I asked Sergeant Jennifer O’Donnell, who works on AIMCOP, how young people are identified as radicalized.
Certainly, if we thought that there was a youth that was more isolated and withdrawn, we would certainly try to engage more. We have received some information about possible traveling back and forth to Africa. We pass all that information on to the FBI. I know that we’ve been told about problems in school, about problems with gangs, nothing specific on the big level of being recruited by al-Shabaab or anything like that.
Isn’t being isolated or withdrawn fairly normal teenage behavior, I asked? “Right,” she replied. “But if they’re spending a lot of time on the Internet, and they change their attire, and they change their philosophy … They start talking about more radical things.”40 Again, the expression of radical opinions was being taken by a law enforcement agency as an indicator of potential terrorist risk without any awareness of the civil liberties issues raised. Indeed, the Department of Homeland Security now sees AIMCOP as a potential model for other city police departments.
A Nationalist Insurgency
At the heart of the FBI’s investigation and the congressional hearings on Somali radicalization was the question of why a group of young Somali Americans, most born in Somalia but having spent the bulk of their young lives in the US, would have wanted to travel to an East African war zone and volunteer to fight on behalf of al-Shabaab. Members of the parents’ generation within the Twin Cities Somali communities, who by and large considered themselves fortunate to have been able to flee Somalia and start new lives in the US, struggled to make sense of why their children would choose to go back. In July 2011, the House Committee on Homeland Security, chaired by Peter King, held a hearing that ostensibly aimed at answering the same question. Incredibly, during more than two hours of expert testimony, not a single mention was made of the political context of the 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, which was clearly an important part of why some Somali Americans volunteered to join the insurgency. Instead, witnesses giving evidence to the hearing indulged the fantasy of Muslim-American community leaders refusing to cooperate with law enforcement and argued that radicalization was fueled by the circulation of “anti-Western ideologies” and a lack of adherence to “American values.” They even spent time considering the preposterous idea that al-Shabaab might be financed by Iran. In effect, the hearing became a discussion of the threat Somalis pose to America, seen largely as a problem of national loyalty rather than a matter of a few individuals volunteering to fight for al-Shabaab overseas.41
The US mainstream media has given Americans a hopelessly distorted image of Somalia. The 2001 film Black Hawk Down, a fairy tale of US military heroes fighting black Muslim terrorists, who die in great anonymous waves of bloodshed, was shot entirely from the point of view of American soldiers. The film is a heavily embroidered dramatization of the 1993 US mission to capture militia leader Mohamed Farrah Aidid, in which over a thousand Somalis and eighteen Americans were killed, and it presents Somalis at best as charity cases, victims of a mess of their own creation; at worst, they are barbarous fanatics with a cultural propensity for tribal warfare. We learn nothing of Somalia’s actual political history and the hand of the US in its collapse. Yet those events owe more to US cold war policy than to any cultural traits of the Somali people.
