What makes a young Canadian want to join al Qaeda, train in urban warfare, and take part in a suicide bombing mission? Those were the questions journalist Stewart Bell has as he began writing his book, Martyr's Oath: The Apprenticeship of a Homegrown Terrorist.

Bell's book looks at the life of Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, a seemingly average Canadian who got swept up in the al Qaeda ideology. Bell says it's precisely that "ordinariness" that made Jabarah an ideal pawn for al Qaeda.

"This is what the terrorist organizations are looking for these days," he explained to Canada AM.

"They're looking for people who are educated, have something to offer, have skills to offer the organization. And in particular, people who are western, who live in the West, who have western passports so they can bypass those security measures that have been put in place since 9/11."

Jabarah, a former resident of St. Catharines, Ont., turned out to be an excellent al Qaeda pupil and eventually won himself an audience with Osama bin Laden.

"Mohammed was one of the very few members of al Qaeda who did what they call 'the martyr's oath'. It's an oath of allegiance that you give to bin Laden either in writing or just a statement in which you basically commit yourself to the cause and to bin Laden and to jihad.

"The estimates of the number of people that took it are very low, maybe only a few hundred. So he was a very select member of the organization."

Jabarah would later confess that he acted as an intermediary between al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah, which is believed to be responsible for the blast in Bali in October 2002 that killed 202 people.

He was charged in the U.S. and pleaded guilty to: conspiring to kill U.S. nationals; conspiring to destroy U.S. property abroad with weapons of mass destruction; conspiring to kill U.S. employees while on duty; and conspiring to use U.S. weapons of mass destruction against American property.

His case has been kept top secret and is not known where he is currently being held.

Excerpt of 'The Martyr's Oath: The Apprenticeship of a Homegrown Terrorist'

PROLOGUE

He called himself Sammy.

He arrived on a coach bus over the bridge spanning the Straits of Johor, the choppy emerald slough that separates Malaysia from Singapore. It is a long, low bridge that, in the space of a few kilometers, links the Third World with the First, transporting travelers from the chaos of the rough Malaysian border region of Johor to the order and stunning wealth of Singapore's high-tech miracle. After the grit and dysfunction of Kuala Lumpur, Singapore seems like it has somehow dropped out of the sky, a tiny island of gleaming office buildings and manicured parks surrounded by the verdant jungle of Southeast Asia.

At the Tuas border checkpoint, Sammy filled out an immigration landing card using his real name, Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, citizen of Canada, age 19. Under the heading Occupation, he wrote: Student. Under Purpose of Visit, he wrote: Tourism. Both answers were lies, but nobody bothered to ask. He flashed his blue and gold Canadian passport and was waved into the Republic of Singapore. He rented a room at the Royal India Hotel, a $50-a-night guesthouse in a three-storey building in Little India. There was an Internet terminal in the lobby, and the Mustafa shopping center was just across the street, a few blocks from the Abdul Gaffoor Mosque. The souvenir shops sold plastic lions, mementos of the Lion City, and miniature Buddhas—tiny versions of the obliterated ancient statues he had seen in Afghanistan a few months earlier, after the Taliban had shelled them with mortar bombs.

Near his hotel, Sammy met his contacts, members of local terrorist cells whose names and telephone numbers he had been given in Pakistan prior to his departure two days before September 11, 2001. He explained that he had come to plan Al Qaeda's next big strike after 9/11. The Al Qaeda leadership had sent him to blow up embassies in Singapore and Manila. He was the envoy, he explained, of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Kuwaiti engineer behind Al Qaeda's deadliest attacks. They talked about targets and how to purchase the explosives they needed. Money was no problem. Al Qaeda had given Sammy $10,000 cash for start-up costs, and there was more where that came from.

They bought a video camera and went out to film the buildings they intended to bomb. They sat at a bus stop on Napier Road opposite the American embassy and zoomed across the eight lanes of traffic to the guard post, then panned up to the U.S. flag. Next was the Israeli embassy on Dalvey Road. Sammy sat in the back seat and aimed the camera out the driver's side window as they rolled past the embassy at moderate speed. When they were opposite the guard post, Sammy quickly lowered the camera. The targets were just as bin Laden would have wanted, for in the doctrine of Al Qaeda, the Israelis and Americans have joined together in a conspiracy to invade, occupy and control the Muslim world. "The Jews manipulate America and use it to execute their designs on the world," bin Laden had said in one of his recruiting videos.

