Cleveland's Islamic leader helped found, lead group linked to bin Laden

Cleveland Islamic leader Fawaz Damra holds himself out as a voice of moderation and interfaith tolerance. Yet he also helped found and lead a New York-based militant group that the U.S. government says Osama bin Laden later made a part of his global terror network.

The Alkifah Refugee Center was set up by Damra and two other men in 1987 at a Brooklyn, N.Y., mosque. It recruited fighters for the Muslim holy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, raising huge sums - by some accounts, millions of dollars - to support the Afghan jihad. Federal records also show it was the chief U.S. branch for the "Services Office" in Pakistan that bin Laden used to recruit Arab fighters for the Afghan war.

When the holy war ended in early 1989, bin Laden didn't want to quit. He set up an organization, al-Qaida, to take the jihad, or holy war, worldwide. And he used the Alkifah structure of moving money and fighters to a network of training camps in Afghanistan to do it, a bin Laden defector testified in federal court this year.

At the time, Damra was still an Alkifah officer and imam, or spiritual leader, of the al-Farooq mosque, where the center was based.

Al-Farooq, a drab second-floor mosque squeezed in among Arabic bookstores and groceries on a busy commercial strip in Brooklyn, was then a hotbed of Islamic activism and gathering place for many of the men later convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Damra, who moved to Cleveland in 1991, did not consent to be interviewed for this story but addressed similar issues in an interview 1½ months ago. He has denied any links to terrorists.

"Maybe those individuals were praying behind me," Damra said of the Trade Center conspirators.

"I was imam of [a] very active mosque in Brooklyn, N.Y. But I don't have any association with them. The FBI realized that. I cooperated with them."

Damra said he was questioned by the FBI in that case only because of guilt by associaton.

At the time he left the al-Farooq mosque, he broke with several of the men later convicted in the wider conspiracy to blow up New York landmarks, including the Trade Center, records show, although he continued to raise money for radical Palestinian groups. The U.S. government has tied some of these groups to terrorist acts.

Damra denied raising money for terrorists and said he did fund raising only for nonprofit groups he considered legitimate.

The Alkifah Refugee Center no longer has a Brooklyn office but still has bin Laden connections.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House listed the Services Office and its branch "Al Kifah" among chief bin Laden-allied "charities" whose assets were frozen.

Federal prosecutors say bin Laden used both groups to form al-Qaida. But the Alkifah center with its powerful fund-raising apparatus and U.S. connections may have been more important.

Bin Laden defector Jamal al-Fadl testified this year that when al-Qaida was set up in 1989, it was put under the "Farooq" structural umbrella - an apparent reference to the mosque and the Alkifah center - after bin Laden had a falling-out with his former mentor who ran the Services Office.

That mentor, Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam, was killed just months later in a November 1989 car bombing in Pakistan.

Azzam - who had appeared at the al-Farooq mosque with Damra shortly before his death, where discussion centered on moving the holy war to Palestine - was not the only one to die between 1989 and 1991.

The bare-knuckled fight among Arab ethnic factions to control the direction of jihad - and the vast sums it controlled - appears to have centered on Brooklyn.

Damra represented Palestinian factions at the al-Farooq mosque. According to a videotape made at that time, Damra wanted to switch the focus to helping the intifada, or uprising, against Israel.

Others, including radical Egyptians and Yemenis who eventually ousted Damra from al-Farooq, wanted to use the struggle to push Islamic governance in their nations. Disagreements led to fisticuffs at the mosque and at New York airports. Damra himself was punched by an Egyptian cab driver named Mahmoud Abouhalima, later convicted of mixing the chemicals for the 1993 Trade Center bomb, when Damra refused to hand over a $1,000 check he had in his pocket, according to federal records.

The trail of violence may even have stretched to Cleveland, where on Nov. 2, 1991, Saud Assed, the son of a wealthy Libyan exile, was killed outside Damra's new mosque on Detroit Ave. in a case briefly investigated for links to the terror factions in New York.

