James Kitfield is senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress. He is a former senior correspondent for National Journal and has written about defense, national security and foreign policy issues from Washington, D.C., for more than two decades.

Tennessee seems an unlikely birthplace for American jihad. Yet long before the five U.S. service members were murdered this past week in Chattanooga, before the Boston Marathon bombers, the Fort Hood shooting or the rise of the Islamic State, it was another troubled teenager from the same state who embarked on a journey of jihad and ended in the first deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil after 9/11.

The road to jihad began here, where Highway 40 bisects the state Abraham Lincoln once called the “keystone of the southern arch,” heading southwest out of Nashville and Jackson and through endless miles of rich Mississippi delta before riding the steel scaffolding of the Hernando de Soto Bridge across the wide lazy waters.


Memphis is where the call-and-response songs of the cotton fields and the gospel hymns of the local black churches fused with the blues of the Southern chitlin’ circuit and the twang of country honky-tonks in the bars and music clubs of Beale Street, creating a powerful concoction that changed American music forever. And which, not incidentally, turned Memphis into a tourist mecca that Melvin Bledsoe’s company, Twin City Tours, is happy to service, transporting you to, among many other places, Stax Records soul music museum and Sam Phillips’ original Sun Studio (the “birthplace of rock ’n’ roll”), the late great B.B. King’s Blues Club and Jerry Lee Lewis’ Café and Honky Tonk—and, of course—Graceland.

A quiet man with chiseled features, slight of stature and with a deliberate diction rounded at the edges by a gentle Southern accent, Melvin Bledsoe has a politeness and direct manner that puts people at ease right away. During summers not so very long ago, Twin City customers were often greeted personally by a proud Melvin and his teenage son Carlos, who since he was 8 years old had been groomed to one day take over the expanding tour business. Carlos attended school at suburban Craigmont High (“Go Craigmont Chiefs!”), sandwiched between the Redeemed Christian Church of God and the nearby East Side Baptist Church. He played basketball at the high school and met his girlfriend and prom date at a local Baptist church. The Bledsoe family—father, mother, son and daughter—lived nearby in a tidy neighborhood of one- and two-story mostly brick houses, with small yards and, in the case of the Bledsoes, a front porch with rocking chairs and, at one end, a prominently displayed American flag.

A few years back, Melvin Bledsoe was living a black middle-class, Southern Baptist version of the American dream. Both of his children were college bound, a step up the socioeconomic ladder that Melvin’s own parents could never afford. The Bledsoes were a tightly knit family clasped in the bosom of a supportive and familiar community. And then a personal crisis opened the door to an utterly unfamiliar intruder, and an idea was planted in a wounded psyche that improbably blossomed into a dark and noxious ideology. And before they even understood the gathering peril, the Bledsoes’ American dream became a nightmare.

Somehow, in ways that a heartbroken Melvin Bledsoe even now doesn’t fully comprehend, his beloved son Carlos was transformed into a murderous jihadist, a hate-filled man who called himself Abulhakim Mujahid Mohammed.

Carlos, to a certain extent, was patient zero in the phenomenon of homegrown, lone-wolf terrorism, a scourge that struck the nation once again this past week, when another young man went on a shooting spree at a recruiting station in Tennessee. The parallels between the life stories of that alleged shooter, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, and Carlos Bledsoe’s are chilling and, perhaps, instructive.

The scene of the July 2015 shooting in Chattanooga, Tennessee outside a military recruiting center. | AP Photo

Both men grew up in Tennessee and turned toward jihadism at a vulnerable moment in their lives resulting from drug and alcohol use and unrelated arrests. They were both further radicalized after extended stays in the Middle East, the birthplace of a virulent form of fundamentalist Islam. Like Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hassan, they both ultimately were influenced by the sermons of the charismatic, radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who in 2011 became the first American citizen to be targeted and killed in a U.S. drone strike. Both Mohammed and Abdulazeez chose military recruiting stations in the south as the targets of their violent jihad.

That journey toward Islamist radicalization and terrorism has become a well-worn path for homegrown extremists, and their growing numbers threaten to overwhelm U.S. authorities, especially the FBI, who are tracking them in a desperate attempt to thwart their plots and, as they say, “stay to the left of the boom.”

***

To his family, Carlos Bledsoe was the happy-go-lucky jokester. His sister Monica, older by seven years, liked having him around when her friends were over to the house, and they all practically adopted the boy with the high-wattage smile as their own littler brother. Carlos played sports, liked rap music and going to dances, and wore his pants too damn low for Melvin’s taste, but kids these days, you know?

And yet there were signs even in high school that Carlos had a hot temper and was susceptible to falling in with the wrong crowd. There were a few fights that ended up in the records of the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, including an apparent road rage incident and another that was written up as gang-related, but nothing that led to formal charges. When Carlos set off for Tennessee State University in Nashville to study business in anticipation of taking over Twin City Tours, Melvin and his wife were among countless middle-class parents around the country who breathed a sigh of relief at having steered their child through treacherous teenage shoals and on to college.

At left, Carlos Bledsoe appears on June 5, 2009 with his attorney, Jim Hensley, in a Little Rock, Arkansas courtroom. At right, Bledsoe is escorted from the Little Rock police headquarters a few days prior. | AP Photo

But trouble followed Carlos to college, culminating in a far more serious brush with the law. On the night of February 21, 2004, a police cruiser in Knoxville pulled Carlos’ blue Mazda over in a traffic stop. A man sitting in the front passenger seat immediately took off running, and a subsequent search of the car found a rifle and a shotgun that Carlos told the police he was trying to sell. The police also discovered a bag of marijuana in Carlos’ pants pocket. He was charged with unlawful possession of a weapon and drug possession and was staring at a possible sentence of up to 14 years in prison. The prosecutor knocked it down to a year’s probation in a plea deal, but on the condition that Carlos stayed out of trouble. Otherwise he might have to do the hard time.

