Al Qaeda recruits swayed by Web images

BOISE — Web sites about violent jihad and graphic videos filled with battle scenes were “inspiring,” two young terrorist recruits told a Boise court on Thursday.

Yahya Goba, an American citizen from Lackawanna, N.Y. said he watched the same two videos of Bosnian battles and martyrs probably 10 times on the Internet after he returned from an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan where he was schooled in weapons, tactics and explosives.

Khwaja Hasan, a Virginia resident, recounted with gusto watching a graphic movie entitled “Russian Hell 2000” on the Internet sometime in 2000, in which a Chechen commander tries to get an injured Russian soldier to stand up, “and then he shoots him with an A.K.”

Prosecutors contend the two men are examples of recruits drawn to terrorism by Islamic Web sites like those maintained by University of Idaho graduate student Sami Al-Hussayen, who is on trial for providing material support to terrorists.

But both young men, who are serving long prison stretches, said respected mentors who urged them to go were the main catalysts for their decisions to travel overseas and take up arms. The two testified in Al-Hussayen’s trial Thursday, but without the jury present. U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge plans to decide on Monday whether the jury should hear the men’s testimony.

Goba is one of the “Lackawanna Six,” which authorities dubbed one of the most dangerous terrorist sleeper cells in the United States. Kamal Derwish, a charismatic Lackawanna resident of Yemeni descent, persuaded a half-dozen young men there to train in jihad tactics at an al Qaeda training camp near Kandahar in May of 2001. Derwish is now dead, killed by a U.S. missile strike in Yemen in late 2002.

Asked to describe his relationship with Derwish, the man who recruited him for al Qaeda, Goba paused and bowed his head. After a long, silent pause, the young, heavy-set, bearded man told the Boise courtroom, “I looked up to him a lot.”

Hasan is part of what authorities have called the Virginia jihad network. Though he testified that he was inspired by the “Russian Hell” movie and by news of the conflict in Chechnya that he viewed at www.qoqaz.com, Hasan said he never would have gone to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan if it hadn’t been for the persuasion of a Muslim cleric who urged him to go shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Just four days after the attacks, Hasan said he went to dinner at a friend’s house in Fairfax, Va. There, Sheikh Ali Al-Timimi, a Muslim scholar and author of numerous religious treatises, spoke of how Taliban leader Mullah Omar told Hasan it was his obligation as a Muslim to come to the defense of Afghanistan against U.S. forces, Hasan said.

Hasan, who was born in Pakistan, left five days later for a training camp in the Kashmir region of Pakistan, intending to “get training to fight in Afghanistan … (against) the American troops, with the mujahideen,” he said.