Word: clerics
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...spread of terrorism throughout Southeast Asia. Born into a family of farmers and Islamic scholars in Sukamanah, West Java, Hambali headed off to join the mujahedin in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s. He later moved to Malaysia, where he teamed up with Abubakar Ba'asyir, a fundamentalist Indonesian cleric. In the mid-1990s, Hambali began raising money and recruiting militants to join some jihadist groups. Meanwhile, Hambali established ties to bin Laden, serving on al-Qaeda's consultative council and lending financial and logistical help to the group's plots, including a 1995 plan to blow up 12 U.S. passenger...
...Sunnis, but its growth potential remains distinctly limited without participation from the Shiite majority. The Shiites were the brutally oppressed underclass of Saddam's Iraq, and they are deeply hostile to the Baathists. They also, however, remain for the most part suspicious of the U.S., and the firebrand young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is making confrontation with the occupiers the centerpiece of his own bid for power among the Shiites. Sadr supporters have engaged in violent street demonstrations against the U.S. and its allies both in Baghdad and southern Iraq, and they control the Shiite slums of East Baghdad where...
...troubling charge in Congress's joint 9/11 inquiry last month was that the FBI failed to investigate adequately Anwar al-Aulaqi, an American Muslim cleric who ministered to several of the hijackers. The FBI concluded al-Aulaqi was merely a spiritual adviser eager to assist followers, and an FBI official says, "I've heard no [further] interest [at the FBI ] in this guy." But the report quotes an FBI dissenter as saying, "There's a lot of smoke" surrounding his contacts with the hijackers. U.S. officials reportedly want further investigation...
Born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, al-Aulaqi studied engineering at Colorado State University. Friends describe him as warm and adamantly nonviolent. But while living in San Diego he met with an ally of an Egyptian cleric imprisoned for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center attack. The FBI investigated, closing the probe in March 2000. Two months earlier, two hijackers moved to the area. Al-Aulaqi, according to the joint inquiry, held "closed-door meetings" with them. When he moved to Virginia in early 2001, two hijackers followed. After 9/11, al-Aulaqi told the A.P. he didn...
...connection with the Bali bombings, was sentenced to death by a court in the island's capital, Denpasar. Meanwhile, a verdict is imminent for Abubakar Ba'asyir, the alleged spiritual head of JI, who is charged with treason and bombings unrelated to Bali. A conviction for the revered cleric?who denies that JI exists, although he did concede late in his trial that he believed attacks on Christian churches were permissible if the churches were proven enemies of Islam?could further enrage militants and spark more reprisals...