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by Dr. Paul L. Williams
July 03, 2015
from
GlobalResearch Website
Islamic paramilitary camps have been set up in the United States and
Canada to train African American Muslims in guerilla warfare.
After months of training on firing
ranges and obstacle courses, the black Muslims are sent to Pakistan
where they receive advanced training in explosives. Many never
return.
Stories about these camps are not new. They have been reported by
the main stream media, including
Fox News.
The origin of these compounds for would-be jihadis dates back
to 1979, when the Agency sent hundreds of radical Islamic clerics to
the United States in an effort to recruit African American Muslims
for the holy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The Tablighi
Missionaries
By and large, these missionaries hailed from Pakistan and belonged
to
Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim movement
with 150 members in 213 countries. [1]
Upholding a strict interpretation of
Islamic law (shariah), the Tablighi were united in,
-
their resistance to Western
culture
-
their insistence that Muslims
should avoid contact with all those who do not share their
beliefs
-
their approval of jihad by
sword (jihad bin saif) [2]
Members of the movement gathered every
year for three days in the small Pakistani town of Raiwind.
In 1979, Sheikh Mubarek Ali Gilani, a Tablighi missionary
from Lahore, Pakistan, arrived in Brooklyn where he called upon
members of Dar ul-Islam, a notoriously violent street gang, to take
arms in the great jihad.
Scores answered his call and were headed
off to Pakistan with payments of thousands of dollars in cash and
promises of seventy hours in seventh heaven, if they were killed in
action. [3]
Welcome To
Islamberg
By 1980, the Agency realized that considerable expense could be
saved by setting up paramilitary camps under the supervision of
Shiekh Gilani in a rural area of the country.
An ideal location was located near
Hancock New York at the base of Point Mountain, where the east and
west branches of the Delaware River converge to form the headwaters
that flow through Pennsylvania and New Jersey to the Atlantic Ocean.
The rocky terrain was infested with rattlesnakes, and the woods were
home to black bears, coyotes, wolves, and a few bobcats.
Islamberg, a seventy acre complex,
came into existence.
Firing ranges and obstacle courses were set up in Islamberg along
with a massive underground bunker and a landing strip. The residents
lived in single-wide trailers that lined the hillside.
The settlement contained,
A sentry post was placed at the
entranceway. [4]
The sound of gunfire and explosions emanating from the property
alarmed local residents, who filed complaints with local and state
law enforcement agencies. But a marked law enforcement vehicle never
appeared at the compound. [5]
Islamberg was off-limits to police
inspection on the spurious grounds of "national security."
The camp also came to contain an illegal cemetery where bodies were
buried in unmarked graves. [6] This alone should
have warranted a raid by the New York State Police. But not even
dead bodies could prompt a police investigation.
When Islamberg was established, Gilani presented himself as an
employee
of the CIA and the future jihadis,
who resided in the compound, called themselves CIA operatives.
[7]
Few in law enforcement doubted the
professed credentials of the Muslim newcomers.
Communities of
the Impoverished
Islamberg was a great success.
Hundreds of African American Muslims
made their way to Afghanistan and joined the ranks of the
mujahedeen. Several were killed in action. [8]
Others, including Clement Rodney Hampton-El, returned to
the U.S. to plot the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New
York. [9]
Under the CIA's directions, a host of other paramilitary camps were
established in such places as,
-
Red House, Virginia
-
Commerce, Georgia
-
York, South Carolina
-
Dover, Tennessee
-
Buena Vista, Colorado
-
Macon, Georgia
-
Squaw Valley, California
-
Marion, Alabama
-
Talihina, Oklahoma
-
Toronto, Ontario [10]
Gilani placed Islamberg and the other
camps under a governing organization called "Jamaat
ul-Fuqra" or "the community of the impoverished." He
established the headquarters of this "charity" in Lahore.
The American arm of Jamaat ul-Fuqra
became the Muslims of the Americas," a tax-exempt corporation with
Gilani's mosque in Brooklyn as its address. [11]
Increased Need
of Radicals
The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 did not spell an end
to the CIA's support of radical Islam.
Throughout the 1990s, Dr. Ayman
Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second in command, travelled at the expense
and bidding of the CIA throughout Central Asia, where he cultivated
new armies of jihadis to destabilize the newly created republics.
His efforts resulted in the uprising of
the Chechens against the Russian Federation, the attempted toppling
of the government in Uzbekistan, and the insurgence of the Uigurs in
the Xinjiang province of China. [12]
A dutiful operative, Dr. Zawahiri met regularly with U.S. military
and intelligence officials at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan
to plan the Balkan operations in which the CIA worked with al Qaeda
to overthrow the government of Slobodan Milosevic for the
creation of "Greater Albania," encompassing Albania, Kosovo, and
parts of Macedonia. [13]
These operations, particularly in the Balkans, required the
recruitment of more and more jihadis.
Gilani's camps continued to prosper. And
more and more of his African American recruits appeared among the
rank and file mujahedeen in various theaters of warfare throughout
the world.
Dr. Zawahiri's help was so valuable that he was granted permanent
U.S. residence by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in
January 2000. [14]
The Rise of
ISIS
After 9/11, the Agency continued to
cultivate Islamic holy warriors to maintain the "strategy of
tension" in the Middle East, the Balkan states, and Central Asia and
to mount new uprisings in Africa to expand U.S. hegemony.
