Mohammed Hamzah Khan, 19, rose before dawn on Oct. 4 to pray with
his father and 16-year-old brother at their neighborhood mosque in a
Chicago suburb.
When they returned home just before 6 a.m., the father went back to
bed and the Khan teens secretly launched a plan they had been hatching
for months: to abandon their family and country and travel to Syria to
join the Islamic State.
While his parents slept, Khan gathered three newly issued U.S.
passports and $2,600 worth of airline tickets to Turkey that he had
gotten for himself, his brother and their 17-year-old sister. The three
teens slipped out of the house, called a taxi and rode to O’Hare
International Airport.
Khan was due at work at 6:30 a.m. at a local home-supply store, so
he knew his parents wouldn’t miss him when they woke up. The two younger
siblings bunched up comforters under their sheets to make it look like
they were asleep in their beds.
Their plan was to fly to Istanbul, then drive into Syria to live in
the Islamic homeland, or caliphate, established by the Islamic State,
the militant group that has massacred civilians in Iraq and Syria and
beheaded Western journalists and aid workers.
This
undated passport photo presented as evidence at a detention hearing at
federal court in Chicago shows Mohammed Hamzah Khan, a suburban Chicago
man accused of seeking to join Islamic State militants in Syria. (AP
Photo/U.S. attorney’s office)
The Khan teens, U.S.-born children of Indian immigrants, each left letters for their parents explaining their motives.
“An Islamic State has been established and it is thus obligatory
upon every able-bodied male and female to migrate there,” Khan wrote.
“Muslims have been crushed under foot for too long. . . .This nation is
openly against Islam and Muslims. . . . I do not want my progeny to be
raised in a filthy environment like this.”
His sister wrote: “Death is inevitable, and all of the times we
enjoyed will not matter as we lay on our death beds. Death is an
appointment, and we cannot delay or postpone, and what we did to prepare
for our death is what will matter.”
In their letters, all three teens, who had grown up playing
basketball and watching “Dragon Tales” and “Batman,” told their parents
how much they loved them and asked them to join them in Syria, but made
it clear they would probably never see them again, except in the
afterlife. They begged them not to call the police.
In the afternoon, FBI agents knocked on the Khans’ front door, armed with a search warrant.
“For what?” asked the teens’ shocked father, Shafi Khan.
“Your kids have been detained at the airport, trying to go to Turkey,” an agent said.
“We were stunned,” said Zarine Khan, their mother. “More like frozen. We were just frozen.”
Slick propaganda
The Khan teens are part of a growing number of young Americans who
are joining or attempting to travel to Syria or Iraq to join the Islamic
State.
This year alone, officials have detained at least 15 U.S. citizens —
nine of them female — who were trying to travel to Syria to join the
militants. Almost all of them were Muslims in their teens or early 20s,
and almost all were arrested at airports waiting to board flights.
A senior U.S. official said the government anticipates more
arrests. Authorities are closely monitoring Twitter, Facebook and other
social media networks, where recruiters from the Islamic State
aggressively target youths as young as 14.
“Their propaganda is unusually slick. They are broadcasting their
poison in something like 23 languages,” FBI Director James B. Comey said
in a
recent speech,
adding that the terrorist group is trying to attract “both fighters and
people who would be the spouses . . . to their warped world.”
When the Khan teens reached the airport, FBI officials were waiting for them.
A U.S. law enforcement official said authorities had been
monitoring the communications of at least one of the teens, although the
FBI has not disclosed how they initially became aware of them.
Hamzah Khan
has been charged
with providing material support to a designated terrorist organization
and faces up to 15 years in prison. At a federal court hearing last
month, a judge ordered him held without bail, calling him a flight risk
and a danger to the community.
His two siblings, minors whose names have not been made public,
were released to their parents but are under investigation and could
face charges.
The Justice Department is not eager to prosecute juveniles, but it
will do so when they are so radicalized that they pose a potential
threat, a senior U.S. official said.
“There are not a lot of good options,” the official said. “You will see more young and juvenile cases in the future.”
In
court last month,
Assistant U.S. Attorney R. Matthew Hiller said Khan and his two
siblings “believe they are religiously obliged to support violent
jihad.”
“This was not a spur-of-the-moment trip but rather a carefully calculated plan to abandon their
family, to abandon their community, and abandon their country and join a
foreign terrorist organization,” Hiller told the judge.
He said Hamzah Khan was “attempting to join an organization that
has called for attacks against the United States and has already killed
U.S. citizens and is dedicated to genocide.”
