The War Diaries

A billboard of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on the outskirts of Tehran. Although the U.S. has been in outright conflict with Salafi-jihadism for twenty years now beginning with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center which involved Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, American policy can often feel stuck in ‘Argo’ in its relentless pursuit of a post-Shah, Shia-ruled Iran and its proxies. Iran is governed by principle peculiar to modern Shi’ism known as velayat-e-faqih, “the guardianship of the jurist” which is a complete anathema to Sunnism’s al-Salafiyya-al-Jihadiyya doctrine. ©1999 Derek Henry Flood

New York- It’s been twenty long years since Eyad Ismail, Ramzi Yousef and co drove that Ford Econoline Ryder rental van through the Holland Tunnel from Jersey City and parked a massive urea urea nitrate bomb in the parking garage of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Today was a quiet anniversary of an event largely forlorn in America’s national collective conscience in the shadow of the much more dramatic 9/11 attacks.

That wintry day two decades ago, the United States faced the beginning of a poorly outlined struggle against the decentralized doctrinal ideology of al-Salafiyya-al-Jihadiyya [Salafi-jihad]-a form of Islamism that articulates violent means to achieve political gains.

One of the points about the Sunni jihadi attack on New York in the winter of 1993 is that it marked an unexpected pivot from the perceived threat of highly centralized millenarian Shia revolutionaries and resistance terrorism epitomized by the rise of the clerical regime in Iran in 1979 and the formation of Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982.

This suited America’s so-called ‘moderate’ Sunni or Sunni-dominated allied nation-states just fine. These regimes could be free to espouse anything from the export of the Wahhabiyya strain of Salafism that serves at the state theology in Saudi Arabia and Qatar to the Marxist-tinged radical Arab socialism emblematic of the Hizb-al-Ba’ath (Ba’ath Party) or the post-Nasserist-turned-personality cult regimes of Egypt and the Maghreb. That was of course until these ideas either collided with American foreign policy as in the case of Iraq or collapsed under their own weight as in the case of Tunisia.

A friend who was stationed for the U.S. State Department in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province-where the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing took place-and later Bahrain, privately hinted to me this view of the Shia threat had changed little at least in some official channels even while the U.S. was propping up a succession of Shia prime ministers in its Iraq project and its Special Forces had fought alongside Shia irregulars to oust the Taliban in northern Afghanistan.

But while the United States has done a great deal to degrade Ba’athism by invading Iraq in both 1991 and 2003 and aiding Syrian rebels bent on demolishing the Ba’ath in Syria at present, for instance, American foreign policy still remains fixated on Iran and Hezbollah and would still not dare challenge the vitriolic Wahhabism prevalent in the Arabian Peninsula. Though it is a fool’s errand to pit absolutist wings of Islam’s great schism against one another for purely hypothetical purposes, it has been transnational Salafism that has attacked the American homeland in 1993 and 2001 and in East Africa in 1998 and Yemen in 2000. If the two fronts of radical Islamism were simplistically made analogous to the space race, Khomeini may have successfully launched Sputnik first, but it was bin Laden who put a man on the moon.

We should be reminded that the 1993 attack was connected to 9/11 through the common thread of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed (KSM as he came to be referred to in intelligence jargon-inflected reporting) who is currently in the pre-trial hearing phase of the never ending, apparently never closing saga at the sweltering detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Though Yousef and the other 1993 plotters were not known to be formally pledged members of a then fairly embryonic al-Qaeda, they certainly were connected to the Peshawar-based jihadi nexus borne out of the CIA and Saudi funded anti-Soviet jihad that took place west of the Durand Line. The radicalization of the Masjid al-Farooq in Brooklyn and its refugee center-cum-Office of Services set-up visited by Abdullah Azzam was a definite factor in the 1993 plot. While the trial of the five accused al-Qaeda men in Cuba (KSM, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi, and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi) is referred to by the United States government as a “9/11 trial” In sense, it dates back the events of 1992-1993 in Brooklyn and Jersey CIty involving the men linked to KSM and the original plot against New York City.

Though there are conflicts about some of the precise specifics, one of Omar Abdel Rahman’s sons, Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman was nabbed (by the CIA, the Pakistanis or a mix of the two) in Quetta, Pakistan around the time of KSM’s apprehension when Pakistani authorities were hunting KSM. Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman is now a free man back at home in Egypt after having been listed as one of the CIA’s “ghost prisoners” (as was KSM) in 2005. He was released by the Mubarak regime in 2010.

