WASHINGTON — When President Obama decided last year to narrow the scope of the nine-year war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he and his aides settled on a formulation that sounded simple: Eviscerate Al Qaeda, but just “degrade” the Taliban, reversing that movement’s momentum.
Now, after the bungled car-bombing attempt in Times Square with suspected links to the Pakistani Taliban, a new, and disturbing, question is being raised in Washington: Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan — notably the Predator drone strikes — actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent?
It is a hard question.
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
ON GUARD A Pakistani Army soldier patrols in South Waziristan.
At the time of Mr. Obama’s strategy review, the logic seemed straightforward. Only Al Qaeda had the ambitions and reach to leap the ocean and take the war to America’s skies and streets. In contrast, most of the Taliban and other militant groups were regarded as fragmented, regional insurgencies whose goals stuck close to the territory their tribal ancestors have fought over for centuries.
Six months and a few attempted bombings later, including the near-miss in New York last weekend, nothing looks quite that simple. As commanders remind each other, in all wars the enemy gets a vote, too. Increasingly, it looks like these enemies have voted to combine talents, if not forces. Last week, a senior American intelligence official was saying that the many varieties of insurgents now make up a “witches’ brew” of forces, sharing money handlers, communications experts and, most important in recent times, bomb makers.
Yes, each group still has a separate identity and goal, but those fine distinctions seem less relevant than ever.
The notion that the various groups are at least thinking alike worries Bruce Riedel, who a year ago was a co-author of President Obama’s first review of strategy in the region. “There are two separate movements converging here,” said Mr. Riedel, a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The ideology of global jihad has been bought into by more and more militants, even guys who never thought much about the broader world. And that is disturbing, because it is a force multiplier for Al Qaeda.”
Mr. Riedel also notes, “The pressure we’ve put on them in the past year has also drawn them together, meaning that the network of alliances is getting stronger, not weaker.” So what seemed like a mission being narrowed by Mr. Obama, focusing on Al Qaeda and its closest associates (which included the Pakistani Taliban), “now seems like a lot broader mission than it did a year ago.”
Figuring out cause-and-effect when it comes to the motivations of Islamic militants is always tricky. Whenever he was asked whether America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were goading Islamic militants into new attacks, President Bush used to shoot back that neither war was under way on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. When President Obama came into office, the conventional wisdom held that the mere arrival of a black president with some Muslim relatives and an eagerness to engage the Islamic world would be bad news for Al Qaeda and Taliban recruiters. One rarely hears that argument now.
A year after Mr. Obama’s now-famous speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, Pakistanis talk less about outreach than Predator strikes. And White House officials say they suspect that their strategy of raising pressure may explain the amateurish nature of the recent bombing attempts.
The militants, they argue, no longer enjoy the luxury of time to train their bombers. To linger at training camps is to invite being spotted by a Predator. The tale told to interrogators by Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the Times Square case, suggests that he hooked up with one set of militants and was passed off to another, and given only cursory bomb-making training. “He wasn’t the greatest student, but they weren’t stellar teachers, either,” a senior administration official said last week, after reviewing the interrogation record. What Mr. Shahzad had was the one thing the insurgents most covet: easy, question-free ability to leave and enter the United States on a valid passport.
Of course, the United States might more effectively identify citizens who pose a threat. But, similarly, terrorist groups could find ways to more effectively train recruits. As Mr. Riedel notes: “You don’t need a Ph.D. in electrical engineering to build a car bomb. You don’t even need to be literate.”
Indeed, the Pakistani Taliban have set off plenty of car bombs that worked well against the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies. It was those bombings that finally convinced the Pakistani government to go after the group. In Washington, officials differentiate between the relatively young Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban, which have deep political roots in its country. “The Pakistani Taliban gets treated like Al Qaeda,” one senior official said. “We aim to destroy it. The Afghan Taliban is different.”
In fact, one Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed in a C.I.A. drone attack last summer while receiving a massage on the roof of an apartment building. His successor was believed killed in a similar attack until he showed up on a recent video. As one American intelligence official said, “Those attacks have made it personal for the Pakistani Taliban — so it’s no wonder they are beginning to think about how they can strike back at targets here.”
