When he was arrested again two years ago, Ravshan Gapirov was not surprised. A popular defense lawyer for Muslims charged with extremism, Gapirov had long angered authorities in Kyrgyzstan who see Islam as one of the greatest dangers to the country's stability. He spent most of 2008 in prison, accused of supporting a banned pan-Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and collaborating with his extremist clients.
Gapirov, director of the Justice and Truth Human Rights Advocacy Center in the southern town of Osh, struggles against a confounding system: because of Central Asia's strategic proximity to Afghanistan, the United States and Russia have supported dictatorships that, by banning even peaceful expressions of Islam, have pushed ordinary disaffected Muslims into the arms of radicals, some based in Afghanistan.
On April 7, after his security forces fired into a mob, leaving more than eighty dead, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev fled the capital, Bishkek. For the five years of his increasingly corrupt reign, he had attacked Islam as both a security and political threat. But he also hosted a US air base at the Manas airport outside Bishkek, established shortly after 9/11, and thus had an unflinching ally in his campaign, one that was willing to put aside its democratic ideals for a short-term strategic gain.
In Bakiyev's sudden and unexpected absence, former opposition leaders from disparate parties announced an interim government and slowly took control. But many of those leaders are tainted with scandal, having previously served with Bakiyev before leaving to form their own personality-driven opposition parties. The acting chair, Roza Otunbayeva, is loved in the West for her grandmotherly demeanor and fluent English, but she is suspected at home of being ineffectual. Other interim ministers are split on where their allegiances lie: with Russia, the former colonial master and driver of Central Asian economies, angry over the presence of American troops in its "near abroad"; or the United States, which most Kyrgyz see as primarily interested in keeping its air base.
Washington was quiet as Bakiyev murdered opponents, shut down media outlets, rigged elections and drove even moderate Muslims, afraid they would be targeted as terrorists, to practice their religion in secret. In private conversations, US officials acknowledged Bakiyev's appalling human rights record, but publicly they offered only tepid criticism and continued training his elite military units. Like other Central Asian despots, Bakiyev received lucrative American rewards for highlighting, or even exaggerating, the threat of terrorism.
US Ambassador Tatiana Gfoeller underscored this support in October, at the opening of a Kyrgyz special forces complex in Tokmok, where she said, "Brand-new, modern military equipment--trucks, tactical gear, ambulances, night sights, body armor and much more--are arriving in Kyrgyzstan daily and being distributed to Kyrgyzstan's armed forces."
Central Asia is a region of varied religious traditions. Islam took root late among the Kyrgyz nomads and fused with local animist and mystic beliefs. But devotion to conservative forms is growing in the Ferghana Valley, a fertile basin of twisting, arbitrary and contested borders and overlapping ethnic groups: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan wrap around one another in puzzle pieces fashioned by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s. The Kyrgyz portion of the valley is home to a large, alienated Uzbek minority. In the 1990s hundreds died in ethnic conflicts. Tensions endure.
Judging by the crowded mosques on Fridays and the number of women wearing hijabs on the streets, the valley is more observant than elsewhere in Central Asia. But locals here, like elsewhere, are still more likely to enjoy their vodka than their prayer, or see no problem indulging in both. Nevertheless, Central Asian governments are paranoid, full of atheist apparatchiks trained in the Communist Soviet Union. Only the Islam espoused by a network of state-appointed mullahs is tolerated.
From Bakiyev's perspective, "all Muslims are extremists," said Kara-Suu Imam Rashad Kamalov, whose father was gunned down in 2006 in an attack human rights observers attribute to the state security services. Because of the oppression, "more Kyrgyz are devoted to the religion and practice Islam," he told me. But tyranny will not work forever, he added. "After someone has experienced fear once, the fear disappears."
Already there is a precedent for radicalism and violence in the Ferghana Valley: the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, bent on destroying the corrupt, despotic regime of Uzbek President Islam Karimov. Karimov's fierce crackdown in the 1990s drove the militant group, which grew out of a political movement, to Afghanistan and an alliance with Al Qaeda. IMU members fought alongside militants during the US invasion in 2001. The IMU's core membership is thought to be hiding in the tribal areas of Pakistan, waiting and plotting a return to Central Asia and their traditional base in the Uzbek portion of the Ferghana Valley. Some are probably hiding in Kyrgyzstan.
Pointing to the IMU, Bakiyev repeatedly said Kyrgyzstan faces a growing threat from international terror. With insecurity spreading into the previously quiet northern Afghan provinces, attacks throughout the Ferghana Valley have been on the rise, such as an assault in May 2009 on a police station in Khanabad, Uzbekistan, on the Uzbek-Kyrgyz frontier, and an alleged suicide bombing in nearby Andijan the following day.
Heightening the fear, the compliant Kyrgyz press eagerly reports the arrest of alleged activists, often those associated with Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation), a transnational group that seeks to establish a caliphate. While the movement forswears violence and has never been implicated in any violence, it is banned not only in Kyrgyzstan but throughout Central Asia, forcing members to practice underground. Observers such as Osh native Alisher Khamidov, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins, fear that, hidden from view, Hizb ut-Tahrir could prepare people to join violent groups if it is unable to offer a political solution. There are no accurate figures on membership, but informed estimates say it is 8,000 in Kyrgyzstan alone.
"If the state repression of religion continues at this pace and there are not political channels for representing Muslim grievances, we are likely to witness radicalization," Khamidov said, adding, "the Kyrgyz government is definitely exaggerating the threat of radical Islam."
The town of Kara-Suu is a natural hub for Hizb ut-Tahrir. Home to one of Central Asia's largest bazaars, it is divided by the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border. Crossing it is difficult, even for ethnic Uzbek families separated by the border, and business is hurting. Moreover, little political opposition remains to offer ideological variety.
"They mention Hizb ut-Tahrir on television every day," a Hizb ut-Tahrir recruiter told me a few weeks before Bakiyev's overthrow. "One of our tasks is promotion, and this is a natural advertisement for us." He was hiding in the back of a station wagon with tinted windows, sandwiched between stacks of shipping containers in the Kara-Suu bazaar. "Our ideology is spreading, and people are becoming more energetic because Bakiyev has moved away from the principles of democracy. It's a victory for us; we benefit from this."
While Hizb ut-Tahrir does not have an anti-Western agenda, he said, Western support for repressive governments in the region is boosting anti-Americanism and providing fertile ground for recruitment.
"They say they are building a democratic country, but at the same time they are violating the principles of democracy: freedom of belief, freedom of the press," said a Hizb ut-Tahrir member in Osh in March. "If they find a book they don't like in your house, they take you to jail. What kind of freedom is this?"
"We don't have machine guns; we have only ideas," said the Kara-Suu recruiter, explaining the group's methods and comparing Central Asia to czarist Russia in the years before the Bolsheviks seized power. "Who is in prison? Those who have been prosecuted and arrested by the government. And of course these people support us. Many revolutions started in prisons."
In October 2008 residents of Nookat organized the Eid al-Fitr festival marking the end of Ramadan, a holiday widely celebrated throughout Kyrgyzstan with the slaughter of sheep--and often a lot of vodka. Villagers say the mayor's office gave permission to celebrate in the town's stadium. Instead, town officials prohibited the celebration and dispersed the crowd. A protest followed in which villagers allegedly threw rocks, breaking windows in a government office. Thirty-two were convicted of inciting unrest and fomenting religious enmity. Sentences ranged up to twenty years.
"The authorities interfered in the process of investigation and in the courts. There was no evidence against the convicted. Witnesses were mostly people from law enforcement bodies. It was obvious that they were ordered" to testify, said an Osh-based lawyer who has represented defendants in extremism trials, including the one in Nookat.