Shahaded Madahneh, the man convicted in that case, said he spent four years in Ohio prisons for a crime he didn't commit. He believes he was set up by people at Damra's Cleveland mosque who took advantage of his lack of English skills to implicate him in the crime.

Another to die was red-haired Mustafa Shalabi, who ran Alkifah and helped found it with Damra. Shalabi and Damra had been close during the Afghan war, but the two had a very public falling-out over money in early 1990. He was found murdered in his rented home on March 1, 1991.

The radical Egyptian cleric known as the "blind sheik" was suspected of having a hand in the killing. The blind sheik was never charged in that case.

The sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman, is now serving a life sentence in prison as the mastermind of a 1993 conspiracy to blow up New York City landmarks and to assassinate political figures including Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Damra acknowledged the mosque supported the Afghan holy war, an effort that had U.S. government sanction. But he said he had nothing to do with terror plots, including the 1993 Trade Center bombing, and that any suspicions traced to his prominence in the Brooklyn Islamic community.

Since moving to Cleveland, Damra did graduate studies at Hartford (Conn.) Seminary, a moderate school with a renowned Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, and has been at the forefront of interfaith efforts in Northeast Ohio.

Jewish and Christian leaders have been invited several times to the mosque, and Damra has been a prominent participant in interfaith gatherings and groups here. In one memorable scene after the Sept. 11 attacks, Damra and Catholic Bishop Anthony Pilla hugged each other at an interfaith vigil at St. John Cathedral.

But shortly after that service, a decade-old videotape was broadcast on WJW Channel 8 showing Damra raising money for a radical Palestinian group that has since been named a terrorist organization by federal authorities. In the video, he's shown praising the murder of elderly Israelis and calling Jews the sons of pigs and monkeys.

Damra has since apologized for the remarks. Yet he's also admitted that he raises money for "oppressed" people like the Palestinians, listing the Holy Land Foundation as one such group. The federal government acknowledged in December 1999 that since 1996 it had been investigating Holy Land for alleged ties to anti-Israeli terror group Hamas, records show.

When asked again about Holy Land fund raising last week, Damra said he never said he "solicited" money for the Holy Land Foundation.

The cross-currents of Damra's life trace to Palestine, a nonland between nations. He was born in 1961 on the east side of Nablus, between two refugee camps, in what is now the West Bank. Many neighboring families lived close to poverty, but Damra's was middle class. They were not fanatical, said his father's cousin, Suleiman Damra, who still lives in Nablus. They were simply good Muslims.

After secondary school, Damra traveled to the University of Jordan for a deeper understanding of his faith. At the time, the campus sizzled with the passion of Abdullah Azzam, a legendary scholar of Islamic law, whose preachings inspired bin Laden.

After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Azzam began counseling holy war, using inspirational tapes to attract Muslims to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. He also convinced countless others to support the jihad by recruiting and raising money.

Damra says he was not Azzam's student. He thinks Azzam had already left Jordan when he studied Islamic law there, graduating in 1984.

Damra settled briefly in Illinois and worked as an imam while taking some elective classes at the University of Chicago.

By 1986, he had moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., to a neighborhood nicknamed "little Arabia," and had become the spiritual leader of the al-Farooq mosque there.

On Dec. 29, 1987, Shalabi, Damra and a third man named Ali Shinawy filed papers incorporating the Afghan Refugees Services Center, which they later renamed Alkifah, meaning "the Struggle."

Shinawy is listed as a director. He later surfaced during the urban terrorism trial. According to evidence in that case, Shinawy helped procure a handgun with the serial number obliterated for one of the conspirators.

Other materials introduced at Abdel-Rahman's trial included bomb-making manuals with the letterhead of the Afghan Refugees Services Center, although using a different address. Military training at private homes, firing ranges and rural camps was coordinated through the center, testimony showed.

The incorporation papers described Alkifah's aim as "helping and caring of the Afghan people everywhere."

