by Clint Watts
Food discussions routinely brought Omar to American references from television, movies, and music. “Best thing since ‘Jason.’ crank up the chainsaw,” he cracked one winter day, using a Friday the 13th movie character to justify terrorist violence. In other discussions, Omar reminisced about the kids’ educational programming Reading Rainbow and Wishbone, where famous stories were retold through an adorable Jack Russell terrier.
The food dialogue discredited Omar among some of the terrorist audiences, but, more important, it opened a gateway for further engagement more in line with my goals. Within a month, jihadis in the ranks and even Hammami’s fellow defectors were trying to silence him on Twitter.
“Funny how people contact me to say stop exposing the opp. Bcuz it make kuffar happy, but so few call 4 an end 2 the opp itself.”
Quickly after, an e-jihadi shot back to this tweet, “Abu Mansuur [Hammami], tell us what you’re after. Are you pro Jihad or Pro-Americans. we are doubting [y]our intentions.”
Omar’s discussions provided essential information about where he and his opponents resided in Somalia, creating a nice terrorist political map. Shabaab’s supporters and their detractors tweeted about their surroundings. Over time, I could piece together their general locations, sometimes the exact towns from which they tweeted. I could discern which ones were true terrorists in Shabaab territory, which were Shabaab dissenters from lesser clans, and which were international diaspora members in far-off places like London, Stockholm, or even America.
To exacerbate these divisions and highlight the differences between the camps, I honed my blog posts to further entice Omar into engagement. Again I fell back on some old training. Using “RPMs” is a discussion technique used to nudge guilty people toward a confession. The science behind the approach remains a bit dubious, but even in general conversation, RPMs help bring the interviewer closer to the subject, making the person more comfortable divulging secrets or confessing to crimes. R stands for rationalize, and throughout my blog posts narrating Hammami’s adventures, I’d note that Omar had “no choice” but to run from Shabaab and “do the right thing” ideologically. When not rationalizing his choices, I focused on the P—projection. “Shabaab betrayed you, they forced you into this position,” I’d say, offering a convenient vehicle to saddle up to Omar’s position and take his side. I was patting him on the back and confirming his actions as the smart decision, placing blame on Shabaab and noting that he had no choice in his decision. M is where you minimize the person’s actions, and this proved a bit harder to use in Omar’s case. He was a terrorist and he had killed people. So I’d drop in comments regarding how egregious Shabaab’s atrocities were but then note that what Omar had done paled in comparison.
In addition to using RPM interrogation techniques, I’d play hot and cold with him. I’d lead one day, patting Omar on the back for being a fighter instead of one of these online wannabees chatting at us on Twitter. A day or two later, I’d criticize him for being so silly as to join a terrorist group that now wanted to kill him. Beyond that, I’d create false competitions. When Omar landed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, I noted that he was worth only a percentage of the top-valued American terrorist on the list, Adam Gadahn, a close adviser to al-Qaeda’s chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Omar took it in stride, though, loving the attention and cleverly responding, “a friend in shabab jail was amazed at me being wanted by u.s. AND muj. Someone responded: like qadaafi!”
Omar, in turn, used his Twitter following, his personal metrics, to compete with me.
“Thnx 2 new followers. I generally like to engage those who take time 2 tweet me, but this is just ridiculous!” Omar said, congratulating himself for his growing Western fame.
“Clint, if I get another 300 followers or so, we’ll be tied. Up for a private match of twitter fightin’?” Omar kept a close eye on his followers and mine, and now he wanted a personal chat. No, thanks, Omar, I’ll keep you wanting, and here talking in public. Omar, isolated in Somalia’s wilderness, was getting attached to his conversations with me and the other Westerners he’d left behind when he ran off to become a terrorist. The time had come to move conversations past rapport building.
Two months into our conversations, my relationship with Omar had reached the point where I felt I could challenge him with questions of substance. I wanted Omar to disavow al-Qaeda. I knew he wouldn’t completely defame them, but I hoped he would suggest that the terror group’s time had passed. Such an admission from a well-known American foreign fighter would take al-Qaeda’s glamour down a notch. To get there, I focused on the conflict Omar had with one Shabaab booster. Jawshan, a Shabaab-supporting Twitter troll, clearly gave Omar pause, and I saw an opening.