To the disappointment of many liberals who thought they were electing an antiwar president, Mr. Obama clearly rejects the argument that if he doesn’t stir the hornets’ nest, American cities will not get stung. His first year in office he authorized more Predator strikes — more than 50 — than President Bush did in his last four years in office. In December, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Obama stated that sometimes peace requires war.
“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” he said. Negotiations “could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”
In fact, recent history and the politics of a polarized Washington are pushing Mr. Obama to step up the pressure. The civil war that paved the way for the Afghan Taliban began when President George H. W. Bush pulled out of Afghanistan once the Soviets left. The Taliban took power and began sheltering Osama bin Laden on Bill Clinton’s watch; as vice president, Dick Cheney often criticized Mr. Clinton’s approach to terrorism, saying he dealt with it as a criminal justice issue, not an act of war. The second Bush administration drove the Taliban from power, but the early histories of the Bush years largely agree that the Taliban saw their opportunity to return when the American war on terror refocused on Iraq. Even the United States, they concluded, could not give its all to two wars at once.
That narrative helped form Mr. Obama’s argument, throughout his presidential campaign, that the Afghan-Pakistan border, not the Sunni triangle in Iraq, was the center of global terrorism. That, he said, was where all attacks on the United States and its allies had emanated.
Now, six months after setting his course, Mr. Obama is discovering, on the streets of New York, the deeper meaning of his own words.
Radical Islamist insurgents in Somalia seized one of the country’s most notorious pirate dens on Sunday, raising questions about whether rebels with connections to Al Qaeda will now have a pipeline to tens of millions of dollars — and a new ability to threaten global trade.
Dozens of insurgents stormed into Xarardheere, a pirate cove on the central Somali coast, around noon, but instead of putting up a fight, the pirates sped off. According to witnesses, several pirate bosses raced out of town in luxury four-by-four trucks, with TVs packed in the back and mattresses strapped on top. Islamist fighters in a fleet of heavily armed pickup trucks then occupied the strategic points in town, including the defunct police station and several crossroads.
What will happen next is not clear. Two of Somalia’s biggest problems and its most troubling exports — Islamist extremism and piracy — seem to be crashing into each other.
For several years, an intense civil war has raged in the country between a weak United States-backed government and radical Islamist groups that are trying to overthrow it. The ensuing lawlessness has given rise to a thriving piracy trade, in which Somali thugs in small skiffs have commandeered some of the biggest vessels on the sea, including a 1,000-foot-long oil tanker.
The pirates of Xarardheere currently hold several hijacked ships. But before they fled, they sent the ships further out to sea to prevent Islamist insurgents from capturing their hostages — a worrying prospect for Western diplomats and others, who fear the insurgents could exploit the hostages for political ends.
An insurgent spokesman implied on Sunday that his movement would shut down Xarardheere’s piracy business.
“We have peacefully seized the town and now we will bring Islamic Shariah,” said Sheik Abdinasir Mohamed Afdhuub, a spokesman for the Hizbul Islam insurgent group.
But many people fear that the insurgents were actually attracted to Xarardheere because of its criminal enterprise and that different groups of insurgents will now battle for control of the town.
“Tension is very high,” said Nor Ahmed, a Xarardheere resident. “People are worried about possible Shabab attacks any time soon.”
Hizbul Islam and the Shabab are two of the most powerful insurgent groups in Somalia and were once closely allied. Both espouse a harsh Islamist ideology and have organized public amputations and stonings. American and Somali security officials said that the leaders of both groups have worked closely with wanted terrorists of Al Qaeda.
But recently, the two groups seemed to have turned against each other. On Saturday, a deadly bombing at a mosque in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, was believed to have wounded a top Shabab official. On Sunday, another mosque was bombed, this time in the southern port town of Kismayu, where the Shabab drove out Hizbul Islam in a power struggle last year. At least two people were killed and eight wounded, in a neighborhood controlled by the Shabab.
Under strict Islamic law, piracy is considered haram (forbidden), and in 2006, during a six-month period when an Islamist movement pacified much of Somalia, the Islamists curtailed piracy significantly.
But now that Hizbul Islam and the Shabab desperately need money, the situation may be changing. The insurgents’ draconian rules banning music, television and bras have steadily alienated much of Somali society, making it harder for the insurgents to raise money and find recruits.
Additionally, Hizbul Islam lost access to hundreds of thousands of dollars in port taxes when they were kicked out of Kismayu last year and may have needed to find a new source of cash.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mohamed Ibrahim from Djibouti.