In the 1980s, the government of General Mohamed Siad Barre was a key US ally in Africa, and the US supplied it with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of arms despite its well-known record of abuses. This level of outside military assistance was at the time unmatched in Africa’s history, and it was intended to overwhelm the Soviet-backed communist government in neighboring Ethiopia.42 Barre had taken power in Somalia in 1969, nine years after the country’s independence from British and Italian colonialism. He was compelled in the 1980s to implement damaging structural adjustment programs in order to be allowed access to International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans, and this in turn led to the collapse of the pastoralist economy, a growing dependence on imported food, and increasingly high levels of urban unemployment.43 By the middle of the decade, facing mounting opposition, Barre’s regime was no more than a clan-based autocracy, imprisoning and executing opposition leaders. The withdrawal of IMF credit in 1988 caused the economy to collapse. The vast military arsenal Barre had amassed from US patronage was now deployed against his own population. The military officers who had been trained by the US in techniques of political repression were given free rein, particularly in the north, where a secessionist movement had risen up. Tens of thousands were killed and half a million became refugees in 1988 and 1989, leaving Somalia mostly for neighboring countries.44 By 1991 the north had succeeded in breaking away, and Barre was expelled from power by an armed insurgency, leaving behind a bankrupt, starving, war-torn country. The politics of clan identity had hollowed out the state itself, fragmenting the nation into various armed factions that fought for control of Mogadishu over the subsequent decade, in the absence of a functioning central state.45
In late 2002, the US took over the former French colonial base at Camp Lemonnier in neighboring Djibouti and deployed nine hundred military and intelligence personnel to what was named the Combined Joint Task Force for the Horn of Africa. Somalia was identified as a breeding ground for terrorist attacks on America, though there were likely only a dozen al-Qaeda militants in the country. Nevertheless, various Somali militia groups were recruited by the CIA as part of the war on terror. Soon the militias were capturing and killing individuals they suspected of being Islamist radicals, usually imams and local prayer leaders who had nothing to do with terrorism. In some cases, they rendered their captives to the US forces at Djibouti. The CIA’s hope was that a group of exiled warlords in Kenya, who had formed a government-in-waiting known as the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), would rule Somalia, once the agency-backed militia had control of the capital. But the effect of the CIA campaign was the opposite of what was intended. Resentment at the militia violence led to growing support for a grassroots network known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which in 2006 succeeded in expelling the CIA-funded militias from Mogadishu.46 The ICU was made up mainly of traditional mullahs, who taught the Qur’an in villages, and of local clerics, who dispensed justice according to their interpretation of shari’a law, in an effort to introduce some kind of order to the chaotic city. There was no talk of international terrorism, and the more militant youth wing, al-Shabaab, was a marginal element.47 The courts proved popular largely because of the security they brought to much of the country after more than a decade of internecine violence, but they had no clear plan for governing. Members of the diaspora in Europe and North America felt they could travel back to Somalia more safely than before and, after returning from their visits, regaled others in Somali communities with stories of how, under the rule of the courts, crime and violence were nonexistent.
In Washington, there was consternation. The ICU was interpreted as part of the global Islamist threat, and the Bush administration began searching for new ways to take them on. They turned to Somalia’s long-standing regional rival, Ethiopia, whose army was given funding and logistical support to carry out a unilateral invasion in December 2006.48 Assisted by US air support and Special Operations forces on the ground, tens of thousands of Ethiopian troops were able to quickly overpower the ICU and install the TFG in power the following year. The Ethiopian invasion fostered tremendous resentment. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill writes:
The [Ethiopian] occupation was marked by indiscriminate brutality against Somali civilians. Ethiopian and US-backed Somali [TFG] government soldiers secured Mogadishu’s neighborhoods by force, raiding houses in search of ICU loyalists, looting civilian property, and beating or shooting anyone suspected of collaboration with antigovernment forces. They positioned snipers on the roofs of buildings and would reportedly respond to any attack with disproportionate fire, shelling densely populated areas and several hospitals, according to Human Rights Watch.
Extrajudicial killings by Ethiopian soldiers were widely reported, particularly during the final months of 2007. Accounts of Ethiopian soldiers “slaughtering” men, women and children “like goats”—slitting throats—were widespread, Amnesty International noted. Both Somali Transitional Government forces, led by exiles and backed by the United States, and Ethiopian forces were accused of horrific sexual violence.49
The foreign invasion established a corrupt and dysfunctional government protected by African Union troops. It also gave rise to a nationalist insurgency, with al-Shabaab at the forefront of the forces combating the Ethiopian army and the TFG.