Several unexplained killings in Uzgen and Jalalabad last summer further rattled Muslim communities and tested the state's credibility. Authorities say they liquidated terrorists infiltrating from Uzbekistan--perpetrators of a suicide bombing by an IMU splinter group in Andijan--yet provided little proof. Human rights activists allege the security services tortured and killed innocent farmers in a botched raid and elaborate cover-up. That several foreign human rights activists investigating the events in Nookat were expelled from Kyrgyzstan in 2009 further undermined faith in the authorities' version of events.
Yet while these abuses continued, the United States maintained its support for Bakiyev, calling him a partner in the "war on terror." Earlier this year Washington announced it would build a $5.5 million anti-terrorism training center in the Ferghana Valley. Activists saw a connection between the US aid and Bakiyev's mounting crackdown. "The authorities don't care about their citizens' rights, about absolutely innocent people," said the Nookat defense lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The crackdown is "to show that we have a problem with religious extremism and terrorism, because a lot of money is being allocated for that.... The money is being given to the Kyrgyz government by the United States and by the Russians."
Moscow and Washington, both concerned about Islamic terrorism, look the other way while repression continues apace in Central Asia. Moscow is also vying to build an anti-terror training center in the Ferghana Valley, and in this competition for strategic influence, the two are willing to overlook odious behavior. For the United States, that could be a mistake, warns a March report by the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. It argues that the Central Asian governments' overreaction is promoting radicalization, because "ongoing state-sponsored violence has almost certainly claimed more lives, and surely maimed more fates, than the sporadic actions of a handful of terrorists." The report cautions that US interests in the region, such as the base at Manas and overland transportation networks used to supply American troops in Afghanistan, make tempting targets.
Since the violent uprising of April 7, that message has gone unheeded. Washington appears most concerned about keeping the base open, worriedly courting Kyrgyzstan's interim government of bickering former officials and apparatchiks. Many of these figures led the so-called Tulip Revolution of 2005. Now they are struggling to define their legitimacy. Some are angry with the United States for not speaking out against Bakiyev's human rights abuses and have openly said Manas must be closed. It's too early to tell how they will approach human rights, but already power struggles are apparent, and friends have told me they fear the recent upheaval just delivered more of the same, as the new leaders are all recycled from past governments.
Bloodshed is on many people's minds these days--not just the kind Bakiyev left on the streets of Bishkek as he fled. "The authorities don't know what they want to achieve. But in my opinion, it will lead to a very bloody revolution if it goes on like this. I am convinced that such a revolution is inevitable," Gapirov, the human rights lawyer, told me a few weeks before Bakiyev's downfall. When it comes to human rights and Islam, in a country known for its spontaneous uprisings, the new government and its foreign backers would be wise to listen.
On April 6 the New York Times reported that the Obama administration had approved the targeted killing of an American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who is suspected of encouraging and planning terrorist attacks against the United States. The news that the president had decided to kill an American without charges, without a jury, without a lawyer and without a trial has thus far stirred relatively little outcry. By contrast, President Bush's assertion of the power to detain two Americans without trial--Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla--led to two Supreme Court cases and thousands of news articles, op-eds and talk-show debates. On April 13 the Washington Post editorial board defended the targeted-killing policy--even though we know precious little about its asserted legal justifications or scope.
David Cole: Spain is leading the charge to criminally investigate US government officials over torture.
In our peculiar post-9/11 world, it is apparently less controversial to kill a suspect in cold blood than to hold him in preventive detention. The Post reported on February 14 that the Obama administration has killed many more suspected terrorists than it has captured. According to National Journal, Obama ordered more drone attacks in his first year than President Bush did in two full presidential terms. The Post article suggested that the two developments may not be unrelated. A dead suspect, after all, has no right to habeas corpus; and with a dead suspect, one need not agonize over the choice between civilian criminal court and a military commission.
But surely this has it backward. The argument for preventive detention during armed conflicts has always been that since the army is authorized to kill an enemy combatant, it must be permitted to take the lesser step of detaining him for the duration of the conflict. If so, shouldn't we be at least as concerned about executive killing as we are about executive detention?
Wars involve killing, of course, but the scope of the current armed conflict and the identity of "combatants" have both been hotly disputed. International humanitarian law requires that the state target only combatants, not civilians who are not directly participating in the conflict; that any use of force be proportional; and that collateral damage be limited. And certainly where an enemy combatant can be captured rather than killed, the government should be required to pursue that avenue. These principles ought not to vary whether the state is targeting citizens or foreign nationals. If a person is aiming a weapon at a US military convoy on the battlefield, convoy members need not check his passport or provide him a hearing before shooting to kill.
Awlaki, however, is nowhere near the battlefield. He's said to be hiding out in Yemen. He's not aiming a gun at US forces. On the other hand, he should not be mistaken for an innocent bystander. American counterterrorism officials accuse him of recruiting people for terrorist plots against US targets. And he has been linked to three of the 9/11 hijackers; to Nidal Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who killed thirteen and wounded thirty in a mass shooting at Fort Hood in November; and to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas Day bomber--although in each instance the alleged ties appear to focus more on vague communications than on any concrete criminal activity.
It may be that Awlaki fits the definition of a "belligerent" who can't be apprehended and is therefore a proper target in this armed conflict. But the American public just doesn't know. Are we simply to trust our government to make the right call? That's what the Bush administration argued about the men in Guantánamo--yet more than 500 of them have been released, suggesting that they were not, as claimed, "the worst of the worst." Unlike a detainee, a dead man cannot be released when the government realizes it has made a mistake.
More troubling, the public doesn't even know what the Obama administration's legal theory is for targeted killings. State Department legal adviser Harold Koh provided very general outlines in a speech in March before the American Society of International Law, but his speech was short on specifics. The program is undoubtedly predicated on a detailed memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel, setting forth the legal arguments that are said to justify the action, the statutory or constitutional authorities relied upon, the criteria for targeting and the procedural safeguards established to minimize mistakes. The ACLU has requested the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, but so far the administration has declined to disclose them. It may well be that the details surrounding a particular target need to be classified in advance, but there is no reason that the government should not be transparent about the legal framework and procedural protections it has adopted. A democracy that permits its president to adopt wholly secret procedures and secret authorities for killing its own members violates the very rule-of-law ideals that President Obama promised to uphold.
About David Cole
David Cole is The Nation's legal affairs correspondent. His latest book is The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (New Press)
By Philip P. Pan Washington Post staff writer Thursday, April 1, 2010; A08
MOSCOW -- An Islamist rebel leader asserted responsibility Wednesday for the suicide bombings in the Moscow subway stations that killed 39 people two days earlier and threatened more attacks to avenge what he called atrocities ordered by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Russia's volatile southwest.
The video statement by the Chechen militant, Doku Umarov, was posted on the Internet hours after another double bombing killed at least 12 people in Dagestan, located east of Chechnya in the North Caucasus region, where the Kremlin has been battling a separatist insurgency.
"You Russians only see the war on television and hear about it on the radio, and this is why you are quiet and do not react to the atrocities that your bandit groups under Putin's command carry out in the Caucasus," Umarov said in the 4.5-minute video. "I promise you that the war will come to your streets, and you will feel it in your lives and under your skin."
Umarov, dressed in fatigues and sitting in what appeared to be a forest clearing, said he ordered the two subway bombings in retaliation for an anti-terrorism raid by security forces in February in which at least 20 people were killed, asserting that officers used knives to execute innocent, impoverished villagers.
Umarov said he could only grin when accused of terrorism because he has not heard people condemn Putin for such crimes, and he pledged new attacks on Russians "who send their gangs to the Caucasus and support their security services that carry out massacres."
