Hardball Tactics in an Era of Threats

Law enforcement officials in Washington see powerful evidence for their concern about homegrown terrorists, including the bombings in London a year ago and last month's arrests in an airline-bombing plot.

A few of the local men admitted trying to fight U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. And even if the local jihad network had its focus abroad, officials say, they couldn't ignore its potential danger.

"These individuals established strong relationships [and] received ideological and physical training" from a group now on the U.S. terrorist list, McNulty said in an interview last year, when he was U.S. attorney in Alexandria. "At the very least, they became a kind of infrastructure of support for international terrorists."

Turning to Their Back Yard

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, hundreds of FBI agents worked on counterterrorism at the headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. But their focus was overseas.

"What we did not know was our own back yard," said Michael E. Rolince, a retired FBI counterterrorism official. Hobbled by staff reductions and wary of violating civil rights, the FBI paid little attention to the Muslim community in the Washington suburbs.

Meanwhile, that community was changing rapidly. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of local residents who claimed ancestry from a mostly Muslim country jumped 75 percent to about 114,000, according to census data analyzed at the State University of New York at Albany. The Council on American-Islamic Relations estimates the total Muslim population in the area at 250,000, including African Americans and white converts.

Like other immigrants, Muslims have been drawn here by the embassies and universities, as well as the booming economy. Many are secular professionals.

But in recent years, an ultra-orthodox Islamic movement blossomed, spurred by a global Saudi missionary campaign. By 2000, the Saudis had built Islamic colleges in Fairfax County and Alexandria and were sending free Korans and preachers to the area. Hundreds of young people were inspired by the movement -- among them, Chandia.

The short, dark-eyed youth arrived from Pakistan in 1994, the son of a lawyer who wanted a U.S. education for his children. "Ali was never especially religious" before he arrived in Gaithersburg at age 17, according to a Web site organized by his supporters.

But he gravitated toward Muslim youths who shared his culture, said the mother of one of his friends at Watkins Mill High School, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Chandia's supporters discouraged contact with the media. For the boys, she said, the mosque "became a community center . . . because they're not really comfortable with the opposite sex. That's a cultural thing."

As a college student, Chandia became increasingly religious. He took classes at a Saudi college in Fairfax. And he began to frequent a new Islamic center in Falls Church called Dar al-Arqam, where he became the assistant to the main speaker, a charismatic scientist in his late thirties named Ali al-Timimi.

Many of those attending the center were children of secular immigrants, rebelling against what they considered their parents' lax observance.