The plea deal seemed to have the intended result of scaring Carlos straight. Knowing that he had to fundamentally change his life and circle of friends, Carlos Bledsoe launched on a spiritual quest. He sought God’s guidance in the Southern Baptist Christianity of his youth, and in a couple of orthodox Jewish synagogues. Neither provided the life-changing epiphany or sense of belonging that he was seeking. Carlos had a cousin who was a lifelong Muslim, and he had once seen Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan speak, so he decided to explore Islam as well. As it turned out, and somewhat to the surprise of his family, Carlos would not have to venture far from his college campus at Tennessee State.

As it happened, Tennessee State offered the free course “Introduction to Islam,” taught by founders of the Olive Tree Education Foundation, the proselytizing arm of the local Islamic Center of Nashville. Promoting itself as a moderate outreach group embracing a tolerant version of Islam, Olive Tree had provided hundreds of hours of instruction to TSU students. As the TSU curriculum in 2005 stated, the course on “Islamic Creed” was taught by Sheikh Abdulhakim Ali Mohamed, the imam of the Islamic Center of Nashville. Another Olive Tree cofounder and leader of the center, Awadh Binhazim, also taught courses in Islam at both Tennessee State and Vanderbilt.

In letters he later wrote to journalist Kristina Goetz of Memphis’ largest daily newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, Carlos Bledsoe recounted the sense of belonging and wonder he first experienced on attending services at the Islamic Center of Nashville. Despite being unfamiliar with the Islamic rituals of bowing and prostration, he recalls being “drawn and amazed” by the congregational prayer, or “salah.” When asked if he was a Muslim, Carlos responded that no, he was just interested in the faith, a declaration that was met by enthusiastic praise and shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is the Greatest.” The congregation, Carlos wrote, “embraced me like I was a long lost brother.”

What would a young black man and son of the South, scared and confused about the direction his life had taken, find in the unfamiliar environs of a mosque that would so resonate? Plenty, as it turned out. Certainly there was a sense of acceptance by the many transplanted Africans and Middle Easterners among the congregants, part of Nashville’s burgeoning population of Somali and Kurdish refugees. There was also the tradition of Black Nationalism preached by Farrakhan, though the conservative Islam taught in the Islamic Center of Nashville was a more exotic strain. What seemed most to resonate with Carlos Bledsoe was the message that he had only to submit his will to God, and the answers to all the confusing questions at the center of his life would be revealed.

Later, Carlos would give a compact disc to his father and other family members in an attempt both to explain himself and to convert them to Islam and save them from eternal hell. It contained a well-known sermon titled “Why You Should Be a Muslim” delivered by Imam Dawud Adib, an African-American convert and former Christian chaplain who had embraced Islam in the 1970s. In his sermon, Adib paints a vivid picture of the hereafter that awaits Muslims (“When you sweat in paradise, your perspiration smells like perfume”), and describes how simple submission to the tenets of the faith guarantees entry and anchors lives tossed in life’s tempest.

For the Bledsoe family, the first sign that Carlos was fundamentally reordering his life occurred during the Christmas holidays when he came home from college. Carlos and his brother-in-law Landis were sitting in the den chatting and sharing a few jokes, and then from a nearby room Melvin Bledsoe heard a voice raised in anger. When he came into the den to ask what the shouting was all about, Carlos was yelling at his brother-in-law about a perceived slight against Muslims. As Imam Adib stressed in “Why You Should Be a Muslim,” turning the other cheek is not part of the Islamic creed or God’s will. The scene repeated itself at a later family gathering, with Carlos getting into a loud argument with a cousin who was a Freemason and whose belief in symbolism was an affront to Carlos’ evolving religious beliefs.

“When I saw Carlos argue that my cousin was like the worst person on earth for being a Freemason, there was so much anger in his eyes that he didn’t even seem like the brother I had grown up with,” Monica Bledsoe says in an interview. “That’s when I first realized there was someone whispering into his ear, putting these ideas into his head.”

Carlos insisted on taking down a photo of Martin Luther King that had hung in the Bledsoe house for decades.

Despite the occasional outbursts, the Bledsoes tried not to overreact to Carlos’ planned conversion to Islam. They understood that the arrest had shaken him badly, and he was looking to change his life and become a better person. That he had stopped drinking alcohol, let alone using drugs, seemed positive. Clearly his new friends at the Islamic Center in Nashville had also embraced him with open arms. The fact that Carlos had begun giving away all of the possessions that he had once cherished—music videos, DVD players, an iPod, even his ridiculously expensive tennis shoes—could be taken as a sign of greater maturity. Nor was anyone particularly bothered by Carlos’ insistence on trying to grow a scraggly beard, or the way he started rolling up his pants legs above the ankles.

And yet signs began mounting that it was a very doctrinaire and insular form of Islam that Carlos was embracing. He mostly stopped coming home on weekends and holidays, and one time when he did return Carlos insisted on taking down a photo of Martin Luther King, Jr., that had hung in the Bledsoe house for decades. As a practicing Muslim, Carlos said he was not allowed to sleep in an abode where photos of “idols” were honored or pictures of anything with a soul were permitted. Then Carlos took his beloved dog into the woods and abandoned him because of religious strictures suggesting that in the houses of the holy dogs do not dwell, nor are living creatures pictured.

At that point Melvin Bledsoe started to worry and decided to find out more about the people influencing Carlos. Yet every time he and his wife visited Carlos in Nashville to take the measure of his son’s new Muslim friends, they were nowhere to be found.