There was no government response, but Chechnya's representative in the Kremlin-controlled parliament dismissed the threat. "It doesn't matter that he has claimed responsibility for those bestial murders," Ziyad Sabsabi told the Interfax news agency. "In any case, his days are numbered."
Russian forces have tried for years to capture or kill Umarov, who declared jihad in 2007 to establish what the rebels call a Caucasus Emirate.
But it is unclear how much power he wields over the insurgency, which analysts say is a loose network of groups that operate independently.
The militants have stepped up attacks over the past year in the North Caucasus, where bombings and shootouts with the authorities occur almost daily. But the timing of Wednesday's double bombing in Dagestan, occurring so soon after two female bombers struck the Moscow subway system, raised fears of a fresh wave of terrorism across the country.
Officials said the first blast Wednesday occurred as traffic police officers approached the bomber's car in the town of Kizlyar, near the Chechen border. As investigators and onlookers gathered, an assailant in a police uniform pushed through the crowd and set off another explosion. Nine police officers were among the dead, including the town's police chief.
In televised remarks, Putin said the attack may have been committed by "the same gang" responsible for the Moscow blasts. "It does not matter for us in what part of the country these crimes have been committed or who -- people of what ethnicity or religion -- have fallen victim to these crimes," he said, ordering police reinforcements in the North Caucasus. "We see this as a crime against Russia."
The subway bombings were the first suicide attacks in Moscow in nearly six years and raised questions about Putin's record of maintaining peace in the capital, as well as his brute-force approach to suppressing militants.
President Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's protégé, has pushed for a more balanced strategy in the North Caucasus, appointing officials there who have sought to improve economic conditions, open talks with critics and draw public support away from the rebels.
"The terrorists want to destabilize the situation in the country, to destroy civil society, and are driven by the desire to sow fear and panic among people. We will not let this happen," Medvedev said at a session of the Russian Security Council.
Gulnara Rustamova, head of Mothers of Dagestan for Human Rights, said conditions in the province seemed to have been improving since Medvedev appointed a new governor last month. Wednesday's attack, she said, may have been intended to undermine the governor's efforts.
"I hope he has the wisdom and enough strength to take the right steps and to continue building the dialogue in society," she said. "We are all so sick and tired of all these terrorist acts and unlawful murders. We want to live in peace and to be safe."
The status quo of the basic framework of the Federal Constitution, which is secular in nature, must be upheld. The status of Islam as the official religion of the federation will never be questioned.
However, separation of the state and religion is fundamental in any democracy. The country’s governance must be based on the written constitution. In short, any theocratic form of government is not suitable and is unacceptable in a multiracial society such as Malaysia.
Malaysia should be a baldatun tayyibatun wa rabbun ghafoor (a state which is virtuous and forgiven by the almighty God). Whatever its name, it must have those qualities and philosophy.
The present status of Malaysia is good enough. According to the interpretation of our constitution and highest court, Malaysia is a secular state with Islam as its official religion. Loosely it can also be called an Islamic state since Islam is its official religion.
The framers of the Federal Constitution [considered] Malaysia a secular country. The social contract we entered [into] when Malaysia was formed in 1957 was based on secular principles.
We must bear in mind that Malaysia is a multiracial country. Hence Malaysia should be a secular country, where the justice, freedom and equality pursued by the people is based on and is compatible with the principles of democracy, and not an Islamic state.
The Federal Constitution clearly sets out the position of Islam as the state’s religion. At the same time, it ensures the religious freedoms of non-Muslims. Ironically, the constitution also provides for those of no particular religious belief, i.e. secularists. I see no need whatsoever to change this.
There are five million Muslims living in France. These migrant Muslims are adjusting to life in France, and France as a country is slowly changing to accommodate this change in demography. What is interesting is, why have these migrants left their Islamic countries to settle down in secular France?
Many of these migrant Muslims come from North Africa. France as an advanced democratic country is like heaven [because it] provide[s] a better life for these war- and famine-stricken people.
The question in Malaysia should be, how is the government fulfilling its obligation to the rakyat in the context of the social contract? Why did 21,066 Malaysian citizens opt to change their citizenship to Singaporean from 2000 to 2009? I believe a substantial number among them are Muslims.
Neither. We in Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) uphold the Federal Constitution. With Article 3 of the Federal Constitution, which says that Islam shall be the religion of the federation, it is also difficult to categorically say that Malaysia is a secular state. It all depends on what meaning you give the word “secular”; there are a range of meanings in which the word is used, all quite different.
Malaysia telah diisytihar sebagai negara Islam dan terbukti tidak pun menindas atau menafikan rakyat bukan Islam. Negara ini lebih terkenal sebagai negara Islam dan kita lebih disenangi oleh semua negara Islam di dunia yang luas pasaran ekonominya.
Let me begin by asserting that I’m an Islamist democrat. Like a social democrat in the DAP, who believes and advances social democracy in its political advocacy, I believe in advocating Islam as a social and political order; besides being a religious conviction per se, within the ambit of parliamentary democracy.
In a multi-party a la-Westminster parliamentary democracy, all contending parties have their right to advocate, compete and seek for electoral mandate in an electoral process that should provide for a free and fair political contestation on a more or less level playing field.
Viewed from this perspective, I must emphatically say that I’m least bothered whether Malaysia should be or is a secular or an Islamic state. I’m least concerned as to whether you call this country secular or Islamic. What matters to me is the provision of equal opportunities. [This includes] free and fair elections where every contesting party or coalition is accessible to the electorate.
That is critical and vital for a democrat rather than [to] be engaged in the endless worthless polemic of whether this country is secular or Islamic. If the entire electorate decides democratically that the country is secular, Islamic or otherwise, so be it. The ability to accept the majority’s decision, based on a functional democracy, is a democrat’s defining criterion.
As an Islamist democrat, I stand to defend others their right to advocate political convictions and I expect to be accorded the same right. As democrats, we are expected to accept the outcome of the political contestation and not take extra-parliamentary actions to subvert and undermine the state and its institutions.
Being part of the Pakatan Rakyat, PAS and other component parties are striving to achieve a truly democratic and functional democratic state, wherein rule of law and the federal constitution are upheld, and an open, transparent and accountable government is put in place.
This is more important, and a critical prerequisite in establishing a strong foundation for nation rebuilding, and securing a level playing field for everyone and every contending political party.
The present system is ok as it is enshrined in the constitution (one should study Malaysian history to understand how it evolves).
So what can we conclude so far?
All Barisan Nasional MPs are okay with the current system (a bastardised hybrid system), and they even proudly call Malaysia an Islamic state (Alor Setar and Ledang).
But why should we be surprised? BN leaders, in an attempt to appease the Malay crowd, have repeatedly claimed Malaysia as an Islamic state (it is not).
Semporna MP, sadly, do not even know the meaning of “secularism” (separation of state and religion), equating it with “atheism” (not believing in gods). With this inaccurately negative image, it will be hard to convince the public on the need of a secular state.
Stay tuned for next week as we list ten more MPs and their answers to the question.
Do Muslims automatically vote Islamic? That's the concern conjured up by strongmen from Tunis to Tashkent, and plenty of Western experts agree. They point to the political victories of Islamic parties in Egypt, Palestine, and Turkey in recent years and warn that more elections across the Islamic world could turn power over to anti-democratic fundamentalists.
But these victories turn out to be exceptions, not the political rule. When we examined results from parliamentary elections in all Muslim societies, we found a very different pattern: Given the choice, voters tend to go with secular parties, not religious ones. Over the past 40 years, 86 parliamentary elections in 20 countries have included one or more Islamic parties, according to annual reports from the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Voters in these places have overwhelmingly turned up their noses at such parties. Eighty percent of these Islamic parties earned less than 20 percent of the vote, and a majority got less than 10 percent -- hardly landslide victories. The same is true even over the last few years, with numbers barely changing since 2001.
