Homegrown Jihadist Terrorism in the United States

Three years later, another violent incident motivated by political Islam bloodied the streets of America’s capital. On the morning of July 22, 1980, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former press attaché at the Iranian Embassy in Washington, was shot dead on the doorstep of his Bethesda home. Since the 1979 Revolution, Tabatabai had been a staunch opponent of the Iranian regime and authorities immediately suspected a political motive for his murder. What they quickly came to learn was that Tabatabai’s killer was a Long Island native and former Baptist named David Theodore Belfield. Belfield, an African American convert to Sunni Islam who also went by the name Dawud Salahuddin, had been hired by Iranian officials to conduct the assassination. Belfield left America a few hours after the murder, reportedly finding shelter in the Geneva home of Said Ramadan, the right-hand man of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al Banna and one of the movement’s most important leaders of the last fifty years. Belfield eventually reached Iran, where he has been living ever since. "I was primed for violence, and I thought about cratering the White House a quarter century before Al Qaeda did," said Belfield in a 2002 interview with The New Yorker. "It would be accurate to say that my biggest aspiration was to bring America to its knees, but I didn't know how."

The Washington siege and the Tabatabai assassination represent two early examples of a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked by experts and policymakers alike: homegrown terrorism of jihadist inspiration inside the United States. Over the last few years, and particularly after the July 2005 London bombings, much attention has been devoted to homegrown jihadist networks in the West. Academics and security services have been analyzing the growing threat coming from small clusters of Western-born, self-radicalized militants who look at al Qaeda as an ideological inspiration but who act with varying degrees of independence from it. Yet most analyses have been based on the dual assumptions that this phenomenon has manifested itself only extremely recently and that it is largely limited to Europe. While these two assertions are not completely unfounded, they do not take into consideration significant anecdotal evidence pointing to an extensive history of homegrown networks inspired by radical Islam operating within the United States.

Obviously the Washington siege and the Tabatabai assassination possess characteristics that set them apart from what could be described as today’s prototypical homegrown terrorism of jihadist inspiration. For example, despite their demand to ban the movie Mohammad, Messenger of God, the actions of the 12 Hanafi Muslims that seized the heart of Washington for a day seem to have been motivated mostly by internal disputes among the most radical fringes of African American Muslim groups. In contrast, Belfield’s actions appear to have been directed from abroad and should be interpreted as an attempt of the newly established Iranian regime to eliminate one of its opponents by using an American executioner. Today’s homegrown networks, conversely, are predominantly motivated by a strict Salafi interpretation of Islam and have no links to foreign governments.