Salafist fundamentalists read the Quran literally and reject any separation of church and state in favor of a strict interpretation of Islamic Sharia Law. The chief guardians and exporters of that ultraconservative strain of Islam are the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, home to the holiest sites in Islam and the place where Wahhabi teachings are considered the official form of Sunni Islam, and are sponsored by the state and the ruling House of Saud.

In the sermon “Sharia—Our Way of Life,” given before the Vanderbilt Muslim Students Association and captured in the documentary “Losing Our Sons,” produced by the Boston nonprofit group Americans for Peace and Tolerance, Awadh Binhazim of the Nashville Islamic center explained this devotion to a “pure” Islam that guides adherents in politics as well as spirituality: “Because the Sharia is a complete way of life of Muslims, the idea that you can separate Islam to become an individual experience for everyone, that Islam is a private matter, and that it cannot be a State matter, and a community matter, that is not the teachings of Islam.”

“Losing Our Sons” unearths other troubling aspects of the Olive Tree Foundation’s curriculum and teachings, including a website that at the time listed among its recommended lectures several by al-Awlaki, the American-born imam of Yemeni descent who as the head of mosques in San Diego and Northern Virginia had preached to a number of the 9/11 hijackers. A person of acute interest to U.S. counterterrorism officials in 2007, Awlaki had left for Britain years earlier, where he joined an orbit of radical Islamic preachers who were earning London its moniker of “Londonistan.” Awlaki gave lectures in English at the London Masjid al-Tawhid mosque praising Palestinian suicide bombers and describing the rewards such martyrs receive in paradise.

The imam of the Nashville Islamic center during Carlos Bledsoe’s time there was Abdulhakim Ali Mohamed, an American of Yemeni descent who studied Islamic theology in Saudi Arabia. Abdulhakim Ali Mohamed is a fine orator, with a smiling countenance and mesmerizing delivery reminiscent of an Arabian Joel Osteen. The sermons Abdulhakim preached, however, captured in “Losing Our Sons,” revealed the Salafist intolerance of other religions such as Christianity (“Tomorrow they’ll celebrate Christmas, assuming that Christ is God, or the son of God. There is no greater lie than this! The greatest lie of all time!”) and Judaism (“The Jews believe that everyone that is created on the face of the earth was only created for their service. They became more vicious than the Pharaoh, throughout history until today.”).

Repeated attempts to reach Abdulhakim Ali Mohamed were unsuccessful. Around the events of 2009 he left Nashville and resurfaced in Texas, where he became enmeshed in a struggle for control of the Al-Hedayah mosque in Fort Worth. After “Losing Our Sons” aired, Awadh Binhazim denied ever having met Carlos Bledsoe. “I don’t know him. He’s never been to my classes,” he told an AP reporter. As spokesman for the Islamic Center of Nashville, Amir Arain is also quoted in the AP story that while Carlos may have attended Friday prayer services, no one at the mosque remembered him.

When Carlos converted to Islam, he assumed the name Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, apparently taking inspiration from the imam of the Islamic Center of Nashville, and adding “Mujahid,” or a person engaged in jihad. There is no doubt that he already considered himself devoted to the ultraconservative Salafi strain of Sunni Islam. A “letter of recommendation” written on his behalf by an “Imam Abdulhaziz,” who is associated with a Somali mosque in Nashville, asks that Carlos–aka Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad—be admitted to an Islamist seminary in Yemen to further his studies and teach English. The letter details that Carlos “seeks knowledge” of Islam and is a practicing Salafi. In a later letter from prison to the journalist Kristina Goetz, Abdulhakim would write, “I’ve loved Jihad ever since I became a Muslim. But here in America you have hypocrites and hypocritical sects preaching against Jihad and the Mujahideen, so I fell victim to their false knowledge and cowardly ways.”

When first explaining his plans to travel to Yemen, Carlos Bledsoe described it to his family almost like a college semester abroad. There was supposedly a job awaiting teaching English at the Al Khair Islamic Institute in the southern port city of Aden, and the promise of a rent-free room at the expansive home of a friend from the Islamic Center of Nashville. Visiting his sister in Atlanta, Carlos told her that he wanted a chance to learn Arabic in order to read the Quran in its original language, and to visit the Saudi Arabian holy city of Mecca, where all Muslims who are able are obligated to journey before they die. He made one more unsuccessful attempt to convert his sister to Islam, but to Monica he seemed like any young man who was doing a lot of soul-searching in an effort to find his way in the world. She reached out to a good friend who was a Muslim, and her father consulted his Muslim cousin. They both pointed out that Carlos seemed to have good intentions, and to be seeking a more spiritual life. Carlos left with his family’s blessing.

At the time, no one in the Bledsoe family made note of the date Carlos chose to embark on his new adventure in Yemen: September 11, 2007.

On his journey of jihad, Carlos Bledsoe had taken the critical first step of indoctrination at the Islamic Center of Nashville. As with so many Americans and Westerners who would later follow in those footsteps, his path led to the Middle East and the epicenter of the faith. At the time, no one in the Bledsoe family made note of the date Carlos chose to embark on his new adventure in Yemen: September 11, 2007.

***

In 2007, the seeds of violent Islamic extremism that were scattered by the tempests in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States was at war in Muslim-majority countries, were increasingly settling in the fertile soil of Yemen. The country was impoverished and lightly governed; the writ of the government in the capital of Sanaa barely extended into hinterlands where deeply conservative tribes still held sway. Money from rich oil sheikhs next door in Saudi Arabia poured into Sunni mosques in Yemeni towns and villages to spread the Wahhabi creed, with its narrative of a war between Islam and modernity, and its message of intolerance not only of other religions, but also of the Shiite strain of Islam. The satellite dishes sprouting throughout Yemen and other countries in the Middle East carried newly ascendant Arab television stations like Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera, with their steady diet of atrocities allegedly committed by U.S. soldiers on Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. As is the case today, conflict between U.S. forces and Islamist terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda or ISIL (also known as the Islamic State) in Muslim-majority countries feeds into the Salafi narrative of a war between Islam and the West, and inevitably stokes embers of rage in youths prone to radicalization in the greater Muslim “Ummah,” or community.

