AL-QAEDA’S NUMBER THREE WAS A CARIBBEAN CITIZEN.

In the presence of representatives from more than 25 countries, the international and regional community had been warned, that should there be any Caribbean involvement in terrorist activities. That the likelihood that there would be black Guyanese involved was almost 100% certain. The warning was made in 2005 by a Guyanese delegate who had made a study on the structure of Islam in Guyana, at an international CARICOM seminar for a Small Business training program.  The majority of black Guyanese men he noted were converted to Islam while in prison. The disaffected poorly educated men in prison are fertile soil for radicalization. Above left Abdul Kadir is the exact opposite of the profile given for radicalization by the delegate. Kadir is a former Guyanese parliamentarian, who was arrested along with his cohorts in the middle and right, in the plot to blow up the Kennedy International Airport in New York. Before he was arrested Kadir had repeated contacts with Mohsen Rabbani (an Iranian cleric involved in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish synagogue in Argentina), and Adnan Shukrijumah, using his extensive influence as a former parliamentarian Kadir was able to help Shukrijumah secure a Guyanese passport.

Adnan al-Shukrijumah the Saudi born Guyanese was at one time the third most wanted member of al-Qaeda after Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. The case of Shukrijumah confused many American ‘reporters’, for years who wrote about him as a Saudi Arabian. Shukrijumah was born in Saudi Arabia, to a Guyanese cleric and his wife. Adnan’s father Gulshair Shukrijumah was born and raised in Guyana grew up in Guyana and ran a mosque there, after he returned from studying Islamic theology in Saudi Arabia. Shukrijumah used passport #A041472141, issued in the US, to enter Trinidad and Tobago he arrived on May 17, 2001, on a flight from Guyana. Shukrijumah’s family resided in Trinidad in the 1980s while his father, traveled preaching at various mosques. Shukrijumah found succor amongst Muslims in Trinidad and Tobago sympathetic to al-Qaeda’s cause. He was last seen in Trinidad on September 4, 2006. His father was an Imam in Miramar Florida, at the al-Hijra Mosque.  Convicted terrorist Jose Padilla also worshipped at the al-Hijra mosque. A report on December 7, 2014, by KNews, stated the following: ‘Al-Qaeda operative with Guyanese parents killed by Pakistan military. A high-level al-Qaeda operative with Guyanese links, who was wanted in the US over a bomb plot, has been killed during a raid in Pakistan’s tribal region, according to Pakistan’s military.

Adnan Shukrijumah was killed along with two other suspected fighters in South Waziristan early on Saturday, the Pakistani military said in a statement.

One Pakistani soldier died while another was critically injured in the operation, the statement said.

A Guyanese national who was born in Saudi Arabia, Shukrijumah is believed to have been al-Qaeda’s external-operations chief, although it is not clear whether he was still in that role at the time of his death.

“The al-Qaeda leader, who was killed by the Pakistan army in a successful the operation, is the same person who had been indicted in the United States,” a senior Pakistani army officer told the Associated Press news agency.

Federal prosecutors in the US alleged that Shukrijumah had recruited three men in 2008 to receive training in Pakistan’s tribal areas with the intention of bombing the New York City subway system.

The FBI had offered a US$5M reward for his capture.

Pakistan said that Shukrijumah had fled to South Waziristan following the commencement of a military operation, Zarb-e-Azb, in neighboring North Waziristan.

Shukrijumah and two other people – described as an “accomplice” and a “local facilitator” – were killed in the raid.

The alleged Manhattan subway-bombing plot was uncovered in September 2009 and Shukrijumah was indicted in that case by a New York court in July 2010.

The indictment also linked him to a similar never-executed scheme to attack British subways.

Eric Holder, US Attorney-General, has called the alleged New York plot one of the most dangerous since the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001.

Shukrijumah had lived more than 15 years in the U.S. and had become chief of the terror network’s global operations, the FBI says, marking the first time that a leader who is so intimately familiar with American society was placed in charge of planning attacks.

Shukrijumah, 39, was born in Saudi Arabia and is a citizen of Guyana. He had taken over a position once held by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was captured in 2003. That position had put him in regular contact with al-Qaeda’s senior leadership, including Osama bin Laden.

Shukrijumah and two other leaders were part of an “external operations council” that designed and approved terrorism plots and recruits, but his two counterparts were killed in U.S. drone attacks, leaving Shukrijumah as the de facto chief and successor to Mohammed — his former boss.

“He’s making operational decisions is the best way to put it,” said LeBlanc, the FBI’s lead Shukrijumah investigator. “He’s looking at attacking the U.S. and other Western countries. 

The FBI had been searching for Shukrijumah since 2003. He was thought to be the only al-Qaeda leader to have once held permanent U.S. resident status, or a green card.