During their reconnaissance outings, they behaved like tourists, sometimes posing in front of the camera while recording images of their targets in the background. Sammy played the part of the tourist with remarkable skill for someone who had spent the better part of the past year immersed in the austere other-world of terrorist training camps. Although still a few weeks shy of his 20th birthday, Sammy already had a thick Omar Sharif mustache that made him look older than he really was. His brown eyes were shaded below eyebrows that joined at the bridge of a hawkish nose and were so thick they looked like they had been drawn there with a black felt marker. His grin expressed quiet confidence. He bore a resemblance to the flamboyant rock singer Freddie Mercury. He sometimes wore a baseball cap and big aviator sunglasses. The overall effect was that he looked like just another tourist, out to videotape the sights of the city. And that was exactly what he wanted.

Singapore was Mohammed Jabarah's first assignment as a terrorist. During his training, he stood out as an exceptionally bright recruit. He was a particularly talented sniper, deadly accurate with an AK-47. He placed first in the Al Qaeda sniping competition. Another bonus: He had a Canadian passport, which allowed him to cross borders without problems, as his easy entry into Singapore demonstrated. He also spoke fluent English and, having grown up in Canada, he knew how to talk and behave like a Westerner. He could fit in. And he was cool and steady under pressure. With his skills, he should have been working for the good guys. Had he not been recruited into Al Qaeda, he would have made an excellent addition to the Canadian military, intelligence service or police. He was on the wrong side of the war on terror.

In Canada, he had been by all accounts a quiet student with good grades, the son of hard-working immigrants from Kuwait who had moved to Ontario after the Gulf War to escape the perpetual insecurity of the Middle East and to give their four sons a better life, a better future. Mohammed had been accepted into university and talked about becoming an engineer or a doctor. Instead, he turned his back on his adopted home and joined a cause devoted to the destruction of Western society. He became, in his eyes, a mujahedin, a holy warrior, a soldier of God. Stripped of its romantic euphemisms, he became a terrorist. In ruling in a terrorism case, a Canadian judge, Pierre Blais, once quoted the saying, "Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are." Mohammed Jabarah's friends were the most bloodthirsty, fanatical murderers in the ranks of Al Qaeda.

Mohammed Jabarah was at the vanguard of a disturbing trend that intelligence agencies throughout the Western world were then just beginning to notice. The type of people joining terror networks was changing. Radical Islamic groups were no longer made up of just Saudis or Pakistanis; they were increasingly the sons of middle-class immigrants living in North America and Europe. Intelligence officers started calling them "homegrown terrorists," those who were either born in the West or had immigrated at a young age, and yet were still somehow subscribing to Al Qaeda's jihadist ideology.

There were the Lackawanna Six in upstate New York, just a short drive from where Mohammed grew up in Ontario. There were the Moroccans in Spain involved in the Madrid commuter train bombings and the Britons arrested for planning an ammonium nitrate bombing in the United Kingdom. The core of the 9/11 terror squad was recruited in Germany. Following the "7/7" bombings in London, which killed more than 50 people, a leaked Cabinet dossier described how British youths were being recruited into extremism. The "factors which may attract some to extremism" were listed as anger, alienation and activism. "A number of extremist groups are actively recruiting young British Muslims. Most do not advocate violence. But they can provide an environment for some to gravitate to violence. Extremists target poor and disadvantaged Muslims, including through mosque and prison contact. But they also target middle-class students and affluent professionals through schools and college campuses. Others get recruited through personal contact, often by chance, and maintain a low profile for operational purposes."

One of the jihadis believed to have gone to Syria to help the Iraq insurgency is a French-born 13-year-old. There were no training camps in his neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris, but Prologue5he didn't need them. He had the Internet, Arabic satellite TV and a radical Algerian preacher who told the local boys about the abuse of Muslims and asked what they were going to do about it.

"Europe is gradually, but surely, rivaling the Middle East and Afghanistan as a recruiting hub of Islamist terrorists," Michael Taarnby of the Center for Cultural Research in Denmark wrote in a paper commissioned by the Danish Ministry of Justice. Dennis Richardson, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization chief, said that, "While small in absolute terms, the number of Australians confirmed or assessed to have undertaken terrorist training courses continues to grow."

Canada's intelligence service is now reporting the emergence of a "new generation of jihadists." Some were born in Canada; others immigrated as children. They are young, educated and computer-literate. In many cases, they were raised in households where radical Islam was the norm. "Canada is home to a number of young men who are the sons of known Islamic extremists and have adopted a jihadist mentality," says a "secret" Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) report.

