The streets of New York City are filled
this evening with children who are going door to door with their parents “trick-or-treating”
for candy on Halloween. Many wear costumes of queens or pirates or bandits or
even ISIS terrorists, and some carry plastic toy weapons.
In New York City’s key borough of Manhattan,
the city’s 44th annual Village Halloween Parade is proceeding up Sixth Avenue, its
participants lining up between Canal Street and Spring Street, and then
marching north to 16th Street. Thousands of marchers are being cheered on by tens
of thousands of viewers standing on the streets and watching from windows
overlooking the parade route, many dressed and made up as a variety of
ballerinas, superheroes, villains, animals, and ghouls.
The LGBT community in particular turns
out in large numbers both as spectators and within the march itself—some being
arrayed in outlandish or risqué costumes and
others simply applauding the gay community’s freedom to dress and act as scandalously
and publicly as it pleases. It is traditionally a night to emulate the excesses
of such festivals as Brazil’s Carnival and Mexico’s Day of the Dead. The crowds
roar with approval as the most extravagantly dressed marchers pass by singing, dancing,
and carrying on.
This year, however, is different in kind
from previous marches because this afternoon, on a bright and brisk day in
lower Manhattan, a 29-year-old Uzbek truck driver, Sayfullo Habibullaevic
Saipov, who was a winner of the immigration lottery sponsored by the Diversity Immigrant
Visa Program—open to participants from countries with traditionally few U.S.
immigrants—went on a one-man killing spree.
Saipov’s reward for winning that lottery?
A much-valued U.S. Permanent Resident Card or Green Card as it is popularly
known. As one of the winners of the 2010 DIV lottery, Saipov was immediately eligible
to emigrate to the United States, and he moved to the Cleveland area early in
2010, relocating over the years to Tampa, Florida, and then to Paterson, New
Jersey, where he has been living with his Uzbek wife Nozima
Odilova and three young
children, including a new-born. His mother-in-law lives in a Brooklyn Uzbek
neighborhood.
The DIV Program was established by
Congress as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, signed into law by President
George H. W. Bush, and nearly eliminated in 2013 when the Senate “Gang of Eight”
proposed “sweeping bipartisan proposal[s] to revamp U.S. immigration laws” that
included removing the diversity lottery. A Republican Congress blocked any
changes. The DIV lottery program was established to encourage people who had
traditionally not immigrated to the States to become part of the diverse
American immigrant mix from all over the globe that settled in the country permanently
without having to wait long years for elusive Green Card approval.
Hence, seven years ago Sayfullo Saipov of
Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then a moderate Muslim from a relatively prosperous family, packed
his bags and came to America, his new Green Card a passport to a new life.
Because of language difficulties he found work as a commercial truck driver and
then as an Uber driver, and except for a series of traffic tickets, had no significant
criminal record. What else he did before Halloween 2017 is being established by
the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in a national and international
investigation.
All this has transpired because this
afternoon Saipov drove a rented Home Depot flatbed pickup truck from New Jersey
into Manhattan and turned south onto the Hudson River bike path on West Street
near Stuyvesant High School (the most selective competitive high school in the
city) where he kept on driving, barreling through that bike path for about 14
blocks during which he killed eight bike riders and pedestrians and injured
eleven others before crashing into a minibus carrying disabled
schoolchildren. Two of the children and two adults on the bus were also
injured. The dead bikers include five Argentine friends who were celebrating
their 30th polytechnic school graduation, a Belgian mother of two, a young New
Yorker who lived nearby, and a man from New Jersey. A sixth Argentinian was among
the injured.
The bike lane was strewn with bikers’
broken bodies—several impressed with truck tire marks—and the mangled bikes of
those riders. It was a gruesome scene, anticipating in actuality what the
Halloween marchers would thereafter simulate on Sixth Avenue with their
skeletons and skulls and symbols of death on the march.
Saipov had driven the truck down West
Street in order to practice turns prior to his Halloween attack.
“He had planned to continue the attack for several more miles to the Brooklyn
Bridge.”
