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Posted on 12/02/2001 10:08:09 PM PST by KQQL

He’s a really good boy’
Exclusive: The parents of the American Taliban describe their son

BY COLIN SOLOWAY

The parents of the so-called American Taliban expressed shock and disbelief at the news that their son, missing for seven months in Pakistan, had turned up in a fortress in Northern Afghanistan, as a prisoner of the Northern Alliance and a survivor of a vicious prison uprising that left one American CIA agent and hundreds of foreign fighters dead.

ABDUL HAMID, who spoke with a Newsweek journalist on Saturday afternoon in the fortress of Kala Jangi in Northern Afghanistan, has been identified by his parents as John Phillip Walker Lindh, 20, of Northern California. Walker (he uses his mother’s last name), was taken into custody by U.S. Special Forces late Saturday night at a hospital near Mazar-e-Sharif, in Northern Afghanistan. He is the only American to be captured fighting for the Taliban. His parents have contacted officials at the U.S. State Department and the U.S. embassy in Pakistan but say they have been given no word on his condition or location.

Marilyn Walker describes her son as a “sweet, shy, kid,” who had wanted to work with poor people and perhaps go into medicine. “Everyone who knows him loves him,” she says. “Everyone expected him to become a scholar.”

Walker said on Sunday that the photo of her son that appeared on Newsweek.MSNBC.com was the first indication that she had of his whereabouts since he left a religious school, or Madrassah, in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, where he had been studying the Quran, seven months earlie “I last talked with him at the end of April,” she says. “He said he was going to be moving somewhere cooler for the summer.”

She never heard from him again. Instead of going to study in the mountains of Pakistan, John Walker told Newsweek he had traveled across the border to Afghanistan to help the Taliban build a “pure Islamic state.” He told CNN that he had gone to the Afghan capital Kabul and volunteered with the Taliban. Because he didn’t know the local languages, he said, the Taliban told him to contact forces supporting Osama bin Laden. He said he had received combat training at a camp in Northern Afghanistan, had fought with the Pakistani allies of the Taliban in the disputed region of Kashmir and then returned to fight recently with the Taliban at Konduz.

Marilyn Walker paints a portrait of her son as an intelligent, articulate young man with a gift for languages and a commitment to social justice. John Walker was born in Washington, D.C., in February 1981. He is the second of three children of a home health care worker and a lawyer, Frank Lindh. His mother says he spent the first ten years of his life in the Washington suburbs of Maryland. His family moved to Northern California in 1991

At the age of 16 he converted to Islam. mother says she does not know why John embraced the religion. Although he was raised as a Catholic, his mother says he was exposed to her following of Buddhist teachings. “It’s very inclusive of all people and [has] a sense of social justice,” she says.

John’s father Frank Lindh, who is divorced from Marilyn Walker, says that his son took to Islam naturally. I to ld him once that maybe he was always a Muslim, because he had clearly found something important for him there,” Lindh told Newsweek.

At age 18 John traveled to Sinna, in Yemen, to learn Arabic. He then moved on to Pakistan and a Madrassah in the village of Bannu, where in addition to working to memorize the Quran, he taught himself some of the Urdu and Pashto languages. Frank Lindh says his son’s study of languages and his dedication to his religious studies makes him proud.

“I support him and his studies,” he says. “He’s learned Arabic, and is memorizing the Quran. He’s a very good scholar.” John Lindh told Newsweek that in the course of his studies in Pakistan he had met Taliban members and some of the former teachers of the Taliban leadership. These encounters may have helped to convince him that, as he said, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was the only true Islamic state in the Muslim world.

His mother said that in some ways, his fascination with the Taliban could have been a quest for purity. “In studying Islam he wanted to study somewhere where it is practiced in its purest form,” she says.

But Walker says she was shocked by her son’s statements of support for the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. She says he had never expressed any interest in the Taliban or a any other militant version of Islam. “If he got involved with the Taliban, he must have been brainwashed,” she says. “He was isolated. He didn’t know a soul in Pakistan. When you’re young and impressionable, it’s easy to be led by charismatic people.”

She pointed out that he went to Pakistan with an Islamic humanitarian aid group as part of his commitment to working with the poor.

“That’s where his heart is,” she says. “I think if he got caught up with Taliban people, it’s because they sucked that part of him in.”

Even harder for her to fathom is the idea of her son as a volunteer fighting for the Taliban. “I can’t imagine him in the uprising (in the prison),” she says. “This is a kid who would freeze [out of fear]. This is my shy kid. He’s totally not streetwise.”

CNN, Walker described himself as a “jihadi,” a holy warrior. “People he knew from the mosque here are just shocked,” she says.” They just can’t believe it.”

ow that they know their son is alive, Lindh and Walker are desperate to find out where he is. His parents say they are working to find legal representation for him. They do not know if he has been, or will be, charged with a crime, or if so, in what jurisdiction he will be tried. No matter what, says Lindh, they will stand by their son.

“I’m proud of John,” he says. “He’s a really good boy. A really sweet boy.” .

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