While the U.S. remains focused on hunting down Al Qaeda's original leadership along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, a lesser-known Islamic militant group has emerged as potentially the most dangerous terrorist outfit on the planet. For more than 15 years Lashkar-e-Taiba, known widely as LeT, has been targeting Indian interests, particularly in the disputed territory of Kashmir. But Western and Indian intelligence experts say LeT now has a growing interest in attacking foreigners and expanding its reach on a global scale—and that the group has the capability to carry out devastating attacks beyond India. At a U.S. Senate intelligence--committee hearing in February, Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, said LeT is now "becoming more of a direct threat," and "placing Western targets in Europe in its sights." Its "willingness to attack Jewish interests and locations visited by Westerners," he said, "raise[s] concerns that either the group itself or individual members will more actively embrace an anti-Western agenda."
To some analysts, LeT may be an even greater threat than Al Qaeda because of its technological sophistication, its broader global recruiting and fundraising network, its close ties to protectors within the Pakistani government, and the fact that it is still a less high-profile target of Western intelligence. Since about 2003 its fingerprints have been found on anti-Western attacks and plots from Afghanistan to Iraq, Dhaka to Copenhagen. And the choice of targets in LeT's most spectacular operation to date—the carefully choreographed November 2008 assault on Mumbai, including luxury hotels popular with Western travelers and a Jewish center—have been cited by Blair and other top U.S. officials as a sign of LeT's increasing interest in attacking the West. "In Mumbai the targets they went after were the targets of the global jihad," says terrorism expert and former CIA officer Bruce Riedel. Shortly after Mumbai, Pakistani authorities arrested alleged LeT communications specialist Zarar Shah and reportedly discovered on his laptop a list of 320 potential targets, most of them outside India. They included sites in Europe, says a Western intelligence official.
As further evidence of LeT's increasingly global agenda, U.S. authorities point to the case of David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American living in Chicago who was arrested in October for allegedly conducting surveillance on behalf of LeT for the Mumbai attacks. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Investigators say he and LeT had another plan as well: attacking the offices of the Danish newspaper that had run a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005. Reportedly acting on information provided to the FBI following his arrest, authorities in Bangladesh late last year picked up a number of LeT operatives whom they believe were preparing to attack the American and British embassies in Dhaka. "Very few things worry me as much as the strength and ambition of LeT, a truly malign presence in South Asia," Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, the U.S. State Department's top counterterrorism official, told reporters in January, after the Dhaka plot was uncovered. To Riedel, the plot against the U.S. Embassy in Dhaka shows that "we are now at war with Lashkar-e-Taiba." And in February a previously unknown faction of LeT claimed responsibility for the bombing of a café in Pune, India, that was popular with foreign tourists and expats. Before Mumbai, Western intelligence officials say, LeT had seemed careful to avoid killing foreigners in India. Now, as in Mumbai and Pune, the group seems committed to "internationalizing" even its Indian attacks.
LeT's roots date back to the guerrilla war against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Among its founders was Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who, along with Osama bin Laden, formed the influential Afghan Services Bureau, a precursor to Al Qaeda. Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, LeT sent its militants to fight in the Tajik civil war as well as in Bosnia. But it found its first real calling in the violent uprising against Indian rule in Kashmir. Pakistan's formidable spy agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, eagerly backed LeT, among other proxies in Kashmir, with money, weapons, and training. LeT headquarters in Muridke was set up on 77 hectares of land donated by the Pakistani government. Its construction was funded by many of the same Saudi moneymen who financed Al Qaeda. To this day, analysts say, some in the Pakistani military regard LeT as an important reserve force that could be unleashed in the event of a conflict with India.
