The Jihadist from Phoenix

 

The Jihadist from Phoenix

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/03/22/the_jihadist_from_phoenix_eric_harroun?page=full

 

 

Eric Harroun claims to have joined up with an al Qaeda-linked group fighting

in Syria's brutal civil war. We tracked him down, but getting the truth was

more difficult.

BY GREG TEPPER, ILAN BEN ZION | MARCH 22, 2013

 

In mid-January, a video emerged on YouTube of an English-speaking man,

wearing a black-and-white kaffiyeh and surrounded by four bearded Arab men,

addressing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad directly. "Your days are

numbered, you're going down in flames, you should just quit now while you

can," he said. "You're going to die no matter what ... we will find you and

kill you."

 

The speaker was Eric Harroun, a white American from Phoenix, Arizona, who

hails from a Christian family. He has become a self-described Sunni Muslim,

fighting in Syria's brutal civil war -- even, he claimed, joining up with

Jabhat al-Nusra, which the State Department has labeled an alias of al Qaeda

in Iraq. He served nearly four years in the U.S. Army's 586th Engineering

Company, but was never deployed overseas.

 

In mid-March, a video released by Assad's supporters celebrated the alleged

death of "The American" fighting in Syria. But Harroun himself confirmed to

us that the rumors were false: In a Skype chat on March 17, he appeared

alive and well, and claimed he was staying near the upscale Taksim Square,

in Istanbul, Turkey.

 

"Don't worry your little yahmickah [sic] off your head, Bashar will be dead

before me," he wrote in a Skype chat on March 15. Two weeks earlier, we were

the first journalists, to our knowledge, to make contact with Harroun. Weeks

of following Harroun's digital trail on Facebook, MySpace, and chat forums

culminated in contacting him through his Skype handle. We published an

account of our initial conversations with him in a Fox News expose -- a fact

that prompted Harroun to denounce us as Zionist conspirators. At times, he

was explicitly anti-Semitic: In a March 17 video chat, he referred to one of

us multiple times as "that fucking kike."

 

In our first conversation with Harroun, which began in Skype chat, he seemed

paranoid about being tracked by U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies. When

on March 2, we asked him whether he had joined up with Jabhat al-Nusra, he

answered, "5 Amendment" -- referencing the stipulation in the Bill of Rights

against self-incrimination. Providing "material support" to Jabhat al-Nusra

would constitute a crime in the United States. He then sent a beer icon and

asked, "What r u C.I.A or Mossad?"

 

His initial reluctance to give a solid answer regarding his connection to

Jabhat al-Nusra encouraged us to probe further.

 

Pinning Harroun down is never easy. At times, he appears willing to provide

very specific details about himself, while at others he becomes more

reserved, preferring to not comment or flat-out denying his previous

statements -- only to retract his retractions. He can become inexplicably

hostile, hurling accusations of lying and anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist

comments, or respond with flippant or jocular comments. He will also, in the

middle of a line of questioning, simply write "bye" or "halas" (his

rendering of the Arabic word for "enough"), and cease communication.

 

But there's no doubt that Harroun has been involved in the fight against

Assad in Syria. In addition to confirmation by a rebel spokesman that he had

linked up with a brigade affiliated with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), one

video shows Harroun in a Jeep driving across a desert landscape, toward a

crashed helicopter. "Yes, we smoked those motherfuckers, didn't we?" he

says.

 

Harroun's first video appearance, in which he addresses Assad directly, may

also contain a hint about his connection with radical Islamist groups. In

the video, one of the fighters alongside him is wearing a shoulder patch

that resembles the insignia used by jihadist groups, including Jabhat

al-Nusra.  The video's publication on YouTube coincided with the time

Harroun said he began associating with Jahbat al-Nusra.

 

During conversations on March 4 and March 16, Harroun said that Jabhat

al-Nusra "picked [him] up" after the rebel group he had been traveling with

was largely wiped out in a firefight with Assad forces. On March 16,

however, he denied that he was a member of the organization, insisting that

he was only a member of a rebel group that was part of the mainstream FSA.

 

Nevertheless, that retraction didn't stop Harroun from bragging, unprompted,

that he had met Jabhat al-Nusra's elusive leader, known by the nom de guerre

Abu Muhammed al-Julani. He said that the two had met twice in January at an

unspecified location near the Syrian-Iraqi border, and described the

terrorist leader merely as a "humble man of few words." He refused to

describe Julani's reaction to meeting an American fighter in the FSA.

 

Harroun also said that he established a friendship with a Jabhat al-Nusra

operative known as Sheeshani -- Arabic for "The Chechen." This man is shown

sitting beside him as they drive toward the crashed helicopter, and appears

again in a video purportedly showing his death a few weeks ago near the city

of Raqqa in northeastern Syria.

