ADAM GADAHN grew up on a farm in Riverside County, California; as a teenage slob he was obsessed with heavy metal music. Today he is known as “Azzam the American” — al-Qaeda’s own Lord Haw-Haw — who stars in a video telling fellow Westerners that they must convert to Islam or be sent “straight to Hell without passing Go”.

Dressed in flowing white robes and turban, Gadahn, 28, delivers a long lecture on the errors of Christianity and Judaism before setting out a critique of US foreign policy ranging from the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima to the present war.

He uses George Bush’s nickname when he tells soldiers fighting the President’s “crusader pipe dream in Afghanistan, Iraq and wherever else Dubya has sent you to die — you know the war can’t be won”.

Gadahn has appeared in a video alongside Shehzad Tanweer, one of the July 7 London bombers, and Ayman alZawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, but this latest message suggests that he is taking a more prominent propaganda role as someone who can talk directly to the American people.

Lord Haw-Haw, whose real name was William Joyce, performed a similar role for the Nazis in the Second World War, making regular radio broadcasts from Germany that mocked Allied military efforts against Hitler. Convicted of treason, he was hanged in 1946.

Gadahn’s early years were spent on a ranch in southern California, where the teenager apparently withdrew into a private world of “horror-slasher” death metal bands such as Cannibal Corpse.

His transformation is thought to have taken place when he moved to Orange County near Los Angeles, converted to Islam and began worshipping at a local mosque from where he was later expelled for attacking one of its leaders. He disappeared shortly after the September 11 attacks on America. The FBI believes that he has since attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan and worked as a translator for the terror network.

Although there are no direct threats of violence in the video, analysts believe that there may be a sinister motivation behind Gahahn’s “special appeal” for soldiers to switch sides. According to some interpretations of the Koran, an enemy must be given an opportunity to convert to Islam before an attack.

• Iraqi security forces have arrested Hamed Jumaa al-Saedi, al-Qaeda’s deputy leader in Iraq, in Baghdad. He is accused of masterminding an attack on a Shia shrine that triggered a wave of sectarian killings. (AFP)

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