Taleban boy from the 'burbs

5 Dec, 2001 08:33 AM4 mins to read

By ANDREW QUINN

SAN FRANCISCO - Most roads in California's Marin County lead to the American dream: million-dollar mansions, glorious beaches, the gracious arc of the Golden Gate Bridge.

For 20-year-old John Walker, the road out of Marin led to Islamic extremism and the ranks of Afghanistan's Taleban - an American boy waging "jihad" alongside the enemies of his homeland.

Walker's odyssey to the bloody Afghan prison uprising where he was captured with other Taleban fighters has shocked his friends and neighbours and left his family pleading for mercy from the United States military who hold him.

"John got caught ... He was in the wrong place at the wrong time," his father, lawyer Frank Lindh, said yesterday.

"It's not fair to say that John went to Afghanistan in order to work against or wage war against his own country."

Walker, who goes by his mother's name and had reportedly taken the nom de guerre "Abdul Hamid", has been dubbed "the American Taleban" by the news media.

His face - grimy, bearded and twisted in pain from a wound - has flashed across television screens as news outlets replay a brief interview he gave while in custody with other Taleban fighters captured after a prisoner revolt at the Qala-Jangi fortress near Mazar-i-Sharif.

Walker called himself a "jihadi", a holy warrior, and said his "heart became attached" to the Taleban's vision of Islam while a student of the religion in Pakistan.

Walker grew up in typically American settings, but it was clear early on he was intent on a different path.

After an early boyhood in Washington DC, he moved with his parents to Marin County where his father worked as a lawyer and his mother, Marilyn Walker, worked in home health care. The parents, who are divorcing, describe him as a "very sweet kid" whose initial interest in Islam was prompted by a high school assignment on The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the US black Muslim leader.

Walker, raised a Catholic, embraced his new faith after converting at the age of 16. He studied at a local mosque, started wearing Islamic dress and grew a beard.

Despite that, other elements of his life remained clearly American, from the basketball hoop in his family's driveway to his career as a promising student at a Marin County alternative school.

As Walker's ties to Islam expanded, his social circle began to change. At a local Islamic centre acquaintances described him as "shy but dedicated".

"Here was this young white kid from the suburbs who was very dedicated and who wore the traditional clothing, doing even more than some of the other kids whose parents were Muslim," Abdullah Nana, a friend from the centre, told the Los Angeles Times. In 1998, after graduating early from high school, Walker used the name Suleyman Al-Lindh. Then, with his parents' support, he set off to further his studies, heading first to Yemen to study Arabic and then to Pakistan for religious education.

Walker's parents said contact with their son was patchy. In his last communication, he said in an email from Pakistan in May he intended to go somewhere cooler to spend the summer. That turned out to be Afghanistan.

Walker's parents have hired a lawyer and are seeking safe passage to visit their son in US custody.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Walker - whom he described as "an American with an AK-47 in a prison with a bunch of al Qaeda and Taleban fighters" - would receive all rights entitled by law.

But he said it had not yet been determined how to treat the youth, who could face charges of waging war against his own country.

- REUTERS

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