Word: yemen
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...Walker passed a proficiency exam and graduated early from Tamiscal High. He asked that the name on his diploma be changed to Sulayman Al-Lindh. He never picked up the certificate. Soon he told Nana that he had found an Arabic-language school in San'a, Yemen, on the Internet. "The language spoken in Yemen is closer to the holy language of the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet," explains Nana. Walker also felt it would be easier to practice Islam in a Muslim country. In December 1998 he left for the Middle East...
From the ages of 16 to 18, John Walker had transformed himself from a quiet, smooth-cheeked American teenager to a devout, bearded Muslim studying in Yemen. That he could grow the requisite beard was something of a miracle. Were his parents really onboard with all this? With the new name? The move to Yemen? Frank Lindh says yes. "He was always intellectually coherent, and he had a wonderful sense of humor," Lindh told reporters. "And none of that changed when he converted to Islam. I never had any major misgivings...
When Walker returned to California around Christmas 1999, he found his parents had separated. He saw Nana and told him that Yemen hadn't met his expectations. "They weren't as orthodox as he thought--they weren't as strict on Islam as he thought," says Nana. But to Abdul Wadood, a 20-year-old Muslim friend who also met Walker at the Mill Valley mosque, John sounded fulfilled. Through his e-mail communications, he told Wadood he felt "free" because he didn't have any material possessions. Wadood says his friend never experienced culture shock because...
...YEMEN: It's bin Laden's ancestral land and long a hideout for terrorists, who can gather comfortably in the mountainous hinterlands well beyond the government's control. Plenty of former mujahedin who came home from the anti-Soviet Afghan war took up the bandit life and now abet Islamic radicals, and al-Qaeda sympathizers are in the army and bureaucracy. Al-Qaeda operatives arrested for bombing the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 received false documents from a former mujahedin fighter working for the Yemeni government. The country, says a senior Western diplomat in the capital of Sana...
...That brought the U.S. down on Yemen's neck, as intelligence and FBI officials crowded in to investigate. It got more difficult for al-Qaeda men to go underground as the spooks threw big money around to put bandit lords on their payroll. Washington still complained bitterly that Yemen was not cooperating fully, but things changed after Sept. 11. The Yemeni government sized up the new risks in courting American displeasure, and President Ali Abdullah Saleh went to Washington last month showing "helpful new energy" in pursuing terrorists. Yemen began to share the intelligence Washington had begged for. Radical preachers...