How much the Alkifah center contributed to the Afghan war effort is unclear, but it evidently was so substantial that two training camps in Afghanistan that became part of the al-Qaida terror network were named for the chief Brooklyn mosques doing the recruiting.

Al-Fadl, the bin Laden defector, testified this year that after he was recruited at the al-Farooq mosque in about 1988 to fight the Soviets, he got training in the Farooq camp in Afghanistan.

"The mosque at the period [Damra] was the imam there was pretty radical," said terrorism expert Steven Emerson, who has built a career on tracking U.S.-based Islamic militants. "There were a lot of nefarious activities being run out of that mosque, including sending bombs to Israel."

El Sayyid Nosair, serving a life sentence for his role in the 1993 urban terror plots, told reporters that he once encountered a CIA agent at Shalabi's Brooklyn home.

In early 1989, the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan and the leaders of the jihad began battling among themselves for the money and power.

Tension built, especially between Azzam-the charismatic scholar who founded the Services Office - and his wealthy supporter and increasingly ambitious adherent, bin Laden.

Bin Laden defector al-Fadl said that bin Laden wanted his own group to take the jihad worldwide. "In [the] beginning, they worked together because Abdullah Azzam, he runs the office, and bin Laden, he gives them the money for that . . . but later on they split," al-Fadl testified in a terror case this year.

Azzam apparently disagreed with bin Laden's drive for a global reach, focusing instead on the Palestinian cause. Around this time, Azzam visited al-Farooq and was introduced by Damra. On a tape of the visit provided by terrorism investigator Emerson, Damra said "this victory of jihad in Afghanistan could lead to a real jihad in Palestine and a victory to those who fight for God."

Not long after the visit, on Nov. 24, 1989, Azzam and two of his sons were killed in a car bomb explosion. Despite speculation about bin Laden's role in the bombing, he has denied harming Azzam.

The seven chief factions of holy warriors who had been fighting the Soviets also started fighting one another.

"After the war is over, they have nothing to do but turn on each other, looking for money and power," said Hamed Nebawi, 42, an ethnic Egyptian who runs a small grocery store near the al-Farooq mosque and was close to the blind sheik and Shalabi. "This is exactly what happened at al-Farooq. They turned against each other."

The problem in Brooklyn started, Nebawi said, when Damra demanded that Shalabi show the money he had raised for the Afghan jihad and Shalabi refused.

In 1989 or 1990, according to the New York Times, Damra wrote a nine-page letter accusing Shalabi of misusing funds and sent the letter to leading Muslims in the United States and abroad.

Madahneh, who attended the mosque at the time, remembers shouting matches at the mosque. He said Damra accused Shalabi of pocketing as much as $2 million.

Damra said recently, of Shalabi, "He was not an honest man and he should be brought to justice . . . I spoke about that at the time."

From Egypt, Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheik, intervened, calling both men, according to federal documents.

Not long afterward, Damra was punched at the airport by one of Abdel-Rahman's chief New York lieutenants in a dispute over money. In a tape-recorded phone conversation Abdel-Rahman talked about his attempts to keep "Fawaz" in the brotherhood. "He tried very hard at the start . . . I don't know what happened," Abdel-Rahman said.

Abdel-Rahman went to Brooklyn in mid-1990, mediating a deal that required Damra to step down as imam and Shalabi to move the Alkifah office out of al-Farooq.

People familiar with the men say that Abdel-Rahman was very interested in the Alkifah Refugee Center and the money it generated.

The blind sheik began traveling the city, delivering fiery speeches endorsing what some would label fundamentalist, others terrorist, causes.

In November 1990, militant Jewish activist Rabbi Meir Kahane was gunned down inside the Marriott East Hotel in Manhattan. Abdel-Rahman was later convicted of a wide-ranging conspiracy that included the Kahane murder.

At an Islamic conference in Chicago, Damra met Dr. Azzam Ahmed, a Cleveland area gynecologist who recruited Damra, Ahmed said.

