Reply #15: one interesting example [View All]

if somewhat atypical - is the guy portrayed in this article of the Chechen Times:


>> 21.07.2003

An American Fighter’s War in Chechnya

(...)

At the age of 19, Collins was out of prison and at loose ends in San Diego. As a teen he’d been in a gang, robbed liquor stores and gotten into a gunfight while robbing a home. In jail he’d converted to Islam. Hearing about the plight of Bosnia’s Muslims, he left California with a vague plan of taking up arms in their defense.

Events detoured him to Afghanistan, where he got weapons training among mujahedin busy harassing Russian forces in Tajikistan — among them Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the man sentenced to death in Pakistan for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. After Afghanistan came Chechnya, where Collins took a second bride (in addition to his wife back in the United States), lost a leg, and waged war alongside guerrilla leaders Shamil Basayev and Khattab.

Collins considered himself one of the mujahedin — which he defines as men fighting to protect the women and children of any invaded and oppressed Muslim lands, from Chechnya to Kosovo. He guesses there are 10,000 mujahedin around the world, perhaps half of them in Chechnya.

(...)

Soon, back home in America, he was a paid FBI informant moving in circles he said included Hani Hanjour, the man believed to have piloted American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. An FBI spokesman told The Washington Post that as an asset of the bureau’s counterterrorism team in Phoenix, Arizona, from 1996 to 1999, Collins «did some very productive things and helped some cases over the years."

(...)

"’Braveheart’ was our favorite movie, and we watched it at least once every couple of days,"

(...)

http://www.chechentimes.org/en/people/?id=3024