Sacrificial Warriors

Bathed in the television's fiery glow of images from the World Trade Center explosions, Pakistani banker Anar Khan turned to his four young sons curled up next to him on the rug. "See? Evil brings evil upon itself," he exulted. "This is Allah's punishment for the wrong that America has done to Muslims." It is easy for Khan to understand the mentality of the airline hijackers who unleashed their apocalyptic destruction on New York and Washington. He can comprehend how 19 educated men, despite having seen the world in all its wondrous multiplicity, can crash airliners into skyscrapers because, in his heart, Khan is one of them. Yet Khan doesn't fit the profile of a typical Muslim terrorist. He's not a vengeful Palestinian youth whose brother was gunned down by Israelis for chucking a stone at a tank. Nor does he fit our stereotype of the suicide killer as a loner, an easily brainwashed misfit.

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His mission is to spread Islam and, as he sees it, America and Israel are the two greatest obstacles to its resurgence. Khan is wealthy by Pakistani standards, but his house is austere; there are no pictures on the wall or homey flourishes. His one vanity, if you could call it that, is his gun collection from the Afghan war, trophies he took off dead Russians. Khan fought in the Al-Badr battalion, made up primarily of Arabs who took the jihad — or holy war — back with them to Algeria, Egypt and Sudan. Their experiences in the Afghan conflict color the way many Muslims see the world today: if we can topple the mighty Soviet empire with Korans and rocket launchers, we can also humble the Americans.

This view is shared by extremists throughout the Islamic world, from Mindanao to Morocco. While it is more comfortable to believe that such fanaticism is rooted only in ignorance, in Pakistan, a member of an Islamic militant organization is as likely to be educated and urbane — an engineer, a computer scientist, a military officer or a businessman. Many tried living in America or Europe and slunk back home, shocked and disturbed by the clash of Western culture and values with their own. Alienated, they fall back on Islam to regain their identity.

Today's well-educated extremist, who keeps in touch with his brethren in Algeria or Indonesia through the Internet, doesn't employ the fire and brimstone of the village cleric to justify terrorist acts. Instead, he sees the conspiracy against Islam in geopolitical omens: foreign debt, IMF restrictions, wars against Muslims in Chechnya and Bosnia, and the Palestinians versus Israel. But often this cool rhetoric masks a hair-trigger emotionalism, an angry hurt. As one senior Pakistani police counterterrorism expert, Muhammed Shoaib Suddle, remarked: "What drives people to this madness? It has nothing to do with reality but with the perceptions that are created. Even if they're smart, a lot of people are fascinated by these half-baked, self-serving stories."

Pakistan has more than its share of Islamic militants. The country's ongoing support of Muslim rebels in Indian Kashmir has fanned the flames of militancy in every town and village. In this struggle, martyrdom has lately become a horrifying tactic; a Muslim Kashmiri youth in April last year blew himself up outside Indian army headquarters in Srinagar. Other militants staged an unsuccessful suicidal siege of the Red Fort in New Delhi. One Pakistani military official said he wouldn't be surprised if U.S. authorities discover that Pakistani nationals were involved in some phase of the Washington and New York attacks. "Our terrorist groups here have links with many other groups abroad," the officer commented.

A Pakistani in his mid-20s, Abu Zaid (his nom de guerre), gave up a chance to study medicine in the U.S. to the dismay of his parents. Instead, he enrolled in an Islamic militant training camp in the mountains northeast of Islamabad. There he learned how to handle a gun and explosives instead of a stethoscope. "We are not fanatics," he insists in a soft, earnest voice, "but we believe it's better to sacrifice ourselves than live in an unjust world." But where is the justice in indiscriminately killing thousands of office workers, firefighters and airline passengers — Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims?