CHAPTER 30

Tirana, Albania

May

AMIN NAWAZ SLID HIS aging fingers from one prayer bead to the next as he recited the Dhikr. This was his third location in as many nights, which is how he had lived into his fiftieth year, an old man in a profession where men died young.

La ilaha illa’llah

There is no god but God.

To an outsider it would look like contemplation or meditation, which in a sense it was. In what had become a lifetime of war, the Dhikr had been a constant. An escape. The one place Nawaz found peace. The one place I can go to remember.

The war against the West had entered a new phase. Nawaz had been at it long enough to recognize that. Today he was having a tougher time concentrating than usual. His collaboration with the Russian, a man exiled from the country that Nawaz had traveled so far to defeat in the Afghanistan of the 1980s, was a necessary evil. This time of war, terror, and treachery made for more than a few strange bedfellows, just as it had decades earlier when the United States and Saudi Arabia had collaborated to fund the mujahideen with money and weapons to turn against their common enemy. Little did they know they were sowing the seeds of a new battle in an ancient war.

Nawaz was nothing if not a pragmatist. The Americans had been very successful in shutting down the flow of money that had once run so freely through Saudi Arabia. If the former Russian GRU colonel wanted to finance the al-Qaeda operation in Europe, so be it. That he understood hawala from his time in the waning days of the Soviets’ misadventure in Afghanistan allowed them to conduct business off the radar of the NSA, whose analysts fought their war with algorithms from climate-controlled offices in Fort Meade, Maryland. Nawaz would use the Russian until his usefulness expired. Then he would kill him.

astaġ firū llā h

I seek forgiveness from Allah.

Performing the Dhikr never failed to transport Nawaz back to the humble home in the Kingdom he had shared with his mother, father, and two sisters. With the glow of an early morning dawn just beginning to illuminate his bedroom window, he had felt a presence. At first he had been startled, thinking it was a messenger of Allah, but then he smiled when he recognized the familiar shape of his father. His eyes were closed and he had rested his hand on his son’s head. His lips were moving, yet only slightly, and the young Nawaz strained to hear his words.

Laa ilaaha illal laahu wahdahoo laa sharikalahoo lahul mulku wa lahul hamdu wa huwa ‘alaa kulli shai’in qadeer

There is No God But Allah Alone, who has no partner. His is the dominion and His is the praise, and He is Able to do all things.

His father slowly removed his hand from his son’s head and pressed a set of beads into Amin’s smaller hand. Then, like an apparition you convince yourself didn’t exist, his father was gone. Amin was puzzled, as his father had never visited him in the night. He rubbed the beads of the misbaha between his fingers as he had seen his father do many times. The prayer beads symbolizing the ninety-nine names of Allah were never far from his father’s grasp. The young boy curled back into a ball to ward off the early morning chill, the beads clutched tightly against his chest.

The date was indelibly etched into his mind: November 20, 1979. A lifetime later Nawaz recognized his father’s visit for what it was: a good-bye given in the way of one who is not coming back.

bi-smi llā hi r-raḥ mā ni r-raḥ ī m

In the name of God, the gracious, the merciful.

Had the West known the chain of events that would be set in motion that early November morning, they might not have sent the GIGN French commandos to help quell the two-week seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. They might not have killed more than two hundred of the devoted rebels who had seized it, or publicly beheaded sixty-seven of the captured Wahhabist insurgents in the weeks that followed. The House of Saud might not have capitulated to the terrorists’ demands and reversed their progressive policies, adding fuel to the tactic of terror.

Amin Nawaz was not the only one who lost a father that day. The Muslim clerics recognized this pool of new recruits, young fertile minds primed for indoctrination and ready to do battle with the West. The principles of Islam would guide them. Experience on the battlefield of Afghanistan against the Soviet invaders would hone them into mujahideen.

Audhubillah

I seek refuge in Allah.

Nawaz first met Osama bin Laden in 1988 as a twenty-year-old Arab Afghan in the same mountains where he would return to fight the Americans in 2001. He had been one of al-Qaeda’s first recruits and had been with Sheik Osama at one of his last sightings before that Tuesday in September that changed the world forever. It had been at the wedding of one of his most trusted bodyguards where bin Laden had quoted the Holy Quran: “Wherever you are, death will find you, even if you are in lofty towers. ” Only Nawaz and a few select others understood the significance of that remark.

Now, after a lifetime of struggle, spent planning the attacks that would be precursors to what the Americans called the Global War on Terror and fighting in the Hindu Kush, Iraq, and Syria, he was now the head of al-Qaeda operations in Europe and was close to striking their most devastating blow to date.

Sheik Osama had bunkered down after his escape from Tora Bora, and had been rendered relatively ineffective in hiding. He had kept the Western forces at bay, but they had eventually found him. The Americans had slain their dragon. The SEAL commando pigs who shot him down would pay. The defenders of the faith have long memories.