KSM was apprehended in Rawalpindi, Pakistan ten years ago (though alternate sources may say he was actually captured in Quetta a month prior and the news of his arrest delayed by Pakistani authorities). His and four other co-conspirators’ painfully deliberating preliminary hearings has been described as being in “discord.” From what information does come out of the proceedings, it has partly the air of a circus what with Walid bin Attash (a.k.a. Khallad) making multiple outbursts about violations of attorney-client privilege and his defense lawyer wrapped in “a black abaya out of respect to the religious sensibilities of her client” according to a Guardian report.

The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg describes the awkward goings on at Guantánamo as primarily focused on the ways in which the five suspects were captured and the conditions under which they were detained before being exfiltrated from “black sites” to the American naval base on Cuba’s southeastern coast. In other words, these proceedings are not about 9/11 .

A tourist shop just dozens of meters from the site of the former World Trade Center selling a model of the original Twin Towers. ©2013 Derek Henry Flood

Half a world away from the shop in New York City, a similar shop near the base of Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia selling metal models of Southeast Asia’s twin towers. ©2010 Derek Henry Flood

An ethnic-Tajik teenage fighter from Jamiat-i-Islami/Shura-i-Nazar on the front line between Khanabad and Konduz on November 15, 2001. These fighters, labeled “rebels” by the media at the time even though the Taliban government was only recognized by 3 states in the international community, were under the command of the now deceased Muhammed Daud Daud (whom certain reporters wrote up as Daud Khan at the time). Daud, who late became a top police chief for northern Afghanistan, was killed in what was purported to be a Taliban suicide bombing on May 28, 2011 at the Takhar provincial governor’s office in Taloqan. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

New York- On February 5th, I participated in a Huffington Post Live discussion entitled “Engaging The Taliban” (featured below) after the trilateral meeting between David Cameron, Asif Ali Zardari, and Hamid Karzai at the British Prime Minister’s country residence outside London. The topic concerned the withdrawal of NATO and ISAF troops from Afghanistan at the end of 2014 and the idea of some kind of vague peace deal with the Taliban midwifed by Pakistan and meant to take place in Qatar. That talk inspired my lengthy article in today’s edition of Asia Times Online (at left).

Afghanistan, once a byword for forgotten backwater, has had its war become internationalized to the absurd point where even a good number of tiny non-NATO, non-Western nations like Georgia (desire to join NATO), the United Arab Emirates (business interests, Islamic hearts-and-minds credibility), and Tonga (pressed by the UK) have inserted troops. And nations like these have done so in the context of their very diverse, often non-overlapping agendas.

For Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun ethnicities who house a sense of collective victimhood, this is the equivalent of having the fox guarding the hen house. Despite US troops and intelligence officers partnering up with warlords who were deemed “legendary” in the earliest days of Operation Enduring Freedom, there are certainly no angels among any of Afghanistan’s warlords of all hues despite a certain amount of rather theatric press reportage at the time. But renewed political power for the Taliban, whose enemies believe it would use to gain military power in the theater of Afghanistan’s gun-barrel politics, would be the surefire catalyst for a retro-themed civil conflict.

Some factional military leaders especially those of the Jamiat-i-Islami/Shura-i-Nazar type whose 1980s and 1990s-era leadership has suffered a string of assassinations attributed to the Taliban such as Burhanuddin Rabbani and Muhammed Daud Daud in 2011, may likely be content to exact retribution in some form. Abdul Rashid Dostum– another sworn enemy of the Taliban who knows that he is on their target list–could easily fully remobilize his Junbesh-i-Milli militia when push comes to shove.

But the risks for the integrity of the Pakistani state have changed entirely since the Taliban swept in Kabul in 1996. The creeping Talibanization of Pakistan creates an entirely different calculus. Additionally anti-Shia/Hazara violence in Balochistan being carried out by Lashkar-i-Jhangvi seems to be at an all-time high, a dire crisis which Pakistan’s political leaders refuse to effectively address. All sorts of Taliban factions are now operating in Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, and inflaming tensions with the very territorial, virulently anti-Pashtun Muttahida Qaumi Movement which portrays itself as the guardian of mohajir identity in southern Sindh Province.

Part of the advantage of Pakistani hegemony over Afghanistan in the 1990s was that Islamabad could have groups that it was funding or manipulating outside of its territory. Afghanistan was relegated to an obscure, abandoned backwater that was essentially a free-fire zone for regional proxy warfare. States from all over Eurasia were dragged into Afghanistan’s internecine battles.