True, Islamic parties have won a few well-publicized breakthrough victories, such as in Algeria in 1991 and Palestine in 2006. But far more often, Islamic parties tend to do very poorly. What's more, the more free and fair an election is, the worse the Islamic parties do. By our calculations, the average percentage of seats won by Islamic parties in relatively free elections is 10 points lower than in less free ones.
Even if they don't win, Islamic parties often find themselves liberalized by the electoral process. We found that Islamic party platforms are less likely to focus on sharia law or armed jihad in freer elections and more likely to uphold democracy and women's rights. And even in more authoritarian countries, Islamic party platforms have shifted over the course of multiple elections toward more liberal positions: Morocco's Justice and Development Party and Jordan's Islamic Action Front both stripped sharia law from their platforms over the last several years.
These are still culturally conservative parties, by any standard, but their decision to run for office places them at odds with Islamic revolutionaries. In many cases, they're actually risking their lives. Almost two decades ago, even before his alliance with Osama bin Laden, Egyptian jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote a tract condemning the Muslim Brotherhood's abandonment of revolutionary methods in favor of electoral politics. "Whoever labels himself as a Muslim democrat, or a Muslim who calls for democracy, is like saying he is a Jewish Muslim or a Christian Muslim," he wrote. In Iraq, Sunni Islamic revolutionaries recently renewed their campaign "to start killing all those participating in the political process," according to a warning received by a Sunni politician who was subsequently assassinated in Mosul.
What enrages Zawahiri and his ilk is that Islamists keep ignoring demands to stay out of parliamentary politics. Despite threats from terrorists and a cold shoulder from voters, more and more Islamic parties are entering the electoral process. A quarter-century ago, many of these movements were trying to overthrow the state and create an Islamic society, inspired by the Iranian Revolution. Now, disillusioned with revolution, they are working within the secular system.
But today's problems for Islamic parties may recall an earlier historical moment, the watershed period of the early 20th century when demands for democracy and human rights first gained mass support in Muslim societies from the Russian Empire to the Ottoman Empire. Then as now, violent Islamic movements such as the Ottoman-era Islamic Unity Society objected to electoral politics. But that was not what ultimately undermined democracy in Muslim societies. Instead, secular autocrats, such as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran, suppressed pro-democratic Islamic movements, driving Islamists underground and helping to radicalize them.
Today, too, dictators and terrorists are conspiring to keep Islamic political parties from competing freely for votes. Government repression has been successful in one sense -- Islamic parties have won few elections. In a broader sense, however, it is failing: According to the World Values Survey, which has polled cultural attitudes around the world, support for sharia is one-third lower in countries with relatively free elections than in other Muslim societies. In other words, suppressing Islamic movements has only made them more popular. Perhaps democratization is not such a gift to Islamists after all.
January/February 2010 Jessica Stern JESSICA STERN is Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.
Is it possible to deradicalize terrorists and their potential recruits? Saudi Arabia, a pioneer in rehabilitation efforts, claims that it is. Since 2004, more than 4,000 militants have gone through Saudi Arabia's programs, and the graduates have been reintegrated into mainstream society much more successfully than ordinary criminals. Governments elsewhere in the Middle East and throughout Europe and Southeast Asia have launched similar programs for neo-Nazis, far-right militants, narcoterrorists, and Islamist terrorists, encouraging them to abandon their radical ideology or renounce their violent means or both.
The U.S. government would do well to better understand the successes and failures of such efforts, especially those that target Islamist terrorists. This is important, first, because, as General David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, has noted, the United States "cannot kill [its] way to victory" in the struggle against al Qaeda and related groups. Although military action, especially covert military action, is an essential part of the strategy against the Islamist terrorist movement, the United States' main goal should be to stop the movement from growing. Terrorists do not fight on traditional battlefields; they fight among civilians, which increases the risks of collateral damage. Indeed, Islamist terrorists provoke the governments they oppose into responding in ways that seem to prove that these governments want to humiliate or harm Muslims. Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and "extraordinary rendition" have become for Muslim youth symbols of the United States' belligerence and hypocrisy.
Second, the effectiveness of deradicalization programs aimed at detained terrorists have direct and immediate effects on U.S. national security. This is especially true regarding the detainees at the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Because it is difficult to gather evidence that is usable in court, some truly bad actors, along with some not so bad ones who have been held unfairly, will inevitably be released. Effective deradicalization programs could help make such individuals less dangerous. Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was repatriated to Kuwait in 2005 on the order of a U.S. judge and was acquitted of terrorism charges by a Kuwaiti court, subsequently carried out a suicide bombing on Iraqi security forces in Mosul that killed 13 Iraqis. Had he received the kind of reintegration assistance and follow-up (including surveillance) now available in Saudi Arabia after his release, he might not have traveled to Iraq.
Third, the success, or failure, of terrorism-prevention programs outside the United States is important to Americans. For one thing, people who carry European passports can enter the United States relatively easily, and so the presence of terrorists in Europe can threaten U.S. national security. For another, terrorism-prevention programs presently under way in, for example, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, could be models for at-risk groups in the United States, such as the Somali community in Minnesota, from which some young men have been recruited to fight alongside al Shabab, the radical Islamist organization that controls southern Somalia and claims to be aligned with al Qaeda. These men do not seem to be plotting attacks in the West, but it is important to think now about how to integrate Somalis into American society more fully in order to reduce the chances that they will carry out attacks in the United States.
The fight against al Qaeda and related groups is not over: Saudi Arabia's deputy interior minister was nearly killed by a terrorist posing as a repentant militant in August 2009; in September, U.S. government officials interrupted a plot in New York and Denver that they believed was the most significant since 9/11; and in October, the French police arrested a nuclear physicist employed at the CERN accelerator, near Geneva, who reportedly had suggested French targets to members of the Algerian terrorist group al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. But in the long term, the most important factor in limiting terrorism will be success at curtailing recruitment to and retention in extremist movements.
Now is the moment to try. Counterterrorism efforts have significantly eroded al Qaeda's strength in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia since the "war on terror" began in 2001. U.S. Predator strikes in Pakistan have killed top al Qaeda leaders, disrupting essential communications between the group's core and its affiliates and new recruits. Testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs last September, Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said that such activities were "potentially disrupting plots that are under way" and "leaving leadership vacuums that are increasingly difficult to fill."
Even though anti-American sentiment remains strong, especially in Pakistan, al Qaeda's popularity is waning. Polls continue to show that many people in Muslim-majority states doubt that the true aim of U.S. counterterrorism efforts is self-protection. A 2007 study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes of public opinion in Egypt, Indonesia, Morocco, and Pakistan, for instance, found that majorities in each of the four countries believed that Washington's primary goal was to dominate the Middle East and weaken and divide the Islamic world. According to another PIPA poll, conducted last spring, anti-American sentiment remained high in Pakistan, where over 80 percent of respondents viewed the Predator strikes as unjustified. Crucially, the report also noted "a sea change" in popular attitudes toward al Qaeda and other religious militants: over 80 percent of the Pakistanis polled said they thought these groups were national security threats -- representing more than a 40-percentage-point rise since 2007. Al Qaeda's reputation as the brave vanguard against Western oppression has been tarnished by the tens of thousands of Muslim civilians killed in Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, and elsewhere since the "war on terror" began. Several Islamist leaders who once supported al Qaeda, including Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, the organization's ideological godfather, have publicly turned against it, as have many ordinary Muslims. If the deradicalization of Islamist extremists is ever going to work, now is probably the time to try.
DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT IDEOLOGY
I first got involved in deradicalization efforts in 2005, soon after the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamist militant. The city of Rotterdam recruited me to help develop a new concept of citizenship that would include Dutch natives as well as immigrants and their children; the city government worried that the idea of jihad had become a fad among not only Muslim youth but also recent converts to Islam. In 2007, a company under contract with Task Force 134, the task force in charge of U.S.-run detention centers in Iraq, asked me to help develop a deradicalization program for the 26,000 Iraqis held at Camp Bucca and Camp Cropper (Camp Bucca has since been closed). Last winter, together with a group of current and former U.S. government officials and analysts, I visited Riyadh's Care Rehabilitation Center, an institution that reintegrates convicted terrorists into Saudi society through religious reeducation, psychological counseling, and assistance finding a job. And in the spring of 2009, I visited a youth center supported by the Muslim Contact Unit, part of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police in London, which works with leaders of the Muslim community there, including Islamists, to isolate and counter supporters of terrorist violence.
These experiences made one thing clear: any rehabilitation effort must be based on a clear understanding of what drives people to terrorism in the first place. Terrorist movements often arise in reaction to an injustice, real or imagined, that they feel must be corrected. Yet ideology is rarely the only, or even the most important, factor in an individual's decision to join the cause. The reasons that people become terrorists are as varied as the reasons that others choose their professions: market conditions, social networks, education, individual preferences. Just as the passion for justice and law that drives a lawyer at first may not be what keeps him working at a law firm, a terrorist's motivations for remaining in, or leaving, his "job" change over time. Deradicalization programs need to take account -- and advantage -- of these variations and shifts in motivations.
Interestingly, terrorists who claim to be driven by religious ideology are often ignorant about Islam. Our hosts in Riyadh told us that the vast majority of the deradicalization program's "beneficiaries," as its administrators call participants, had received little formal education and had only a limited understanding of Islam. In the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, second- and third-generation Muslim youth are rebelling against the kind of "soft" Islam practiced by their parents and promoted in local mosques. They favor what they think is the "purer" Islam, uncorrupted by Western culture, which is touted on some Web sites and by self-appointed imams from the Middle East who are barely educated themselves. For example, the Netherlands-based terrorist cell known as the Hofstad Group designed what one police officer described as a "do-it-yourself" version of Islam based on interpretations of takfiri ideology (takfir is the practice of accusing other Muslims of apostasy) culled from the Internet and the teachings of a drug dealer turned cleric.
Such true believers are good candidates for the kind of ideological reeducation undertaken by Task Force 134 in Iraq and by the prison-based deradicalization program in Saudi Arabia. A Saudi official told the group of us who visited the Care Rehabilitation Center in Riyadh last winter that the main reason for terrorism was ignorance about the true nature of Islam. Clerics at the center teach that only the legitimate rulers of Islamic states, not individuals such as Osama bin Laden, can declare a holy war. They preach against takfir and the selective reading of religious texts to justify violence. One participant in the program told us, "Now I understand that I cannot make decisions by reading a single verse. I have to read the whole chapter."
PREJUDICE AND PRIDE
In Europe, Muslim youth describe themselves, often accurately, as victims of prejudice in the workplace and in society more generally. Surveys carried out in 2006 by the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (now subsumed by the Fundamental Rights Agency), an EU body, showed that minorities and immigrants in the European Union experience greater levels of unemployment, are overrepresented in the least desirable jobs, and receive lower wages. After the van Gogh murder, the native Dutch, who are famously proud of their tolerance, grew visibly less so: they started complaining about rising rates of criminality among Dutch Moroccan youth and the rhetoric of radical imams who preach that homosexuality is a sickness or a sin. Rightly perceiving that this growing prejudice against Muslims could become a source of social conflict, local governments and nongovernmental organizations put in place various programs to integrate young immigrants into broader Dutch society.
Group dynamics are as important as social grievances. Young people are sometimes attracted to terrorist movements through social connections, music, fashion, or lifestyle and only later come to understand fully the groups' violent ideologies and goals. Al Shabab, spurred by a member who calls himself Abu Mansour al-Amriki, and other groups affiliated with al Qaeda have begun using anti-American hip-hop -- "jihad rap" -- in their recruitment videos; the British rap group Blakstone and the defunct but still popular American band Soldiers of Allah promote violence against kafir (nonbelievers). The first- and second-generation Muslim children I interviewed for a study of the sources of radicalization in the Netherlands seemed to think that talking about jihad was cool, in the same way that listening to gangster rap is in some youth circles. Most of these children will not turn to violence, but once youth join an extremist group, the group itself can become an essential part of their identity, maybe even their only community. And so deradicalization requires finding new sources of social support for them. The Saudi program takes great pains to reintegrate participants into their families and the communities they belonged to before their radicalization by encouraging family visits and getting the community involved in their follow-up after they are released. The program rightly assumes that group dynamics are key to both radicalization and deradicalization.
Then there is economics. For some, jihad is just a job. According to studies by the economist Alan Krueger, now the U.S. Treasury Department's assistant secretary for economic policy, and Alberto Abadie, a professor of public policy at Harvard, there is no direct correlation between low GDP and terrorism. Nonetheless, poor people in countries with high levels of unemployment are more vulnerable to recruitment. Of the 25,000 insurgents and terrorist suspects detained in Iraq as of 2007, nearly all were previously underemployed and 78 percent were unemployed, according to Major General Douglas Stone, the commander of Task Force 134 at the time. Because these insurgents took up the "job" of fighting a military occupation, typically targeting soldiers rather than civilians, at least some of them could conceivably be rehabilitated once foreign troops leave Iraq.
According to Christopher Boucek, an expert on Saudi Arabia and Yemen at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Advisory Committee, which helps run the deradicalization program in Saudi Arabia, has reported that most detainees are men in their 20s from large lower- or middle-class families; only three percent come from high-income backgrounds. Boucek says that according to Saudi officials, 25 percent of the detained terrorists who had participated in jihad had prior criminal records, approximately half of them for drug-related offenses; only five percent were prayer leaders or had other formal religious roles. For such individuals, job training and career counseling may be the best deradicalization strategy -- or at least a strategy as important as religious reeducation.
ALL IN THE HEAD
Psychology also matters. One element worth examining in particular is the potential impact of sexual abuse on radicalization. Much has been written about the role of radical madrasahs in creating terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere, some of it in these pages. Outside of the Pakistani press, however, little note is made of the routine rape of boys at such schools. Also troubling is the rape of boys by warlords, the Afghan National Army, or the police in Afghanistan. Such abuses are commonplace on Thursdays, also known as "man-loving day," because Friday prayers are considered to absolve sinners of all wrongdoing. David Whetham, a specialist in military ethics at King's College London, reports that security checkpoints set up by the Afghan police and military have been used by some personnel to troll for attractive young men and boys on Thursday nights. The local population has been forced to accept these episodes as par for the course: they cannot imagine defying the all-powerful Afghan commanders. Could such sexual traumas be a form of humiliation that contributes to contemporary Islamist terrorism?
Similarly, one need not spend many days in Gaza before understanding that fear and humiliation, constants of daily life there, play at least some role in certain Palestinians' decisions to become martyr-murderers. If terrorism can be a source of validation, then surely helping adherents come to terms with the humiliation they have experienced could help bring them back into the fold. To that end, the Saudi rehabilitation program includes classes in self-esteem.
Aside from the question of preexisting personal trauma, consider the impact of a terrorist's lifestyle on his psychology. Exposure to violence, especially for those who become fighters, can cause lasting, haunting changes in the body and the mind. Terrorists are "at war," at least from their perspective, and they, too, may be at risk of posttraumatic stress disorder. Moreover, those who have been detained may have been subjected to torture and left with even more serious psychological wounds. The Guantánamo detainees sent back to Saudi Arabia have posed a particular problem for the Saudi government, for example. One graduate of the facility in Riyadh told me privately that although he was taking psychotropic medications, which helped, he was still suffering from terrible nightmares and feeling hypervigilant. (He claimed to have been tortured with electrodes in Afghanistan, prior to being moved to Guantánamo.) It will be critically important to incorporate some of what the medical community learns about posttraumatic stress disorder. This is not because terrorists deserve sympathy -- they do not -- but because understanding their state of mind is necessary to limiting the risk that they will return to violence.