It's not clear when LeT began plotting against Western targets, but its grudge against the West is longstanding. LeT's philosophy is similar to other Pan-Islamic jihadi groups, including Al Qaeda, but with a uniquely Pakistani twist. It wants to establish a Muslim caliphate across South Asia, re-creating the dominance of the 17th-century Mughal empire. In addition to being virulently anti-Jewish, LeT is rabidly anti-Hindu. It blames British imperialism and the West for what it perceives as the weakness of Pakistan, and Muslims in South Asia generally. In its official literature, the group has called for the "reconquest" of Europe, which it claims was once in Muslim hands but was stolen away by Christian Crusaders. Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, one of LeT's founders and its top spiritual leader, has repeatedly proclaimed that the Western world "is terrorizing Muslims." "We are being invaded, humiliated, manipulated, and looted," he told a Pakistani newspaper in 2003. "How else can we respond but through jihad?" He has urged his fellow Muslims to "fight against the evil trio: America, Israel, and India." As recently as this past spring, his son, Hafiz Talha Saeed, had publicly preached that it is the duty of every Muslim to wage jihad against Jews and Christians wherever they are.
In practice, however, LeT restricted its attacks to targets in India until recently. In the wake of 9/11, unlike other jihadi organizations, LeT steadfastly refused to send fighters to battle U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and publicly claimed it was interested only in liberating Kashmir from Indian control, in order to avoid antagonizing its protectors in Islamabad or drawing scrutiny from Western intelligence. But as long ago as 1998, Dilshad Ahmed, a top Lashkar military commander, argued that LeT should expand its operations beyond India. And in 2003 Lashkar sent militants to fight in Iraq, including Ahmed, who was captured there by British forces. That same year, a Lashkar-orchestrated plot to launch a major terrorist attack in Australia was thwarted by French and Australian authorities. As anti-American sentiment has grown in Pakistan over U.S. drone strikes on Pakistani soil, Lashkar's anti-Western rhetoric has become more heated, according to Stephen Tankel, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of a forthcoming book about LeT. Though LeT still denies any role in Afghanistan, U.S. security experts say LeT began sending fighters to battle U.S. troops there in 2006, and by 2008 they were among the mixed group of 200 militants who overran a U.S. outpost in Wanat, killing nine U.S. soldiers, which at the time was one of the single worst U.S. combat losses in Afghanistan.
There is evidence that LeT began plotting attacks against Western targets in India around the same time the group decided to get involved in Afghanistan. In 2007 it sent an Indian operative it had trained, Riyazuddin Nasir, to plot attacks against Western and Israeli targets at beach resorts in Goa, India, but Nasir was arrested by chance before he could carry out any attack. That did not stop LeT from targeting Westerners and Jews. Ajmal Kasab, the sole surviving Mumbai terrorist, told police interrogators that attackers had been instructed to single out Americans, Britons, and Israelis "because they have done injustice to the Muslims."
What worries many Indian and Western intelligence officials now is LeT's extensive international network. For starters, LeT's relationship with Al Qaeda is increasingly close. In 2002 Abu Zubaydah, alleged Qaeda mastermind of the 1998 bombings on the U.S. embassies in Africa, was arrested at an LeT safe house in the Pakistani city of Fai-sa-la-bad. Tawfiq bin Attas, a suspected Qaeda operative arrested by the Pakistanis in 2003, allegedly told interrogators he had recruited at least a dozen men to carry out attacks against U.S. targets from LeT camps. More recently, at least one of the perpetrators of the 2005 London Underground bombings, later claimed by Al Qaeda, had attended LeT training camps. LeT also provided funding to alleged Qaeda terrorists arrested in 2006 for plotting to blow up 10 airliners en route from London to the United States. In March 2009 a British parliamentary committee concluded that Al Qaeda and LeT had reached a "merge point" and were coordinating their activities closely. LeT leaders "have now aligned themselves in practice and operationally with the goals of Al Qaeda and the global Islamic jihad," says Riedel.
LeT's network is even broader than Osama bin Laden's, some analysts say. Unlike Al Qaeda, which is on the run and largely confined to the isolated AfPak border, LeT operates terrorist training camps more or less in the open, preparing thousands of young men for jihad every year (although a far smaller number are actually selected for terrorist missions). As many as 200,000 people have attended these camps over the past 20 years, by some estimates, including several hundred from Europe and North America. Some trainees returned home, where they may continue to work clandestinely for LeT. In a recent briefing paper for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Tankel writes that the group uses the Persian Gulf for fundraising purposes and as a logistical and recruiting hub. Authorities investigating "shoe bomber" Richard Reid's support networks in Paris "uncovered channels used to send volunteers from France to Lashkar camps in Pakistan." The group "also deployed a French convert named Willie Brigitte to Australia in 2003 to support attacks there." Riedel says LeT has "cells in the U.K., throughout the Persian Gulf, Nepal, and Bangladesh, and probably in the U.S. and Canada." Most of these cells are currently limited to providing logistics—ranging from recruiting and fundraising to procuring SIM cards and providing reconnaissance—for attacks against India, as was the cell in Bangladesh before it began plotting against the U.S. and British embassies in Dhaka.