Damra started his new job in January 1991. He hired an al-Farooq worshiper, Shahaded Madahneh to transport Damra's belongings in his van.

About the same time, Damra's former associate Shalabi and the blind sheik had a falling-out, and Shalabi made plans to leave Brooklyn.

He sent his wife and children to Egypt and promised to join them later. But shortly before Shalabi was to leave, he was shot and stabbed in the kitchen of his Brooklyn apartment.

Abdel-Rahman was never charged with the murder, but according to a transcript of a telephone call, a government informant who had infiltrated the terrorist group told his FBI handler that Shalabi's murder "is very fishy . . . it's smelling from Rahman's side."

The tranquillity of Cleveland's Islamic community didn't last long for Damra. After evening prayers one Saturday in November 1991, a worshipper, Saud Assed, was killed outside Damra's mosque on Detroit Ave.

Assed turned out to be the son of the exiled Libyan prime minister. A brother had been murdered in Libya the previous year.

According to police reports, Madahneh and Assed had both attended the prayer service that night and had planned to eat dinner together afterward.

But on the way out of the mosque, Assed was shot. According to police reports, Madahneh came running back into the mosque screaming, "They shoot us, they shoot us," yelling for someone to get help.

Damra was meeting with some men in his office at the mosque, he told police. He ran outside to Assed, who was lying in the front seat of his car.

The imam said he lifted Assed's shirt because he saw blood. Damra said he asked Assed what happened, but Assed, who was having trouble breathing, didn't answer.

Madahneh initially swore "by Allah" that he had nothing to do with the shooting, insisting that someone in a passing car shot at both him and Assed.

But Damra later told police Madahneh changed his story when he and three members of the mosque visited Madahneh in jail. Madahneh still denied the killing, Damra said, but claimed that Assed had been playing with his gun and it went off, according to police reports.

Madahneh now says his story about the shooting never varied - that he found his friend Assed shot in his car by a drive-by shooter.

In the beginning, Cleveland police figured the shooting was merely a dispute between friends. But when Assed's father, living in exile in Morocco, showed up at an American consulate to complain, saying that his other son had been murdered in 1990, the case attracted increased attention.

The FBI joined the investigation, as did the CIA although it has never been clear what they were looking for.

By all accounts, Assed lived much like a pauper even though he was an heir to his family fortune.

Besides a beat-up Honda, his only possession was an Arabian horse named Sahil that he boarded at the Cuyahoga County Fairgrounds. Assed, who worked for a local food store, was so frugal that he brushed and groomed the horse himself to save money.

Yet Assed's friends told investigators he kept $10,000 to $15,000, along with some personal papers, in a locked tack box either in his car or at the stable.

What happened to the money remains unclear. As investigators hunted for a motive behind the slaying, police and prosecutors were stunned when Damra tried to sell the horse, estimated to be worth $2,500 to $3,000. They stopped Damra. Federal officials later arranged for Assed's brother, who was living in hiding in New York to get the horse.

In July 1992, Madahneh pleaded guilty to a reduced charged of attempted involuntary manslaughter in Assed's death.

However, there was no forensic evidence against Madahneh, according to news accounts at the time. And even the prosecutor in the case, Winston Grays, said: "The bottom line is, I don't know if he did it or not."

On Feb. 26, 1993, six people died and more than 1,000 were injured when a truck bomb exploded in the basement of the Trade Center. Investigators uncovered a secondary plot to blow up New York City bridges and tunnels and assassinate world leaders.

Many of those arrested, including the blind sheik, had ties to the Al Farooq mosque.

Yet his name, along with that of Shalabi, Azzam and bin Laden was included on a list of 172 people whom federal prosecutors called unindicted persons who may be alleged as co-conspirators with the blind cleric.

On Nov. 17, 1995, a special agent with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service mentioned Damra in an affidavit connected to the Florida deportation case of another man.