It is not difficult to see why—in this context—a trickle of young men in the diaspora would be attracted to the idea of answering al-Shabaab’s call for volunteers to defend Somalia from US-backed invaders. The only English-language journalist who has interviewed young Somali-American recruits themselves about why they volunteered for al-Shabaab is Fatuma Noor of Kenya’s Nairobi Star. In her interviews with recruits from the US in 2011, carried out as they prepared to enter Somalia from Kenya, we get the clearest sense of what lay behind their choices to leave their lives in the West. Nuno Ahmed, age eighteen, said:
Young people like me are needed there [in Somalia] to protect our country. I can do something important over there compared to what I was doing back in the US … This is my choice and no-one has made me come here as my mother would like to believe. They have lived in Minnesota for too long and now they want to forget about home. But not me.
Another, twenty-three-year-old Abikar Mohamed, says: “We are all here to defend what we believe in. We are all here to protect Islam and we are going to do that at all cost.” He adds that, once his family was granted US citizenship, he thought he “would enjoy the same treatment and rights as any other US citizen, but that was never to happen.” Though finishing among the top five students in his Minnesota high school, he was unable to get a job or a college scholarship. A third recruit, Abdirahman Gullet, aged nineteen, talks about the mood in Minneapolis in 2008 after the FBI began its investigation into the disappearances. “We have all been seen as terror suspects. Police regularly storm our houses and conduct searches without permission,” he says, and he recalls being taken off the street by the FBI for several hours of interrogation. Before these incidents, he says, joining al-Shabaab did not cross his mind. “I thought it was a stupid thing … Now I understand why. I have had firsthand experience.”
As Noor puts it, the Ethiopian invasion prompted a “political awakening” among young Somalis in the diaspora, as word spread about the brutality of the occupation.50 But that awakening would not have taken the form it did were it not for the barriers these young men faced in America. They perceived their lives in the US as marked by stigma, blocked opportunities, and the suspicious gaze of the national-security state. Ironically, the perception that Muslims were terrorists itself became one of the factors leading to some joining a group designated a terrorist organization. Once an initial few had made the journey and started to tell their peers back home tales of military heroism in defense of nation and religion, a recruitment chain started that rested mainly on international cell-phone calls and social media communication, with a small number of individuals in the Twin Cities each raising a couple of thousand dollars or so to cover travel costs.51
By 2009, al-Shabaab controlled most of southern Somalia and Mogadishu. The US government’s invasion plan, which aimed at removing the threat of international terrorism from Somalia, had, as so often in the war on terror, made the problem worse. Thus, for the first time, a group with loose ties to al-Qaeda gained control of territory and began imposing its brand of Taliban-style rule, with beheadings, floggings, and amputations meted out on the spot to those who violated its edicts—including, on one occasion, the fatal stoning of a child victim of rape. At one point, musical ringtones on cell phones were banned for being un-Islamic. Even so, al-Shabaab’s rhetoric remained focused on regaining control of the country rather than striking at the West. And the group could count on a modicum of support, due to the perception that it was the only force defending the nation. As even Peter King’s star witness, Abdirazak Bihi, acknowledged:
I know a lot of people in al-Shabaab in Somalia from neighbors I grew up with. Whether you like it or not, they are there because of nationalism but they don’t agree with them a bit. Because Shabaab are the only people fighting to keep Somali borders, Somali pride, and Somali nationality and government, and bringing them together. Because every other group is not nationalistic, is corruptible, works for Ethiopia, or the UN, for the illiterate warlords, destroying the whole country.52
For young Somalis in Minnesota angry at US foreign policy in the war on terror, and who want to give expression to their opposition, al-Shabaab seems to be the only show in town. As several Minneapolis community organizers pointed out, conversations among young Somali Americans about Muslims being oppressed and Somalia being victimized, with the American government to blame, are fairly normal. They also noted that apart from al-Shabaab, there were no political groups attempting to pick up on those opinions and give them an organized expression, offering alternative forms of political activism to al-Shabaab’s violent fundamentalism. And attempts by young Somali Americans to express themselves politically tend to become the object of government suspicion. Two days after he became a US citizen, Abdiwali Warsame, a