Homegrown Terrorism

Daniel Boyd Has Been Charged With Plotting To Carry Out Violent Jihad, But His Actions Aren't So Out Of Place In North Carolina

By Terry Mancour
Sunday 2 August 2009 18.00 BST
Courtesy Of The Guardian

Daniel Boyd, one of seven men from North Carolina to be charged with planning 'violent jihad' in countries including Israel. Photograph: AP/City County Bureau of Identification Photograph: AP

There is an irony hovering around the arrest last week of seven suspected terrorists in Willow Spring, North Carolina. The cell of Islamic radicals, including one drywall-hanging, truck-driving good ole' boy convert – Daniel Boyd – was busted in what is often considered exclusively Bible-belt territory. But despite the common perception of folks from North Carolina being black and white and Baptist all over, bedroom communities like Willow Spring, just south of the state capital, Raleigh, are filled with expatriates from all over the world.

The Research Triangle Park area is home to four major universities, state-of-the-art medical centres and enough private research facilities to lure the brightest minds from every culture on Earth. That makes the Triangle home to thousands of foreign nationals. The town of Cary, for example, has one of the highest concentrations of South Asians in the country – about 20%. Durham, the cosmopolitan City of Medicine where Boyd attended the Ibad Ar-Rahman mosque, is home to a polyglot mix of ethnicities and nationalities. I have neighbours who are Sikh, Shia, Sunni, Presbyterian, Buddhist, Shinto, Hindu, Jewish, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Coptic, Wiccan, Mormon, Scientologist, agnostic and atheist. All of them get along in a pleasantly secular fashion.

Boyd's case is a little more interesting than his alleged co-conspiritors. A sandy-haired drywall installer whose step-father was Muslim, Boyd converted to Islam and had a reputation for being a quietly devout family man in Willow Spring. But he also, apparently, had been recruited as a mercenary in his youth to wage violent jihad – as part of the US-led effort to train and equip the mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the late 1980s and early 90s. Details are, understandably, murky. But it's reasonable to suspect that the US or its allies paid for that training.

He stands accused of stockpiling automatic weapons (which, due to North Carolina's liberal gun laws, is both ridiculously easy and laughably common) and supporting a violent jihad movement overseas. He in no way stands accused of plotting attacks on US soil or against US interests or of exhibiting any behaviour that could be considered traitorous to the nation of his birth. None of the countries he travelled to would have put him and his fellows at odds with American service personnel in a war zone – he wasn't trying to kill US Marines in a bloody jihad in Iraq. He seems to simply have militantly supported the liberation movements – jihadist in nature – in several Islamic conflict zones like Kosovo and Gaza.

He also stands accused of "practising military tactics" in a rural North Carolina county last year. But the case can be made that any recreational shooting party (a fairly common occurrence in Dixie) or paintball game could be construed by a prosecutor as doing just that. He apparently also once gave a Kalashnikov demonstration in his living room – a rite I have been subjected to by good ole' boys of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds a number of times over the years. His stockpile of arms was sneered at by a few of my friends who have ancestral armouries dating back to the civil war.

In spite of the impulse to brand him a terrorist and ship his butt to Gitmo, Boyd doesn't seem to be guilty of much beyond advancing unpopular political and religious beliefs at a time when official US policy is running the other direction. He was a foreign fighter who, according to federal authorities, supported an off-shore militant movement. If he had done exactly the same things in support of, say, a political movement in South America or some other non-Muslim region, it's doubtful he would be prosecuted at all. But he devoutly believed that jihad against those perceived of oppressing his co-religionists was the obligation of all good Muslims, and that made all the difference.

The irony is that US policies created men like Boyd, and had he acted similarly in support of Israel or against Cuba's communist regime, he might have even gotten a CIA "get-out-of-jail free card" – as it appears he did when he was sprung from Pakistani bank robbery charges in the 90s. He was also considered a violent jihadist terrorist financially and materially supporting the mujahideen then, too – by the Soviet Union.

To our government, though, he was a valuable asset to be used and rescued by the US state department, for doing much the same thing he stands accused of today.