After the unanticipated bus collision
Saipov hopped out of the damaged rental truck, ran around the streets briefly,
yelled “Allahu Akbar” (the ancient Islamic phrase for “God Is Great” that has
become the call of choice for Islamist terrorists following the 9/11 attacks on
New York City), and waived two guns.
These actions immediately attracted the
attention of several New York City police officers, one of whom shot Saipov in
the abdomen and brought him down. He is currently alive but intubated in a New
York City hospital after undergoing surgery.
The two guns in Saipov’s possession consisted
of a relatively harmless paintball weapon and a pellet gun, evidence (if more is
needed) that Saipov did not expect to survive the attack alive and/or that his
planning was less than sterling.
Saipov left a note in the
pickup truck “claiming he committed the attack on behalf of the Islamic State
of Iraq and the Levant.” He left other writings in Arabic that referenced ISIS
and its goals. Notwithstanding the contents of the notes, New York Governor
Andrew Cuomo has initially indicated that Saipov “appeared to have acted
alone,” adding that “[t]here’s no evidence to suggest a wider plot or a wider
scheme. These are the actions of one individual meant to cause pain and harm
and probably death.”
When
Saipov was first interrogated prior to surgery (pre-counsel questioning is
permissible in order to forestall potential imminent additional terrorist
activities in the wake of an attack) he was defiant, smug, and proud of his
actions, but provided no further information, according to law enforcement
personnel. He was subsequently charged with
providing material support to a terrorist group and violence and destruction of
motor vehicles, “Prosecutors [alleged] that Saipov planned the attack for
Halloween because he knew more people would be out on the streets.”
In
the FBI’s initial investigation “agents found 90 videos and 3,800 photos on
Saipov’s phone, many of which were ISIS propaganda.
This included videos of ISIS fighters killing prisoners and
bomb-making instructions. Agents said he was particularly taken with a video in
which ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ‘questioned what Muslims in the United
States and elsewhere were doing to respond to the killing of Muslims in Iraq.’”
Saipov
was apparently radicalized online within the U.S., and was not formally connected
to the Uzbekistan extremist organization known as the IMU—the Islamic Movement
of Uzbekistan—which was originally affiliated with al Qaeda but in 2015 switched
its allegiance to ISIS. Uzbeks have been reported as assisting ISIS and its
affiliates in the combat arenas of Syria and related areas for some time, and
hence the sympathies of Saipov are not unusual regardless of the fact that he was not listed on
the FBI or international terrorist watch lists at the time of his attack.
No
international Islamic terrorist organization has claimed credit for Saipov’s
attack even though that attack “closely mirrored
instructions for a vehicle attack offered in an ISIS magazine last November.”
Saipov
was also undoubtedly inspired by previous “lone wolf” fatal truck attacks on
pedestrians in Stockholm (by an Uzbek), Nice, Berlin, London, and Barcelona,
all within the past two years. In fact, such attacks are becoming the
terrorists’ “attack of choice” because they require little in the way of
weapons, planning, explosives, or even manpower. Some law enforcement personnel
describe Saipov’s attack as a red letter ISIS truck attack that was carried out
specifically as described in Islamic social media instructions.
The
death and destruction such attacks leave in their wake can be substantial. As
were the death and destruction this Halloween in Manhattan, a mere five blocks
from the site of the twin towers of the World Trade Center that were destroyed
by Islamic terrorist airline hijackers sixteen years and fifty days earlier on
September 11, 2001, killing at least 2,753 people in the towers including first
responders who were attempting to rescue them. Another 224 additional innocent
victims perished in the nearly simultaneous airline crashes into both the
Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania when the final airliner was
brought down by the passengers’ revolt against their hijackers, avoiding yet a
third attack on a U.S. target of importance.
America
is under attack. Yet again. With no end in sight.
But
as poet Maya Angelou wrote, referring to the brutal subjugation of
African-Americans for centuries, “And still I rise.”
“You may write
me down in history
“With your
bitter, twisted lies,
“You may trod
me in the very dirt
“But still,
like dust, I’ll rise.”
As
will the American people.
[updated November 2]
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