Nawaz chose the opposite approach, emulating the security protocols of Yasser Arafat. Well, the Arafat of the Fatah days anyway; before he grew soft and capitulated to negotiations with the Israelis. Nawaz preferred to stay highly mobile, rarely spending the night in the same place twice, often changing plans and spreading disinformation among his own people. While the U. S. intelligence apparatus sifted through Google and Facebook accounts, Nawaz and the new al-Qaeda he commanded communicated via courier and used the movement of funds via the ancient system of hawala. Systems born of the Silk Road still worked in modern times. The Great Game continues.

The refugees pouring into Europe provided the conduit; more than enough of his fighters had made it into Europe as part of the mass influx of migrants. The very people the West spent such vast sums trying to destroy in foreign lands had been welcomed right into the heart of Europe, into the belly of the beast.

Say what one would of the Israelis, they were smart enough to understand the essence of the conflict. They understood. Had the Americans been surrounded by their enemies instead of protected by vast oceans, they might have understood it, too, instead of opening their borders to let in the very people bent on destroying them.

Though Ayman al-Zawahiri had thus far evaded the special operations teams and drone strikes favored by the enemy, he remained in hiding. As the worldwide leader of al-Qaeda, he had sent Nawaz from Afghanistan first to Iraq and then to Syria to lead Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s operation in the Levant. A brilliant man who had lived for the cause, al-Zawahiri was now entering the twilight of his life. Nawaz had the drive and the energy to be the architect of al-Qaeda’s next evolution. While ISIS had captured the headlines and distracted the American military and political machines, Nawaz had patiently built his network, not in the Middle East and Central Asia, but in Europe. America was next.

He was proud to have led a group with so many veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That experience had filled the ranks of Jabhat al-Nusra. The West had built their army for them, and then opened the doors into Europe. That would be the next battleground. America would follow, but that duty would fall to the next generation of jihadis, just now finding their voice. The death of the West was not a fantasy, it was an inevitability.

SubhanAllahi wa biHamdihi, Subhan-Allahi ‘l-`adheem

Glory be to Allah, and Praise Him, Glory be to Allah, the Supreme.

It had been close to forty years since his father had last placed his hand on Nawaz’s head, and it had been not quite twenty years since the lofty towers had been brought down by Allah.

Stupid Americans. Didn’t they comprehend what was happening? They were killing themselves. While they foolishly spent their treasure and spilled their blood in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, the very ideology they were fighting to defeat was moving into their cities, their schools, their very government. The freedoms the West championed so proudly would be their ultimate downfall. Those freedoms would be targeted and exploited. Their freedoms were their weakness. Know thy enemy.

Didn’t they realize that 9/11 hadn’t been planned in the caves of Afghanistan? The idea had been approved there, but the foot soldiers had done their work in Hamburg, Germany, and in the United States itself. They had learned to fly and blended into communities in California, Arizona, Florida, Virginia, and New Jersey. September 11 had been planned right under the nose of the most powerful nation the world had ever known.

Though they had doomed themselves through their culture of political correctness and open borders in the strategic sense, you had to be extremely wary of their tactical acumen. At that level the Americans could be exceedingly dangerous.

lā ḥ awla wa lā quwwata illā billā h

There is no might nor power except in Allah.

Nawaz knew he would not live to see the sword of Islam sweep across the Americas. This was a generational conflict. Just as the Mongols had altered the ethnic identity of Eurasia, Islam would change the very fabric of Europe and America; instead of invading on horseback, they would legally immigrate, build their political bases, and incrementally defeat their enemy from within.

The very countries whose policies had helped create the refugee crisis were welcoming the enemy with open arms. They were sowing the seeds of their defeat, spurred on by politicians pandering to a new constituency.

The mujahideen of the new millennium didn’t need territory to plan and train. The new jihadis could adapt within the very countries they targeted. The Americans projected strength with their tanks and bombers, but they had a soft underbelly. Their comforts and entitlement culture were breeding a weakness. He could prey on their fears; he could inflict further damage to their economy. Even the attacks that failed caused a reaction from the West that continued to cripple their markets.

What had been their greatest strength and brought them abundant prosperity was a soft target ripe for exploitation. Death by a thousand cuts.

Nawaz hesitated on the final bead of the misbaha.

Lā ilā ha illā -llā h

There is no god but Allah.

“Tariq! ” he called, summoning the courier who would make contact with a series of what he had learned the West called “cutouts. ” The message would eventually find its way to the man who could decipher it, a man who had been trained by the CIA but who had proven himself in Syria as a most valuable asset to the cause. He would be the instrument of yet another cut into the soft fabric of Europe.

Pressing the encoded note into his courier’s willing palm, Nawaz set his hand on Tariq’s head and closed his eyes.

“Allā hu‘akbar. ”

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