The grand purpose of these enterprises
was US economic and political control of Eurasia.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former
Secretary of State and leading strategist for
the Council on Foreign Relations,
writes:
For America, the chief geopolitical
prize is Eurasia... Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in
Eurasia... and America's global primacy is directly dependent on
how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian
continent is sustained...
To put it in a terminology that
harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the
three great imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent
collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to
keep the tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the
barbarians from coming together. [15]
In accordance with the strategy of
keeping "the barbarians from coming together,"
ISIS forces were and are trained at
a secret U.S. military base in the Jordanian town of Safawi.
[16]
The weapons for ISIS came, compliments
of the Agency, from the arsenal of deposed Libyan dictator
Muammar Kaddafi.
The shipment of these weapons to ISIS in
Syria was supervised in 2012 by David Petraeus, the CIA
director who would soon resign when it was alleged that he was
having an affair with his biographer. [17]
Supply and
Demand
In response to the increased demand, Gilani continued to churn out
more and more African American jihadis.
More and more training camps opened,
including one in Texas. [18] More and more bodies
were buried in unmarked graves. More and more complaints were made
to law enforcement officials.
And more and more graduates from the
training camps made their way to Pakistan.
Blowback
Of course, there was blowback to the CIA's establishment on Islamic
paramilitary camps on American soil.
Over the years, numerous members of
Jamaat ul-Fuqra have been convicted in U.S. court of such crimes as
conspiracy to commit murder, firebombing, gun smuggling, and
workers' compensation fraud. Others remain leading suspects in
criminal cases throughout the country, including ten unsolved
assassinations and seventeen fire bombings between 1979 and 1990.
[19]
In 2001, a resident of the ul-Fuqra camp in California was charged
with first-degree murder in the shooting of a sheriff's deputy;
another was charged with gun-smuggling; and twenty-four from the
camp in Red House, Virginia were convicted of firearms violations.
[20]
By 2004 investigators uncovered evidence that purportedly linked
both the Washington, DC "sniper killer" John Allen Muhammad
and "Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid to Gilani's group and reports
surfaced that Wall Street Journal reporter
Daniel Pearl had been captured
and killed in the process of attempting to gain an interview with
Sheikh Gilani in Pakistan. [21]
By 2015, Jamaat ul-Fuqra had been involved in more terror attacks on
America soil (30 and counting) than all the other terrorist groups
combined.
Despite these attacks, the group has
never been placed on the official US Terror Watch List, and the
Muslims of the Americas continues to operate as a legitimate
non-profit, tax-exempt organization. [22]
The Warning
Investigators, including Patrick Walsh and William Krayer,
who have visited Islamberg and other paramilitary settlements,
believe that the next major attack on US soil will emanate from
Gilani's jamaats of homegrown terrorism.
Based on the history of the CIA's
involvement in the creation of these camps, such an attack may occur
in accordance with the Agency's own design.
Notes
[1] Alex Alexiev, "Tablighi Jamaat:
Jihad's Stealthy Legion," Middle East Quarterly, no. 1 (Winter
2005)
[2] Jane I. Smith, Islam in America (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999), p. 161.
[3] Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002),
[4] Douglas J. Hagmann, "Special Report: Jamaat ul-Fuqra
Training Compound Inside the U.S.," Northeast Intelligence
Network, February 28, 2006.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Paul L. Williams, Crescent Moon Rising: The Islamic
Transformation of America (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books,
2013), p. 134.
[7] "Afghanistan Update," Daily Telegraph (London), August 5,
1983; Los Angeles Times, August 5, 1983.
[8] Ibid
[9] Zachary Crowley, "Jamaat ul-Fuqra Dossier," Center for
Policing Terrorism, March 16, 2005.
[10] Gordon Gregory and Sonna Williams, "Jamaat ul-Fuqra,"
Special Research Report, Regional Organized Crime Information
Center, 2006.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, "Whistleblower: Al Qaeda Chief Was
US Asset," Huffington Post, May 21, 2013.
[13] Sibel Edmonds, "Know Your Terrorists: Ayman al-Zawahiri,"
Boiling Frogs Post, February 16, 2013.
[14] Rory McCarthy, "The Real Ayman al-Zawahiri," The Guardian,
August 5, 2005. See also Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization
of War (Montreal: Global Research Publishers, 2015), p. 111.
[15] Zbigniew Brzezinski,
The Grand Chessboard - American
Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (New
York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 20, 40.
[16] "Americans Are Training Syria Rebels in Jordan," Reuters,
March 10, 2013.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ryan Mauro, "Islamic Terror Enclave Discovered in Texas,"
The Clarion Project, February 18, 2014.
[19] "Jamaat ul-Fuqra: Terror Group of Pakistan," Institute
ofContact Management, 2001.
[20] Ibid.
[21] "The Jamaat ul-Fuqra Threat," Stratfor, Security Consulting
Intelligence Resources, June 3, 2005.
[22] Patrick B. Briley, "AL Fuqra: U.S. Islamic Terror Network
Protected by FBI, U.S. State Department, Liberty Post, July 28,
2006.
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