In the mid-2000s, U.S. counterterrorism officials were also increasingly concerned by the ascendance of the Al Qaeda franchises in both Yemen and Somalia, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and Al-Shabab, respectively. Al Shabab had achieved near dominance of the failed state of Somalia and was running terrorist training camps that were attracting increasing numbers of Somali-Americans and other Westerners. For its part, AQAP, almost uniquely among the Al Qaeda franchises, had begun to embrace Osama bin Laden’s strategy of striking at the “far enemy,” meaning the United States.

As fate would have it, Carlos Bledsoe’s journey of jihad would intersect with both of those spiking trend lines in international terrorism.

Dar al Hadith mosque in Dammaj, Yemen, where Bledsoe spent days memorizing the Quran. | Wikimedia Commons

The paths of the most committed Islamist pilgrims, those deemed most worthy in the constellation of satellite mosques and Sunni Islamic schools scattered throughout the country, often converge in northern Yemen at the remote mountain village of Dammaj. The town of adobe dwellings and vineyards clinging to picturesque hillsides is home to the Dar al Hadith mosque and Islamic academy, revered as one of the wellsprings of Sunni religious thought and an incubator of the pure and uncompromising form of Islam practiced in the days of the Prophet Muhammad.

Carlos Bledsoe found his way to Dar al Hadith along with hundreds of others Western true believers from Europe and America. In Dammaj, Carlos truly became Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, spending his days there memorizing the Quran and discussing what he learned with a small clique of fellow Westerners, mainly other African-Americans. As one student at Dar al Hadith described the academy, students lived in dorms and learned in tightknit “cells” where the they spent long hours discussing and debating the Quran. The idea behind the instruction was that such cells would eventually attach to networks bound by a unifying ideology, and spread throughout the world.

Just down the hallway from Abdulhakim in the student dorm of Dar al Hadith lived another American named Theo Padnos. Padnos found Abulhakim taciturn and distrustful, as if he might suspect the truth: Padnos was an imposter, a journalist who had feigned conversion to Islam in order to peer behind Dar al Hadith’s veil of religious sanctity. What Padnos found in that inner sanctum he described as akin to a school for lost boys, many of them second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants to the West who felt stuck in a purgatory between conflicting cultures and mores, neither fully Western nor accepted in their former homelands. Some of the most zealous were converts like Carlos who wholly rejected their former lives but had yet to fully form new identities. And the job of the imam at Dar al Hadith was to help ground the lost boys in the dogma of a fundamentalist ideology, beginning with unquestioning submission and the surrender of free will.

“I’ll tell you how it works and what Carlos Bledsoe and the others were taught,” Padnos says in an interview. “They are told that you are the holy and good ones, the true inheritors of Islam, and all others are corrupt and the enemies of God. Your destiny as prophesized in the Quran is to oppose the enemies of God. You are the virtuous and the others are sinners. You are honest and the others are hypocritical. You are sincere and the others are liars. Heaven, Hell. Good, Evil. Arab, Jew. Islam, West. They simplify the world, make it black and white, bring the students 95 percent of the way and then leave it to them to decide how to confront and oppose the ‘other.’”

Padnos would later mine his experiences at Dar al Hadith for the book “Undercover Muslim.” He points out that an overwhelming majority of the students even at one of the most stringent Salafi Islamic academies in the world do not make the leap from religious indoctrination to violent jihad. What you take away from the instruction depends on the psychological underpinnings you bring to the education. According to some news reports, John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” from California who converted to Islam and also traveled to Yemen to study Arabic, also studied at Dar al Hadith before traveling to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. Padnos was unable to confirm the reports. He did have a sense of foreboding, however, about what would happen when Carlos Bledsoe, aka Abdul-Hakim, and the other Westerners returned from Dar al Hadith to their homes.

“To be honest, I thought they were all headed for trouble. They had totally submitted themselves to the power of a sheikh, who said he wanted only what was good for Islam, but who had an undisclosed agenda,” Padnos says. “The sheikh was patiently training soldiers for an Islamic army to eventually take over the world.”

***

The incessant ringing of the phone came in the middle of the night, and it woke Melvin Bledsoe from a sound sleep in November 2008. A woman speaking very broken English was obviously excited about something, but before he could make out what exactly the line went dead. The next night when the phone rang again in the early morning hours, Melvin was immediately wide awake and on edge. He listened patiently to the woman’s entreaties and stayed on the line long enough to understand that Carlos had been arrested and was in jail in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa, and that the woman relaying that information was his son’s wife.

“In the middle of the night I’m hearing that Carlos is in a ‘political jail’—she kept repeating that the jail was ‘political’—and that I had a daughter-in-law that I don’t even know about,” Melvin Bledsoe recalls in an interview. “And I’m thinking I need to wake up from this nightmare.”

In the year since Carlos had left for Yemen, Melvin Bledsoe had heard from his son only sporadically. Carlos moved around and always used disposable cellphones whose numbers would go dead in a matter of days or weeks, making it impossible to reach him. It was clear from the last calls that Carlos had moved to someplace fairly remote, and that he was staying at a place that sounded like a commune, from his descriptions. During one phone call, Carlos asked his father to sell his car and forward the money. Melvin Bledsoe would later discover that the money was used as a dowry so that Carlos could marry one of his Yemeni classmates.