Shukrijumah’s father, who died in 2004, was born in Guyana, thus his son’s eligibility for citizenship here.

Shukrijumah was named earlier in 2010 in a federal indictment as a conspirator in the case against three men accused of plotting a suicide bomb attacks on New York’s subway system in 2009. The indictment marked the first criminal charges against Shukrijumah, who previously had been sought only as a witness.

Shukrijumah is also suspected of playing a role in plotting potential al-Qaeda bomb attacks in Norway and a never-executed attack on subways in The United Kingdom. Travel records and other evidence also indicate Shukrijumah did research and surveillance in spring 2001 for a never-attempted plot to disrupt commerce in the Panama Canal by sinking a freighter there, LeBlanc said.

Shukrijumah, who trained at al-Qaeda’s Afghanistan camps in the late The 1990s, was labeled a “clear and present danger” to the U.S. in 2004 by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Shukrijumah’s mother, Zurah Abu Ahmed, reportedly said in 2010 on the front stoop of her small home in suburban Miramar, Fla., that her son frequently talked about what he considered the excesses of American society — such as alcohol and drug abuse and women wearing skimpy clothes — but that he did not condone violence.

She also said she has not had contact with her son for several years.

“This boy would never do evil stuff. He is not an evil person,” she said. “He loved this country. He never had a problem with the United States.”

Before turning to radical strains of Islam, Shukrijumah lived in Miramar with his mother and five siblings, excelling at computer science and chemistry courses while studying at community college.

He had come to South Florida in 1995 when his father, a Muslim cleric and missionary trained in Saudi Arabia decided to take a post at a Florida mosque after several years at a mosque in Brooklyn, N.Y.

At some point in the late 1990s, according to the FBI, Shukrijumah became convinced that he must participate in “jihad,” or holy war, to fight perceived persecution against Muslims in places like Chechnya and Bosnia.

That led to training camps in Afghanistan, where he underwent basic and advanced training in the use of automatic weapons, explosives, battle tactics, surveillance, and camouflage.

While still in Afghanistan, he met another young recruit — Jose Padilla, an American citizen once suspected of plotting to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb” and now imprisoned on a 2007 terrorism material support conviction in Miami.

At one point, according to interrogations of Padilla and other al-Qaeda detainees, Shukrijumah and Padilla were paired in a plot to fill apartments in several high-rise apartment buildings with natural gas and blow them up, but they had a falling out”. As can be gleaned from the information in the public domain Shukrijumah was a highly placed al-Qaeda operative who was actively pursuing a course, of perpetrating attacks in the West particularly America. Shukrijumah shatters the stereotypical image of a Caribbean male, he is a ‘profile’, yet to be taken into account by the various intelligence apparatus’ of the US, which is that of an educated westerner with links not only to the west but also in the ME, a multi-lingual a person who grew up Muslim who looks like a Middle Easterner, yet is fully western and street-savvy since he is a Caribbean male. The profile previously enumerated, is the perfect terrorist, since they fit no specific ‘intelligence profile’ of a potential terrorist, making them nearly impossible to spot in their developmental stages. Such individuals in The Caribbean in countries with high Muslim populations are becoming the rule and not the exception. The future operational theatre for ‘spectacular’ terror attacks on the scale of 9/11 is not North America or Europe but the Caribbean. Government corruption, the presence of Mexican Transnational Illicit Narcotics Trafficking Organizations, porous borders, endemic poverty, weak infrastructure, the non-existent exchange of security intel regionally amongst security institutions and the high level of North American and European citizens living, traveling and vacationing throughout the region, it is literally a ‘sitting duck’, waiting on a terror strike. All the ingredients for a spectacular the regional attack is here, with the diminishing of the IS territory in Iraq and Syria, it is only a matter of time before returning jihadist’s from Trinidad in coordination with their IS emir’s will stage attacks in Trinidad and Tobago and beyond regionally.     

 

The “plot” to blow up the Kennedy Airport was brought to Kadir and his blundering cohorts by convicted drug dealer Aaron Francis, Francis agreed to lure the men into a CIA masterminded plot, whose aim was to entrap Shukrijumah. Kadir was targeted because he was an influential, educated Guyanese who had extensive ties in Iranian diplomatic circles and was seen as a threat by the US.

