Alms for Jihad Giving to charity is incumbent upon every Muslim. Throughout history, Muslims have donated to the poor and to charitable endowments set up for the purposes of promoting Islam through the construction of mosques, schools, and hospitals. In recent years, there has been a dramatic proliferation of Islamic charities, many of which were created in the declining decades of the twentieth century by the infusion of oil money into the Muslim world. While most of these are legitimate, there is now considerable and worrying evidence to show that others have more questionable intentions, and that funds from such organizations have been diverted to support terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda. The authors of this book examine the contention through a detailed investigation of the charities involved, their financial intermediaries, and the terrorist organizations themselves. What they discover is that money from these charities has funded conflicts across the world, from the early days in Afghanistan when the mujahideen (Muslim warriors) fought the Soviets, to subsequent terrorist activities in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Palestine, and, most recently, in Europe and the United States. This ground-breaking book is the first to piece together, from a vast array of sources, the secret and complex financial systems that support terror. J. MILLARD BURR worked for many years in the Department of State and was formerly United States logistics advisor for Operation Lifeline Sudan I. He has worked closely with international charities for more than forty years. ROBERT O. COLLINS is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They have previously co-authored three books: Requiem for the Sudan: War, Drought, and Disaster Relief on the Nile (1995), Africa's Thirty Years' War: Chad, Libya, and the Sudan. 1963-1993 (1999), and Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989-2000 (2003). Alms for Jihad Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World J. Millard Burr Robert 0. Collins CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridae.org Information on this title: www.cambridae.org/9780521857307 © J. Millard Burr and Robert 0. Collins 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press First published in print format 2006 ISBN-13 978-0-511-24741-5 mobipocket ISBN-10 0-511-24741-9 mobipocket ISBN-13 978-0-521-85730-7 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-85730-9 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents List of illustrations List of tables Preface List of abbreviations Introduction 1 The third pillar of Islam: zakat Charitable recipients Zakat in history Zakat. the Egyptian experience Zakat in the Sudan Sadaga Wagf Saudi Arabia and Islamic education 2 Saudi Arabia and its Islamic charities Charities and charitable donations in Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia Red Crescent Society Muslim World League International Islamic Relief Organization Al Haramain Islamic Foundation World Assembly of Muslim Youth Al Wafa Humanitarian Foundation Benevolence International Foundation Riyadh bombings and Saudi Arabian charities 3 The banks Golden Chain Investigating the banks Saudi banking Islamic banking Al Raihi Banking and Investment Corporation National Commercial Bank Dallah Al Baraka Group and Bank Al Tagwa Hawala system Continuing bank scrutiny 4 Afghanistan beginnings Al Qaeda Qutb and the Afghans Emir of Jihad Osama bin Laden and MAK Al Kifah Ayman al-Zawahiri Shavkh Omar Abd al-Rahman 1 Peripatetic muiahideen Foot-soldiers Wael Hamza Julaidan and the Rabita Trust Pakistan and the Al Rashid Trust 5 Islamic charities and the revolutionary Sudan Banking in the Sudan Enter Osama bin Laden Islamic charities and the Sudan Revolutionary Sudan People's Defense Force Turabi's presence Yassin Abdullah al-Qadi and Muwafag Sudanese charities in Somalia Al Qaeda and Islamic charities in East Africa Islamic charities in West Africa 6 Islam at war in the Balkans Afghanistan in Bosnia Al Muwafaq Brigade Sudanese connections Third World Relief Agency Aftermath in Bosnia Albanian imbroglio War in Kosovo After 9/1 7 Russia and the Central Asian Crescent Outsiders begin to arrive Islam in Tajikistan Heartland of Central Asia: Uzbekistan Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan: door to China Transcaucasia Republic of Georgia Chechnya Lost opportunity and investigations 8 From Afghanistan to Southeast Asia Moro Islamic Liberation Front Muhammad Jamal Khalifa Abu Sawaf Group Malaysia Indonesia Revolt in southern Thailand Forgotten Bangladesh 9 The Holy Land Palestine Red Crescent Society Charities in Palestine HAMAS HAMAS abroad The United States responds Arafat's charitable corruption Reviving the Intifada More charitable support for Palestine and HAMAS