Al-Matari whittled this number down to thirty-nine by sending four two-man teams of recruiters across the U.S. for individual meetings and evaluations. These potential recruits did not know what they were being asked to do at this point, only that they were being considered by Islamic State leadership for a role in the organization. Some clearly thought they would be going into Syria to fight in the jihad; others pieced together on their own from the questions asked by the recruiters that their work would be inside America.
Abu Musa al-Matari spent considerable time looking carefully into the remaining thirty-nine. He found a couple of the possible recruits who, while apparently not on any terrorist watch lists or known to the government as potential radicals, nevertheless had relatives who had expressed jihadist views or had spent time under FBI surveillance.
That would not do. This operation needed the purest of the pure, because this operation was not designed with an end date in mind. He didn’t want FBI to have any interest in these individuals, even after the attacks began.
He eliminated a few more who did not have the physical characteristics he required. One man was too heavy; another had a knee injury that had not healed.
Finally, Musa al-Matari narrowed his choice down to thirty-one potential recruits. His recruiters in the U.S. met with each man and woman again and offered them the chance to serve.
Twenty-seven agreed. Of the four who did not, three demanded to fight on the front lines in the Middle East, and they were told they would be contacted soon.
One more man, a thirty-three-year-old convenience store owner from Hallandale Beach, Florida, had told his wife, a recently converted Muslim, about his conversations with ISIS recruiters, and she demanded that he report the recruiters to the police. The man refused, but warned the recruiter that his wife might make trouble.
Three days later another ISIS team drove into town, donned ski masks, and shot both the clerk and his wife to death while they worked behind the counter of their store.
And now Musa al-Matari was here in the hills of western El Salvador, looking over his twenty-seven recruits, all of whom had just passed their monthlong training.
The Guatemalan trainers had left earlier in the day, and now, in the evening before the last of the day’s light had left the jungle, al-Matari had assembled his operatives in a dry streambed within sight of the rusty barracks. He stood in front of them while they all sat on rocks or on the hilly creekside.
Al-Matari was proud of his students. The trainers had put the class through small-arms training, small-unit tactics, taught them how to fight hand to hand and with edged weapons. They taught them how to build bombs and booby traps and, more than anything, they hardened this class — only a few even knew how to hold a gun on day one, but by the end they could all confidently and rapidly hit targets with an AK-47 at more than a hundred meters, an Uzi submachine gun at fifty meters, and a pistol at fifteen meters. They could reload quickly, transition from shoulder weapon to handgun with economy of movement, and move in groups of twos and fours, covering for one another, keeping up the fire during reloads.
They shot from rusted-out cars and threw dummy grenades and built simple booby traps and explosives.
These weren’t Special Forces by any stretch; but after thirty days of training, they were a competent unit of operatives. They had spent much more time firing weapons than a soldier in the U.S. Army’s ten-week basic-training course, and their drills were one hundred percent based on killing their targets, and getting away to do it again.
Looking at them now, al-Matari could barely recognize some of his cleanskins. They’d all lost weight in these austere conditions, but they were stronger, more confident, more steely-eyed, and ready for the war to come.
To be certain, some were better than others, but none had washed out utterly. He’d keep his eye on a couple of them, and he’d modulate the missions to play to the strengths of his force, but overall he was more than pleased with the students here at the facility he called the Language School.
Except for those who were related, the men and women here did not know one another’s names. Al-Matari assigned them numbers as they arrived. It had nothing to do with seniority or pecking order. Those who arrived first had lower numbers, and the woman who arrived last took the number twenty-seven.
He had separated them into cells, five in all, and though al-Matari had names for each of the cells, he did not share them with the group. He just called them one through five.
But Matari had divided them geographically, based on the city in the geographic center of the homes of the cell members. There was Chicago, five men and one woman. They were members of two families, both second generation, and he had identified them early on as one of his best and most competent teams.
There was Santa Clara, his California cell. Again, five men and one woman. Two with Pakistani passports and two Pakistanis with British passports, and two Turks with German passports. The Turks were husband and wife. All six were students in the San Francisco area and, besides the Turks, they did not know one another. Now they lived and trained together, perspired and bled together.
Fairfax was five men. Four were U.S. citizens of Arab descent, from Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq. And the fifth was an African American named David Hembrick. While Hembrick was a star pupil at the Language School, the rest had had trouble with some decision-making, and they argued among themselves regularly. But they could shoot, and Fairfax was as committed to this cause as any of the other cells.
Al-Matari would have liked a better-integrated cell to position near the nation’s capital, but he would make do with the recruits at his disposal, and send other cells into D.C. to help when necessary.
Atlanta was five — four men and one woman. All but one were American citizens, one a blond-haired, blue-eyed twenty-three-year-old from Alabama who had converted to Islam and reached out online three years earlier to a group in Somalia, where he went over to fight. He made it back to the States without the government picking up on his actions, so al-Matari felt it was worth the risk adding him to the team, because he was the only one of the group who had any sort of combat training. There was also a black woman from Mississippi named Angela Watson, an extremely intelligent college student who’d secretly married a Tunisian student who joined ISIS to fight in the Middle East. She planned on accompanying him over, initially wanting to “make cubs for the jihad,” but when the opportunity arose to serve ISIS in America, she knew no one would ever think of her as a Muslim jihadi, so she and her husband flew to the Language School, where Angela exceeded her husband’s skills in every way.
Detroit was another strong unit. Five in number, four men and one woman. All of them were U.S. citizens or permanent residents, and al-Matari knew they, as well as Chicago, would be the teams he gave the toughest missions to.
Al-Matari addressed them now in English, because it was the one language everyone here at the camp understood. He spoke perfect English, with a decidedly British accent, so the twenty-seven men and women in front of him all assumed he came from the UK.
“It is time to tell you more about your mission. First, know this. You are now soldiers. Warriors. Mujahideen. You will hear the word ‘terrorist’ from the American media, but your targets are not the targets of terrorists. You will soon see that your targets are handpicked to hurt America’s ability to fight against Islam, against the Islamic State. You will be proud of your fight, and you have every right to be. You are lions of the caliphate. Vanguards of the jihad.”
The group cheered in unison.
One of the young men from Santa Clara said, “Mohammed, we trained with the Guatemalans using the weapons they brought. But how are we getting back home with weapons?”