In April 2004, Muhammad Hassan Abrahemi, an Iranian Shiite cleric affiliated with Guyana’s International Islamic College of Advanced Studies (IICAS, received large amounts of money from the Iranian government ), was abducted by armed unknown assailants (whether his murderers were CIA or others is not known) . His decomposed remains were discovered a month later buried in a shallow grave. More Iranians are beginning to make use of the Caribbean, due to the nonexistence of background checks before diplomatic passports are issued. Some Iranians have been given passports of Caribbean island nations as in the case of St Kitts, which issued a Kittitian diplomatic passport to Iranian Alizera Moghadam, he claimed to have paid $1million for the passport, en route to Canada he was detained in transit. While the prime minister of St Kitts and Nevis Denzel Douglas maintains that it is impossible to obtain a diplomatic Kittitian passport through payment reports coming out of various sectors in St Kitts and Nevis refute his statements. Apparently, under the ‘Citizenship by Investment” program, Moghadam was granted his passport, in other words, he did pay for his passport. The potential for criminals, terrorists, and others to make use of the “citizen by investment”, are enormous the ramifications of this practice will be felt throughout the western hemisphere in years to come.

 Sheik Abdullah Al Faisal the Jamaican born, former Christian who converted to Islam at the age of 16, he was deported from Britain in May 2007 after having spent four years in a British prison and is now on the no-fly list.

He was accused of inciting racial hatred and soliciting murder. He is said to have influenced the “shoe bomber”, Richard Reid, Germaine Lindsay (Lindsay like Faisal is of Jamaican descent), responsible for 2005 underground train bombing in London, in which he and 26 other others died.  Faisal Shazzad the failed Times Square bomber was also named as one of the people he “inspired”. In 2010 the Sheik was arrested in Kenya and accused by the government thereof entering the country illegally. His arrest sparked deadly riots and reprisals in Kenya that lasted well over a week. The Kenyan authorities later spent well over 500,000 dollars to have him flown back to his native Jamaica.  The Sheik at the age of 16 traveled to Saudi Arabia where he spent eight years, he is believed to have converted to Islam in Saudi Arabia. He took a degree in Islamic studies before coming to the UK. An Associated Press article published on, Fri May, 272011, by David McFadden, stated: “U.S. diplomats have expressed concern that an Islamic cleric convicted of whipping up racial hatred among Muslim converts in Britain might do the same thing in his homeland of Jamaica, according to a leaked cable from the island’s U.S. Embassy”.

The following are excerpts and quotes from Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA), The Project for the Research of Islamic Movements (PRISM.

The report stated that the regions Muslim population consists largely of South and South East Asians, with their roots stemming back to the colonial period, in the last decades the region has also witnessed an increase in migrants from the Middle East. According to the report, there is a growing number of Muslim converts in  The Caribbean amongst disenfranchised populations of African descent. Many of the Caribbean people of African descent converting to Islam are perceiving Islam as a “rite”, of political empowerment as well as an adaptation of a “suitable” identity. Many are adopting Islam as Christianity is being increasingly viewed as a “white man’s religion”, particularly by young men of African descent regionally. Recently across the region where Islamic communities have been entrenched for decades, a clamor for The Arabization of society is taking place. The Arabization process is specifically being felt in the growing demands that Arabic be taught in primary and secondary schools. South Asia and the Middle East is impacting the region politically, culturally, and religiously, as Islamic missionaries from both regions are being sent to the Caribbean, while Caribbean Muslim students are studying in increasing numbers in the above-mentioned Islamic regions. The report highlighted what it referred to as the: Sunnification and Islamization process in Guyana. According to the Central Islamic Organization of Guyana (CIOG), there are 150 formal and informal mosques throughout Guyana. There are several Islamic organizations active in Guyana most notably, the Hajatul Ulamaa, the Muslim Youth Organization (MYO), the Guyana Islamic Trust (GIT), the Guyana Muslim Mission Limited (GMML), the Guyana United Sad’r Islamic Anjuman (GUSIA), the Tabligh Jamaat, the Rose Hall Islamic Center, and the Salafi Group. In mid-1988 Guyana became a permanent member of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). In 1966 after Guyana won its independence it established diplomatic relations with Arabic countries including Egypt, Iraq, and Libya all those countries opened embassies in Guyana. Guyanese Muslims presently travel to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Libya to study Islamic theology and Arabic. The Guyanese Muslims upon returning to Guyana began and continue to introduce Wahabism (a strict Saudi Arabic interpretation of Islam), into Guyanese society. The report cited a growing concern in Trinidad that elements of some Islamic groups have traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and have fought in both countries in support of radical Islamists in those nations. What governments regionally nor internationally seem not to comprehend, is the Guyanese and TNT Muslim population are mainly of a Sunni Islamic persuasion, the Wahabist doctrine that has been spread, clandestinely throughout the Caribbean for years, mainly through Islamic organizations sponsored by Saudi Arabia, has borne fruit and are manifesting at present in Caribbean Sunni’s from a broad spectrum of Caribbean nations joining the fight in Syria and Iraq in aid of their Sunni brethren in IS.