Al-Matari said, “I know of some refugees from Syria who have been sent to America.”
“No,” the Saudi said with authority. “They will be watched carefully. I only want men and women in your forces who can move freely and without undue scrutiny. Once the first wave of attacks is successful, when the world sees we are not terrorists, but we are Islamic soldiers fighting infidel soldiers, then the follow-on waves of self-motivated will come, they will align themselves with our noble cause, and they will multiply your good work by ten times, by one hundred times.”
Musa al-Matari’s heart filled with a purpose and a power he had not felt since the day before the Americans wiped out his last operation before it even began.
“Inshallah,” al-Matari said. If God wills it.
“Inshallah,” the Saudi echoed.
The war inside America against the military and intelligence community began right there, with two men over tea in a courtyard garden.
10
Abu Musa al-Matari left Kosovo with a new direction. While he did not even know the name of his new benefactor, he did know the man had been vetted by ISIS leadership and met with their approval. He couldn’t imagine how the Saudi could possibly obtain the information he promised to pass along, and he didn’t understand or even trust the Saudi’s motivations. But even though al-Matari had gone to Kosovo with great skepticism, he returned to Syria more excited than ever, and ready to embark on a new mission.
After more consultations with his leadership, he knew this plan would go forward.
Finding potential jihadi recruits in the United States of America was not difficult. Finding potential jihadi recruits in the United States of America who were not on any U.S. government watch list, not already under surveillance, and who had documentation that would allow them to drive, travel, survive a passing encounter with American law enforcement, while simultaneously possessing the intelligence, language, and social skills necessary to serve in an operational role for the Islamic State’s Emni branch . . . now, that was tricky. Still, Musa al-Matari knew that for this operation he needed cleanskins—operatives with no ties whatsoever to his organization or any history of radical behavior.
Cleanskins were hard to find, but al-Matari had the infrastructure in place to find them.
The average American has no clue who the American government has caught pledging allegiance to and even planning attacks on behalf of ISIS in America. Musa al-Matari knew. He could recite the latest stats from the FBI, stats reporting that of all the cases of people inside the United States being charged for illegal activities on behalf of ISIS, seventy-eight were United States citizens, eight were lawful permanent residents. Five were refugees, and of those with no U.S. residency, most were on student visas.
Almost a third had at least some college, eighty-seven percent were male, and the average age was only twenty-one.
Seventy-two percent of those caught by the FBI for working with ISIS had absolutely no prior criminal history.
Most cases involved material support, and al-Matari couldn’t easily draw from this large group of ideological supporters for a cell of direct-action operators, but there existed a sizable portion of men and in a few cases women who actively sought to travel to the Middle East to wage armed jihad on behalf of the Islamic State.
And there were so many more out there. The FBI had found only the tip of the iceberg.
Dearborn, Michigan, for example, had a significant Muslim population. While ninety-nine percent or more would have nothing to do with al-Matari’s aims, it was certain the town nevertheless possessed hundreds of disaffected young men who would take up arms against the infidels. Still, al-Matari couldn’t just grab an unemployed man off the street and send him to D.C. to kill a Pentagon official. No, the integrity of the entire operation would be jeopardized by using recruits more suited for armed conflict in Iraq, Syria, and Libya than political assassination in the United States.
No, he had to choose extremely carefully.
After weeks of searching and consulting with his team of online recruiters, he chose seventy names, men and women located across the United States who had both expressed the will and been found by the recruiters to possess the right raw materials to make a potential operative.
Al-Matari whittled this number down to thirty-nine by sending four two-man teams of recruiters across the U.S. for individual meetings and evaluations. These potential recruits did not know what they were being asked to do at this point, only that they were being considered by Islamic State leadership for a role in the organization. Some clearly thought they would be going into Syria to fight in the jihad; others pieced together on their own from the questions asked by the recruiters that their work would be inside America.
Abu Musa al-Matari spent considerable time looking carefully into the remaining thirty-nine. He found a couple of the possible recruits who, while apparently not on any terrorist watch lists or known to the government as potential radicals, nevertheless had relatives who had expressed jihadist views or had spent time under FBI surveillance.
That would not do. This operation needed the purest of the pure, because this operation was not designed with an end date in mind. He didn’t want FBI to have any interest in these individuals, even after the attacks began.
He eliminated a few more who did not have the physical characteristics he required. One man was too heavy; another had a knee injury that had not healed.
Finally, Musa al-Matari narrowed his choice down to thirty-one potential recruits. His recruiters in the U.S. met with each man and woman again and offered them the chance to serve.
Twenty-seven agreed. Of the four who did not, three demanded to fight on the front lines in the Middle East, and they were told they would be contacted soon.
One more man, a thirty-three-year-old convenience store owner from Hallandale Beach, Florida, had told his wife, a recently converted Muslim, about his conversations with ISIS recruiters, and she demanded that he report the recruiters to the police. The man refused, but warned the recruiter that his wife might make trouble.
