Nihad Awad, national executive director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, spoke in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday about the arrests in Pakistan of five Americans
Police in Pakistan raided a house linked to an Islamic militant group Wednesday and arrested five young American Muslim men from the Washington, D.C., area, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.
One of the young men had left behind a video showing scenes of war, calling for the defense of Muslims and saying that “young Muslims have to do something,” said a person who had seen the video, describing it as a farewell of sorts.
It was the third known case since September in which Americans with ties to the Pakistan-Afghanistan region have been detained over possible terrorist connections.
The men were not accused of any crime, but their intent remained mysterious, and both U.S. and Pakistani officials emphasized that they were still gathering facts.
The five Americans, ranging in age from 19 to 25, were arrested in Sargodha, a dusty city in Punjab province, where several militant organizations with links to al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban operate, according to a senior Pakistani official and a U.S. official in Washington. Both spoke on condition of anonymity.
Three of the men arrested Wednesday are Pakistani-Americans, one is a Yemeni-American and one an Egyptian-American, the Pakistani official said. Pakistani law enforcement officers had “continuously tracked” the men from the moment they arrived Dec. 1 at Karachi international airport. All carried U.S. passports, he said.
They traveled to the city of Hyderabad, returned to Karachi, the hub of commerce in Pakistan, and then went to Lahore, the Punjab provincial capital, where they spent five days before going to Sargodha, he said.
They were arrested at a house that was occupied by Khalid Farooq, the father of one of the young men, Umer Farooq, according to an official familiar with the case. The elder Farooq is believed to have ties to Jaish-e-Muhammad, a banned Pakistani militant group, the official said.
Other Islamic militant organizations are also known to operate in Sargodha, including Sipah-e-Sahaba and a splinter group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Both are Sunni Muslim groups that have targeted minority Shiite Muslims and have also been linked to al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.
Al-Qaeda, whose leaders are primarily Arabs, and the Pakistani Taliban, led by ethnic Pashtuns, are based in the country’s Pashtun-dominated tribal region bordering Afghanistan. They have spearheaded an insurgency that has killed and maimed thousands of people in suicide bombings and other attacks since 2007.
Many experts are concerned about cooperation between the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda and militant groups based in Punjab that were once used by Pakistani security services to wage a proxy war with India in the disputed Kashmir region.
The U.S. official confirmed that the five men were the same five men from Washington’s northern Virginia suburbs whose families reported them missing last month. Also confirming that they were the missing five men was Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a Muslim American advocacy organization to which their families turned for help.
CAIR arranged a Dec. 1 meeting for the families with Islamic leaders in northern Virginia, who then contacted the FBI, said Hooper, who declined to give further details.
Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the families of the five men were particularly disturbed to see the video message that one of them left behind.
“One person appeared in that video, and they made references to the ongoing conflict in the world, and that young Muslims have to do something,” Awad said. “The video’s about 11 minutes, and it’s like a farewell. And they did not specify what they would be doing.”
He cautioned against drawing hasty conclusions. But Awad and other Muslim leaders said the case – along with the recent recruitment of young Somali-American men in Minnesota by a violent group in Somalia – suggested that at least a small number of young American Muslims were drawn to extremist views. They pledged to start a nationwide campaign to counter such attitudes.
Hooper said neither the young men’s mosque – the ICNA Center, associated with the national Islamic Circle of North America – nor their families in Virginia supported extremism or violence.
“The Muslim community has taken the lead on this case in terms of taking it to law enforcement,” Hooper said.
Asked for assistance by the FBI, Pakistani security officers tracked the men to Farooq’s house, where they were taken into custody, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.
In addition to Umer Farooq, two of the other men – named in Pakistani press accounts as Ahmed Abdullah and Wakar Khan – were described by officials as of Pakistani descent. Another, Ramy Zamzam, is of Egyptian descent, and the fifth man, Aman Yasser, is of Yemeni descent, according to one official. Some were born abroad, but all are now U.S. citizens, U.S. officials said.
A local imam in the Washington area said that before the men left, they did not seem to have become militant.
“From all of our interviews, there was no sign they were outwardly radicalized,” said Imam Johari Abdul-Malik.
Zamzam is a dental student at Howard University, where he received an undergraduate degree this year with a major in biology and chemistry, according to his Facebook page.
One of Zamzam’s younger brothers, interviewed at the family’s apartment in Alexandria, Va., said Zamzam has a 4.0 grade-point average and is “a good guy.”
An upstairs neighbor, Peter Max-Jones, 16, called Zamzam “very intelligent, very kind, very helpful. Good citizen, all around.” He said Zamzam’s family was “very patriotic, very quiet.”
A U.S. official said there were no apparent links between the men and another American with roots in Pakistan, David Headley. Headley pleaded not guilty Wednesday in a Chicago federal court to charges he helped a Pakistani group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, plot last year’s terrorist strike on India’s financial capital, Mumbai. That attack killed 166 people, including six Americans.
Headley, who was arrested in October, has also been indicted on charges of plotting an attack on a Danish newspaper that published a controversial cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. In another case linked to Pakistan, U.S. authorities in September arrested a Colorado airport van driver, Najibullah Zazi, and charged him with receiving explosives training from al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal area and conspiring to carry out a bomb attack in New York.