U.S.-Born Yemenis Gave Few Hints of Radicalism Before Trip to Pakistan
by Michael Powell, Washington Post
LACKAWANNA - It’s the riddle for which few in this old company steel town have an answer: How did the six thoroughly American Arab boys wind up indicted as al Qaeda soldiers?
Yasein Taher was a star soccer player at Lackawanna High School, and Sahim Alwan was a chatty fellow who talked of Allah but also made the girls laugh. Shafal Mosed watched over his younger brothers with a paternal eye. They had many friends, black and white friends, and Alwan and Yahya Goba counseled young children over meals of barbecued chicken wings.
“They were very Westernized; they would club, they would drink, they would date women outside the community,” said Aliyah Ali, a young woman of Yemeni descent who grew up down the street from the men. “They got into religion more after they got married. But this is a mystery.”
It deepened yesterday as federal officials arraigned Mukhtar al-Bakri, 22 -- a former co-captain of the renowned Lackawanna High School soccer team -- in Buffalo on charges of giving material support to al Qaeda, the terrorist network accused of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Al-Bakri was arrested last week in the Persian Gulf emirate of Bahrain, where he had gone to get married, according to friends.
Including Faysal Galab, that brought to six the number of Lackawanna men of Yemeni background who have been charged with belonging to a terrorist cell in this town by the south shore of Lake Erie. Two more Lackawanna men have been named as unindicted co-conspirators, but federal prosecutors have not identified them. FBI agent Peter Ahearn said these eight men -- all of whom were born in the United States -- made up the so-called Lackawanna cell.
“Western New Yorkers should be no more or less concerned than anybody else in the United States with regard to terrorism,” he said. “Are there more [terror cells] out there? I would have to say from my experience, yes, they’re all over the world.”
FBI officials said that the Lackawanna men journeyed together to Pakistan and then to a terror training base in Afghanistan in May and June of 2001, before the Sept. 11 attacks. There, the officials said, the men learned to fire rifles and pistols and heard a speech by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
But federal officials have not offered evidence that al Qaeda operatives were in touch with the Lackawanna men. Nor, federal officials say, do they believe these men were planning an imminent attack, here or overseas.
One U.S. counterterrorism official said that al-Bakri’s presence last week in Bahrain so concerned U.S. authorities that they closed the U.S. embassy there for security reasons and arrested him. After arresting him, the official said, investigators in the United States felt they had to move against the five men in Lackawanna because they feared their investigation would become known.
But the general nature of the charge against the men -- providing “material support” to al Qaeda -- has fed a deep skepticism here about the charges, a disbelief that six native-born Americans could have allied themselves with their nation’s deadliest foe. On Sunday night, school superintendent Paul G. Hashem drove to this city’s Ward 1 to meet more than 200 people at the Yemenite Benevolent Association; he saw tears and heard anguished and sometimes angry questions.
“It was visceral: These were men they’ve known at the mosque and in the playground, as fathers and friends,” Hashem said. “They think these arrests were either a mistake or a political act by the Bush administration to stir up an attack on Iraq.”
This suspicion was by no means limited to Arab Americans -- one heard whispers of the same from black, Polish and Puerto Rican neighbors of the men. One young black man, Anthony Anderson, offered to bet, any odds, that his Arab friends were not guilty. Another, an older black homeowner who asked not to be named, stood amid his flowers in the front of his bungalow and shook his head.
“My mind is numb; it’s a numbness,” said the man, who lives down the street from the al-Bakri family. “I respect these kids like they were my own; they looked out for all the young kids in the neighborhood.”
That said, some acknowledged, quietly, that they had seen a change in a few of the young men in recent years. Several had taken wives and adopted a more serious mien. Their trip to Pakistan in the spring of 2001 was no secret. Many in the neighborhood knew that the men, all of whom met at the local mosque, planned to attend a month or so of religious instruction at the Tablighi Jamaat religious school in Pakistan.
Such trips to Pakistan or the Arab nations were common before the Sept. 11 attacks, many residents said.
“A lot of people went to the airport with them to wave goodbye,” said Sam Hussein, who wore an NBA T-shirt and spoke of his respect for these men. “It wasn’t like they sneaked off.”
When the men returned from Pakistan, some saw a change in them. They were quieter, and several, Alwan and Mosed among them, began going to the mosque many times each day.
“They were virgins in religion, but they had become serious,” said Ali, the young woman.
They wrestled, too, with the economy of this fading steel town. Bethlehem Steel once pumped out 8 million tons of steel each year and employed 24,000 men -- more than the entire population of Lackawanna now. Ward 1, where the men live, is the former company town.
The promise of steelworker jobs drew the first Yemeni immigrants here in the 1920s and 1930s; in the ‘70s, the Arab population exploded. Lackawanna now has about 2,000 citizens of Yemeni descent.
Then the mills shut down in the 1980s.
“There is nothing that comes close to paying what those jobs did,” said Hashem. “A lot of young men are left working from job to job. It’s very frustrating.”
That might work as a description of the work life of the indicted men. Four of the six studied at Erie Community College’s South Campus, taking criminal justice and college survey courses. Only Sahim Alwan, described by the FBI as a leader of the group, graduated, with a 2.5 grade point average and a degree in criminal justice. He excelled in classes such as deviant behavior and criminal investigations, but failed gym.
“He was either an A or an F student,” said Lance Konkle, director of public relations for Erie Community College’s South Campus.
Alwan worked until this past weekend as a security guard at the Iroquois Job Corps Center in Medina, N.Y. He was placed on unpaid leave after his arrest. The other men seemed to have moved from one relatively low-paying job to another, selling cars or satellite dishes.
There are suggestions, too, of ethnic tensions in Lackawanna. After Sept. 11, the Buffalo News, by chance, interviewed Alwan. He said he had been attacked by seven men during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and even now, he said, “When I’m at a red light, people look at me.”
In the end, no one knows what to make of the charges. Their friends study the federal papers and draw hope from the details; they note that the men did not complete their seven-week training course at the camp in Afghanistan.
“They were the kind of guys, if they drove over an animal on the highway they’d stop and give it CPR,” said Sam Hussein. “These boys wouldn’t know how to kill anyone.”
Which is not to say that no one is visited by doubt about their innocence. Superintendent Hashem recalls that at the meeting one of the uncles of the young men took him aside.
“He told me that he would swear that his nephew could do nothing like this,” Hashem said. “But he said that if his nephew did this by some chance, he belonged in jail.”