Following 9/11, the Afghan morass brought into most if not all of the armies of the Western world. At the same time, Pakistan’s military and intelligence apparatus was ejected after the fall of Konduz in late November 2001. Now as the West and its allies clamor for the exits, Pakistan, Iran and other regional powers will be forced to reassess their role in the future of Afghanistan. And it does not look promising. The Pentagon would like to leave a residual number of troops behind for training and “support” missions pending an as yet unspecified status-of-forces agreement being worked out with Kabul.

Though the United States ending its combat mission in Afghanistan has made a big splash in the news, there has already been an attrition on Western troop numbers. Dutch troops packed up and left Uruzgan Province in August 2010 when the Netherlands enfeebled coalition government collapsed over the issue. The Dutch ditched their Australian partners in the home province of Mullah Muhammed Omar which created a vacuum that had to be filled by American troops. The French, now deployed in Mali in what is perceived as being a more immediate to France’s national interests, entirely abandoned their combat mission in Kapisa Province in November 2012. The final French combat troops then departed Afghanistan altogether in December 2012. New Zealand plans on pulling out the majority of its troops from Bamiyan Province by April of this year.

In the understated words of noted Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai: “2014 and the Western withdrawal will not mean Pakistan’s problems are over.”

A protestor marching on Benghazi’s corniche on March 9, 2011 defaces as 1 dinar note featuring Muammar Qaddafi to shown his disdain for the Libyan dictator at the height of the Arab Spring movement. This image to me epitomizes the concept of my article featured below. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

New York- I had a couple of long term projects published at the end of this past week. The first was an examination of the little known history conjoining Mali in West Africa with North Korea in Northeast Asia over at Asia Times Online. I discovered this newly built part of Bamako while riding around on my fixer’s motorcycle last year when we were trying to organize a semi-doomed trip toward the front line with MUAJO et co up in Mopti Region.

This spot I found (linked, left) in the Malian capital is called Carré des Armées (Army Square) and it was built by a North Korean state enterprise (not as if Pyongyang encourages private enterprise). As I begun to play with the idea of doing a full length article on the topic, it dawned on me that Mali and North Korea had a shared history dating all the way back to Mali’s independence from France in 1960.

Not exactly a topic for broad mass consumption, I know, but for those who it may interest, I think it’s a fascinating topic. It also speaks to a lesser understood phenomena of how ties forged in the heat of the Cold War still can very much exist in a post-Cold War world.

The ties between North Korea and Mali certainly may have lessened over the decades and have changed in their orientation (started out as political and military in the 1960s, now more transparently financial-the same goes for Mali’s relationship with China). One of the key differences between the relationships between North Korea and China with an inherently unstable state like Mali is that seemingly no circumstances would or will derail ‘business as usual.’

Just for argument’s sake, I honestly think that if Ansar Eddine and its Salafi allies had somehow managed to capture Bamako and miraculously gain some kind of political legitimacy that over time Beijing and Pyongyang would still send delegations back to Mali to get their business interests on track. After all in 1960, the government of Modibo Keita was deemed a righteous, radical enough anti-imperialist government by Kim Il-sung and co to forge ties on the other side of the world. Maybe the anti-imperial tenets preached in the context of  Salafiyya-jihadiyya would be revolutionary enough for the Beijing’s politburo and the DPRK’s Workers’ Party of Korea to be able to keep infrastructure projects going uninterrupted. Who’s to say….

The second was a passion project nearly 14 years in the making about the history and symbology of all the war zone/quixotic regime currencies have managed to collect in my travels over the years featured in The Christian Science Monitor. It spans from an out-of-circulation Iranian rial I obtained in Tehran in 1999 to a Libyan 1 dinar note I saved from Benghazi in 2011.

The depiction of Philip the Arab on Syria’s 100-pound note is an indicator of the deep historical ties between ancient Iran and Syria. In a rock carving at the Naqsh-e Rustam necropolis in southern Iran’s Fars Province, Philip the Arab (kneeling, far left) is shown along with the Roman Emperor Valerian the Elder (center) as they bow before the Persian king Shapur I the Great (mounted). Damascus’s employing Philip the Arab is likely no accident. Unlike the Saddam-era old 25-dinar note in Iraq depicting the Battle of al-Qadissyah showing an ancient Arab (Iraqi) enmity toward Persia (Iran)–Hafez’s al-Assad’s mortal enemy in the inter-Ba’ath rivalry–Syria’s 100-pound bill emphasized Syria and Iran’s ancient, shared history…in which Roman Arabia (present day Syria) is the supplicant. ©1999 Derek Henry Flood

Not a project that even the most ambitious young turk with a fancy master’s degree fresh out of Georgetown or Columbia could have done. It’s a bit of a blood, sweat and tears project in that sense and I was thrilled to have it come to fruition. I’ve dealt with countless fast talking money changers, sky rocketing wartime inflation, crossed borders only opened when regimes were in the process of being toppled and made all sorts of other absurd, laborious entreaties to obtain this collection.