Three days later another ISIS team drove into town, donned ski masks, and shot both the clerk and his wife to death while they worked behind the counter of their store.
—
And now Musa al-Matari was here in the hills of western El Salvador, looking over his twenty-seven recruits, all of whom had just passed their monthlong training.
The Guatemalan trainers had left earlier in the day, and now, in the evening before the last of the day’s light had left the jungle, al-Matari had assembled his operatives in a dry streambed within sight of the rusty barracks. He stood in front of them while they all sat on rocks or on the hilly creekside.
Al-Matari was proud of his students. The trainers had put the class through small-arms training, small-unit tactics, taught them how to fight hand to hand and with edged weapons. They taught them how to build bombs and booby traps and, more than anything, they hardened this class—only a few even knew how to hold a gun on day one, but by the end they could all confidently and rapidly hit targets with an AK-47 at more than a hundred meters, an Uzi submachine gun at fifty meters, and a pistol at fifteen meters. They could reload quickly, transition from shoulder weapon to handgun with economy of movement, and move in groups of twos and fours, covering for one another, keeping up the fire during reloads.
They shot from rusted-out cars and threw dummy grenades and built simple booby traps and explosives.
These weren’t Special Forces by any stretch; but after thirty days of training, they were a competent unit of operatives. They had spent much more time firing weapons than a soldier in the U.S. Army’s ten-week basic-training course, and their drills were one hundred percent based on killing their targets, and getting away to do it again.
Looking at them now, al-Matari could barely recognize some of his cleanskins. They’d all lost weight in these
austere conditions, but they were stronger, more confident, more steely-eyed, and ready for the war to come.
To be certain, some were better than others, but none had washed out utterly. He’d keep his eye on a couple of them, and he’d modulate the missions to play to the strengths of his force, but overall he was more than pleased with the students here at the facility he called the Language School.
Except for those who were related, the men and women here did not know one another’s names. Al-Matari assigned them numbers as they arrived. It had nothing to do with seniority or pecking order. Those who arrived first had lower numbers, and the woman who arrived last took the number twenty-seven.
He had separated them into cells, five in all, and though al-Matari had names for each of the cells, he did not share them with the group. He just called them one through five.
But Matari had divided them geographically, based on the city in the geographic center of the homes of the cell members. There was Chicago, five men and one woman. They were members of two families, both second generation, and he had identified them early on as one of his best and most competent teams.
There was Santa Clara, his California cell. Again, five men and one woman. Two with Pakistani passports and two Pakistanis with British passports, and two Turks with German passports. The Turks were husband and wife. All six were students in the San Francisco area and, besides the Turks, they did not know one another. Now they lived and trained together, perspired and bled together.
Fairfax was five men. Four were U.S. citizens of Arab descent, from Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq. And the fifth was an African American named David Hembrick. While Hembrick was a star pupil at the Language School, the rest had had trouble with some decision-making, and they argued among themselves regularly. But they could shoot, and Fairfax was as committed to this cause as any of the other cells.
Al-Matari would have liked a better-integrated cell to position near the nation’s capital, but he would make do with the recruits at his disposal, and send other cells into D.C. to help when necessary.
Atlanta was five—four men and one woman. All but one were American citizens, one a blond-haired, blue-eyed twenty-three-year-old from Alabama who had converted to Islam and reached out online three years earlier to a group in Somalia, where he went over to fight. He made it back to the States without the government picking up on his actions, so al-Matari felt it was worth the risk adding him to the team, because he was the only one of the group who had any sort of combat training. There was also a black woman from Mississippi named Angela Watson, an extremely intelligent college student who’d secretly married a Tunisian student who joined ISIS to fight in the Middle East. She planned on accompanying him over, initially wanting to “make cubs for the jihad,” but when the opportunity arose to serve ISIS in America, she knew no one would ever think of her as a Muslim jihadi, so she and her husband flew to the Language School, where Angela exceeded her husband’s skills in every way.
Detroit was another strong unit. Five in number, four men and one woman. All of them were U.S. citizens or permanent residents, and al-Matari knew they, as well as Chicago, would be the teams he gave the toughest missions to.
Al-Matari addressed them now in English, because it was the one language everyone here at the camp understood. He spoke perfect English, with a decidedly British accent, so the twenty-seven men and women in front of him all assumed he came from the UK.
“It is time to tell you more about your mission. First, know this. You are now soldiers. Warriors. Mujahideen. You will hear the word ‘terrorist’ from the American media, but your targets are not the targets of terrorists. You will soon see that your targets are handpicked to hurt America’s ability to fight against Islam, against the Islamic State. You will be proud of your fight, and you have every right to be. You are lions of the caliphate. Vanguards of the jihad.”
The group cheered in unison.
