http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/international/asia/08jihad.html?
Ex-Londoner's Diary of Jihad: A Portrait Sprinkled With Koran Verses
and Epithets
By DAVID ROHDE and MOHAMMED KHAN
Published: August 8, 2005
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Aug. 4 - In a small house outside the city of
Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, a 25-year-old man from the
suburbs of London chronicled his personal holy war in the pages of a
diary.
March 10, 2005. "All alone in a strange land," he writes. "I can
trust no-one except Allah."
March 26. Questions how fellow Muslims can live peacefully in London
when the "kufr," or unbelievers, have turned every corner of the
globe into "a battlefield for the Muslims." Calls London the "vital
organ of the minions of the devil."
April 5. Vows to make "an all out immense effort" to "rejoin my
contingent."
What specific operation the man, Zeeshan Siddique, was preparing for
is unclear. One month later, Pakistan security forces arrested him
at the house after receiving reports that he was acting
suspiciously. Inside, according to a Pakistani security official,
investigators found an electrical circuit that could be used as a
bomb detonator; a desktop computer that contained aeronautical
mapping; and the cryptic 35-page diary, typed in English, with
nearly daily entries from March 2 to April 6, 2005.
The Pakistani official said he believed that Mr. Siddique was
waiting to be dispatched as a suicide bomber. Phone numbers found
with Mr. Siddique have been traced to known members of Al Qaeda, as
well as British extremists involved in a failed plot to detonate
bombs in London in 2004, the investigator said.
The British police are also investigating whether Mr. Siddique, who
was reared in Britain, had ties to the terrorist attacks in London
on July 7, officials said. In particular, they are trying to
determine whether a diary entry on March 13, in which Mr. Siddique
says he has learned that "wagon is now called off," refers to the
July 7 bombing plot.
Mr. Siddique denies having played any role in the failed 2004 plot
or the recent London attacks, according to the Pakistani security
official. Still, his diary offers a chilling, if fragmented, self-
portrait of a young Muslim man not only disaffected with Western
society, but with other Muslims unwilling to join in jihad.
Printed on sheets of paper from Mr. Siddique's computer, in mostly
capital letters, its 35 pages are sprinkled with British slang,
profanities and verses from the Koran. Entries from the diary were
shared with The New York Times by a Pakistani security official who
insisted on anonymity because of the delicacy of the investigation.
Across the top of its first page is a quote from the Koran: "The
greatest tests are truly to be soon alleviated."
Based on the diary entries, he quickly grew uncomfortable, even
contemptuous, of those around him after arriving at the house near
Peshawar in early March.
"I can't live in filth unlike u animals" he writes on March 8,
calling a group of Pakistani neighbors "dirty geezers" and a
Pakistani store owner a "monkey con artist." He suffers bouts of
diarrhea and is unhappy with his hideaway, which has no running
water.
In the same entry he also notes that a person he contacted over the
Internet "seemed 2 be chickening out." He fears he is
being "conned," and is running out of money.
On March 10 he complains of isolation and not speaking the local
language. "Im constantly laughed at & ridiculed," he writes.
Mr. Siddique has told investigators that he is from the London
suburb of Hounslow and is a Muslim of Indian descent. Efforts to
locate his family in Hounslow were unsuccessful. The only traces of
his former life are school records and a single clipping from a
Hounslow area newspaper.
The article, from November 1997, quotes the police as saying that
the then 17-year-old Mr. Siddique "ran off to join the mujahedeen"
in Lebanon. He returned to his "frantic parents" one month later,
the article says. It says Mr. Sidddique suffered from "a depressive
illness."
After the British press reported his possible link to the London
bombings last month, officials in Hounslow issued a statement saying
he was an "ordinary, average" student at Cranford Community College
there from September 1992 to July 1997. But officials also say they
believe that he befriended another student at Cranford, Asid
Muhammad Hanif, who blew himself up in the suicide bombing of a Tel
Aviv nightclub in 2003.
"We think they were friends," said Philip Sutcliffe, a Hounslow
government spokesman.
Mr. Siddique has told interrogators that he first traveled to
Pakistan in February 2003 with a British Muslim who was one of eight
men later arrested on suspicion of having a role in the failed 2004
London plot.
He also said he had spent two and a half months in the eastern
Pakistani city of Lahore with Mohammed Junaid Babar, a Pakistani-
American computer programmer from Queens, according to the Pakistani
security official. Mr. Babar pleaded guilty last year to charges of
supplying military equipment to a Qaeda training camp in Pakistan
and working to aid the failed 2004 London plot.
While denying involvement in the two plots, Mr. Siddique has told
interrogators that he spent the last two years fighting in
Afghanistan and Kashmir. His diary offers little sense of what
initially drove him to extremism, but abounds with examples of how
he views the world through a radical lens. He rails about Pakistanis
who "claim 2 b Muslim" but "don't get it thru there thik heads" that
it is their "fard," or religious duty, to help him wage his holy
war.
On March 11, he visits people whom he identifies by code name and
learns "bad news." "The relaxing place was done over," he writes,
and "7-8 of the guys taken whilst asleep."
"Told guys need 2 make a move soon," he writes. "Cant stik round."
On March 15 Mr. Siddique is told "the situation is really bad" and
he should "just sit tight & wait it out until things get a bit
better."
Over the next week he gardens, listens to BBC radio news broadcasts
and rejoices at the death of "Yankee pigs" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He sees himself as a valiant defender of a faith under
siege. "Indeed the kafrs do possess everything at the moment but for
how long," he writes on March 23. "Indeed the armies of Islam are
coming."
On April 5 he complains about endless news coverage of the death of
Pope John Paul II and predicts that "Allah will throw him in hell."
On April 6 he celebrates the deaths of Prince Rainier of III Monaco
and the American Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, whom he called a "Jew
boy writer friend of Herzl," apparently a reference to Theodor
Herzl, the founder of the Zionist political movement, who died in
1904.
"Excellent news," he writes. "May Allah curse them."
He seethes the most at Muslims he sees as aiding the West, calling
them hypocrites. Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is
Satan. Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of Iraq is "the dog of the
hell fire."
When his spirits flag, Mr. Siddique bolsters his morale by
watching "vids," apparently videos or DVD's from the "bros," or
brothers, in Iraq.
Mr. Siddique has told interrogators that he misses his parents in
Britain, according to the Pakistani security official. But he
believes that the only way he can spend eternity with them is by
becoming a martyr.
"Do not waver or become weak," he writes in one of his last diary
entries. "This is the only way I can be reunited with Mummy and
Daddy."
David Rohde reported from Islamabad for this article, and Mohammed
Khan from Peshawar.
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