Many of these specimens were lost for years or so I thought, until I uncovered them last fall in a musty storage locker and began to examine them one by one. I then realized they merited an article treatment on their own.

Most of these notes (except the Qadaffi-era dinar which is still in circulation pending the release of new notes by Libya’s central bank) are long out of circulation. And more importantly, each banknote tells a story both in its iconography laden artistry and in the circumstances in which I obtained it. The 20th anniversary of the Shia Islamic revolution in Iran, the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, and so forth.                                                                                                                                                                       

MRE marked as a humanitarian daily ration. Packed by illegal migrants in Texas for Tajiks and Uzbeks in Afghanistan, eaten by Western journos and other war tourists. Just another of my war souvenirs.

New York- I’ve been rummaging through my archives from the terror wars era for the last week or two while working on an upcoming project on Syria and have opened a veritable Pandora’s Box in the process. The other day I found a couple of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) from the very beginning of the American-led intervention in the ongoing Afghan civil war in November 2001. These hideously bright yellow packets were being sold by traders in the smuggler’s bazaar of Khawja Bahauddin, the ramshackle town near the border with Tajikistan where Ahmad Shah Massoud had been assassinated on September 9, 2001. These preservative laden bags of glorified junk food were air dropped over ‘friendly’ (i.e. areas controlled by cash-for-allegiance warlords) parts of northern Afghanistan in what was much more a bungled PR campaign than an effective humanitarian effort.

Rural Afghans were puzzled by the squirt packs of peanut butter and stale pop tarts entirely alien to their diet. To put things in the effete terminology used by food nerds today, Afghanistan is a “farm-to-table” society where all food is de facto “organic” even though the whole country is devoid of a Whole Foods.

These plastic bags were carefully labeled in English, French, and Spanish for illiterate villagers that speak Dari, Uzbek, and Pashto, might as well have been artifacts from the Roswell crash. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that more Western journos and CIA types ended up eating these awful things than the Afghans themselves. They were manufactured by a military contractor eager to reap the early buildup of the immediate post-9/11 spending boomlet called The Wornick Company.

The Wornick Company apparently employed undocumented Mexican immigrants to pack these things. An investigation was launched after it was discovered an AQ operative had his sights set on the company’s HQ in south Texas after Wornick ingeniously labeled these packets with their company name and address. Like an AQ for dummies target.

A better holistic strategy would have been to contract an nearby Iranian company (who could have perhaps given honest work to Iran’s own resented Afghan refugees) to package pulao and freeze dried naan, you know, like, food Afghans actually eat not dissimilar to Iranian fare. Laughable as it sounds, something akin to this might have killed two birds with one stone-actually nourishing starving Afghans and engaging Iran economically.

Such a practical initiative could have opened the door to undermining both the clerical regime in Qom and Tehran during Mohammed Khatami’s “Dialogue of Civilizations” era and the still-not-going-away bomb Iran chicken hawks poisoning the present debate  in DC. But the anti-Iran agitators active in Washington today are often one in the same as the men and women who wanted to pull away from Afghanistan in 2002 (and therefore an Iran that was cooperating at the time) to focus Pentagon efforts on Iraq thereby keeping the US pitted against Iran for the foreseeable future. The maintenance of this highly negative staus quo was far  more important for those with a vested interest in keeping hostilities alive and well.

The air dropping of quintessential American foodstuffs into Afghanistan was an ill conceived plan at best and a poor use of tax payer funds. With no follow up measures to coordinate events on the ground, there was no methodology employed to ensure that the food was received by those that needed it most. Meanwhile, the few who happened upon these poorly planned c-17 borne drops would often hoard them and sell them to bazaaris who would then resell them to the strangers in their midst. There was no way to ensure appropriate and even distribution, the thing bona fide unarmed humanitarian NGOs are supposed to be most adept at.

Oh and another story going around at the time was that these clumsy airborne food drops had actually managed to kill a few unsuspecting villagers along the way. I never got to the bottom of weather that was actually true or not because to be honest I was too busy covering the war. But I was never all that comfortable with the idea of armed humanitarians. “Armed humanitarian” is a stark contradiction in terms.