thirty-year-old Minnesota bus driver, created a Web site, Somalimidnimo.com, or United Somalia, which quickly became popular in the diaspora. It expressed a variety of political opinions on Somalia but was strongly opposed to US intervention. In June 2012, Warsame received a Google Alert e-mail notifying him that his site had been mentioned in a document posted on the Internet. On opensource.gov, a federal Web site, he discovered that a government military contractor, the Virginia-based Navanti Group, had been commissioned by US Special Operations Forces to “counter nefarious influences” in Africa, and, as a result, had begun to monitor his site and compiled a confidential research dossier about its founder and its content. The dossier identified “opportunities” to conduct “Military Information Support Operations,” more commonly known as psychological operations, that would target Somali audiences worldwide. The US military ought to consider a “messaging campaign,” argued the dossier, by repeating comments posted on the site by readers opposed to al-Shabaab. This dossier was also passed to the local field office of the FBI, whose agents interviewed Warsame. At first the agents told him he was under criminal investigation, but after his attorneys intervened and he refused to meet bureau agents without a lawyer, the bureau stopped calling.53
Living in Fear
Officially the federal investigation into the disappearances from the Twin Cities was considered a success. By the end of 2009 the number of young Somali Americans trying to leave the US and volunteer for al-Shabaab seemed to have declined. A handful of people were convicted of donating four-figure sums to it. Its credibility was gradually undermined as people learned of its brutal violence against any Somalis who had a different view of the country’s political future. To some extent, the heroic image of fighting a foreign occupation had waned. One of al-Shabaab’s most famous members was Omar Hammami, known as Abu Mansour al-Amriki, or “the American,” an Alabama-born convert who performed raps in propaganda videos. In April 2012, it was reported that al-Shabaab had fallen out with Hammami, apparently over ideological differences, and attempted to kill him.
Whether the federal investigation had also contributed to preventing further recruitment in Minnesota was unclear. On the one hand, the systematic surveillance of the community would have made it harder for new volunteers to reach Somalia; on the other hand, the tensions it generated could easily have further fueled the feeling that young Somalis faced a dismal future in the US. What was more certain was that the concept of radicalization that guided federal efforts to respond to the problem was an inadequate way of understanding the experiences of young Somalis in Minnesota, and that it had led to
unwarranted surveillance of the everyday lives of young people in an entire community in the hope of finding the magical indicators of a drift to extremism. As community organizer Nimco Ahmed points out, the idea that members of the community could spot radicalization through a set of indicators is flawed.
In fact, I could be a friend of a radicalized individual and never have to know. Which I actually did. I never knew they were radicalized until they left and did what they did.
The signs usually listed, such as changing to an Islamic dress style, apply to millions of people, she notes.
And people are smart—they’re not going to come saying I’m supporting al-Shabaab, or I’m doing this, or al-Qaeda this. Nobody’s going to do that.54
A generation of young Somali Americans had seen their whole community treated as suspect. Local law enforcement had been drawn into surveillance of young people’s political opinions. Community leaders of the targeted population had competed to establish themselves as useful to the government rather than as advocates for the people on whose behalf they claimed to speak. Opposition to the foreign and domestic policies of the war on terror had no outlet.
None of this went unnoticed by young Somali Americans themselves, who bore the brunt of official suspicion. At the University of Minnesota I met with a group of Somali-American students. After just a short while talking about their lives, their anger started to flow. “I think this is an image that the media has portrayed,” begins one of the group. “The stereotype: oh, you’re Muslim, you’re a terrorist. Minnesota is a nice place, they don’t say nothing. But it’s an image war.” Another relates how she is questioned for three or four hours every time she leaves the country. “Even if you went nowhere near Somalia, they want to give you a hard time, they just wanted me to sweat. Even if we haven’t done anything wrong, they still give us a hard time.” Others agree, and began talking about being discriminated against for having a Muslim name or wearing head scarves. They speak of being prevented from traveling to visit family in Somalia because their names come up on the wide-ranging terrorist watch lists. “Every Muslim in America lives in fear to be blunt,” one of the young men comments.
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 27