Daniel Boyd and homegrown terrorism

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On Monday, federal agents including four SWAT teams converged on a house outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. They arrested Daniel Boyd, his two grown sons and four other young men allegedly being instructed in military techniques.

The grand jury indicted Mr. Boyd on charges evolving from an apparent desire to go overseas to participate in a ‘violent jihad.’ Mr. Boyd, who had traveled to both Pakistan and Afghanistan for military-style training, had fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The federal indictment suggests the motive for the training was religious extremism and that Mr. Boyd was prepared to die as a martyr for his beliefs.

On "The Takeaway," Dave Dewitt, the Raleigh bureau chief for North Carolina Public Radio said the Muslim community in Raleigh is having a hard time with news of the arrests, "Unfortunately  [some] are taking the Muslim community here in Raleigh and putting them all in the same boat. The Muslim community here is very active, it’s about 6,000 strong in the Raleigh area, and they’ve gotten out in front of this and said look … we don’t know what the situation is here, we know some of these people — we don’t know them well, please don’t paint us all with the same brush."

"There are 60,000 Muslims in North Carolina — let’s just look at it from a good point of view that a few people, whether they are innocent or guilty, that doesn’t mean it has to hit the Muslim community here, and Islam too," said Jihad Shawwa from The Muslim American Society-Freedom at a news conference in North Carolina.

Dewitt says 39-year old Daniel Boyd was singled out as the ringleader of the alleged terrorist group because he was the oldest, "So the allegations are that Daniel Boyd was the ringleader and that these younger men had become disenchanted in their own lives, and somewhat disenchanted with the Muslim faith as it’s practiced in some of the more moderate mosques here in Raleigh, and that they had formed this group. And Daniel Boyd and his family … broke from the Islamic center here in Raleigh about a year ago and started having prayer services at his house.

"The wife of Daniel Boyd now has come out … and she says these trips they took overseas, they were just to get in touch with their Islamic faith, and to … understand what countries are predominantly Islam and how they work. Obviously the US government sees them a little bit differently, they’ve got some evidence — they haven’t laid out much of it, some of it’s in the indictment."    

Peter Bergen, a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden," says this case is different than the other homegrown terrorism cases he’s seen.

"A lot of the cases that we’ve seen in the last several years since 9/11 have been informant-driven, so there’s always the question of is someone being entrapped," said Bergen. "Often the cases have evolved around people talking about acts of terrorism that’s not really doing anything; but we’ve seen a number of cases in the last year or so where I think the bar is higher. The case in Minnesota, for instance, where the group of Somali Americans who went to fight with a quasi-Al Qaeda-like group in Somalia. One of the Americans involved actually committed suicide in a suicide attack — the first time ever an American has ever done that.

"Now this case doesn’t quite amount to those others yet, from what we know about it, but … this group had assembled a very large number of weapons … and when you combine that with the kinds of views of jihad and martyrdom that appear in the indictment, and then you combine that with travel to places like Kosovo, Jordan and Israel … they were seeking some foreign jihad opportunity as the Department of Justice would suggest."

Bergen says the cases make him question whether they are isolated incidents, or if there’s a homegrown radical movement at work.

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