The pacifist European NGOs were careening around with large decals on the side of their Landcruisers showing Kalashnikovs encircled in red with a line crossing them out while the Americans were landing armed helicopters, disgorging bulky helmeted men in camouflage, guns drawn, in the exact same political space. It all seemed like such a bad juxtaposition.

I photographed what was then a very rare daylight landing of American troops in northern Afghanistan. Until this point, the only visual evidence of American action in Afghanistan were sightings of warplanes like the C-130 aircraft high in the sky unloading 15,000 lb BLU-82 ‘daisy cutter’ fuel bombs near Taliban trenches in Dasht-i-Qala and other assorted aircraft painting their voluminous vapor trails across the clear sky. @2001 Derek Henry Flood

For background on the use and origins of the “daisy cutter’ bomb, see here  and here (brief) and here (extensive).

A B52 Stratofortress strategic bomber makes an early morning run from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean toward the frontline between Jamiat forces and Taliban trenches. Soaring over the front line town of Dasht-i-Qala on a cloudless November morning, the B52′s contrails acted as ominous skywriting. Having come from a-just-after-9/11 New York, it gave me a weird feeling to hear the deep subsonic roar of these massive, weaponized planes overhead-especially when realizing you are in a place that has no ordinary air traffic after decades of international isolation. They would wake me from my slumber in the basement of a warlord’s guesthouse where I was holed up. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

For more on the B52 component and other facets of the initial air campaign in Afghanistan, see here and here (brief) and here (extensive).

Enter the armed humanitarians. Andrew Natsios, then chief of USAID, staged a dramatic daylight landing in a duo of Chinook helicopters in Khwaja Bahauddin, Takhar Province, Afghanistan, November 2001. The local villagers and attendant refugees didn’t seem to know what to make of the latest interlopers with an agenda in their country. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

An American soldier accompanying Natsios into the fray of dust and intensely curious Afghan men and boys looks exhausted and dazed. The American landing party seemed to have coordinated their daylight landing with members of Jamiat-i-Islami who arrived with antiquated rifles to keep the crowd at bay along with a French NGO called ACTED that was active in the area. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

An American soldier at the edge of the perimeter as Nastios gives an unannounced press conference to the journos who were still in Khawja Bahauddin that day. After word of the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif spread like wildfire, most people had moved further west to cover what would become the battle of Qala-i-Jangi. I think I was nearly as taken aback as the locals. Until this moment, the American ground presence in Afghanistan was strictly clandestine as far as I knew at the time, obscured in the dark of night. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

As quickly as they came, they left. The USAID chief was spirited away by his solider-guards off into the sunset to what I presumed was back to Uzbekistan. America was playing good cop, bad cop. Dropping bombs on those Afghans it deemed worthy of death and portraying the US government and contractors like Wornick as an aid organization writ large. What were average Afghans to make of all this confused messaging? ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

New York-Going through a storage locker the other day, I dug up a lot of stuff from my personal archives in the early post-9/11 period. I collected lots of odds and ends back then thinking they’d be of historical import down the road. Here we are a decade on and its interesting (at least to me) to reexamine this stuff. Here are scans I made of magazines I collected in 2001-2002.

I believe it is important to collect and document these artifacts in time where we are inundated with so much media and where attention spans seem to be ever shortening. Each new global crisis feels like it obfuscates the previous one. It is almost as if the Arab Spring replaced the global financial crisis (such an inarticulate term) which replaced the terror wars.

This is a visual record of an indelible post-modern tragedy.

This very dramatic title epitomized the mood at that moment. There developed an extreme dichotomy at the time between what were referred to as “the everything changed-ists” versus the “nothing changed-ists.” But don’t judge a periodical by its cover. The bulk of this issue was in fact not dedicated to 9/11, just the first few front articles mostly. Whereas a New York area periodical would have been entirely dedicated to 9/11, shutting out the rest of the news cycle save for perhaps speculating about Afghanistan.

Paris Match, September 20, 2001, “The War: World Trade Center, Tuesday, 9:03 a.m., New York”

Reading the September 12, 2001 edition of the New York Times in Brooklyn. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

The September 23, 2001 New York Times magazine titled “The Remains of the Day.” A gorgeous, stark illustration of collective loss.

The October 11, 2011 edition of Paris Match “At the Heart of the War” featuring a Jamiat fighter on the front line at Bagram, Afghanistan. World media attention began to shift away from New York and toward Afghanistan when the bombing there began on October 7 of that year.