“Instead of a twitter fight, could u & Jawshan set up a shabaab celebrity boxing match or something & broadcast it?” I posed the question to Omar, and he again thought he’d be clever.
“Somalis don’t box, so I’m sure I’d win, but jawshan is more the hide behind the curtain and pretend 2 b wiz of oz type.” Omar pursued the question as a way to tread on his competitor. A perfect setup for me, to side with his adversary and see if he’d reach for my approval.
“U complain about #sockpuppet Americans but then u argue with Shabaab #sockpuppet—they must get to u.” I was offering some credibility to Omar’s rival Jawshan.
“Shabab one is an arm pretending 2 b its own sep. body. The American one has a hand up its . . . sleeve.” Omar’s response fell flat.
“Took u while to think up this right. Nice try but ur attempt to be clever didn’t work out this time . . . ur analolgy no good.” I wanted to sting him a bit; he had gotten too comfortable with me.
“No. It was immediate, but net is bad. You can have ur opinion abt my analogies i guess. It’s not what makes u a watty kafir!” Omar tersely replied.
“Ahh name calling . . . I guess when u don’t have answers just fall back to that . . . like team jawshan.” I wanted to keep up the pressure on Omar a bit.
“So someone banned big watty small’s cigarette break at work and now he’s taking it out on the terrorist.” Omar appeared upset with me, and again he resorted to a negative nickname he and his small terrorist posse had assigned me weeks before: “Big Watty” or “Watty Kafir,” a transliteration in Arabic of my last name, an insult roughly meaning “lowly unbeliever.”
Now was the time to challenge Omar’s decision to join a terrorist group. “I can’t figure out why u insist on violence to pursue ur beliefs. U could have stayed in states & worshipped the way u want.”
Omar’s response was lackluster, scripted, and vacant. “Establishing khilafah is the pinnacle of worship.” A khalifah—caliph, in English—is the civil and religious leader of a Muslim state and the representative of the Muslim god, Allah, on earth. Omar seemed to suggest that pursuit of violence must be done to establish this khalifah. The answer was again weak, and he knew it.
“So like I said, Jawshan gets to u then? Why do u care what he thinks? He should be worried bout u right?”
Strangely, my opportunity to prompt the question came during a workout. On an April afternoon in 2013, I glanced down at Twitter while I was at a gym along Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Surrounded by Boston University students hopping on treadmills and staring at themselves in the mirror while lifting dumbbells, I saw the opening I’d been looking for.
Omar had tweeted, “only respond to things that could lead to doubts if led unanswered.”
I paused for a second, then started typing on my iPhone.
“Ok, we’ll, here is what I have doubts about when it comes 2 u, ‘are u a member of al-Qaeda & do u believe in their ideology?’”
I challenged Omar’s allegiance to al-Qaeda. I wanted him to disavow the group he’d once defended back in Alabama and aspired to on social media. I hoped he’d point out, in front of all jihadi watchers, that al-Qaeda’s time was passing.
Omar answered quickly: “not member of aq but agree with most of their ideology.” Thanks, Omar. Gu
ys like Omar were still motivated to commit terrorism but looking for a new direction.
“Hey, man, are you using this bench?” As I tried to pull dialogue from a terrorist half a world away, a young BU student was getting frustrated with me. Hey, man, I’m busy talking to a terrorist, give me a second. In my mind, I was shouting at this kid, but he was right: I wasn’t lifting, and my towel secured a bench I hadn’t used for at least ten minutes.
“It’s all you,” I said, turning back to my Twitter feed, trying not to be that annoying prick everyone runs into at the gym who hogs the equipment while gazing at his phone.
Omar admitted that he wasn’t a member of al-Qaeda, and again pointed to where jihad was headed: a decentralized stew of angry young men looking for a new direction and the next objective.