Some individuals join terrorist movements out of conviction but evolve over time into professional killers. Once that happens, the emotional, or material, benefits of belonging can overtake the spiritual benefits of believing. This suggests that some terrorists might develop enduring reasons -- perhaps even a compulsion -- to pursue violence. Such individuals should be detained preventively and the key thrown away, as some governments do with sexual predators. But in cases in which the law precludes indefinite detention, governments may be forced to release suspects. In those instances, officials will have to choose whether to ignore the threat posed by these people or work with other governments to develop tools to reduce the chance that they will resume being terrorists. Regarding lower-level operatives, governments must consider risky tradeoffs. On the one hand, how great is the chance that graduates of deradicalization programs will return to terrorism or other forms of violent crime? On the other hand, are incarcerated terrorists recruiting in prison among the ordinary criminals or the guards, or can preventive detention, or the prison itself, become a symbol of injustice to potential recruits?
REHABILITATION AND RECIDIVISM
After participating in a 1974 survey of 231 case studies of rehabilitation programs for criminals in prisons, the sociologist Robert Martinson wrote that "with few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism." This observation sparked a "nothing works" movement throughout the United States. Academics continued to study the rehabilitation of criminals, however, and there is now a fairly broad consensus that some measures do work. The most successful rehabilitation models focus on the motivations of individual offenders. The ideal approach includes three components: prison-based rehabilitation programs, services to help released prisoners reintegrate into society, and postrelease services. The community's involvement in the postrelease services, in particular, is essential to reducing recidivism rates.
Terrorists are different from ordinary criminals in many ways, of course, but it is worth noting that according to the Saudi government, its deradicalization program -- which relies on prison-based rehabilitation programs, transitional services, and postrelease services -- has been extraordinarily successful. The Saudi government has not disclosed the total number of people who have completed its program, but as of 2009, 11 graduates had ended up on the country's most-wanted terrorist list. Still, according to official statistics, the rate of recidivism is 10-20 percent, far lower than that for ordinary criminals. In order to gain a more complete understanding of what works, and what does not, in deradicalization efforts, it will be important for the Saudi government to give outsiders greater access to the program and to statistics regarding it.
That said, some of the Saudi program's main features, and thus its results, may be difficult to replicate elsewhere. The project is extremely expensive; it is constantly being updated, based on input from the staff and participants. It includes psychological counseling, vocational training, art therapy, sports, and religious reeducation. Former Guantánamo detainees who graduate from the program are given housing, a car, money for a wedding -- even assistance in finding a wife, if necessary. They receive help with career placement for themselves and their families. There is an extensive postrelease program as well, which involves extensive surveillance. The guiding philosophy behind these efforts, the program's leaders explained, is that jihadists are victims, not villains, and they need tailored assistance -- a view probably unacceptable in many countries.
Could aspects of the program nonetheless be replicated elsewhere? The U.S. government has been trying to persuade the Saudi government to assist in reintegrating into mainstream society 97 Yemeni terrorist suspects who remained in Guantánamo as of October 2009. According to Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, these Yemenis "include many of the worst of the worst." Repatriating them to Yemen, Wittes adds, is not an attractive option because of the fragility of the Yemeni state and its notoriously leaky jails: ten terrorist suspects escaped in 2003; in 2006, 23 suspects did. And because the Saudi program depends on relatives to police the behavior of the detainees once they are released, Boucek, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, describes the U.S. proposal to send the Yemenis to the Saudi program as "a catastrophically bad idea," unless the detainees grew up or have relatives in Saudi Arabia. Boucek favors giving U.S. assistance for a new program in Yemen that would be modeled in part on the one in Saudi Arabia.
GANGPLANK
Both radicalization and deradicalization typically involve several steps, including changes in values and changes in behavior. The changes in values do not necessarily precede the changes in behavior, John Horgan, director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Pennsylvania State University, has found. Individuals often join extremist groups in the same way that they might join gangs -- through social connections, to gain a sense of belonging -- and only later do they acquire extremist views. The literature on gangs, for its part, suggests that the most productive time to intervene in this process is before an individual joins the group.
It is based on this understanding that, alongside their deradicalization projects, several governments are devising programs to forestall radicalization altogether. Youth programs developed by the Institute for Multicultural Development (also known as FORUM), in the Netherlands, help adolescents and young adults in the country resist radicalization and recruitment into terrorist groups by encouraging them to "express their possible disappointments and (justified) feelings of exclusion in peaceful and democratic ways and turn their genuine concerns into positive social action." FORUM focuses on "problem neighborhoods," namely, ethnic neighborhoods with high levels of unemployment.
The Saudi government also runs a terrorism-prevention program, which monitors religious leaders, schoolteachers, and Web sites. It recently arrested five individuals for promoting militant activities on the Internet and recruiting individuals to travel abroad for what the government called "inappropriate purposes." Meanwhile, it also supports a nongovernmental organization called the Sakinah Campaign (sakinah means "tranquility"), which helps Internet users who have visited extremist sites interact with legitimate Islamic scholars online, with a view to steering them away from radicalism.
Such projects may serve as models or at least as a source of inspiration for similar efforts elsewhere. Washington should study them, even though the United States has so far been relatively immune from the kind of homegrown Islamist terrorism that has afflicted Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. This may be because American Muslims tend to be more fully integrated into American society and tend to be better educated and have higher-paying jobs than the average American. In the last few years, however, a small number of Somali immigrants who had settled as refugees in the United States, especially in Minnesota, have joined al Shabab in Somalia. (One of them is the first known American to become a suicide bomber.) These immigrants have less in common with other American Muslims and more resemble Pakistanis in the United Kingdom and Moroccans in the Netherlands, who face discrimination in school and on the job market. Unlike previous waves of Muslim immigrants to the United States, these Somalis arrived with little knowledge of English or the United States. Partly as a result, they have had difficulty assimilating into American society: according to the most recent census, Somali Americans have the highest unemployment rate among East African diasporas in the United States and the lowest rate of college graduation.
U.S. officials devising social programs for Somali American youth can learn not only from previous anti-gang efforts in the United States but also from the experiences of European governments and their efforts to lure lower-achieving immigrant youth away from gangs and terrorist groups. As part of these efforts, it makes a great deal of sense to back anti-jihadi Muslim activists. But that is also a risky move. Antifundamentalist groups that get official backing risk being perceived not just as opposing violence but also as opposing Islam. The Quilliam Foundation, an anti-extremism think tank in the United Kingdom that was started by two former members of the Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, has received nearly one million pounds from the British government -- and has lost credibility among ordinary Muslims.
But there are hopeful signs: Hanif Qadir, together with his brother and a former member of a local gang, created the Active Change Foundation in 2003, an organization that runs a youth center and a gym in Waltham Forest, a culturally diverse and gang-infested borough of northern London, and is supported by the Metropolitan Police. Qadir told me that he had been recruited by al Qaeda in 2002 and was on his way to Afghanistan expecting to fight when he changed his mind after hearing that volunteers were being used as "cannon fodder." Now, he explained to me, he encourages youth to express their rage about the mistreatment of Muslims in Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere and channel it into peaceful political action. Having been involved in its gangs or violent extremist groups themselves, he and the other program leaders know the community well. The foundation's ambition, as it puts it, is to "work behind the 'wall of silence'" with people who are marginalized by mainstream British society.