Last spring, FBI Director Robert Mueller voiced concern about the number of LeT operatives from so-called visa-waiver countries, such as Britain and France, whose citizens are allowed to enter the U.S. with only a cursory background check. Still others, like Headley, may have U.S. passports. Since 2003 nearly a dozen members of the so-called Virginia jihad network, based outside Washington, were found guilty of terrorism-related charges for providing support to LeT and seeking to attend its training camps. Members of the group helped an LeT operative buy night-vision equipment, bulletproof vests, wireless video cameras, and even an unmanned aerial vehicle in the United States and then ship them to Pakistan. One consequence of this global reach is that LeT has already "become the replacement infrastructure" for the Qaeda network, says Juan Carlos Zarate, a former deputy national-security adviser for counterterrorism under President George W. Bush. Even if LeT itself did not orchestrate a strike in Europe or the U.S., he says, it might lend its international operatives to Al Qaeda for such an attack.
That's worrisome, many analysts say, because of LeT's technological sophistication. The Mumbai assaults took an exceptional degree of planning. The terrorists hijacked an Indian fishing boat on the open sea, navigated it to Mumbai with help from a GPS device, transferred to an inflatable dinghy, which they landed in Mumbai harbor after dark, and fanned out to hit multiple targets almost simultaneously. The attacking teams carried GPS devices to locate targets and had studied Google map images, Styrofoam mock-ups, and videos of the interiors of their targets. The terrorists stayed in constant contact with LeT handlers over mobile phones. The handlers, in turn, employed an Internet-based telephone service to conceal their location, and used live international TV images to help direct the assault. They also knew how to amp up worldwide media attention. "I can't think of any other group that has done anything on that scale of sophistication," says Nigel Inkster, the former director of intelligence and operations for Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. Benjamin, the top State Department counterterrorism official, has said that the only group that can even compare to LeT in terms of its size, sophistication, global capability, and ambition is Hizbullah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group.
Taking on LeT may be even tougher than countering Al Qaeda. If Pakistan is reluctant to go after (or allow the U.S. to go after) Al Qaeda in the border regions, it is less eager to go after LeT's base in the Pakistani heartland. Unlike Al Qaeda, LeT has a large charity arm that is popular in both Punjab and Kashmir, where it runs schools, an ambulance service, mobile clinics, and blood banks. It earned tremendous good will in Kashmir for providing humanitarian assistance after a devastating earthquake in 2005. Moving against it could provoke serious civil unrest—or even civil war. LeT and the Pakistani Army draw many recruits from the same poor Punjabi areas, often from the same families. LeT's humanitarian wing worked alongside the Pakistani military to help civilians displaced during the Army's campaign to retake the Swat Valley from the Taliban. Zarate describes Is-lama-bad as being in "a delicate dance with a Frank-enstein of their own making" when it comes to LeT. He says that many Islamabad officials realize that the group has become a liability, but want to avoid provoking LeT into turning on the state.
Even without direct attacks on the West, LeT could deal a severe blow to Western interests. Few believe New Delhi would allow another major attack from a Pakistani-based group to pass without a military response. And any conflict between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan has the potential to spiral out of control. Even a limited Indo-Pak conflict could have severe effects on the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. Nearly 80 percent of supplies for NATO forces in Afghanistan are offloaded in the Pakistani port of Karachi. An Indo-Pak war would also distract Pakistan from pursuing the Taliban. One solution, then, is for the U.S. and its allies to move more aggressively to ferret out and dismantle LeT cells located throughout the Pakistani diaspora. The other is to do everything possible to support peace efforts between India and Pakistan, including resolution of their dispute over Kashmir. Just last week New Delhi and Islamabad resumed direct peace talks for the first time since the Mumbai attacks, although no immediate breakthroughs were expected. It is likely that Islamabad will be willing to wipe out LeT only when it perceives less of a threat from India. But worryingly, some analysts say, Western intelligence agencies are still not focusing enough of their resources on LeT. And that means the next time the group makes headlines, it might be with a devastating attack—not in Mumbai, but in Manhattan or Miami.