In the social media world, Omar was becoming more of a friend to the counterterrorists than to the terrorists. The more Westerners engaged him, the more information he coughed up, spilling the beans on infighting among jihadis in Somalia. As March turned to April, I played more and more to Omar’s ego. Every disclosure Omar made I’d summarize and post on my blog. Any evidence emerging publicly of Omar’s disclosures and reports of internal terrorist conflicts I’d add in there, too. A couple of days after our al-Qaeda discussion, I sat among BU students again, this time in my favorite coffee shop, Blue State Coffee, and quickly wrote a post supporting Hammami’s thesis. “#Shabaab in #Somalia publicly fractures & pressures al Qaeda” went live just as I headed home for dinner.
I checked my phone as I walked, and there was Omar: “5 min ago was gonna ask u if were busy writting a new blog post.” You bet, Omar, I’m always there to help you hurt a terrorist group.
A few days later, Omar provided an English version of how al-Shabaab had betrayed and hunted him in Somalia; he’d learned that most people in the Arab world weren’t too interested in the tragic story of an American jihadi. I again repeated my technique, quickly summarizing his tragedy on my blog: “#Shabaab’s betrayal of Omar Hammami—in English this time!”
“If u get some award for ur coverage, u owe me a halal burger.” Omar loved reading about himself.
I joked back with Omar: “I haven’t heard Pulitzer knocking, and my English is about like ur Arabic, so critics often overlook me.” Again I lumped him and myself together, like long-lost Twitter brothers.
A couple of months into Omar’s discussions with Westerners on Twitter, he rightly became worried about his personal security. Al-Shabaab, once the champion of Twitter, now sought control over its group members and their tweets. They understood what I and others were seeing and what we were doing—tracking the strength, unity, and direction of terrorist groups and their members using open-source social media information. Shabaab members scolded one another in tweets, referencing their boss’s instructions to stop revealing operational information on Twitter. They also warned Omar about his disclosures.
“The only reason thy r even talking to u is to get more info frm you! And to make fun u dnt u see tht?” tweeted by one of Omar’s Twitter followers.
I’m confident Omar knew we were tracking his information, but the message struck a chord with him. “Is this true?” Hammami tweeted out to his Western followers. Some immediately responded with denials, and others sought to redirect his discussions to other topics. But this represented an important moment in my relationship with Omar. Most will try to hide from the hard questions, obfuscate, or lie. But these misleading statements end relationships, both real and virtual. The best answers are simple, straightforward, and true. My response was easy:
“For information, yes, of course, I write blog posts about it, if u don’t talk about something interesting, I don’t right [sic],” I said, mixing up homonyms amid my daily fatigue.
Omar, in response, seemed all right with it. “Yeah, I thought it was a fun dramatic question to ask. I’m a grown up and know who I’m dealing w/. Good answers tho.”
I then offered, “funny, u & I r 2 only people I see in these discussions that r actually who we say we r on this thing called Twitter.”
Omar, a typical American, confirmed, “I like to keep it real yo. Word.”
Our game of operational-security chicken needed to end, though. By tweeting with him, I was revealing a good deal about my own locations and activities and making myself vulnerable to whatever young jihadi boy might decide to knock on my door and behead me.
In Omar’s case, he should have been worried, as even his most innocuous revelations provided details of his whereabouts. “Had some ice today. Gave the donkey a day off to enjoy the rain. The shabab are bluffing. No worries.” But Hammami, in showing off his fearlessness, gave me and the rest of the world key details. His technical signatures hitting my blog didn’t provide much other than his presence in Somalia, but his words gave me important context.
In just a few short Google searches, I pulled up maps from aid efforts in Somalia, showing roads and villages not typically displayed or easily correlated in Google Earth. A few minutes later, I printed a Somali clan map created by a college professor, showing the group Hammami said had helped him hide in Somalia. It doesn’t rain much in that country, so I pulled the weather reports for the clan area, and it had rained in only a couple of places that day. Omar mentioned ice, a rare commodity in the Horn of Africa and one requiring electricity, so I looked for places within a thirty-to forty-five-minute donkey cart ride—five kilometers or so—from towns where it had rained that day. Then I looked back to the tweets where Hammami had noted people speaking out on his behalf or in line with his views. His supporters consistently mentioned only three or four towns, and all surrounded the areas witnessing rain that day. In less than an hour, using a home computer, I had two to three guesses as to where Hammami was hiding in interior Somalia. If I could figure this out from my house, Omar had reason to be wary of what others could do with his information—terrorists or counterterrorists, both of whom wanted him dead.