In his affidavit, Agent William West called Damra and a Sudanese diplomat "terrorist suspects."

And last year, the INS released the decade-old videotape submitted as evidence in that case showing Damra raising money for Islamic jihad causes and making slurs against Jews. This was the tape shown locally by Channel 8.

In his recent apology "for the horrific statements," Damra said they were made at a time when he had been cloistered from other faith communities.

"The person who made those comments had absolutely no interaction with the Jewish-Christian community, or have any idea what extraordinary people they are," Damra said.

Even his critics in the mosque say they never heard the imam make anti-Semitic remarks, and members said an effort to make the mosque part of the regional interfaith movement was one of Damra's accomplishments.

Since the videotaped remarks became public, some mosque leaders have resigned and some Jewish leaders have said they will distance themselves from Damra. But many in the religious community have chosen to regard him as sincere in his stated desire to do "everything in my power to continue to show the community that I am the peacemaker they have come to know me as."

Interreligious Partners in Action of Greater Cleveland has kept Damra as a board member, and is trying to develop a team to rebuild trust in the interfaith community.

The Rev. Joseph Hilinski, interfaith director of the Diocese of Cleveland, also said he will continue to work with the Muslim leader. Hilinski said he has never heard Damra "speak in a derogatory fashion, or even hint in a derogatory fashion, of any religion."

Imam Abbas Ahmad of First Cleveland Mosque, acting leader of the Greater Cleveland Council of Mosques, said Damra has done "a great job" building bridges among Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities in the last decade.

"If God is willing to forgive a man for his sins, certainly we can forgive him, too," he said.

"He generally has tried to assume a new identity in the hope that no one would uncover his past," said Emerson, the terrorist investigator.

Plain Dealer reporters Steve Koff, Sabrina Eaton and Mike Tobin, researchers Cheryl Diamond and Olivia Wallace and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

For those Muslim terrorists among us who are American Citizens, not much can be done at the moment, until they break the law. But there is a huge number in the USA who are NOT citizens. Time to send them all home, along with all visitors from Muslim countries. It's the only way to make sure they are all out of our midst and not amongst us planning the next attack.

FUTURE WIDOWS OF AMERICA: WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN

The enemy is in this country right now. And any terrorists who are not already here are free to immigrate. The government has been doing an excellent job rounding up suspects from the last two attacks. But what about the next attack? We thought there was only one murderous Islamic cell in America the last time, too.
Congress has authority to pass a law tomorrow requiring aliens from suspect countries to leave. As far as the Constitution is concerned, aliens, which is to say non-citizens, are here at this country's pleasure. They have no constitutional right to be here.

Communicate! Let the Sons of....

NOW IS THE TIME TO CANCEL ALL VISAS!! WE MUST DEPORT ALL ALIENS, ENACT A MORATORIUM ON IMMIGRATION!!!

'Arab terrorists' crossing border: Middle Eastern illegals find easy entrance into U.S. from Mexico

WND POLL
Why is U.S. government taking little action to secure its borders?

Congress Still Won't Stop Illegal Immigration Democrats have not dropped their opposition to stopping illegal immigration, with troops or without. Complaining that Democratic efforts to make immigration into the United States easier have been complicated by the attacks, a Democratic Senate aide told the Washington Post, "Obviously what happened is going to make our job harder."

International Terrorism and Immigration Policy House Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims

Hearing on International Terrorism and Immigration Policy

January 25, 2000

Good morning. Before I begin my prepared comments, I would like to take a moment to express my deepest appreciation to you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing, and, equally important, for standing up to the orchestrated campaign to stop me from appearing. Because of the investigative work I have carried out as a journalist and investigator in exposing the presence of militant Islamic fundamentalists and Middle Eastern terrorists in the United States (see attached bio), I have been the subject of a sustained campaign of vilification, defamation and even a threat to my life during the past five years by militant Islamic organizations operating as self-anointed representatives of the larger Muslim population, whom they decidedly do not represent.

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