One of the young men from Santa Clara said, “Mohammed, we trained with the Guatemalans using the weapons they brought. But how are we getting back home with weapons?”
Al-Matari said, “Remember, you all came here telling your loved ones you would attend language school. You all have return flights. You will all go home on your return flights, and you will not take your weapons. I will bring everything you need to America, and I will deliver it to you before you begin operations.”
As al-Matari talked operational details, the headlights of a pickup truck appeared in the distance, near the corrugated metal buildings. The truck parked, and a man climbed out and then looked around. Al-Matari shined a flashlight toward the man that would be easily visible in the dusk, letting him know his position.
Three hundred meters away, the man began walking toward the group in the dry streambed.
Al-Matari turned back to the students of the Language School. “You will all leave tonight, but before you go, I have one final exercise. The man coming this way owns the shell company that purchased this property, and I asked him to come here to collect the last of his money this evening.” He paused a moment. “He is an infidel. He can identify me, and he has shown suspicion about what we are doing.”
The African American woman from Mississippi raised her hand. “The trainers . . . They are infidels, they sure as hell knew what we were up to.”
Al-Matari nodded and smiled. “This morning your trainers from Guatemala boarded a helicopter they had stored in a hangar near Playa El Zonte, an hour-and-a-half drive southwest of here. They planned on returning home by flying below radar into Guatemala. Two associates of mine prepared a surprise for them on their helicopter. When they were off the coast and within sight of the Guatemalan border, their helicopter exploded at an altitude of two hundred feet. There were no survivors.”
No one said anything, but some eyes widened.
He pointed to the man approaching, now two hundred yards away.
“Each of the five cells will speak quietly to one another, and you will, together, elect one member of your unit to kill this man who is approaching us now. Pick the one you believe will be the best representative of you to draw blood in front of me. Your most sure killer. When I have my five selectees, I will make the final choice. You have one minute to decide.”
The man was fifty meters away by the time the choices were made. Al-Matari was proud in his abilities as a leader of warriors. He’d correctly predicted the chosen killer in four of the five units. The fifth group, Atlanta, had selected the twenty-two-year-old female college student from Mississippi to do the deed. A mild surprise; he thought she would be their logistics expert, the brains of the unit. That still might well be the case, but the fact she was also the one designated as the first to draw blood for the unit impressed him.
The man arrived at the group now, sweating in the night’s heat. He was well into his sixties and seemed uncomfortable and agitated to be here. He looked around at the students, then up to al-Matari.
Al-Matari smiled at him and then, without saying a word, he drew his knife, and stabbed the man through the throat. The man had made no reaction to the movement at all before the blade plunged down, slicing into his airway.
Blood spewed, the Latin man gurgled and wheezed as he crumpled to the rocks of the streambed, then he lay there still.
Al-Matari turned to the others. He saw the shock and confusion on their faces. “Very well,” he said, still trying to get his pulse back to normal. “Your assignment was not, in fact, as I had described. If I am present, I need no help in killing an infidel.”
He wiped the knife off on a handkerchief and returned it to the scabbard hidden under his shirt.
“Each cell has just chosen its leader. Your killers are your leaders. I want killers in charge because that, first, foremost, and fully, is your job. Do you all understand?”
One of the Atlanta team, the Jordanian American with the student visa, switched into Arabic to address M
usa al-Matari. “No! I will not serve under a woman! We put her forward to test her dedication, not because she was a leader!”
Al-Matari glared at the young man. “Then you disobeyed my order. Maybe I’ll have her kill you to prove her leadership ability.”
Al-Matari looked at the woman, who had no idea what was being discussed. In English, he said, “Number twenty-seven, are you ready to lead these men into war?”
Twenty-two-year-old Angela Watson replied, “Oh, yes, sir. I will not fail.”
Al-Matari nodded. The Jordanian American fell silent.
“Now you will all return to America. Not to your mosque, not to your friends, not to your Muslim way of life. No. You will go to safe houses we have arranged, you will live quietly, establish your peaceful, nonthreatening routines, give all those around you no reason at all to be suspicious of you.
“And then, as soon as I arrive and deliver your weapons, I will assign targets. When these targets are destroyed, inshallah, I will assign more, and more, and more. As new recruits beg to join the jihad you, my brothers and sisters, will arm them and send them on their way, directly into the soft targets. But your main mission will always be direct action against the military and intelligence arms of America.”
He smiled. “A month from now . . . chaos. Three months from now . . . the armies of the West will be leaving to fight in the caliphate. One year from now, inshallah . . . the permanent retreat of the West, devastated and demoralized, the bodies of their dead left behind to fertilize our fields. They will run and they will never return. Within five years the caliphate will vanquish the Shiites, including Iran, and we will control their oil. The caliphate will destroy the tyrants in Mecca, the Saudis, the King’s severed head at the foot of the Ka’ba, and we will control the oil to the south.