CHARLOTTE: FROM his parents' basement in a part of town where homes have lots of bedrooms and most children go to college, Samir Khan blogged his way into the highest circles of al-Qaeda, waging a media war he believed was as important as the battles with guns on the ground.
His parents were worried about the increasingly radical nature of their son's philosophy and the media reports that exposed it.
They turned to members of their religious communities to impress upon their son the perils of such thinking and behaviour.
It didn't work. In 2009, he left his comfortable life in North Carolina for Yemen, started a slick magazine for jihadists called Inspire that featured political and how-to articles written in a comfortable American vernacular and continued to dodge government and civilian efforts to stop his self-described ''media jihad''.
| That'd one of those soft jihad thingies to be undertaken from within Dar al Harb, the land of war, as opposed to the hard jihad of the sword, waged from the borderlands. |
His life ended in Yemen on Friday, when Khan, 25, was killed in a drone strike that also took the life of radical holy man Anwar al-Awlaki
... Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, al-Awlaki is was a dual citizen of the U.S. and Yemen. He is was an Islamic holy man who is was a trainer for al-Qaeda and its franchises. His sermons were attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers, by Fort Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hussein, and Undieboomer Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He is was the first U.S. citizen ever placed on a CIA target list...
and two other men.
At the Islamic Society of Greater Charlotte, few of the several hundred Mohammedans gathered for Friday prayer wanted to talk about Khan.
''This is a very dangerous road when you go and kill someone like this,'' Ayeb Suleiman, 25, a medical resident, said. ''He was just an editor. He was just writing.''
| Whatever happened to "The pen is mightier than the sword"? |
Others felt grief for a family who had lost a son. Khan's father, Zafar, is an information technology executive and a respected worshipper who bought his family a two-storey house near a golf course. Mustapha Elturk, the imam and president of the Islamic Organisation of North America, met the family in the mid-1990s. Khan was interested in Islam as a way to ''stay away from the peer pressure of his teenage days,'' he said.
But after the September 11 attacks, Khan's radical views grew to the point where his father intervened.
''He tried his best to make his son meet imams and scholars to dissuade him from those views.'' |