A native of Egypt, Ali Abdelsoud Mohamed rose to the rank of major in
Egypt's special forces before being forced out of Egypt's military in 1984
because he was considered a religious extremist. Much later he was
identified as a secret member of the Islamic Jihad movement that
assassinated Egypt's President Sadat in 1981. According to an amazing front
page story in the Wall Street Journal on November 26 headlined The
Infiltrator, "Ali Mohamed Served In the U.S. Army - And bin Laden's Inner
Circle," it is implicit that the FBI and the CIA would have had to have
knowledge of Mohamed's chameleon-like lifestyle. Mohamed was able to obtain
a visa, marry an American woman, become a U.S. citizen, settle in California
and somehow become a U.S. Army sergeant by 1986. Until 1989, he was a
supply sergeant and lecturer on Mid-east culture at the U.S. Army's special
warfare school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a place where he had studied
earlier as an Egyptian officer.
Even though the U.S.. Army and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
declined to comment to Journal reporters, Mr. Mohamed's new friends in
California took it for granted that he was working for the CIA in their
proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The CIA helped recruit,
organize and finance the mujahedeen in an anti-Soviet Jihad throughout the
Muslim world. Ali Zaki, a San Jose obstetrician and close friend of Mr.
Mohamed, told the Journal that "Everyone in the community knew he was
working as a liaison between the CIA and the Afghan cause." Mr. Mohamed
brought Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Dr. Ayman Zawahri, who is now thought
to be bin Laden's right hand man, with him to California in the early 1990s
on a fund-raising trip, ostensibly for the Kuwaiti Red Crescent. Mr.
Mohamed was also deeply involved with a group in New York headed by a
"fiery blind imam," Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. They set up the Kitah Refugee
Center in Brooklyn, established to help the mujahedeen in the anti-Soviet
Jihad, but by the 1990s it began turning into an al-Queda front. The group
was implicated in the assassination of the extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane in
New York as well as the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the F.B.I. questioned Mr. Mohamed in
1993 and he told them Mr. Bin Laden was running a group called al-Queda "and
was building an army". Many of the mujahedeen liberation fighters who
fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan became al-Queda members under bin
Laden's leadership. It was not until 1998, following the bombings of the
U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, that Mohamed was arrested. He pled
guilty to the East African bombings and is awaiting sentencing in federal
prison. Nabil Sharef, a former Egyptian intelligence officer, told the
Journal, "For five years he was moving back and forth between the U.S. and
Afghanistan. It's impossible the CIA thought he was going there as a
tourist." Like Dr. Frankenstein's creation, the CIA's invention of the
marvelous mujahedeen to rid Afghanistan of the Soviets has turned into the
"evil-doing" al-Queda that attacked America.
The latest news from the war in Afghanistan has a bitterly ironic, but
interesting, story on the continuum of terror from the mujahedeen to
al-Queda. Like the Saudi Arabian leader, bin Laden, the mujahedeen were
recruited by the CIA from across the Arab world to fight the Soviets in
Afghanistan in the 1980s. Many of those same Arabs are now Taliban or
al-Queda, and U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has proclaimed they cannot
leave Afghanistan alive. Rumsfeld wants them either killed or made
prisoners, but not allowed to go home to Saudi Arabia or Egypt or wherever
they were recruited from in the Arab world.
There are news reports of the summary executions by the Northern Alliance of
several hundred prisoners of war including "foreigners" among the Taliban
and more killings of "foreign Arabs" in a controversial "prison revolt" in
the Northern Alliance controlled city of Mazar-e-Sharif. The U.S.'s Persian
Gulf allies, led by Saudi Arabia, are calling for the repatriation of the
"foreign" fighters. Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz
told reporters, "We hope that all people who are of Arab or Islamic origin
in Afghanistan can return to their country of origin.... We hope that no
one will be subject to injustice."
Given the miserable human rights record of many elements of the Northern
Alliance who now occupy the Afghan capitol of Kabul, where they raped,
murdered and pillaged as recently as 1996, human rights advocates have an
overwhelming sense of foreboding about the future of the strife-ridden land.
The Northern Alliance seems to have the upper hand in forming a new
government as remnants of the Taliban and al-Queda are either destroyed or
dissolve into the caves and barren countryside. Meanwhile, back in the
laboratories of Washington, D.C., is Dr. Frankenstein concocting another
invention that will extend the continuum of terror???
Tom Turnipseed is an attorney, writer and civil rights activist in Columbia,
South Carolina. www.turnipseed.net
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