With his quiet and polite demeanor it would be easy to underestimate Melvin Bledsoe at first glance. But as numerous U.S. officials were about to discover over the next few months. Melvin became a one-man juggernaut pestering his U.S. representative in Congress, the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Yemen to have his son released from a foreign jail and brought home.

Carlos had apparently been stopped at a highway checkpoint in Yemen and arrested for overstaying his student visa. Melvin could not understand why his son wasn’t just deported at that point, but there was a complication: Carlos had been carrying a fake Somali passport.

U.S. and Yemeni counterterrorism officials knew that terrorist training camps in Somalia run by Al-Shabab were a magnet for would-be Islamist militants looking to complete their education in violent jihad. A Congressional Research Service report in 2013 would reveal that of a total of 63 homegrown jihadist attacks and plots since 9/11, more than half (35) involved intent or actual travel abroad for terrorist training and planning. Carlos said that at the time of his arrest he was also carrying a computer thumb drive containing the names of connections that he had gathered in Yemen, as well as bomb-making instructions. According to Melvin Bledsoe, a State Department official would later confide to him privately that the information on the thumb drive caused U.S. officials’ “hair to stand on end.” An FBI agent was dispatched to interview him in the Yemeni jail.

...They bring the students 95 percent of the way and then leave it to them to decide how to confront and oppose the ‘other.’”

By 2008, the FBI was well into its transformation from a domestic criminal investigative agency into primarily an intelligence-gathering organization focused on counterterrorism, trying to get “to the left of the boom” by preventing terrorist plots before they could quite literally blow. That mission had driven the bureau to closely study the dynamics of Islamic radicalization, from indoctrination to mobilization and ultimately violence. The challenge was to act as circuit breakers between sparks of incendiary rhetoric and the human fuses that could ignite terrorist action. And by the time of his arrest in October 2008, FBI agents had every reason to suspect that Carlos Bledsoe was a potential live wire.

The problem that bedeviled the FBI agent who interviewed Carlos Bledsoe in a Yemeni jail is the same one the bureau confronts to this day in trying to gauge the threat posed by suspected Islamic militants and extremists: Until they act on their extremist beliefs or are ensnared in one of the FBI’s elaborate “stings”—designed to bring them to the very edge of “boom,” where actual violent intent can be proven in a court of law—suspects have yet to commit a crime. In Bledsoe’s case, his only offense at the time of his interview was overstaying a visa and acquiring fraudulent documents. Although Carlos was clearly on the FBI’s radar, so were thousands of others, a number of whom were also interviewed by the FBI before going on to commit terrorist acts, including Fort Hood shooter Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki himself, who Bledsoe later claimed to have contacted in Yemen.

“The answer to the question of whether Carlos Bledsoe was radicalized towards violence in Yemen is that quite possibly he was, but we may never be sure,” a senior FBI source says. “We didn’t have electronic surveillance on him before he was arrested by the Yemenis. The fact that he was using the same kind of throwaway phones routinely used by terrorists and drug dealers is suggestive. If you have nothing to hide, why would you go to the hassle of constantly changing phones?”

Carlos spent the four months between his arrest by Yemeni authorities and his deportation in early 2009 in a “political prison” with hardcore jihadis. The prison proved an ideal finishing school for violent Islamic extremism, bringing into clear alignment the rage in his heart, the perceived persecution of his Muslim brothers and sisters, and his desperate need to belong to a cause greater then himself. As it happened, FBI agents had been to Yemen only months before Carlos was interviewed to visit another imprisoned American, al-Awlaki. The young, widely popular Yemeni-American imam, whose recorded sermons on the “Life of Mohammad” had brought him considerable fame, was arrested by Yemeni authorities in 2006 for links to an Al Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. military attaché. He was held, with the encouragement of U.S. officials, for 18 months. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Awlaki had marketed himself as a moderate and a “bridge between Americans and one billion Muslims worldwide.” Weeks before the 9/11 attacks, he had even spoken at the U.S. Capitol.

The FBI had long been suspicious of his shadowy connections, however, including the fact that two of the 9/11 hijackers had prayed at Awlaki’s San Diego mosque and were seen in long conferences with the imam, and even followed him to a new mosque in Northern Virginia. Investigators for the 9/11 Commission referred to Anwar al-Awlaki as the “spiritual adviser” for 9/11 hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi. After interviewing Awlaki four times in the days after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI had concluded that the connections were probably random.

The problem FBI agents had in interviewing Awlaki in a Yemeni jail and trying to discern his intensions was not unlike the conundrum they faced months later in talking with Carlos Bledsoe: radicalism of thought is not a crime, nor is inspiring others to choose the path of jihad, however they interpret the word. By the end of 2007, U.S. officials, concerned about the imprisonment of an American citizen without formal charges, reportedly signaled to the Yemenis that they no longer supported Awlaki’s continued imprisonment. They didn’t yet know that Awlaki would leave prison an even more committed extremist, determined to harness his considerable rhetorical skills to the mission of furthering a global jihad against the West, and to translate Osama bin Laden’s vision and message into a more accessible American vernacular.

A 2008 file photo of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen | AP Photo

Carlos would later confirm that he formulated his own plan to carry out violent jihad during his imprisonment in Yemen, and he claimed to have contact with al-Awlaki. There’s no doubt that he emerged from the prison a self-actualized jihadi with the fully formed worldview of a violent Islamic extremist. “Like I said, there’s an all-out war against Islam and the Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Waziristan, Chechnya, Somalia, Palestine, Yemen, etc.,” he would later write from a U.S. prison. “We believe in an eye for an eye, not turn the other cheek. Now it’s an all-out war on America, and I’m on the other side. The side of the Muslims, Yes! The side of Al Qaeda, Yes! Taliban, Yes! Al-Shabab, Yes! We are all brothers under the same banner. Fighting for the same cause, which is to rid the Islamic world of Infidel and Apostate Hypocrite Regimes and Crusader Invaders, and reestablish the Caliphate, the Islamic Empire and Islamic Law...”