 

On March 15, Harroun confirmed a close relationship with Sheeshani. Harroun

said he'd heard of his friend's death, identifying him as "Shaheed [martyr]

Ismael." Ismael, he said, had a Russian mother and Syrian father -- possibly

Kurdish -- and was killed by shrapnel in a Syrian Air Force bombing run near

the northeastern city of Raqqa. Harroun said that Ismael was not an

extremist, and "was a good young kid" who had killed at least 50 of Assad's

soldiers.

 

Harroun claimed to belong to a militia known as the Amr Ibn al-'Aas Brigade,

which is part of the FSA. The media spokesman for the Amr Ibn al-'Aas

Brigade acknowledged in a Skype chat in February that Harroun had operated

with their outfit near Aleppo, but said he had since left Syria for the

United States. The iconography employed by the brigade on its Facebook page

clearly distinguishes it as a Salafist group, according to Raphael Green

from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), and the spokesman had

warm words for the jihadist group: "[I]n Syria all civilians like alnusra

because alnusra protect them and give them a lot of living assistance."

 

Getting a straight answer out of Harroun about his background proved as

difficult as parsing his actions inside Syria. His credibility was already

brought into question once, when we discovered he'd lied to us about his

family heritage: He had told us his father was Lebanese -- a fact denied by

the father, Darryl Harroun, when we contacted him during the course of our

initial investigation. Harroun backpedaled after we confronted him, saying

that's what he tells his comrades in order to gain more credibility with

them -- and that all other details he supplied are true.

 

Harroun appears to have had trouble with the law while residing in the

United States. He made public on his MySpace page three years ago that he'd

been jailed for driving under the influence, and Arizona public records

indicate that he was convicted multiple times for driving while intoxicated.

 

As reported in our original Fox article, Harroun seemingly drifted toward

Islam after becoming close with two Iraqi-American brothers, Maadh and

Hayder Ibrahim. Both Harroun's father and one of his friends, Alon Benditoo,

cited the brothers, with whom he studied at Pima Community College in

Tucson, as key influences in Harroun's embrace of Islam.

 

But getting any details about his upbringing out of Harroun was a

conversational minefield. Answering a follow-up question after the original

piece ran regarding his father's comments about the Ibrahims, Harroun

replied, "My crazy father said that." Asked about his anti-Zionist comments,

with which his mother told a local Phoenix television news station she

disagreed, Harroun replied, "My Mom says that because She is a turn the

other cheek type. But I am an eye for an eye type. Get it got it, good!

Never mention my Mother again!"

 

Unlike previous conversations, including one in early March in which he

said, "I am a Muslim," Harroun on March 15 provided conflicting answers

about how he found Islam. At one point, he cited a sixth-grade report and

having "studied the Middle East in general" as the basis for his ongoing

interest in Islam.

 

Judging by his conversations with us, Harroun doesn't appear to strictly

follow the tenets of his faith. While observant Muslims tend to shun

alcohol, Harroun appears to enjoy drinking. A lot.

 

Alcohol and women came up in the majority of our conversations with Harroun.

He stated openly that he drinks beer. While talking to us from what he said

was a disco in Turkey, Harroun wrote he was "trying to bang some Turkish

girl right now lol." He then referenced the eighth-century Abbasid ruler

Harroun al-Rashid, explaining that he was "a Caliph of Baghdad and a

womanizer." On another occasion he lauded the pleasures of Istanbul as "good

beer and nice women."

 

Harroun said he was "content" with his religious observance as a Muslim.

Asked if his Syrian rebel comrades know that he drinks, he answered that

they did and that their reaction was "haram haram [forbidden] blah blah."

 

Harroun continues to speak to us online. He has threatened to retain the

services of a "Jewish" attorney for redressing what he claimed were

misrepresentations of his jihadist connections in our article, while at the

same time continuing to claim that he is cooperating with Jabhat al-Nusra.

His behavior can appear both inexplicable and manic.

 

Harroun, in a conversation on March 16, invited one of us to Istanbul,

adding, "bring me a bulletproof vest." Though he mentioned that he has made

one trip to the U.S. consulate in Istanbul, he appears to be leaving open

the possibility of returning to Syria.

 

If Harroun does return to Syria, his erstwhile comrades may greet him with

suspicion. According to MEMRI's Green, several jihadi Internet forums have

taken note of him: One author on the Ansar al-Mujahideen forum, who goes by

the pseudonym Wali Allah, writes, "I don't blame him of anything, but I am

not reassured with regard to him. Jabhat al-Nusra should be cautious."

 

A little risk, however, doesn't seem to scare Harroun. In one of our chats,

we brought up a recent Los Angeles Times article reporting that U.S.

officials were considering the possibility of using U.S. drone strikes

against Islamist extremists in Syria. Harroun's response was short and

simple: "Fuck a drone."

 

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