The World's Most Dangerous Place (39 page)

‘My nephew became a Salafist. All of a sudden it was “their way” or “no way”. I banned him from my house,’ he said, with a faint smile that acknowledged the paradox. ‘I understand kids who go from Barelvism to Salafism because I did the same journey; I understand how that misinterpretation works.’

The purpose of his foundation, he said, was to show young Muslims a shortcut to enlightenment, although he insisted that religious guidance was only a part of the solution.

‘A lot of them have legitimate grievances, which we try to address. Everyone is different. Engagement is the key. You have to look at the person and try to get where they are coming from.’

This was in sharp contrast to the approach usually taken by government which, he said, was driven by ‘performance indicators . . . They are not interested in the emotional stuff, and that neglect just plays into the narrative of oppression that radicalization begins with.’

He was a believer in the ‘hug a hoodie’ philosophy once embraced by David Cameron in his bid to rebrand his Conservative Party, a controversial approach to youth crime that the Tories had quietly dropped once they returned to government. It was intriguing to meet someone who both practised the technique and swore that it worked.

Hanif had had a great deal to do with young Somalis over the years. He had seen several would-be Somali jihadis in Islamabad and Rawalpindi on his way to Afghanistan in 2002, and saw a strong similarity between the Taliban and al-Shabaab in the way that the latter manipulated the idealism of its young foreign
recruits. He had coaxed several Somalis away from the path that led to terrorism, and offered the example of ‘Blade’, an ex-street gangster whom he had met during a four-day Outward Bound course in the Surrey countryside near Guildford in 2010. Instead of scolding Blade when he was caught skiving off smoking a joint in the woods, Hanif had made a point of befriending him. He was clearly a natural mentor with a knack for winning the trust of a certain type of confused young person. Blade, he learned, had joined an Afro-Caribbean gang ‘for the authority’, and had slid into a life of ‘severe violence’ from which he was struggling to escape.

‘We drilled down,’ said Hanif. ‘His mother was devout and she had thrown him out for smelling of weed, so all he had was the gangs. There was no father or father-figure in his life.’

Amil Khan, the documentary maker, had described to me ‘a particular poor UK urban shittiness that the middle-class world hardly ever sees’, and Blade’s story sounded a good example of that. Khan thought that the poverty, although real enough, was almost incidental to the main problem, which he identified as ‘a lack of opportunity, or a perception of not having opportunities . . . At the same time there’s a youth culture that quickly coalesces around social problems to make dysfunction a badge of pride.’

Back in Waltham Forest, Hanif persuaded Blade to attend one of his ‘gang workshops’ that were designed to give people like him a chance to vent their grievances. It was in the course of one of these sessions that he revealed he had recently downloaded some bomb-making instructions from the internet.

‘His life was a mess and he blamed “the West” for that,’ shrugged Hanif, ‘and so he wanted to bomb some non-Muslims.’

It was possible, or even likely, that Blade would never have acted
on his bomb-making impulse. Terrorism – or as Hanif described it, ‘disastrous action’ – was no more than a form of desperate self-expression born of frustration and anger, with only the very loosest connection to political Islam, let alone to al-Qaida or al-Shabaab. The same could not be said, though, of the Active Change Foundation’s most celebrated deradicalized Somali, Kader Ahmed, who had specifically wanted to be associated with the cause of al-Shabaab.

Kader had been so close to the London suicide bombers of July 2005 that he phoned each of the 21/7 gang, one by one, to wish them luck on their mission shortly before they set off. He was also among the group of Muslims photographed, notoriously, on a terrorist training weekend at Baysbrown Farm in the Lake District in 2004 run by Mohammed Hamid, an East African Indian Muslim preacher and reformed crack addict known as Osama bin London. Kader was only seventeen in 2004 when he first came under the spell of Hamid, at a rally at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. He was sent to Belmarsh Prison’s high security unit for his involvement in the terror cell, but had come under Hanif’s influence on his release, and was now on the same deradicalizing mission. He was famous for touring the worst housing estates on his bike, and stopping to tell his cautionary tale to any youths he found hanging about there.

