Lindh, John Walker (1981–)

A young American convert to Islam, John Phillip Walker Lindh became known as the “American Taliban” after being captured fighting alongside Taliban forces in Afghanistan in November 2001. Brought back to the United States to stand trial, Lindh pled guilty to supplying services to the Taliban and agreed to serve a 20-year sentence.

Lindh was born in 1981 in a suburb of Washington, D.C. At the age of 10, he moved with his parents and two siblings to San Anselmo, an affluent community in the San Francisco Bay area. He attended private schools and cultivated various interests, including one for hip-hop. Browsing the internet for more information on this musical genre he became enthralled by websites on Malcolm X and, subsequently, Islam. By the age of 16, Lindh had converted to Islam and changed his name to Suleyman al Faris.

Feeling that local mosques could not fulfill his desire to live in an Islamic environment, the 17-year-old Lindh traveled to Yemen, where he enrolled in a school to study Arabic. He soon became dissatisfied by the school's lack of focus on Islam, however, and he went to live on the campus of Al Iman University, an institution on the outskirts of Sana'a headed by the Yemeni Islamist leader Abdul Majid al Zindani.

After spending some months in a madrassa near the Afghan border, in the spring of 2001 Lindh got in contact with leaders of Harakat ul-Mujahideen, a Pakistan-based jihadist group with close links to the Taliban and al Qaeda. Lindh underwent paramilitary training in a Harakat ul-Mujahideen camp and then traveled to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban.

In May 2001, Lindh reported to Taliban recruiters in Kabul, who assigned him to al Qaeda's al Farouq camp. Lindh spent six weeks at al Farouq, where he briefly met Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders. Asked to conduct operations against the United States and Israel, Lindh chose instead to join Taliban forces fighting against the Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan. A few weeks before the September 11 attacks, Lindh reached the front lines in the Takhar province with a handful of foreign fighters.

In November 2001, under heavy bombardment from U.S. airplanes, Lindh and many of his comrades surrendered to the Northern Alliance warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. They were detained at the Qala-i-Jangi fortress, and some of the prisoners started a bloody rebellion that killed, among others, CIA operative Mike Spann, the first known U.S. victim in Afghanistan. Lindh, though injured, survived and was taken into custody by U.S. forces. After being treated by the U.S. military, on January 23, 2002, Lindh arrived back in the United States where he was indicted on a number of charges, including conspiring to kill Americans. He eventually pled guilty to one of the charges—supplying services to the Taliban—and was sentenced to 20 years in a federal penitentiary.

As the first American arrested in the “war on terror,” Lindh attracted enormous public attention. While some considered the “American Taliban” a traitor who had consorted with both the Taliban and al Qaeda, others thought of him as a naïve young man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lindh has since publicly expressed regret for his actions and condemned al Qaeda.

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