Road to Jihad: Americans Recruited for Terror

Dec. 11, 2009 — -- ABC News has obtained the investigative report prepared by Pakistani police that offers insight to what had become the road to jihad for five young Americans.

Pakistani police this morning showed the pictures and the U.S. passports of the five young college students from the Washington, D.C., suburbs, who authorities say had come to Pakistan to train for jihad. The men have been identified as Ramy Zamzam, Umar Farooq, Waqar Khan, Ahmad Mini, and Aman Hassan Yemer.

The authorities said the recruitment began on the Web site YouTube after 20-year old Ahmed Mini praised videos that featured attacks on American troops.

According to the Pakistani interrogation report, the men ended up in a house in Sargohda in Northeast Pakistan after traveling to the country on separate flights over the Thanksgiving weekend.

They were on their way to al-Qaeda strongholds in North Waziristan when they were arrested on a tip from the FBI after their families back home reported them missing.

"They had left video cassettes back there for their parents," said Usman Anwar of the Sargodha police, " that they have left for jihad and they wouldn't be back, so we suppose that they were here for some very bad activities."

The news came as a shock in the suburban communities the men had left behind.

The five are now part of a steady stream of disaffected Americans coming to Pakistan to learn how to wage jihad.

"We really now have the worst of all possible worlds," said Clark Kent Ervin, former inspector general of the Transportation Security Administration. "We have a continuing threat from what I would call al-Qaeda central, foreign terrorists. We also have, as you say, a growing threat of insider terrorism here in the United States as well."

The five young men are being questioned today by the FBI in Pakistan, which is now focusing on the details of who exactly directed these men and how, in hopes that other Americans who might be in the same jihad stream can be detected.The men will likely be deported to the U.S.

In the case of these men they had initially been rejected by the first jihadist groups they approached because they didn't seem all that competent. They didn't speak the language and had too much of a Western demeanor.

It's one more indication that for all in the U.S., the road to terror starts in Pakistan. While U.S. troops are headed to Afghanistan, it is Pakistan that poses the most serious threat to this country.

Click Here for the Blotter Homepage.