Terrorism continues to pose a significant threat to civilians around the world. If every terrorist could be killed or captured and then kept locked up indefinitely, the world would be a safer place. But there are limitations to this approach. Often, the only evidence implicating captured terrorists is not usable in court, and some terrorists will inevitably be released if they are returned to their countries of origin. The destructive ideology that animates the al Qaeda movement is spreading around the globe, including, in some cases, to small-town America. Homegrown zealots, motivated by al Qaeda's distorted interpretation of Islam, may not yet be capable of carrying out 9/11-style strikes, but they could nonetheless terrorize a nation.
Terrorism spreads, in part, through bad ideas. The most dangerous and seductive bad idea spreading around the globe today is a distorted and destructive interpretation of Islam, which asserts that killing innocents is a way to worship God. Part of the solution must come from within Islam and from Islamic scholars, who can refute this ideology with arguments based on theology and ethics. But bad ideas are only part of the problem. Terrorists prey on vulnerable populations -- people who feel humiliated and victimized or who find their identities by joining extremist movements. Governments' arsenals against terrorism must include tools to strengthen the resilience of vulnerable populations. These tools should look more like anti-gang programs and public diplomacy than war.
By Eli Saslow, Philip Rucker, William Wan and Mary Pat Flaherty Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, December 31, 2009; A01
Nidal Hasan was causing a ruckus in his one-bedroom apartment during the early hours of Nov. 5, banging against the thin walls long after midnight, packing boxes and shredding papers until he woke up the tenants next door.
Maybe that was a clue.
He picked up the phone at 2:37 a.m. and dialed a neighbor. Nobody answered. Hasan called again three hours later, this time leaving a message. "Nice knowing you, friend," he said. "I'm moving on from here."
Maybe that was a clue, too.
He left Apartment 9 early that morning and stopped next door to see a woman named Patricia Villa, whom he had known for less than a month. He gave her a bag of frozen vegetables, some broccoli, a clothing steamer and an air mattress, explaining that he was about to be deployed to a war zone. Then Hasan visited another neighbor, a devout Christian, who looked at him quizzically when he handed her a copy of the Koran and recommended passages for her to read. "In my religion," Hasan told her, "we'll do anything to be closer to God."
Just before the break of dawn in Killeen, Tex., Hasan drove away from the Casa Del Norte apartment complex and stopped for his customary breakfast at a nearby 7-Eleven. The store's owner, wary of him, had spent the past month pretending to be absent whenever Hasan entered. This time, Hasan approached the counter with coffee and hash browns at 6:22 a.m., wearing an Arab robe and a white kufi cap. Before fiddling in his pockets for change, buying his breakfast and driving away to work at Fort Hood, he smiled at another customer and issued what sounded like a warning.
"There's going to be big action on post around 1:30," he said, according to witnesses. "Be prepared."
Clues -- he left them everywhere. When viewed in retrospect, Hasan's life becomes an apparent trail of evidence that leads to an inevitable end. At 1:34 p.m. on Nov. 5, he bowed his head in prayer during his regular shift at Fort Hood, opened his eyes and started shooting, witnesses said. The 39-year-old Army psychiatrist allegedly aimed for soldiers in uniform, firing more than 100 times with a semiautomatic pistol and a revolver. The terror lasted less than 10 minutes. Thirteen people died. Thirty were injured.
Now, more than seven weeks later, what is left of the Fort Hood tragedy is a community haunted by clues that somehow went unheeded. During a week in which the government has lamented missed signals in the case of an attempted bombing on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, there remain unresolved questions about how so many signals could have passed unnoticed before the Fort Hood shootings. While the Pentagon, the Army and the FBI work to complete investigations of Hasan with findings due next month, his former friends and colleagues sift backward through his biography and search for answers of their own.
This story, which attempts to fill in that biography, is based on interviews with 100 people who lived, worked or prayed with Hasan in Texas, the District, Virginia and Maryland -- a group now united by its obsession with the same troubling questions.
How do you differentiate between pious and fanatical?
Between lonely and isolated?
Between eccentric and crazy?
And the one question the former friends and colleagues return to most: Could they have recognized the clues in time to stop him?
* * *
Where were the clues back in 2001, when a friend told his Silver Spring youth group to emulate Hasan as the role model for well-rounded success? Here was a devoted student -- a summa cum laude graduate of Virginia Western Community College, an honors graduate of Virginia Tech -- now well on his way to becoming a doctor. Here was a devoted Muslim who regularly drove to a mosque to pray five times each day, as is customary among the devout, and stuck around between prayers to raise money for the homeless and find temporary housing for new arrivals to Washington. Here was a devoted son who took time off from school and made space in his one-bedroom apartment to care for his mother, sick with cancer.
Hasan took a leave from medical school to spend the better part of two years in his suburban Washington apartment with his mother, Nora, until she died on May 30, 2001. She was 49, and other family members considered her Hasan's closest confidante -- a woman who discouraged her son from joining the military only to later introduce herself as the mother of an Army officer. Hasan hosted her funeral at Dar al-Hijrah, Northern Virginia's biggest mosque, where more than 3,000 people sometimes attend evening prayer and stay afterward for brief funerals. Nora's service, held after a crowded Thursday prayer, was Hasan's last gift to his mother: Muslim belief dictates that the more people who pray for the deceased, the greater the rewards in heaven.
Nora's death left Hasan bereft of his anchor, relatives said, and over the next several years he started to drift. He moved three times in three years, renting rooms in one transient apartment building after the next in the Maryland suburbs.
In the meantime, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had made him an occasional target as a Muslim in the Army -- his car was twice vandalized with graffiti and dirty diapers at work -- and he confided to fellow Muslims that he opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and felt like "an outcast." Even inside the mosque, Hasan's haven, he was becoming a misfit as an aging bachelor in a religion that considers marriage not just a priority but a cultural duty.
His solution was to find a new anchor. Hasan began looking for a wife.
It seemed less a search than a full-time obsession. Hasan's status as a doctor and a military officer made him a considerable catch, but his standards were exacting. He wanted a virgin of Arabic descent -- a woman in her 20s who wore the hijab, understood the Koran and prayed five times a day. He enlisted matchmaking help from three imams, a neighbor in his Silver Spring high-rise apartment complex and the proprietor of a Maryland deli where Hasan liked to eat halal meat for dinner. He quizzed fellow Muslim men about their wives and asked family members to keep an eye out for prospects.
As the years wore on with little to show for the search, Hasan's plight became a running joke among some at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring: Because of his age, fellow worshipers joked, Brother Nidal always got the first chance at any new woman who joined the mosque.
One day in 2006, as Hasan edged toward his late 30s, he attended a matchmaking event at the Islamic Society of the Washington Area. The annual gathering is a last-chance staple for hundreds of Muslims, some of whom travel from as far as India or Hawaii, to mingle over a breakfast buffet. But attending such an event was an uncharacteristic step for Hasan, who steadfastly avoided group parties with co-workers and who, his aunt Noel Hasan said, "did not make many friends easily and did not make friends fast."
Hasan arrived at the Islamic Society's beige house in Silver Spring, paid the $15 sign-up fee and completed his application. He wrote down his phone numbers, then changed his mind and crossed them out. He skipped several categories, filling out only the essential ones.
Height: 5'6.5".
Weight: 190.
Nationality: Palestinian.
Personality and character: "Quiet, reserved until more familiar with person. Funny, caring, and personable."
Priorities desired in a spouse: "Prays 5x/day at prescribed times. Wears hijab appropriately. Lives life according to Quran/Sunnah."
