Brother Describes Al Qaeda Suspect as Dutiful Muslim

The United States considers Ahmed Omar Abdel Rahman a top official in Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network. To Abdullah Omar Abdel Rahman, Ahmed is the older brother who trained him in football and wrestling.

But the last time Abdullah saw Ahmed was in the late 1980s, just before Ahmed left for Afghanistan with another brother, Mohammed, and their father, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman--the leader of a radical Egyptian Islamic group who is serving a life sentence in the United States for plotting to bomb New York landmarks.

“My brothers went to Afghanistan to fight the enemy of Islam, the Soviet Union, which was as important a duty to Muslims as praying,” Abdullah, 27, said Saturday in an interview at his apartment here.

Abdullah described the U.S. war on terrorism as a war against Islam. But he wouldn’t say whether that meant that a jihad, or holy war, against the U.S. was as legitimate as the war against the Soviets.

He warned, however, that capturing another member of the Rahman family would only “ignite more conflict against the U.S.”

He denied that either Ahmed or Mohammed has ties to Al Qaeda, saying that they “may have had a personal relationship with Bin Laden, but that does not necessarily mean they belong to Al Qaeda.”

Abdullah, who is working on his master’s degree in Islamic theology at Al Azhar University in Cairo, insisted that there is an ideological difference between Al Qaeda and his father’s Gamaa al Islamiya, to which Mohammed and Ahmed belong.

“Al Qaeda believes that the United States is the main enemy of Islam,” he said. “The Gamaa Islamiya doesn’t.”

He said his brothers stayed in Afghanistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union because they weren’t particularly welcome in Egypt. “They opened a business in Afghanistan,” he said. “Also, returning to Egypt would have been difficult because they would be branded as terrorists here.”

The Rahman family has not heard from the brothers since Mohammed called from Afghanistan more than a week ago to inform them that he was safe and that Ahmed had been captured, Abdullah said.

He admitted that the most he had heard from his brothers in the last 12 years were brief telephone conversations once or twice a year.

“We don’t like to discuss sensitive topics over the phone,” he said. “But I once asked Mohammed about reports that his voice was identified during a conference in support of my father which was attended by Osama bin Laden, . . . and he [Mohammed] said that it was all fabricated.”

Throughout the interview, Abdullah avoided meeting the eye of the female reporter, looking either straight ahead or down. He sat behind a gray metal desk in an office with bare walls and a pile of dusty books on Islam on the floor.

The office, the closest room to the main door, was separated from the rest of the apartment by a curtain--a custom to keep the eyes of strangers off the women of the household.

Abdullah refused to allow an interview with his mother, who was the only one who talked with Mohammed when he called recently. Abdullah said that women are forbidden to interact with the media and that when men are available, there is no reason for women to appear.

Abdullah said that he is concerned about the fate of his brothers in Afghanistan but added that the family knew there was a price to pay when they left to fight “the enemy of Islam.”

“Dying as martyrs, though,” he said, “is completely different than being captured and humiliated by the U.S.”