But Omar loved the attention and felt that, through his notoriety, he was waging a counter-jihad against his previous terrorist overlords. He kept dumping insights onto the internet, and at times I couldn’t even keep up with his disclosures. More English versions of his previously published Arabic documents came out each week, and I also had to focus on my day job to pay the bills working as a cybersecurity consultant. Omar wanted my attention, wanted me to keep writing. Two days after the Boston Marathon bombing, he reached out to me wondering why I hadn’t been quickly writing up a new post about him. “Clint is either saving the day in boston, or busy digesting my 20page or so doc . . . and maybe a chillidog or something.” He was right: I was distracted. Living less than two miles from the end of the Boston Marathon route, I’d been busy keeping an eye on the rapidly unfolding events.
Omar was a lost soul, estranged from his country, his family, and even his terrorist group. Hunkered down in a nearly inhospitable African country, hunted by his former fellow terrorists, he stayed alive for a time because of his social media prowess. Shabaab, which had pioneered Twitter use for terrorism, now suffered from the openness it had unleashed. To silence dissenters as the group declined, Shabaab turned off cell towers, squashing social media usage and information sharing among its challengers. When Shabaab raided Omar’s home, searching his family’s belongings, they took the cell phone charger, a scarce commodity in Somalia and one that silences Shabaab’s mobile-phone-empowered critics. Words, information, and social media had become more powerful weapons in Somalia than AK-47s and RPGs.
By the end of April 2013, Ahmed Godane, leader of al-Shabaab, had had enough of Omar’s disclosures and the dissension they had fueled, both in his ranks and among clans in Shabaab’s orbit. Not long after complaining about not having a proper shower since he arrived in Somalia, Omar tweeted, “just been shot in neck by shabab assassin. not critical yet.”
Soon after, he posted a picture showing his neck wound. Omar dropped off Twitter for a few days, then resurfaced to detail his tribulation
s leading up to being wounded. He’d appealed to a Shariah court for help, and while the local court took Omar’s side, Shabaab’s hunters didn’t stop. Omar and his small posse headed into the woods, where a small battle ensued. Omar survived, and Shabaab’s troops took losses. But Omar’s social media presence would never be the same. He tweeted one last, hopeful time on May 3, 2013, saying that forces were closing in on him and that the people were on his side. And then silence: Omar vanished from Twitter, much as he’d done for extended periods before.
The summer passed, and I moved on to other terrorist groups, namely the brewing battles between jihadis in Syria. No word came from the @abumamerican Twitter account for months. Then, just after Labor Day 2013, Omar briefly reappeared. Harun Maruf, from Voice of America, did a phone interview with him, and excerpts appeared in a story on September 5. When asked whether he’d come back to the United States, he said, “That is not an option unless it’s in a body bag.”6 He whined in one tweet about the interview, claiming that Voice of America hadn’t provided enough of his thoughts and had simply painted him as a terrorist. September 5, 2013, would be Omar’s last tweet.
Omar Hammami didn’t come home to the United States, in a body bag or otherwise. Twelve years and a day after the September 11 terrorist attacks, al-Shabaab hunted him down in the forests of Somalia and killed him.
News reports surfaced as word spread quickly. A Hammami ally took control of Omar’s Twitter account, sending out a death announcement to the world and to Omar’s father, Shafik Hammami: “We confirm the martyrdom of Omar Hammami in the morning of Thur 12 2013. Shafik’s family please accept our condolences.” Omar’s discussions with his father via social media offered a twisted, complicated subtext to his writing. Shafik still lived in America, and he slowly watched terrorists hunt down his terrorist son, all the while concerned for his Somali grandchildren he’d never met. For a few weeks after Omar’s death, the @abumamerican account continued to promote Omar’s story and the failures of al-Shabaab, before falling silent.