The September 2, 2002 edition of Der Spiegel titled “The Day that Changed the World.” I got this issue and the Stern below as I was leaving Hamburg, Germany after investigating the lives of the Hamburg cell led by Mohammed Atta in the Harburg district.

The September 5, 2002 edition of Stern titled “New Photos from 9/11.”

The September 11, 2002 edition of Time Europe. I took this from my flight from Hamburg to New York as I was returning home to document the first 9/11 anniversary.

New York Magazine, September 11, 2011, “One Day, Ten Years.”

486 Union Avenue on the ramshackle side of the tracks in Paterson, New Jersey. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

Paterson- New York magazine occasionally runs a segment of their real estate section called “Fame Slept Here” about astronomically priced homes for sale on the NYC market that were inhabited by all manner of celebrity past and present. I’ve spent parts of the last decade looking at much less desirable habitations of the men involved in the ‘planes operation’ (9/11) around the world from Kuala Lumpur to San Diego. Blog entries like this one are not meant to be exhaustive chronologies but a portion of my research.

Yesterday I finally made the trek from midtown Manhattan to a northern New Jersey slum called Paterson where up to six of the hijackers stayed during the summer preceding 9/11. I took a Latino shuttle bus from the front door of the New York Times’ ivory tower across from the dreary Port Authority bus terminal. The unassuming coach then pulled away from Arthur Sulzberger Jr’s vertical empire of glass and steel toward the Hudson River, through the Lincoln Tunnel and on to Paterson and neighboring Totowa, New Jersey.

In continuing my (what seems like) never ending journey to document the lead up to 9/11 which has been quite a global endeavour, it had been bothering me that I haven’t done some of the work closest to home.

According to man called Jimi Nouri, Hani Hanjour (believed to have crashed American Airlines 77 into the Pentagon) and Ahmed al-Ghamdi rented the third floor unit in May of 2001. It was in this red brick black where Nawaf al-Hazmi would relocate after leaving San Diego now joined by his brother Salem and Khalid al-Midhar along with Majed Moqed and Abdelaziz al-Omari.

On a side note, al-Omari was mentored by Suliman al-Elwan, a jailed Saudi Salafi theologian profiled by my colleague Murad Batal al-Shishani for the February 2011 edition of Militant Leadership Monitor (which I edited-subscription only).

Infamy slept here, on the third floor in the back. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

The next stop on my trek took me just over two miles directly down the road to the ATS travel agency in the lower middle class town of Totowa. It was here that Hani Hanjour and Majed Moqed bought Hanjour’s ticket on AA 77 for 9/11. (For reference see: FBI Summary  about Alleged Hijacker Hani Hanjour, p.50.) This small converted house on a hill in north Jersey unknowingly facilitated partial destruction of the Pentagon. Undoubtedly all of the people who inhabit or utilize these particular locales today would prefer these highly unpleasant affiliations end up in the dust bin of history but I am trying ensure, sorry to say, that they never be.

In 2010, I revisited the Parkwood Apartments in San Diego’s Clairemont area and noticed the complex had been pleasantly renamed “Blossom Walk” since I first photographed them in 2002 after finding out that Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, and allegedly Saudi student/spy Omar al-Bayoumi had resided there.

From the hijackers’ cockroach infested apartment in Paterson to the World Trade Center is a distance of about 23 miles. So this post doesn’t seem entirely an abstraction, I thought I should include an image of 9/11 itself. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

Advanced Travel Services at 232 Union Boulevard in Totowa, New Jersey. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

The Passaic River that divides Paterson between the rather well-kept Middle Eastern small business community where the hijackers ran errands from the run down black and Latino neighborhood where they holed up six men in a one bedroom apartment until days before the attacks. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

My third and final stop on the Jersey terror tour brought me to the tidy Arab and Turkish enclave of south Paterson below the Passaic River. I’d first gotten off the shuttle bus here far too early at the beginning of the day when I was trying to get my bearings and so I came full circle back to Main Street. Bathed in a splendid late afternoon sun after a very light rain shower was Apollo Travel on Main Street.

It was here that in early July 2001 Mohammed Atta bought his ticket from Miami to Madrid via Zurich in order to rendezvous with Ramzi bin al-Shibh (though they ended up meeting in coastal Catalunya when bin al-Shibh could only get a ticket from Hamburg to Reus Airport) in what was believed to have been a final planning meeting for the planes operation in the EU. As a Yemeni, bin al-Shibh was unable to secure an American visa to join the men in Paterson or south Florida. He now resides at the detention facility at Guanánamo Bay.