Even if Carlos had confessed to such beliefs before returning to the United States, it’s doubtful the FBI could have arrested him, nor did the bureau have the resources to put every potential Islamist radical under constant surveillance. Again the FBI had a problem: It couldn’t arrest anyone before an actual plot was detected. “Hasan had been in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, though I’m not sure whether Bledsoe had or not, because there were literally thousands and thousands of people in touch with Awlaki,” Chris Warrener, a deputy assistant director for the FBI, says in an interview. “He understood American culture and had great appeal to Western, English-speaking youth.” Even if some suspected extremists rise up on the FBI’s radar and are even contacted and interviewed, he said, the law allows the bureau to go only so far in monitoring their movements and communications. Along with Anwar al-Awlaki and Carlos Bledsoe, the FBI had also interviewed Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev before they turned violent thought into action.

“We have very limited surveillance resources, and it takes a tremendous amount of effort to really keep someone under tabs 24/7,” concedes Warrener, before adding a prescient warning that preceded last week’s attacks in Tennessee. “In the end if they don’t say or do anything incriminating, we probably have to let the case go and move on. But there’s no doubt in my mind that there will be another Carlos Bledsoe, just as there will be another Nidal Hasan.”

And by the time of his arrest, FBI agents had every reason to suspect that Carlos Bledsoe was a potential live wire.

After picking up his son at the airport in January 2009, Melvin Bledsoe drove him back to their suburban Memphis neighborhood, past “Dindie’s Soul Food Shack” and the “Save a Lot” grocery, beyond the familiar strip malls and Baptist churches, up Aspen Avenue where the extended family was waiting under a banner that read “Welcome Home Carlos!” There was a reunion dinner, and Melvin revealed his plans to expand the Twin City Tours business to Little Rock, Arkansas, and to make Carlos the boss of the new operation. Melvin was determined to help his son replant roots in the soil of his Southern upbringing.

The grand opening was held in the lobby of the Little Rock Hilton on May 1, 2009, attended by leaders of the Chamber of Commerce and a host of local businessmen who extended a warm welcome. Following the celebration, the manager of the Hilton approached Melvin Bledsoe to tell him a lot of overseas phone calls had been charged to the room he had rented. Looking at the bill, Melvin saw that the recipients were all in Yemen, and none of the phone numbers matched Carlos’ wife, who had been unable to follow him home because of difficulties obtaining an American visa.

In actuality, Melvin Bledsoe was deceiving himself; his son Carlos had not come home. Instead in his place was a different person named Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, and he was seething inside. At the dinner following the grand opening, his sister Monica had worn a skirt that he said made her look like a whore. Just about everything his brother-in-law Landis said was couched in such ignorance that he had to bite his tongue and keep quiet, or else the anger would spill out like bile. Worst of all, his father kept trying to reclaim a lost past, as if he couldn’t see that Carlos had been transformed.

“I’m not Carlos. I’m Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad—a new man, changed man,” he would write later, comparing the alienation he felt from his family to that of the prophet Abraham. “Abraham was a friend of Allah but his relatives and people especially his father were enemies of Allah, and that’s the situation with me and [my family]. I love Allah and His Messenger, they hate them. So we are on different sides.”

Abdulhakim was worried that his plan for jihad would be exposed before it could reach fruition. The same FBI agent who interviewed him in Yemen had recently called him into the Bureau’s Nashville field office and tried to turn him into an informer. As if Abdulhakim would betray his Muslim brothers and sisters to the enemy. Upset, the FBI agent had promised to watch him for the rest of his life. Abdulhakim had purchased a .22 caliber rifle at Wal-Mart in part to see if the FBI would somehow flag the sale or had him under surveillance, and when he walked out of the store and nothing happened he knew: “It’s on.”

On the last weekend of May 2009, Abdulhakim loaded his black Ford Explorer for the final leg of his journey. He brought an SKS rifle, a Mossberg International 702 rifle with a scope and laser sight, a Lorcin L-380 semi-automatic handgun and a .22 caliber handgun, and over 550 rounds of ammunition. Inside a red duffel bag he stuffed some extra clothes along with two homemade silencers and a set of binoculars. Abdulhakim also had maps to his intended targets of military recruiting centers and Jewish organizations, but almost immediately the lack of the training he had hoped to receive in Somalia betrayed him.

The 350-mile drive from Little Rock to Nashville took five hours, but he found the address on Mockingbird Lane where the Orthodox Jewish rabbi was supposed to live. Abdulhakim crept up and attempted to throw a Molotov cocktail through the window to firebomb the house, but it bounced harmlessly off the window and he fled back to his car. The ride to the Army recruiting center in Florence, Kentucky, was another 250-plus miles, and when Abdulhakim finally arrived the recruiting office was closed. He had failed to check the opening hours. By the time he got back to Little Rock on the morning of June 1, 2009, Abdulhakim was feeling tired and dejected. He had covered more than 1,100 miles, and at $4 a gallon for gas that added up to a lot of money with nothing to show for it. Yet as he drove down Rodney Parham Road on the way home, Abdulhakim noticed two Army soldiers in uniform standing outside an Army-Navy recruiting center smoking cigarettes, and he saw an opportunity to redeem his mission of jihad. He pulled into a parking lot next to the recruiting center and approached his unsuspecting targets from around a blind corner.