The story of Kader’s progression from confused refugee street kid to Islamist terrorist was like a version of Hogarth’s
Rake’s Progress
, updated for the twenty-first century. His parents had fled the civil war in the 1990s in the usual way, and begun a new life in a council flat in Plaistow, a short bus-ride south of the Lea Bridge Road. But his father left when Kader was twelve, and his devout mother took him out of secondary school at fourteen, apparently
intent on educating him at home. Hanif described Kader as an ‘emotional, compassionate person’ and a natural ‘seeker’. He was also young and lonely; and so when he fell in with Mohammed Hamid’s group of fellow seekers, his mother, disastrously, encouraged him. Kader quickly rose up the ranks of the group, becoming the favoured protégé of its leader, and growing close, too, to its number two, a ‘very aggressive Turkish Cypriot’ called Atilla Ahmet.
*

‘It was just the wrong crowd,’ said Hanif. ‘All his desires and grievances were massaged. He was taught to hate, and all his cultural norms were stripped away . . . I would call it abuse, brainwashing.’

It took the grim reality of the London Transport attacks, and then a spell in Belmarsh, to make Kader see the mistake he had made.

Despite his successes, Hanif was far from sanguine about London’s young Somalis. He, too, thought that the violence and lawlessness of a section of that community were getting worse, and he agreed that there was a Somali crime ‘time-bomb’ in Britain, waiting to go off.

‘Somalis are harder to engage with than any of the others,’ he said. ‘They never change, no matter what you do for them. They are much harder to crack than the Algerians, the Afghans . . . you can be six months into a programme with one of them, and you think you’re making some progress, and then, boom! Something
happens, and it’s back to square one. It takes a lot of money and patience, and, to be honest with you, I’ve used a lot of my patience up now.’

Somalis, he had concluded, were often ‘special’ in their disrespect for authority, the ease with which they could be manipulated, and the speed with which they resorted to extreme violence.

‘Life is cheaper to them even than it is to the Afghans,’ he said, ‘and they seem to have no code of conduct, even among themselves.’

A lot of Somalis he worked with, furthermore, could be ‘very thick’, with an inability to think for themselves that was uniquely self-destructive. For instance, the foundation’s bike shed had been vandalized recently by one of Hanif’s regulars, a Somali whose street name was Fester; his crime had been caught on one of the centre’s four CCTV security cameras. Hanif confronted Fester, who apologized with a cheery ‘Sorry, Uncle!’. But a few days later he returned, and was filmed trying – and failing – to destroy the cameras that had betrayed him the first time. A month or two later came the Tottenham riots, which showed that Fester had still not learned his lesson. Hanif recalled watching the television news one night and immediately spotting Fester, the only youth in a huge crowd of law-breakers not wearing a mask or hood.

The danger was that young men like Fester seemed capable of almost any atrocity, any imbecility – including, no doubt, going back to Somalia to be trained by or to fight for al-Shabaab. You didn’t need many brains to do that, as was proved by a bizarre episode at Mogadishu airport in March 2012, when a black Briton arriving from London via Nairobi was stopped with hundreds of CDs and a quantity of mysterious powder in his luggage. When
questioned he said he was trying to get to Kismayo ‘to help the Muslims’ – at which point, AMISOM security personnel arrested him. The hapless would-be jihadi, later identified as Jamaican-born Clive Everton Dennis, had conspicuously failed to do his homework about who controlled the Somali capital.

Dennis was deported, but Britain’s security services knew that many British Muslims like him had made it through, and that others were continuing to try. The more usual way to reach al-Shabaab territory was simply to walk over the poorly guarded Kenyan border. Two 18-year-olds from Cardiff, Mohamed Abdulrahman Mohamed, a Somali, and his Pakistani friend Iqbal Shahzad, were arrested trying to do just that in October 2011.

‘He was brainwashed and taken away from us and he was told that he was going to fight a holy war in Somalia,’ said Mohamed’s father, Abdirahman Haji Abdallah, who flew to Kenya to raise the alarm.