WASHINGTON — A Pennsylvania woman who called herself JihadJane was tied Tuesday to an alleged assassination plot against a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the prophet Muhammad atop the body of a dog.
In an indictment unsealed Tuesday, federal prosecutors accused Colleen R. LaRose, an American from the Philadelphia suburbs, of linking up through the Internet with militants overseas and plotting to carry out a murder.
Ms. LaRose, 46, was arrested in Philadelphia in October, but her case was kept under seal. Although the indictment does not identify the target, a law enforcement official said her case was linked to the arrests Tuesday of seven Muslims in Ireland in connection with a scheme to kill the cartoonist, Lars Vilks. A group linked to Al Qaeda had put a $100,000 bounty on his head for the cartoon, which the group perceived as an insult to Islam.
European news reports said Irish police, who arrested the four men and three women, had coordinated the operation with the United States.
A police statement issued Wednesday in Dublin said the Irish arrests followed a joint investigation by police in Ireland, the United States and “a number of European countries,” and that the suspects were being held at four police stations in an area about 100 miles south of Dublin, under a law that allowed for them to be held for up to seven days for questioning.
News reports in Ireland said that the seven being held were from Algeria, Croatia, the Palestinian territories, Libya and the United States, and were aged between their mid-20’s and late 40’s. The Irish Times reported that American investigators believe that the leader of the group was an Algerian who has been living in Ireland for the past 10 years.
A Justice Department spokesman would not confirm whether Ms. LaRose had been involved with the plot.
Mark T. Wilson and Rossman D. Thompson, federal public defenders in Philadelphia who are representing Ms. LaRose, declined to comment.
Michael L. Levy, the United States attorney for Eastern Pennsylvania, said in a statement the case illustrated how terrorists were looking for American recruits who could blend in. “It shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance,” he said.
Ms. LaRose is white, with blond hair and green eyes, according to the law enforcement official, who was not authorized to share details of the case and spoke only on the condition of anonymity. The official said Ms. LaRose was born in Michigan and later lived in Texas and Montgomery County, Pa.
The indictment said that in mid-2008, Ms. LaRose, using the aliases JihadJane and Fatima LaRose, began posting on YouTube and other Internet sites messages about her desire to help Muslims. A MySpace profile for a woman who refers to herself as JihadJane displays pictures of bloodshed and violence in the Middle East scrawled with messages like “Palestine We Are With You” and “Sympathize With Gaza.”
By early 2009, the court papers said, she was exchanging e-mail messages with unidentified co-conspirators in Southeast Asia and Europe and expressed a desire to become a martyr for an Islamist cause.
The indictment refers to e-mail messages in which a conspirator, citing how Ms. LaRose’s appearance and American passport would make it easier for her to operate undetected, allegedly directed her in March 2009 to go to Sweden to help carry out a murder. She agreed to do so, writing, “I will make this my goal till I achieve it or die trying,” the indictment says. She and another unnamed American later posted online solicitations for money for that project, the document said.
Ms. LaRose had attracted the government’s attention by then. She was questioned by F.B.I. agents on July 17, 2009, and falsely told them that she had never solicited money online for terrorism, had never used the alias JihadJane and had never made postings on a terrorist Web site, the court papers say.
Despite drawing the F.B.I.’s attention, the indictment says Ms. LaRose traveled to Europe in August, joined an online community hosted by the intended Swedish victim in September and performed online searches to track him. She apparently never attempted to carry out the killing.
The indictment also says Ms. LaRose recruited other people on the Internet to wage or support jihadist attacks.
In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr. Vilks, the cartoonist who was the target of the alleged murder plot, said that he learned of the American and Irish investigations from reporters, who tied up his telephone line. Unable to get through by phone, the police who were trying to contact him to send a patrol car to his home in rural Sweden, he told the paper.
Mr. Vilks said he had grown concerned early this year when someone using a Somali mobile phone began calling him. But he said his home’s remote location gave him some protection.
Mr. Vilks defended his drawing, saying that it was not meant as an attack on Muhammad but rather as a satire.
“But people have no sense of humor,” he was quoted as saying.
Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting from New York, Eamon Quinn from Dublin and Brian Knowlton from Washington.
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