But Khan’s lawyer, Thomas Anthony Durkin, told the judge that the
government was prosecuting Khan for what amounted to the “thought crime”
of rejecting America and supporting the establishment of an Islamic
homeland. He said the Khan teens wanted to go live in that homeland but
not become fighters, a desire that he said was naive and misguided but
not criminal.
Durkin cited a speech President Obama gave in September at the
United Nations, where he said the Islamic State’s “propaganda has
coerced young people to travel abroad to fight their wars and turned
. . . young people full of potential into suicide bombers. We must offer
an alternative vision.”
“This is the alternative vision we’re getting today: jail,” Durkin
told the judge. “If we want to solve this problem, we are not going to
solve it by threatening to lock people up forever. . . . We have to find
a solution, because these are American children. . . . They are not
barbarians. They are our children.”
‘Those are not our teachings’
Khan’s parents, in an interview at Durkin’s Chicago law office one
recent evening, said they were bewildered by what their children tried
to do.
“What they wrote in those letters is not from us,” Zarine Khan
said, her voice rising behind a colorful veil that covered her face,
except for her eyes. “Those are not our teachings. That’s not what we
believe in. This didn’t even come from our family, friends, neighbors —
nobody.”
“We tried to be the best parents we could,” she said. “That’s all I
can say — we tried our best. And they are good kids. This thing came
out of the blue. We are still trying to figure it out.”
Hamzah Khan grew up in a suburban American home with pretty shrubs
out front and a basketball hoop in the back yard. He earned a
Presidential Physical Fitness Award in the eighth grade and loved
Naruto, the Japanese manga. He volunteered at his local mosque and
represented Argentina in the National Model United Nations.
He graduated from a local Islamic high school in 2013 and enrolled
last year at Benedictine University, a Roman Catholic school about 10
miles from his home, where he studied engineering and computer science.
Shafi Khan, who came to Chicago from India almost 30 years ago, and
Zarine Khan, who followed her husband 20 years ago, said they consider
themselves “average” Muslims, no more or less religious than any of
their friends and neighbors in Bolingbrook, Ill., a suburb of about
73,000 people southwest of Chicago.
They try to pray five times a day but said they often don’t. Shafi
Khan wears a bushy beard and a white knit skullcap, which he said is an
attempt to follow the example of the prophet Muhammad. Zarine Khan
covers her head and most of her face, which she considers a sign of
modesty, not extreme piety.
Like millions of American Muslims, the Khans, who are both U.S.
citizens, said they have raised their children to love their country and
their religion. Asked if he felt more Muslim or American, Shafi Khan
said, “Both.”
Shafi Khan, 48, earned a degree in environmental science from
Northeastern Illinois University and has worked for many years as an
event planner for a humanitarian aid organization. Zarine Khan, 41,
studied genetics and microbiology at an Indian university but gave it up
to move to Chicago with her new husband.
They have four children — the three who were arrested, plus a
3-year-old girl — and Zarine Khan has worked for many years as a teacher
at a local Islamic school.
The Khans tried to shield their children from unwanted influences.
They had a TV when the children were younger, but they had no cable
service. The TV was used solely for showing DVDs — mainly cartoons and
educational JumpStart programs from the public library.
When Hamzah Khan was about 8 years old, the family got rid of the
TV, because by then they had a computer with Internet access, which the
parents carefully monitored. The children were allowed to watch cartoons
and read news online, but they were not allowed to browse the Internet
by themselves. “We didn’t want to expose them to adult stuff,” Zarine
Khan said. “We wanted to preserve their innocence. We wanted to channel
their intelligence into their studies and to becoming good human
beings.”
The children studied at a local Islamic school, which offered a
standard U.S. curriculum of English, math and science — but also classes
on Islam. The Khans’ daughter, who turned 18 shortly after her arrest,
was being home-schooled by her mother so she could graduate early from
high school and begin studies to become a physician.
All three Khan children also became
Hafiz,
which means they completely memorized the Koran in Arabic. Each went to
Islamic school through the fourth grade, then spent the next 2 1/2
years immersed in all-day memorization classes, augmented by evening
programs to keep up with basics such as English and math.
The memorization process is common among Muslims and is not considered a sign of religious extremism, said
Habeeb Quadri,
who is principal of the Islamic school Hamzah Khan attended until the
fourth grade and who frequently writes and lectures on Muslim youth.
Zarine Khan said the family took many vacations together, driving
to Niagara Falls and Connecticut. She said they shopped at Wal-Mart and
acted “like any other normal American family.”