For more on this, see my post from August 2011: Retracing Mohammed Atta’s Footsteps in Catalunya

Apollo Travel at 1009 Main Street in Paterson, New Jersey. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

Exhausted I flagged down a shuttle bus trundling down Main Street bound for Manhattan. Listening to Bloc Party’s Four on my iPod I look through the windshield as the bus crests over a slight hill on the highway to see the new World Trade Center in the distance towering over the New Jersey foliage. I realize the AQ operatives would have inevitably seen this view while they were driving around this area doing their mundane errands with the Twin Towers–their intended target–rising above the hot Atlantic landscape 11 summers ago.

I thought about how many people in this country and around the world, especially those that never had to live through 9/11, still cling to wildly unfounded conspiracy theories rather than confront and cope with history and reality. To see these ordinary facets of the 9/11 plot, the air ticket offices, halal meat markets, run down apartments, an ATM here, a big box store there, is to visit a painful period of recent American history that lacks any of the glamour of the elaborate plots dreamed up by the ‘inside job’ crowd where suited Bilderbergers in Langley or Tel Aviv or god knows where planned to hoodwink the entire world on live television.

What’s partly fascinating in all the exploration I’ve done from San Diego to Hamburg to Scottsdale to Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles to Bangkok and now New Jersey is the sheer banality of it all. There is no imagined evil lair from an Cold War Ian Fleming novel. These are living, breathing locales. I bought a Vitamin Water in the utterly non-descript mini-market below the hijackers old apartment. All of it still exists for those that bother to look.

My day ends where it began as the shuttle bus drops me off at the base of the New York Times corporate headquarters on 8th Avenue and West 40th Street in Manhattan. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower anchors the southeastern end of what is left of Brooklyn’s historic Atlantic Avenue Arab strip. Rapid gentrification of the neighborhood in the last decade has transformed the area from a lively ethnic enclave into bland real estate developments. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

New York- Yesterday for the 11th anniversary of 9/11 I decided to do something a bit off the beaten path. Though New York City was the site of the attacks, no other part of the ‘planes operation’ timeline is known (to my knowledge) to have occurred in the city’s five boroughs. The closest thing would be when several of the hijackers led by Hani Hanjour moved into an apartment in Paterson and rented mailboxes at Mail Boxes Etc. in Fort Lee and Wayne, New Jersey nearby.

A Chinese man peers warily at my camera from the third floor office which once served as the Afghan Taliban’s makeshift UN mission. Before 9/11 I drove out to this place to try and get an Afghan tourist visa in person but the guys were never there. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

There are however a few tangential, yet important locales that fit into the larger picture. One quietly resides in a nondescript brown brick medical office complex at 55-16 Main Street in Flushing, Queens. This had been the site of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s ‘Mission’ to the UN (not a terribly convenient location for access to Turtle Bay?). I visited this dull building a couple of times in August of 2001 while trying to acquire a visa for Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The State Department ordered the two rather sullen ‘diplomats’ to close the office on February 13, 2001. But when I knocked on their door that summer there was still a sign on the front of the office door in English, Pashto, and Dari that listed it as their mission. And the phone still worked as either Abdul Hakeem Mujahid or Noorullah Zadran (most likely Zadran) would occasionally and very skeptically listen to my queries. I thought about titling this post a Salafi-jihadi tour of New York but of course the Taliban were hardcore Deobandis influenced more by radical Islam in British India than modern Saudi Arabia.

The door of the former Taliban UN mission office in Flushing, Queens. ©2002 Derek Henry Flood

From Flushing I made the long subway trek to downtown Brooklyn in the footsteps of the now long dead Sheikh Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. Azzam was bin Laden before bin Laden was. The original transnational jihadi ideologue, Azzam was born near Jenin, British Mandate Palestine in 1941. He fled to Jordan after the 1967 war when the Israelis began to militarily occupy his homeland. During his radicalization, Azzam was an early adapter to the Salafi interpretation of Islam and preached accordingly. According to New Yorker writer George Packer, the building pictured below was the location of Azzam’s Afghan Services Bureau which was used to recruit volunteers to fight in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad as well as funnel funds there.