After breakfast, Hasan and the other 150 singles in attendance formed a gigantic circle and took turns introducing themselves. Some were divorced, others were widowed, and a few had children. When his turn came, Hasan talked about his work as a doctor and his devotion to Islam. Several women showed interest, but Hasan didn't reciprocate. Instead, as the singles filed out, Hasan visited privately with the matchmaker, Faizul Khan, and expressed disappointment. Not a single woman had interested him, he said.
Khan apologized and offered to let Hasan return in a few days to look through stacks of matchmaking applications from previous years. Maybe, Khan suggested, Hasan would find the pious woman of his dreams in the collection of 300 applications and accompanying head shots.
Maybe, Hasan agreed. But he never went back.
In the ensuing months, colleagues said, Hasan spent most of his time alone. He studied for long hours inside a wooden cubicle in the library of the Muslim Community Center, where the administrative assistant wondered whether he was lonely. He ate dinners by himself at his favorite deli, with an open laptop on the table and his head buried behind the monitor. Family members worried that he was becoming increasingly isolated -- with no wife, no parents, no close friends -- but Hasan reassured them. He had no time for company, he said. All of his energy was devoted to work.
* * *
Meanwhile, Hasan's colleagues were beginning to worry, too. He proselytized to them in the hallways of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he was a psychiatry resident, turning conversations about war and the Redskins into lectures about the Koran. He spoke openly about his opposition to the war in Iraq, repeatedly saying that he could not imagine deploying to fight against fellow Muslims. As the war dragged into 2007, Hasan told family members that he had unsuccessfully tried to get out of the Army by consulting with a lawyer and even offering to repay the cost of his education.
While working at an overloaded military hospital desperate for psychiatrists, Hasan sometimes saw only one or two patients per week -- far fewer than most of his peers, many of whom privately regarded him as either a dud or a slacker. The patients Hasan did treat seemed to deeply unsettle him. He spoke to his aunt Noel Hasan about a patient who had mental problems and facial burns so severe that his skin had nearly melted. The sessions, the aunt quoted him as saying, were sometimes "traumatic." At least once, Hasan counseled a patient about the healing virtues of Islam, prompting a reprimand from his supervisors.
But nothing raised alarm among Hasan's colleagues at Walter Reed quite like his classroom presentations, which seemed to chart the evolution of his beliefs. In June 2007, he gave the culminating presentation of his medical residency to 25 colleagues and supervisors. He was allowed to talk about any subject, and Hasan stood at the front of the room and gave a 50-slide introduction to Islam.
Slide 11: "It's getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims."
Slide 12: "(4.93) And whoever kills a believer intentionally, his punishment is hell."
Slide 49: "God expects full loyalty."
Slide 50: "Department of Defense should allow Muslim Soldiers the option of being released as 'Conscientious objectors' to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events."
Hasan gave another presentation on the topic six months later, classmates said. This time, during his research, he e-mailed back and forth with Anwar al-Aulaqi, an al-Qaeda sympathizer living in Yemen (who also has been linked to the Nigerian man charged in the attempted Detroit plane bombing). Hasan also tested his material in front of fellow Muslims at the Silver Spring mosque. Other students in his public health class presented on topics such as water safety and mold. Hasan focused his work on the thesis that the war on terrorism was actually a war on Islam, several classmates said.
A few months later came a third presentation. This time, Hasan advanced his thesis by one degree: He spoke about the heroism of suicide bombers, classmates said.
Were these the clues of a developing extremist? Or just more cluelessness from a floundering student? Hasan's classmates were divided. At least one student mentioned his concerns to a medical staff supervisor; another classmate, a devout Christian, privately explained to Hasan that the conflict in Iraq was not about "warring with religion," prompting Hasan to shake his head and walk away.
One classmate thought Hasan was misunderstood: "I didn't see him as a threat, I saw him as fervent."
Another believed Hasan could pose a risk but kept quiet. "If you complain and someone higher up says you're biased, that can be a career ender. That dogs you."
By early 2009, what emerged were two conflicting narratives of Hasan's life, which now had only his name in common. One, told by his classmates and colleagues, depicted an isolated man struggling in his career and tending toward radicalism. The other, documented in Hasan's official record, continued to track an Army psychiatrist on the rise: Hasan completed his prestigious medical fellowship, earned a promotion to the rank of major despite his supervisors' misgivings and was named co-chairman of a panel assembled by the American Psychiatric Association. Then, in July 2009, he was assigned to Fort Hood, where he would evaluate and prepare soldiers for war, and prepare to go to war himself.
* * *
Hasan told friends in Maryland that he wished he could avoid moving to Texas, and he never acted like he planned to stay long. Fort Hood staffers typically help officers locate nice places to live, but Hasan found his new home in the classified ads of the Killeen Daily Herald. He paid $325 per month for a one-bedroom unit in a shabby apartment complex on the seedy side of downtown. The welcome sign at the 27-unit Casa Del Norte apartment building was patched together with duct tape, and low-hanging electrical wires lined the nearby streets. Police were dispatched to the building about once a week.
Hasan usually left his apartment for prayer before dawn and returned late in the evening, wearing a white robe and clutching a copy of the Koran. His route home took him past a group of neighbors who liked to drink beer at the picnic table in the courtyard, and they sometimes laughed at his outfits. One neighbor, John Van de Walker, scraped a key across the passenger side of Hasan's car and ripped off a bumper sticker that read "Allah is Love." Van de Walker was charged with criminal mischief and fined, but Hasan told neighbors that he would forgive Van de Walker as a gesture during the holy month of Ramadan.
Shortly after moving to Killeen, Hasan made two purchases that would soon be seen as clues. He went to Guns Galore, a windowless white cinder-block shop on a country highway, and bought a high-powered semiautomatic pistol. He also ordered business cards that listed his professional specialties -- "Behavioral Health -- Mental Health -- Life Skills" -- without mentioning his involvement in the Army. The cards included an abbreviation after Hasan's name: "SoA," standing for "Slave of Allah" or "Soldier of Allah." It was an unusually forceful assertion, one considered odd even by the most pious Muslims.
During business hours at Fort Hood, Hasan worked at the Resilience and Restoration Center, writing psychological profiles of soldiers entering and exiting war. Nobody could study Hasan as closely. Regulars at a Killeen mosque knew him only as devoted and quiet; neighbors in his apartment building referred to him not by name but by his apartment number, calling him "Number 9." He ate dinner night after night at Golden Corral with an 18-year-old named Duane Reasoner, a recent Muslim convert who had left a trail of anti-American postings on jihadist Web sites, but they sat in a corner booth and kept their conversations at a low volume, witnesses said.
Nearly everyone in Killeen who interacted with Hasan considered him a mystery, and his actions became more confounding as October turned to November.
Why was an Army psychiatrist, instead of helping soldiers, obsessing over charging them with war crimes?
Why was a conservative Muslim going to the Starz strip club on the nights of Oct. 28 and 29, spending seven hours each night sitting alone at a round table near the stage, handing out Bud Lights and generous tips to each dancer and then buying a series of fully nude private lap dances that cost $50 each?
Why was an Army officer eschewing the shooting range at Fort Hood to drive 35 miles into the central Texas flatlands on Nov. 3 and take his target practice at Stan's Outdoor Shooting Range, where bullets sometimes ricocheted off square targets and hit cars?
Why, on the morning of Nov. 5, were witnesses seeing Hasan hand out copies of the Koran, give away his groceries, issue a warning at 7-Eleven, report to work, stand on a table, shout "Allahu Akbar" and wave two guns inside the Soldier Readiness Processing Center?
Then Hasan allegedly opened fire, and suddenly the questions became clues, and the clues began to make horrifying sense.
Staff writers Anne Hull, Kafia Hosh and Dana Priest, research director Lucy Shackelford and staff researchers Meg Smith and Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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