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IONA in the News
2nd American In Strike Waged Qaeda Media War (September 30, 2011)
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — From his parents’ basement in a part of town where homes have lots of bedrooms and most children go to college, Samir Khan blogged his way into the highest circles of Al Qaeda, waging a media war he believed was as important as the battles with guns on the ground.
His parents — by all accounts a low-key, respected couple who had moved south from Queens in 2004 — were worried about the increasingly radical nature of their son’s philosophy and the increasing media reports that exposed it.
They turned more than once to members of their religious communities to impress upon their college-aged son the perils of such thinking and behavior.
It did not work. In 2009, he left his comfortable life in Charlotte for Yemen, started a slick magazine for jihadists called Inspire that featured political and how-to articles written in a comfortable American vernacular, and continued to digitally dodge government and civilian efforts to stop his self-described “media jihad.”
Samir Khan, 25, pictured in 2008, was killed on Friday in Yemen. In 2009, he began a magazine for jihadists called Inspire.Credit…Fox News, via Associated Press
His life ended in Yemen on Friday, when Mr. Khan, 25, was killed in a drone strike that also took the life of the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and two other men, according to both American and Yemeni officials.
At a mosque run by the Islamic Society of Greater Charlotte, few of the several hundred Muslims gathered for Friday Prayer wanted to talk about Mr. Khan.
“This is a very dangerous road when you go and kill someone like this,” said Ayeb Suleiman, 25, a medical resident. “He was just an editor. He was just writing.”
Others felt grief for a family who had lost a son, no matter the nature of the son’s activities.
“If Samir got caught up with something, that was on his own,” Mr. Raja said.
Steve Glocke, who lives across the street from the family, watched Mr. Khan grow from a cordial teenager who played basketball with his brother in the street into a quiet, but radical, young man. When Mr. Khan moved to Yemen, he said, “I would ask if he was O.K., and they would say they didn’t know.”
A drone attack in Yemen kills United States-born Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki; a look at Awlaki’s influence on young Muslims; and a 2007 interview with Samir Khan, who also died in Friday’s attack.
His parents were worried even before the family moved from Queens. Mustapha Elturk, the imam and president of the Islamic Organization of North America, met the family in the mid-1990s during an educational program at a mosque in Flushing, Queens. Mr. Khan was interested in Islam as a way to “stay away from the peer pressure of his teenage days,” he said.
But after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Khan’s attraction to militant sites on the Internet and his radical views grew to the point where his father intervened.
“He tried his best to make his son meet all sorts of imams and scholars to dissuade him from those views,” said Mr. Elturk, who spoke with Mr. Khan’s father on Friday to offer condolences. “He would give you the impression that he would change.”
Early intervention by members of the local community is key to preventing the radicalization of Islamic youth, said Sue Myrick, the member of Congress who represents the part of Charlotte where Mr. Khan lived.
Mr. Khan’s last issue of Inspire came out this week. It was 20 pages, smaller than the rest, and dedicated largely to the Sept. 11 attacks. It has lost some of the cheekiness of early editions, which outlined what to expect on a jihad and had headlines like “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
In this edition, he made clear the role he believed he played in the war. “While America was focused on battling mujahedeen in the mountains of Afghanistan and the streets of Iraq,” he wrote, “the jihadi media and its supporters were in fifth gear.”
Robbie Brown reported from Charlotte, and Kim Severson from Atlanta. Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 1, 2011, Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Drone Victim Went From American Middle Class to Waging a Media War for Al Qaeda.
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IONA's objective is to help the Muslims of North America understand and fulfill their divinely ordained obligations, in order to please Allah (SWT) and thereby achieve success and salvation in the Hereafter.
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