Privates William Long, 23, and Quinton Ezeagwula, 19, were Arkansas natives who had only recently joined the Army. They were at the recruiting station as part of an Army program that used soldiers recently out of basic training to help recruit in their home regions. In fact, William’s mother Janet was watching her son from a car parked nearby, having stopped by to say hello. She heard the unexpected bursts of gunfire from Abdulhakim’s SKS assault rifle, watched in shock as her son and his friend crumpled to the sidewalk. Badly wounded, Quinton Ezeagwula crawled back into the recruiting station, leaving a trail of blood. After the black SUV drove off, other soldiers poured out of the recruiting station and tried to administer CPR, but William Long would be pronounced dead by the time he reached the hospital less than an hour later.

Melvin Bledsoe, second from the left, testifies on March 10, 2011 during a congressional hearing on the radicalization of American Muslims. | AP Photo

Melvin Bledsoe and his wife were in their car and already on the outskirts of Little Rock when his cellphone beeped. All weekend Melvin had tried to reach Carlos without success, and by Monday morning he was worried enough to call a coworker and ask that they stop by his apartment to see if his son was OK. The parents had hopped in the car and set out for Little Rock with a growing premonition that something was wrong. The FBI agent on the phone told Melvin that he needed to come by the Little Rock Field Office; something really bad had happened and someone had been killed, and they thought his son was involved. Melvin had to pull to the side of the road and stop the car before telling his wife the news about their beloved son.

They had raised him steeped in a proud African-American culture, guided him through difficult teenage years with love and determination and sent him off to college. Then an unseen hand had reached into their lives and, step by subtle step, guided their troubled son on the path toward this awful day. They hadn’t put the gun in his hands, but they didn’t have to. At that moment, Melvin Bledsoe sensed what Abdulhakim already knew, and the father would take that sorrow to the grave. Carlos really was gone.

***

The first lethal attack on U.S. soil by an Islamic extremist since 9/11 was not an aberration, instead heralding an era of increased homegrown terror both by alienated Muslim immigrants and radicalized converts like Abdulhakim Mujahid Mohammed. Just a few months after his attack, a Denver airport shuttle-bus driver and former New York City pushcart operator named Najibullah Zazi, who traveled to Pakistan to receive Al Qaeda training, was arrested in September 2009 for a plot to bomb the New York City subway system. Within the next year his plot would be followed by the Fort Hood shooter, the Detroit underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber. Yet another attempt to down commercial aircraft with explosive-laden packages was foiled later that year, and once again the investigative trail led back to Yemen and AQAP. Violent jihad had come home to America.

A September 2009 courtroom drawing of Najibullah Zazi, at left, another homegrown terrorist who was arrested a few months after Carlos Bledsoe for plotting to bomb the NYC subway | AP Photo

U.S. counterterrorism officials characterize that spate of attacks and plots on the homeland in 2009 and 2010 that began with Carlos Bledsoe as the most significant evolution of the terrorism threat since 9/11, and they ushered in a new era that has come to define counterterrorism operations to this day. Counterterrorism officials adapted by embracing newly aggressive tactics, to include closer surveillance of radical imams and mosques, elaborate FBI stings to flush out would-be terrorists, and a dramatic expansion of the war on terror as a result of the realization that Al Qaeda affiliates were becoming equally as dangerous as the core Al Qaeda group led by Osama bin Laden.

Greater intelligence-gathering resources were also directed at the likes of the Pakistan Taliban, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Algeria, Al-Shabab in Somalia, and especially Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The number of U.S. drone and cruise missile airstrikes in Yemen skyrocketed from just one before 2009, to 56 in 2012 alone, according to figures compiled by the New America Foundation.

The fact that jihadi recruitment is increasingly couched in an American vernacular also prompted counterterrorism officials to refocus their manhunts and target Americans who had joined the ranks of jihadist propagandists, putting rewards on the heads of Adam Gadahn, a Californian who became a spokesman for core Al Qaeda; Omar Hammami, the U.S. citizen and former resident of Alabama who produced Al Shabab recruiting videos in English from Somalia; Samir Khan, an American from North Carolina who helped launch and edit AQAP’s propaganda magazine Inspire; and of course, special interest was directed at Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki and Khan became the first Americans killed in the government’s targeted killing program on September 30, 2011, when their vehicle was destroyed in Yemen by two Hellfire missiles fired from an unmanned Predator. More recently, the FBI and other intelligence agencies have established a special joint task force to track the hundreds of Americans, and thousands of Westerners, who have flocked to the Middle East to train and fight under the black banner of ISIL.

The threat of homegrown radicalization inside the United States also drove closer scrutiny of Islamic preachers for signs of extremist incitement. The New York Police Department, the largest in the country, used a special surveillance unit that infiltrated Muslim student groups on college campuses and in some cases designated entire mosques as suspected “terrorism enterprises,” tactics that alarmed civil rights group and prompted two federal lawsuits, but which New York police officials argued were necessary to prevent future terrorist attacks.

For its part, concerns about homegrown terrorism and lone wolf radicalization pushed the FBI to a greater reliance on elaborate sting operations designed to catch would-be jihadists in fake plots of their own fevered imaginings. The FBI was infiltrating U.S. Muslim communities and developing an informant network; under the PATRIOT Act, it had a lot more latitude also to set up sting operations that might formerly have been considered entrapment.

Those Potemkin plots have become part of the new normal in homeland security, netting would-be terrorists whose plots included imagined mass-casualty bombings in Baltimore, Portland, New York, Columbus and Washington, D.C.; a Mumbai-style suicide shooting attack in an Illinois shopping mall; the toppling of the Sears Tower in Chicago and an office tower in Dallas; the rupturing of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline; attacks on John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and Los Angeles International Airport; and the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The Justice Department has better than a 90 percent conviction rate in these counterterrorism stings, but civil rights groups argue that in many cases they amount to entrapment of hapless or mentally deranged individuals.