The first person charged under Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act was a Canadian-born Muslim, accused of taking part in a bombing plot in the United Kingdom. In October 2004, Russian troops claimed to have killed a young Canadian from Vancouver, who they said was an armed fighter with Chechen rebel forces. It later emerged that he was a follower of a Canadian sheikh who had said in a recorded lecture, "It is inconceivable that a true believer will not desire martyrdom." In Israel in late 2004, a young Palestinian-Canadian pleaded guilty to charges he was recruited into Hamas. And then there are the Khadr siblings, all Canadians, raised by Ahmed Said Khadr, a close associate of bin Laden's. One of the boys was sent to Guantanamo Bay for allegedly killing a U.S. soldier; another said his father tried to recruit him to be a suicide bomber; a third was wounded in the gun battle in Pakistan that killed his father.

"The presence of young, committed jihadis in Canada is a significant threat to national security for a number of reasons," says another "secret" CSIS study. "These individuals are very familiar with Canadian customs and morés and have no difficulty fitting into Western society. They have excellent English-language skills and can pass as average Canadians, thus evading more rigid scrutiny by security officials. Their knowledge of Canadian—and by extension Western—society renders them a valuable resource for international Islamic extremists who need individuals to infiltrate our countries to carry out terrorist acts. Young Canadian extremists also have bona fide Canadian travel documentation. The possession of a valid Canadian passport facilitates international travel." Yet another CSIS study reports, "Some of these individuals . . . [such as] Jabarah . . . have engaged in terrorist operations. For terrorist recruiters, these young men's idealism, hatred, language skills and cultural familiarity with the West renders them valuable potential resources in the international Islamic extremist movement."

When he trained at Al Farooq camp near Kandahar, Mohammed Jabarah met Frenchmen and Americans. Two of the men who trained with him were Australians with blonde hair. Another spoke with a distinctly British accent. These were not the despondent, poverty-stricken revolutionaries that conventional wisdom says join terrorist causes out of despair and lack of hope. All had joined the jihad out of comfortable homes in the West. They had thrown it all away for the brotherhood of martyrdom, and that trend has only worsened as Iraq has emerged as the new land of jihad. "They are, for all intents and purposes, elitists, much as Hitler's youth were," Saudi columnist Dr. Mohammed T. Al-Rasheed wrote in the Arab News about young, Western-educated jihadis. "Like the Nazis, they believe in their own superiority of moral and racial origins."

Since the Soviet War in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and the other Sunni Islamic extremist groups that share its ideology have become expert at bringing such young men into their organizations and making them the cannon fodder for the advancement of their international agenda. The recruiters know Prologue7just the right buttons to push. They play off current world events, portraying them as yet another example of the repression of Muslims. They use friends and clerics to approach potential recruits, and they couch their recruiting in the unquestionable authority of religion. Terrorists are recruiting through four frameworks: friendship, kinship, worship and discipleship.

Jabarah is a classic case.

Mohammed's journey to the dark heart of Al Qaeda was guided by all four influences until, at the age of 19, he formally swore the martyr's oath to die for bin Laden. And now, weeks after the 9/11 attacks, he was walking the streets of Singapore, posing as a tourist while orchestrating a day of holy terror. The plan was typical of Al Qaeda. He would rent a godown—a warehouse. He would buy six trucks and hide them in the warehouse while Mike the Bombmaker, his Indonesian explosives expert, rigged each with three tons of fertilizer and TNT. On the chosen morning, Arab suicide bombers would detonate the bombs-on-wheels outside the targeted buildings. Hundreds were going to die. Al Qaeda was counting on it.

The mechanics of Al Qaeda bombing operations are by now well known, owing to their nauseating repetition from New York to Bali. What remains elusive is perhaps the more fundamental question: How could someone possibly reach this level of fanaticism? How does a man like Sammy get here from there? How does he reach the stage where he is not only willing, but eager, to kill masses of innocent people? As a little boy, Mohammed never wanted for anything. His father was a businessman, his mother a lawyer, his grandfather an elected Kuwaiti official. One of the Jabarah family homes had an indoor swimming pool. There were bad times, for sure, but for the most part, Mohammed lived a life of privilege. He had money, family, friends, security and a good education. He had deep and proud roots in the Arab world, and he had the gift of Canadian citizenship. He could have done anything with his life.

So, how did he become a terrorist?