“We tried to have them grounded and exposed to everything,” Zarine
Khan said. “We tried to give them good morals. But it was not just
Islam, Islam, Islam. We tried to expose them to different ideas as
well.”
Omer Mozaffar, a Muslim community leader who teaches theology at
Loyola University Chicago and the University of Chicago, said many
Muslim families appear to have sheltered their children from the culture
around them.
He said that since the 1991 Persian Gulf War and especially since
the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, some Muslims have felt “under siege” in
the U.S. communities where they live. “There’s a defensiveness that
compels parents to pull their kids out of everything,” Mozaffar said. “A
lot of parents feel overwhelmed and don’t know what to do, so they try
to isolate their children.”
The process is often called “cocooning” — shielding children from
as much American culture as possible by banning TV, the Internet and
newspapers and sending them to Islamic schools.
“Parents send them less for the Islamic tutelage and more for the
sense of protecting them,” Mozaffar said. “They think ‘American’ equals
‘immoral,’ and there’s a common belief that if it’s more strict, it’s
more pious. This is something I have to preach against all the time.”
The result is often that American Muslim children find themselves
caught between two worlds. They are American, but they feel their
parents and their religious leaders trying to steer them away from
American culture.
That can leave them vulnerable to those who promise something
better, a place where they are celebrated for their religion. And,
recently, that message has often come in the form of the network of
anonymous, persuasive recruiters on social media who lure youth to join
the Islamic State. Quadri calls them “Sheik Google.”
Letters full of rhetoric
According to Shafi and Zarine Khan and court documents, the Khan
children’s “Sheik Google” appears to have been a man with the nom du
guerre Abu Qa’qa, whom they met on Twitter.
Hamzah Khan and his sister both had Twitter accounts, which they
accessed on their cellphones because their parents closely controlled
their Internet use on their home computer.
In court, Hiller, the prosecutor, said the Khan teens intended to
meet with Abu Qa’qa when they arrived in Turkey and then travel with him
to Syria. Notes found by FBI agents searching the Khan house suggested
the teens were ultimately headed for Raqqah, an Islamic State stronghold
in Syria.
Khan’s sister went by the Twitter name “Umm Bara” and signed her
tweets with @deathisvnear. Prosecutors said that in May, she tweeted
about watching an hour-long Islamic State propaganda video called
“Saleel Sawarim,” which features photos and videos of beheadings and
other gruesome violence.
Hiller told the judge that on May 28, apparently after watching the
video, she tweeted that she had reached “The end of Saleel Sawarim,”
followed by emoticons of a heart and a smiley face. Hiller described her
reaction to the video as “twisted delight,” which he presented as
evidence that the Khan teens supported the Islamic State’s violence and
intended to participate in it.
Durkin said it was “inflammatory nonsense to say somehow, because
somebody downloaded that video, that somehow they’re dangerous to the
community.” He said the young woman wrote that her role in the caliphate
would probably be to marry a fighter, not become one herself.
The letters the three teens left behind were filled with rhetoric
their parents said was so out of character it could only have come from
Islamic State recruiters.
“I am . . . obliged to pay taxes to the [U.S.] government,” Hamzah
Khan wrote. “This in turn will be used automatically to kill my Muslim
brothers and sisters. . . . I simply cannot sit here and let my brothers
and sisters get killed, with my own hard-earned money. . . . I cannot
live under a law in which I’m afraid to speak my beliefs. I want to be
ruled by the Sharia [Islamic law]. . . . Me living in comfort with my
family while my other family are getting killed is plain selfish.”
He continued: “We are all witness that the western societies are
getting more immoral day by day. I extend an invitation to my family to
join me in the Islamic States. True, it is getting bombed, but let us
not forget that we didn’t come to this world for comfort.”
Sitting in Durkin’s office while their two younger teens worked on
homework in the other room, Shafi and Zarine Khan said they are
struggling to understand how their children could write such things.
Durkin would not permit interviews with the younger siblings.
The Khans knew that their kids were on Twitter and Kik, a messaging
service, but they said they didn’t know they were communicating with
strangers overseas.
The evening before the teens tried to fly away forever, Zarine Khan
said, she and her daughter sat together putting henna dye on each other
in celebration of the upcoming Eid al-Adha holiday.
“I think they were completely brainwashed by whatever online things
they were reading,” she said. “I wouldn’t want any parent to go through
what we are going through; it’s a nightmare. We just thank God that our
kids are with us here, and not over there.”