The spate of attacks and plots that began with Carlos Bledsoe also foreshadowed today’s raging debate between civil libertarians and many American Muslim leaders on one side, and critics of radical or fundamentalist Islam on the other. The former argue that police are trampling on civil liberties, and heightening a widening “Islamaphobia” in the country that only further alienates some American Muslim youth; critics on the other side claim that political correctness that keeps U.S. officials from even publicly admitting the true nature of Islamist radicalization understates the threat and undermines those who would reform the radical ideology at the core of jihad.

Zainab Al-Suwaij is a co-founder of the American Islamic Congress, which runs outreach programs on American college campuses to counter what it sees as the intolerant messages spread by Salafi imams promoting adoption of a fundamentalist Sharia Law. “Political Islam has an agenda to promote this narrative of a war between Islam and the West, and of the victimization of Muslims,” she says in an interview. “The imams in the United States don’t call publicly for Jihad, because they know they are being watched. But they plant the seeds of hatred of Jews, Infidels and nonbelievers, and impressionable youth who hear these things can be easily manipulated.”

In retrospect Carlos Bledsoe was “Patient Zero” in a malady of radicalization that has now reached epidemic proportions. Today it threatens to overwhelm U.S. counterterrorism capabilities. FBI Director James Comey recently warned that the bureau has launched investigations into “homegrown violent extremists” in all 50 states; the FBI says it has arrested dozens of would-be terrorists already this year, but it doesn’t have the resources to police and watch every possible suspect.

Thousands of Westerners and hundreds of Americans have in recent years followed Bledsoe’s journey of jihad to the Middle East, where increasingly they are being lured by the Islamic State’s promise of glory and martyrdom on behalf of a new caliphate. The Islamic State has adopted AQAP’s message that “lone wolf” terrorists in the United States should focus on launching local attacks, and if anything the group has improved on Awlaki’s social media savvy with slick YouTube videos and constant Twitter blasts.

At a vulnerable moment in his life, Carlos Bledsoe heard the siren’s song and followed it to the source. Now Abdulhakim whiles away his days and nights in near total isolation at the Varner Supermax Prison down State Highway 65 in Lincoln, Arkansas, considered too dangerous to mix with the other prisoners. He might have received a death sentence and lethal injection except that a psychiatrist for the defense testified that his indoctrination was so thorough as to inflict a "delusional disorder.” This “brainwashing” defense concerned the state prosecutor and a plea deal was reached, with Abdulhakim pleading guilty to murder in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In April of this year, the U.S. Army finally gave Purple Heart medals to Quinton Ezeagwula and the family of William Andrew Long. The award was enabled by a provision inserted into the fiscal 2015 National Defense Authorization Act by Arkansas Senator John Boozman, which for the first time authorizes the Purple Heart for service members killed or wounded anywhere in an attack that specifically targets them as soldiers, or is carried out by an individual inspired or directed by a foreign terrorist organization. As William Long’s grieving father said after the attack that killed his son, “They weren’t on the battlefield; but apparently, the battlefield’s here.” Tragically, as a result of the attack last week in Chattanooga, the families of five more service members are eligible to receive posthumous Purple Heart medals.

They weren’t on the battlefield; but apparently, the battlefield’s here.”

Melvin continues to advocate for his son, sending letters to the Arkansas Department of Corrections that his years in solitary confinement and harsh treatment amounts to torture. It’s his way of keeping faith with what was good in Carlos, before strangers seized on his boy’s vulnerability and twisted his mind into the hate-filled creation Abulhakim Mujahid Mohammed.

“Every day I wake up in the morning and hear about how radical Islamists have killed somebody else or blown something up, but six years ago my family and I were ignorant and totally alone in dealing with what was happening,” Melvin Bledsoe says. “It never even occurred to me that my son could be ripped out of his own culture, and brainwashed and programmed to become someone else. I’ve told Mr. Long that he lost his son to a jihadist, and I lost my son to radical Islamists. There’s tragedy and a crime on both sides of that deal, and the world needs to understand it. As a father, I intend to speak out forever about what happened to my son at the hands of radical Islamists.”

He may need to, for there is no end in sight. Drawn reluctantly back to Iraq by the improbable success of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in capturing large swaths of territory in both countries and advancing its agenda of genocidal slaughter, ethnic cleansing and sexual slavery, the United States has launched more than 7,500 airstrikes against the group in just the past year, killing more than 10,000 of its fighters. As Osama bin Laden understood as part of his twisted genius, the conflict Al Qaeda provoked on 9/11 would play into a narrative of war between Islam and the modern world that has deep roots in fundamentalist theology, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of violence and retribution.

Daris Long, in the red cap, and wife Janet Long, by his side, attend the funeral of their son Pvt. William Long on June 8, 2009 in Arkansas. | AP Photo

Obama administration officials who publicly expressed hopes that the “global war on terror” was on the verge of ending with the 2011 death of bin Laden have more recently been forced to concede that the ideology fueling this conflict and violence may darken the lives of Americans yet unborn.

“This is a long-term campaign,” a somber President Barack Obama said recently after meeting at the Pentagon with his top military commanders on the ongoing war to defeat ISIL, itself a single tree in a poison forest. “This larger battle for hearts and minds is going to be a generational struggle.”

The families of Carson Holmquest, Randall Smith, Thomas Sullivan, “Skip” Wells, and David Wyatt lost their sons to that struggle last week, and, like the family of William Long, they can count their loved ones among the heroes. The names of the murderers Abdulhakim and Abdulazeez are now written on the side of the ledger where evil is reckoned, but they are not alone there.

Melvin Bledsoe has a point: There is tragedy, and a crime, on both sides. Others lost their lives to violent jihad. He lost his son to it.

Correction: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this post said Abdulazeez was “American born-and-raised” – he came to the United States as an infant from Kuwait.