free speech ends and criminal activity begins could prove tricky.

It isn't clear how many young British Muslims travel to Pakistan for military training. An Indian government official puts the number "in the hundreds" each year; an official at the British Foreign Ministry says it's only a few handfuls. Either way, Mr. Rehman's story opens a window on how young Western-born and -educated Muslims can fall under the sway of extreme Islamicism and end up in military camps run by the likes of Osama bin Laden.

Until Sept. 11, this traffic between urban Britain and the Hindu Kush was a serious concern mainly for India, which fears that it feeds rebels in Kashmir. Britons of Pakistani descent tend to feel as passionate about the fate of Kashmir as Irish Americans do about Northern Ireland, or American Jews about Israel.

A case in point: Ahmed Omar Sheikh, who was brought up in the same part of East London as Mr. Rehman and studied at the London School of Economics. Indian authorities jailed Mr. Sheikh for his participation in the 1994 kidnapping of three Britons and an American in Indian Kashmir. Then, in 1999, hijackers diverted an Indian Airlines jet to Afghanistan, where they traded the passengers for Mr. Sheikh and two other militants in Indian jails. Mr. Sheikh's current whereabouts aren't known.

With the Taliban

Now, the graduates of these military summer camps are chafing British nerves, too. Some Britons are known to have gone to fight for the Taliban. One, Anwar Khan from the textile town of Burnley, was captured by the anti-Taliban forces of the Northern Alliance in 1998; BBC radio recently interviewed him from his jail cell in northern Afghanistan. And the Times of London reported on Monday that it had spoken by phone to a Londoner who says he and two British friends left to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan after Sept. 11.

Mr. Rehman, for his part, says he's ready to fight British troops in Afghanistan if need be. "I've got nothing in common with the people in Afghanistan," he says, adding that he believes the Taliban are mistaken in many of their laws, such as denying education to girls. But they are sincere Muslims, he says, and "I'm a Muslim first."

It's difficult to confirm the details of Mr. Rehman's experience; he blocked attempts to interview members of his family or friends.

But Britain's Crown Prosecution Service has confirmed that it is investigating representatives of al-Muhajiroun, a radical Islamist group to which Mr. Rehman belongs. The original issue was a fatwa, or religious ruling, that the group's London-based leader, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, issued on Sept. 16 to condemn Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf for his cooperation with the U.S. government. But British police expanded the investigation after a representative of al-Muhajiroun was quoted by news service Agence France Presse as saying that U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair was now a "legitimate target" for any Muslim to kill, because of his role in the allied attack on Afghanistan.

Mr. Rehman declines to say whether he made the remarks, although they were made from his mobile telephone. But he says the comments were taken out of context. What was meant, he says, was that Muslims in Afghanistan wouldn't be condemned by Islam if they were to attack Mr. Blair. But "we weren't calling for anyone to do anything," he adds.

'A Minuscule Fraction'

British police also are looking into whether al-Muhajiroun, which means "the emigrants" in Arabic, has recruited members for banned organizations. Mr. Bakri denies the charge, although in the past his group has boasted about sending young Britons to train in military camps.

Mainstream British Muslims say the influence of Mr. Bakri and other radical leaders is limited yet worrying. "These people represent a minuscule fraction of Muslim society," says Abdel Haleem, director of the Center for Islamic Studies at London's School for Oriental and African Studies. "But over young men who often have no prospects, they can have great power."

A majority of Britain's Muslims are concentrated in urban neighborhoods plagued with high unemployment. Several hundred were caught up in race riots triggered by white neo-Nazis this summer in the faded textile towns of Oldham, Burnley and Bradford. Mr. Rehman, by contrast, came from a family that could afford to give him a good education. At age 16, he was uninterested in politics, preferring soccer and weight lifting. He aspired to be an architect.

He traces his political awakening to the Gulf War, when television footage showed exploding cruise missiles lighting the sky over Baghdad. "I kept asking myself, 'Why are we bombing Muslims?'" he recalls.

So he attended a lecture at his local library where a Muslim in his early 20s argued that the West was trying to divide and suppress the Muslim world. The solution, the speaker said, was Khilafah -- a revival of the ancient Caliphate that united the world's Muslim states under Islamic law and a single ruler after the death of the Prophet Mohammed in the seventh century. The idea was to create a new superpower capable of challenging the West's military and cultural dominance.

Radical Islam, Peugeot GTI

That lecture led Mr. Rehman to a meeting with al-Muhajiroun leader Mr. Bakri, a passionate exponent of Khilafah and an imam at the Shepherds Bush mosque in West London. A Syrian by birth, Mr. Bakri came to Britain in 1986 after being ejected from Saudi Arabia. Mr. Rehman soon fell under his sway. "He had this aura," Mr. Rehman says. "We were all so young, but this guy was a true scholar."

Mr. Rehman attended Redbridge Technical College in East London, where he became the head of the student union. He arranged a prayer room for Muslim students and began an Islamic society. Each Wednesday, he would pile friends into the Peugeot 205 GTI his father had given him and head off to lectures on radical Islam in towns as far away as Birmingham and Derby. Soon, he was giving lectures of his own.

But it was the war in Bosnia that convinced Mr. Rehman, now married with two children, to get military training. At the start of the war, he couldn't place Bosnia on the map. "I thought Bosnia was some kind of washing machine," he says. But Mr. Bakri convinced him that what happened to the Muslims in Bosnia could happen to Muslims in Britain, too. Such talk helped persuade Mr. Rehman to travel to Pakistan for military training.

Not much is known about the training camps. Mr. Rehman describes the camp he attended in Pakistan as a kind of united nations of Muslims, including young men from across the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent. Fluent in both Arabic and Urdu, Mr. Rehman fit in easily with his fellow trainees. The "advanced" training he undertook this year in Afghanistan was more "psychological and political," Mr. Rehman says. But he offers few details about the instruction given at either camp and declines to say whether other Britons attended. "This isn't a good time to talk about that, is it?" he says.

From Sharia to C4

Further insights into the such training camps emerged in testimony given by defendants during a U.S. trial in absentia of Mr. bin Laden and others accused of perpetrating the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The testimony, now filed in a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, suggests that the training could cover Islamic law and jihad; explosives; small arms; assassination (including the use of chemicals, poisons and toxins); hand-to-hand combat; physical fitness; intelligence and communications. The explosives course alone could take from 15 to 60 days, dealing with how to identify, handle, modify and improvise munitions ranging from hand grenades to TNT and plastic explosive C4.

Mr. Rehman probably had only a small part of this training. He says he went to Afghanistan to deliver a letter from the London School of Shariah -- another of Mr. Bakri's organizations -- to the Taliban. It asked them to pay less attention to nation-building and more to promoting the new caliphate. In the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Mr. Rehman says, he met a deputy to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the regime's reclusive leader, who said the Taliban was still too weak to think about rebuilding the caliphate.

"They said I could meet Mullah Omar if I waited a week, but I was feeling a bit sick," Mr. Rehman says, pointing to his stomach. "Besides, you have no idea how hot it is out there. I wanted to go home."

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