The former site of 1980′s era Brooklyn mujahideen front Maktab al-Khidamat (Afghan Services Bureau) at 566 Atlantic Avenue. The front door was plastered with building and construction code violations from the City of New York and nothing appeared to be doing there. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

Next door to the perfume factory is the infamous al-Farooq mosque  (and former al-Kifah Refugee Center) at 552 Atlantic Avenue. It was here that, according to French scholar Giles Kepel, Azzam had kindly requested sympathizers to the jihad to send their donation checks made out simply to “Service Bureau.” Azzam had opened a checking account several blocks northwest of the office and mosque complex at the Independence Savings Bank on the corner of Court Street and Atlantic Avenue (which is now a Trader Joes supermarketin line with the area’s intense gentrification).

Site of the former Independence Savings Bank in Brooklyn (currently a Trader Joes supermarket) where Palestinian Salafi theologian Abdullah Azzam maintained a checking account to channel donations toward ‘Afghan-Arab’ groups fighting the Red Army and PDPA Afghan government forces in the 1980s. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

A 1995 New Yorker article describes how the CIA-linked Azzam as well as the currently imprisoned Omar Abdel Rahman preached at al-Farooq and a rustic masjid in Jersey City called al-Salam. Azzam is most often referenced as Osama bin Laden’s ‘mentor.’ After the conclusion of the Afghan jihad, Azzam and his sons were killed in a bombing in November 1989 while en route to salat al-juma (Friday prayers) at the “Mosque of the Martyrs” in Peshawar’s University Town district. The reasons for Azzam’s killing have never quite revealed themselves. Some believe it was factional infighting amongst the Arab jihadis in Peshawar who were adrift after the Red Army had withdrawn from Afghanistan earlier that year. It has even been speculated that bin Laden himself ordered his henchmen to carry out the bombing.

Whether Azzam is as relevant today to those in the sway of Salafi rhetoric I can’t be sure but it is very likely that Mohammed Atta and other old school AQ core operatives were very much influenced by the writings and speeches of a man with cause who once dined in Brooklyn’s halal eateries and opened a checking account with great ease in an open society.

On a side note, it was on this street that in the fall of 2000 I purchased a shalwar kammez–Pakistan’s national dress–at an Arab store (ie not a Pakistani one) to work on my senior thesis in…Peshawar.

The entrance to the al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood just after dusk. A muezzin made the azan (call) for salat al-maghrib (evening prayers) on loud speakers that echoed over the cacophonous traffic. I’d never heard the azan in the United States before. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

The new WTC tower, known as One World Trade Center, rises from ground zero eleven years after the original Twin Towers’ demolition by Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehi. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

Barcelona- Partly out of boredom and partly out of the itch to simply create something new out of old, I threw together this photo montage over the weekend. In this era of digital photography where one shoots thousands of frames rather than analog hundreds, I was reflecting on how almost all of the images I make will never see the light of day in this regard. I put this video together in a largely random fashion with images that have been just sitting in my laptop for years. I put the photos in the order they came to me as I grabbed them one by one from various folders containing my view of many of the biggest news events of the last 10 years.

Interspersed with them are much more sublime moments of everyday life around the world. An elephant in Thailand, an aged priest in Ethiopia, a glitzy office tower in Manhattan. This has been my reality and is our collective reality. Globalization and social networking simultaneously accelerate worldwide travel and technological integration while hyper compartmentalizing our lives. We speak more so to only those who we want to and listen to those with whom we already agree.

Dr. Abdullah Abdullah preparing to depart for Ghazni province with the Afghan airforce to campaign in remote ethnic Hazara villages. Abdullah was the leading opposition candidate challenging President Hamid Karzai in the August 2009 elections. On the right stands a Shi’ite Seyyid accompanying him to Shia population centers for campaign credibility. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood

No one knows just where any of this is going. Billionaire fraudsters suddenly imprisoned, social revolutions springing up from seemingly nowhere (though not quite), calcified dictatorships counted on for decades in the interests of “stability” suddenly crumbling to pieces, it seems as if the entire world order is in question.

No grand conspiracy here, just plain, old awful war. On August 15, 2006, a Lebanese ambulance lay destroyed by what appeared to be an Israeli missile strike (quite possibly a drone strike or SPIKE anti-tank missile) outside of Sidon in southern Lebanon, an irrefutable violation of the Geneva Conventions on war crimes. Pro-Likud right-wing bloggers would dare say scenes like these were part of elaborate false flag operations by Hezbollah or photoshop masterpieces by left-wing or pro-Hezbollah journalists meant to demonize the Israel Defense Forces. This ambulance was not part of the so-called “ambulance controversy” nor am I aware that this particular wreckage appeared anywhere in the international media at the time.  ©2006 Derek Henry Flood