In October 2001, nearly a month after the 9/11 attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan. The Americans were surprised to discover a 19-year-old countryman fighting for the Taliban
‘Detainee 001’ and Ernest Hemingway
Dubbed the ‘American Taliban’, the bearded teen John Walker Lindh became ‘Detainee 001’ in America’s war on terror. In October 2016, The New York Times carried an op-ed by Paul Theroux urging the then US president Obama to commute his sentence on compassionate grounds. In an earlier op-ed in the same paper, Lindh’s father compared his son’s actions to Ernest Hemingway’s during the Spanish Civil War
From Kashmir to Kunduz, a terror story
So was Lindh a scapegoat, a victim of the charged post-9/11 times? Inspired by Spike Lee’s Malcom X, Lindh converted to Islam in his teens and went to Yemen to learn Arabic. He then went to Pakistan, joined a terror group and fought in Kashmir.
He later moved to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban’s vision of sharia before being caught in Kunduz Lindh, Georgelas and the Islamic State Has Yahya Lindh, as he calls himself now, repented? Graeme Wood, who has spoken to Lindh, writes he has “spent his sentence studying Islam”.
Lindh has expressed cautious support for the IS. “More than a decade in prison appeared to have the same effect on Lindh that 34 months in jail were to have on (US-born IS leader) John Georgelas: not a softening of jihadism but a confirmation of it,” writes Wood in The Way of the Strangers
To be released in two years
Most sentences for terror-related cases involving US citizens in the post-9/11 era “are ripening into release just now,” the Foreign Policy magazine’s website quotes a lawyer as saying. “Now it will be up to President Trump to decide one of the trickiest legacies of the war on terrorism: how to treat homegrown terrorists after they’ve served their time,” it adds