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Washington. The apparent ties between the Nigerian man charged with plotting to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day and a radical American-born Yemeni imam have cast a spotlight on charismatic clerics who use the Internet to indoctrinate young Muslims with extremist ideology and recruit them for Al Qaeda, US officials and counterterrorism specialists said.

US military and law enforcement authorities said on Thursday that the man accused in the bombing attempt, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, most likely had contacts with the cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who investigators have also named as having exchanged email messages with Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a US Army psychiatrist charged with the recent killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas.

Speaking in eloquent and colloquial English, Awlaki and other Internet imams from the Middle East to Britain offer a televangelist’s persuasive message of faith, purpose and a way forward, for both the young and as yet uncommitted, as well as to the most devout worshipers ready to take the next step, to jihad, officials say.

“People across the spectrum of radicalism can gravitate to them, if they’re just dipping their toe in or they’re hard core,” Jarret Brachman, author of “Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice,” said. “The most important thing they do is take very complex ideological thoughts and make them simple, with clear guidelines on how to follow Islamic law.”

In an online posting in 2005, Abdulmutallab referred to another radical Muslim cleric he listened to, a Jamaican-born preacher named Abdullah el-Faisal.

Faisal, who was deported from Britain in 2007, was convicted four years earlier for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred in speeches urging his followers to kill Hindus, Christians, Jews and Americans. He was later accused of influencing one of the attackers in the London bombings of July 2005.

These notorious imams, in addition to their knowledge of the Koran and Islamic theology, offer an almost romantic flair because of their occasional brushes with the law.

Among the examples are Abu Yahya al-Libi, a Libyan cleric, who escaped from prison in Afghanistan in 2005, and Faisal, who continued to preach online even after his arrest and deportation.

In his May 2005 online posting, Abdulmutallab wrote: “I thought once they are arrested, no one hears about them for life and the keys to their prison wards are thrown away. That’s what I heard Sheikh Faisal of UK say.”

US and European authorities say some of these clerics, like Awlaki, offer something much more sinister than just guideposts to radical Islam — a pipeline to Al Qaeda operatives in places like Yemen and the lawless Pakistan tribal areas.

“Awlaki is, among other things, a talent spotter,” a US counterterrorism official said. “That’s part of his value to Al Qaeda. If people are drawn to him, he can pass them along to trainers and operational planners. Abdulmutallab was cannon fodder, a piece snapped into an operation.”

Sheikh Khalid bin Abdul Rahman al-Husainan of Kuwait, who is fast attracting a large following, mixes contemporary politics with talk of martyrdom.

“Obama, in the same way that you raised the slogan, ‘Yes We Can,’ I too have a slogan,” Husainan wrote in August 2009. “My slogan in this life — and memorize this slogan — is ‘Happiness is the day of my martyrdom’.”

Intelligence officials and congressional aides briefed this week on the inquiry say investigators are still determining the precise nature of any contacts between Abdulmutallab and Awlaki.

It is not clear what role, if any, Awlaki played in the airliner plot.

Marc Sageman, a former Central Intelligence Agency operations officer and Al Qaeda scholar, said the relationship between these imams and younger men like Hasan of the US Army and perhaps Abdulmutallab was a two-way street.

“It is really young people seeking them out — the movement is from the bottom up,” Sageman said. “Just like you saw Maj. Hasan send 21 emails to al-Awlaki, who sends him two back.

“There is an influence, but the direction is from the young people seeking folks out, as opposed to older guys recruiting them.”

Sageman cautioned about placing too much singular responsibility on leaders like Awlaki. He also said he had no independent evidence that Awlaki and Abdulmutallab were linked.

But Sageman is anxious to find out if that is the case.

“Young people have a mind of their own,” he said. “They are not robots, brainwashed. They are already radicalized. What they want in a sense is a validation of what they already believe. The religious leaders are lightning rods, because of the extreme statements. They form a community around them.”



The New York Times