Mohamed and Shahzad were classic examples of the misguided teenager recruit identified by SO15’s Abid Raja. After questioning back in London, counter-terrorist police released the pair back to their relieved families in Cardiff. The threat posed by other British Muslims was much graver, however. In May 2012, for instance, Kenyan police were reportedly still searching for Samantha Lewthwaite, a Muslim convert and the widow of the 7/7 London bomber Germaine Lindsay, whom they suspected of organizing the finances of the Jermaine Grant bomb plot in Mombasa.

A report by the Royal United Services Institute in February 2012 said that as many as a quarter of the estimated two hundred hardcore foreign fighters in al-Shabaab’s ranks were British. Many of them were of non-Somali origin. Bilal al-Berjawi from west London, for example, who was killed near Mogadishu in January
2012 by an American drone strike, was Lebanese. With perhaps 2.8 million Muslims resident in the UK – as well as a British expatriate community of around 30,000 living in Kenya – it was no wonder that British security services were worried. Somalia, according to one unnamed intelligence official, was ‘regarded as a dog which has barked but not yet bitten . . . These people are no mugs. Somalia is awash with weapons and there are some very tasty fighters out there.’ Al-Shabaab, this official thought, had the potential to become a ‘very accomplished’ international terrorist organization.
¹⁰

‘Those who survive tend to return [to Britain] in a matter of months or perhaps a year,’ said RUSI’s director general, Professor Michael Clarke, adding: ‘It is only a question of time before their commitment to the cause, and their newly acquired expertise, are likely to be seen on British streets.’
¹¹

Clarke’s assertion was based in part on what had happened in recent years in the US, where as many as forty-eight Somali-Americans were known to have travelled back in secret to Somalia in order to receive terrorist ‘training’ from Islamist extremists. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the American Congressman Peter King, the chairman of the US House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, came to London to warn British MPs that there was ‘increasing evidence’ of terrorist-trained Somali-Americans attempting to come back to the US, where the danger of radicalization had grown ‘much worse’.

Tightened security in the West, King argued, meant that it was now ‘very difficult [for al-Qaida] to attack on a large scale from the outside’. As a consequence, al-Qaida – and the congressman made little distinction between that organization and al-Shabaab – had changed tactics. Even President Obama’s Deputy National Security
Advisor, Denis McDonough, agreed that al-Qaida was now ‘definitely recruiting within the Muslim American community’.
¹²

The enemy within: it was the West’s greatest nightmare, as the success of the 2012 TV drama series
Homeland
perhaps demonstrated. Audiences on both sides of the Atlantic were gripped by the series’ atmosphere of moody paranoia, and its plot revolving around a CIA agent’s pursuit of a US marine who, rescued after years in al-Qaida captivity, had been ‘turned’ by his former captors and was now plotting against the Washington government. It seemed to say something about the closeness of Britain and America in the War on Terror that Damian Lewis, the actor chosen to play the US marine, was British.

The SO15 detective Paul Birch thought that Britain ought to be paying more attention to the American experience, if only on the grounds that ‘what happens over there always happens over here eventually’. I was particularly intrigued by the Upper Midwest’s ‘Twin Cities’, Minneapolis and St Paul, the home of the largest Somali community in the US, from where at least twenty young Somali men had vanished since 2007, only to reappear soon afterwards in Somalia as fighters for al-Shabaab. In some cases, they had become suicide bombers. Most of the twenty had been in their mid-twenties, but at least two of them were still at high school when they left, aged just seventeen. In proportion to its size, the Twin Cities had exported far more Somali jihadis than London, or anywhere else in the Western world. How had that happened? And what could be done to stop the same from happening in Britain? In the autumn of 2011 I went to America to try to find out.

*
Ahmet, according to Hanif, was the model for Barry, the crazed white extremist character in Chris Morris’s 2010 movie
Four Lions
, a ‘jihad satire’ that British counter-terrorism officials referred to almost constantly in the course of my research. Barry’s plan to bomb a local mosque in order to ‘radicalize the moderates’ provides one of the film’s best black-comedy moments.

13

The missing of Minneapolis

Twin Cities, Minnesota, September 2011