Lebanon and Hizbullah 10 The Islamization of Europe Muslim Europe Germany's problem Muslims in Italy Islam and France Islamic charities. Algerian Islamists, and Palestinians The Netherlands. Belgium, and the Danes The United Kingdom 11 Islamic charities in North America Investigating charities BIF and GRF Al Kifah and Al Haramain Holy Land Fund for Relief and Development Canadian connections WISE SAAR Foundation Epilogue 12 Conclusion Notes Select bibliography Index Illustrations Maps 1 The Peshawar-AI Qaeda nexus 2 The Khartoum-AI Qaeda nexus Figure 1 The Peshawar Connection Tables 2.1 The Saudi royal family and its charitable interests 2 2 Charitable entities belonging to or associated with the Al Qaeda organization 3.1 The Golden Chain 4.1 Islamist terrorist organizations Preface This book seeks to unravel and bring clarity to the complex, elaborate, and secret world of Islamic charities that have financed terrorism. It is not an attempt to give the kind of learned discourse on zakat, sadaqa, or viaqf that can be found in the Encyclopaedia of Islam. Similarly, it cannot provide an extensive analysis of each of the regions where Islamic charities have supported terrorists. Thus, the individual chapters are more an abstract, a precis, to provide a succinct explanation of the composition, financing, money-laundering, and management of those charities through which runs their common objective, the establishment of the Islamist state. It must be abundantly clear from the outset that there are thousands of Islamic charities to assist and support the poor, the destitute, the sick, and the refugee that have nothing to do with terrorism. Many of these charities promote Islam for its religious mission, but that is not what this book is about. Our objective was to have the reader, when reaching the last page, have an appreciation for the global extent, ferocity, and determination of the Islamists who are perpetrating crimes against humanity in the name of religion, and the role that certain Islamic charities have played in supporting those Islamists. The rhetoric of revolution to justify terror to seize political power has become a masquerade that denigrates the very spiritual meaning and power of Islam. Although the authors have had to struggle to select the critical evidence from our many sources to satisfy the practical constraints of publication, the genesis of this book began during the writing of Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989-2000 (Leiden: Brill, 2003). For those familiar with Khartoum, one of the most striking differences between the city in the 1980s and in the 1990s was the appearance of new Islamic charities and their gratuitous proliferation in prominently situated offices. Who were these charities? What was their purpose? Why the Sudan of all places? The more we sought the answers to this phenomenon, the more we realized that Khartoum had actually been transformed from a rather somnolent outpost of the Islamic world into a center of the international Islamist movement, made possible by the enormous amounts of money made available to its leaders by Islamic charities. The search was on before the trail turned cold. The authors owe a debt of gratitude to Olivier Roy and Steven Emerson, investigators whose lone voices were heard in the early 1990s warning governments that an Islamist revolutionary movement was germinating throughout the western world. Emerson distributed a video to convince those who would look and listen that the Islamists had established in the USA "an elaborate support and recruiting network coast to coast with branches in more than 88 American cities." They served as recruiting centers that supported mujahideen operating around the world. Despite the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Khobar bombing of the US military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, and the substantial evidence afterward that Islamist warriors had declared war on the USA and now Europe, Emerson was seen as an alarmist, perhaps because of his well-known Israeli bias. Even though certain intelligence officers understood the dangers of jihad in the USA, the authors determined as early as 1993 that the FBI was extremely cautious in its investigation of Islamic charities. A second debt of gratitude is owed Rita Katz, the "anonymous" author of Terrorist Hunter, the story of one woman's struggle to expose the activities of seditious operators within Islamic charities functioning in the USA. Like Emerson, she was a vox clamantis in deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness, for the abundant evidence she uncovered during a decade of determined investigation. Her book is essential to an understanding of how Islamic charities supported Islamist movements in the USA, but it has been largely ignored by Washington.