The World's Most Dangerous Place (41 page)

‘Ninety per cent of the kids who have gone back to fight came from single mother homes,’ he said. ‘Without a father figure to guide him, Burhan was
raised
by imams. And they say they are not responsible? That’s baloney.’

His feud with the Abubakar mosque was as bitter as ever. In 2009, he claimed, the imam had preached a sermon suggesting that if any of the congregation had the chance, they should run Bihi over with their car. Then Bihi alleged that Hassan Jama, the mosque’s director, had personally met Burhan and the other new recruits at Nairobi airport when they first arrived from Minneapolis in 2008, and driven them to the Abubakar’s sister mosque in Eastleigh, Nairobi’s teeming Somali suburb, for onward transportation to the war.

This incendiary accusation was curiously detailed. If correct, it implied that the Abubakar, one of the largest mosques in the US, was a thinly veiled front for al-Shabaab – which, I almost had to remind myself, had been formally designated a Foreign Terrorist
Organization by the US State Department since February 2008. Could it possibly be true?

‘Everyone in Minneapolis knows the truth about Hassan Jama,’ said Bihi, leaning back and pushing up his glasses. ‘Ask anyone. It’s an open secret in our community.’

‘But if it’s true, why haven’t the FBI investigated?’

‘Ah . . . the FBI,’ he said. ‘They have their own reasons. And they never tell you anything.’

I went to test this assertion a few days later at the FBI’s Minnesota headquarters, a striking glass and steel block on the edge of the downtown business district. Supervisory special agent E. K. Wilson was a short, sharp-faced man in a white shirt and dark tie. The previous evening, when I had told my contact on the local
Star Tribune
newspaper, Paul McEnroe, who I was going to see, he said: ‘Oh my God! It’s the Burnsville Flash!’

Minneapolis, I was learning, was the sort of town where everyone knew each other. Paul and E.K. had once played hockey together in and around Burnsville, a southern suburb where E.K. was brought up. The nickname was a playful tease. E.K. was a determined player, according to Paul, and quick on his feet, yet he was somehow always being flattened by the other kids who were taller and heavier than him.

E.K. and I sat across a table from each other in a windowless interview room, where he explained how he had led the charge on Operation Rhino for the last three years. He sighed when I relayed what Bihi had said about Hassan Jama and the Abubakar mosque: he had clearly heard it often before.

‘There is no evidence that the Abubakar or any other mosque was responsible for the recruitment or radicalization of any of the kids,’ he said carefully. ‘That is not to say the recruiters didn’t use
the mosque – they clearly did. And there was some level of organization – but not at the level of the mosque leadership.’

‘And Jama? Bihi says he is immune from prosecution because he’s providing you with information on extremists.’

‘Any supporter of a terror organization would be indicted whether or not they were providing us with information.’

It was plain enough that he thought Bihi’s allegation was nonsense. What was interesting was the care he took to avoid saying so specifically. In fact, his responses to all my questions seemed unusually diplomatic for a law enforcement officer.

‘There is always rumour in this very . . .
communicative
culture,’ he said at one point. ‘Rumours and allegations are constantly in motion. The challenge is to see beyond the misconceptions.’

In a sense, of course, E.K.
was
a diplomat – an envoy of America in Little Somalia – and like a regular ambassador abroad, he couldn’t afford to be seen to be taking sides. When the first wave of al-Shabaab recruits left, he recalled, none of their friends or family reported what had happened to the police, for fear they would end up in Guantanamo. It had taken his team years of difficult ‘outreach’ work, involving dozens of public meetings in conference centres, youth forums and, eventually, mosques, to persuade the community that the FBI was not anti-Somali or anti-Muslim, but anti-terrorist. The FBI’s mandate was to protect all US citizens – ‘
Including
Somali-Americans,’ E.K. emphasized – and he had worked out that the best and probably only way to do this was to win, and maintain, the trust and cooperation of all parts of the Somali community, regardless of their views. It was a delicate task and, as he acknowledged, still far from complete.

‘Operation Rhino will still be going long after I’m gone.’ He shrugged, philosophically.

He also frankly doubted that young American Muslims had stopped travelling back to fight.

‘I think we’ve slowed the flow down some, but it hasn’t stopped. It’s likely more underground now.’

E.K. was comfortable that the FBI’s response was proportionate to the reality of the terrorist threat. Although they had ‘no credible information’ about any al-Shabaab plot to attack America, he insisted this remained a possibility they couldn’t afford to overlook.

‘There are ten Minneapolis Somalis that we know about who are still fighting for al-Shabaab, an organization that has pledged allegiance to al-Qaida,’ he said. ‘The camp training they receive includes instruction on handling explosives. That is a threat to US interests – and it
is
illegal for a US citizen to provide material support to a terror organization.’

This last remark was a reference to the ongoing trial of two local Somali women, Amina Farah Ali and Hawo Mohamed Hassan, who were accused of fundraising for al-Shabaab. The women had participated in interstate teleconferences dedicated to the Islamist cause, as well as going door-to-door in Minneapolis while pretending to be collecting for the poor. The sums involved were not great: at the end of one teleconference, the pair had recorded pledges totalling just $2,100. For this they faced a maximum penalty of fifteen years in prison for conspiracy.
⁷

At their trial, Amina, the younger woman, distinguished herself by repeatedly refusing to stand for the judge, a gesture of defiance that earned her an additional fifty days in jail for contempt of court. It was classic Somali behaviour, the sort of self-destructive obstinacy I had seen for myself in Galkacyo, where the aunt-biting teenager Kafiyo preferred to go to jail rather than apologize. I remarked to E.K. by email that such behaviour was ‘hard to love,
yet at the same time, impossible not to admire somehow’ – a paraphrase of Gerald Hanley – but E.K. was having none of it.

‘I’ll save my admiration for the persistence and tenacity of other community leaders,’ he shot back.

Amina and Hawo were far from the only American Somalis accused of fundraising for terrorists. The FBI had been investigating the phenomenon for more than two years, and were in the process of bringing to court twenty similar cases. The Burnsville Flash, it seemed, was as dogged on the trail of al-Shabaab as he had once been in pursuit of a suburban hockey puck.

The FBI had concluded that the al-Shabaab recruitment process in Minneapolis had no ‘mastermind’ but was, as E.K. put it, ‘a very lateral, peer-to-peer organization’ – which was another way of saying that the recruits had talked each other into it. This might have happened at the Abubakar mosque, but that did not mean the mosque was complicit. In fact, the Abubakar’s leadership was closely focused these days on reaching out to young people to keep them on the right path and away from al-Shabaab. Indeed, the mosque worked so closely with the FBI that some Minnesota Somalis felt an ill-defined sense of betrayal.

Two months previously, a young Somali attending Friday prayers disagreed so vehemently with the peace-inclined sermon of a visiting scholar that he attacked the mosque director, Hassan Jama. The episode made the local papers, and had been cited by Congressman King in Washington as yet more evidence of radicalism in the Minneapolis community. The attack was defended afterwards by a website called Somali Midnimo – ‘Somalis United’ – which was run by Abdiwali Warsame, a student and part-time cab-driver. He was at the wheel of his cab when I interviewed him.

‘Some people think I am . . . controversial,’ Warsame acknowledged, with a hint of pride he could not quite conceal.

Warsame’s attacks on the Abubakar’s leadership had become so virulent recently that he had been banned from the mosque’s premises. Somali Midnimo had quite a high profile online, so it was a surprise to discover that the website had a staff of one – him – and that it didn’t have a business address of any kind.

‘People think I run my operation out of a big office somewhere, but actually – this is it,’ he laughed, nodding at the laptop sitting on the grimy front passenger seat of his cab.

The thrust of Warsame’s complaint was that the leaders of the Abubakar mosque were hypocrites. Back in 2007, he asserted, they had collectively sung a different tune, preaching against America for its backing of the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. He said that many young Somalis, Burhan Hassan and Shirwa Ahmed among them, had been encouraged by this to return to Somalia to fight the invaders. The Minneapolis community was understandably confused now: why had the mosque leaders abandoned their previous position? This, he explained, was what the attack at the mosque two months previously had been all about.

As Warsame described what had actually happened, however, I began to see that the ‘attack’ on the mosque director was not so much an expression of radicalism as an outbreak of hot-tempered fisticuffs. The visiting scholar, Mohamed Idris Ahmed, had used his Friday address to urge worshippers to focus on their lives in Minneapolis, and not to be distracted by the destruction and fighting back in Somalia, which he blamed equally on the TFG and al-Shabaab. At one point he asked: ‘Who destroyed Mogadishu?’

‘Gaalo!’ called out a young man in the crowd. ‘Foreigners!’

Two other young men in the congregation murmured their agreement, but Ahmed tutted and shook his head.

‘Tell me: who destroyed it?’ he repeated, before answering himself: ‘Somalis destroyed Mogadishu.’

The first young man was agitated by this and wanted to argue the point. But this is not done during a Friday address, any more than it is acceptable in the West to interrupt the vicar in the middle of a sermon on a Sunday. The mosque director asked the young man to pipe down and to put his question in writing, at which point the young man lost his temper and tried to punch him. The confusion was heightened when someone turned the lights out: the act of an ‘accomplice’, according to some reports. Amid shouts and catcalls, the trouble-makers were ejected from the building.

The significance of all this had been wildly exaggerated. Disagreeing with a visiting cleric about who was responsible for the destruction of Mogadishu was hardly evidence of jihadism, as Congressman King claimed. Nobody was hurt, apart from the mosque director who sustained a slight cut to his lip. Warsame, furthermore, was no jihadi. I told him some of the stories I had heard, about mutilations and beheadings and death threats towards foreigners, and he conceded them all.

‘Shabaab ideology is all bullshit,’ Warsame said. ‘They are confused. It is not Islamic to kill innocent people – journalists, aid workers trying to help. Al-Shabaab say they are spies. Maybe it was justified in the nineteenth century, but not now.’

What he liked about al-Shabaab was that they had defended the homeland and successfully resisted the infidel Ethiopian invaders.

‘But the Ethiopians have left Somalia now, haven’t they?’ I asked.

‘Physically, yes. But they are still very influential in Somalia –
and we are still under foreign occupation. I am against the African Union. Their foreign troops kill Somalis all the time with their rockets and shells. They should get out of our country.’

‘But if they weren’t there, al-Shabaab would be running the government now,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t want that, would you?’

‘Maybe al-Shabaab are better than occupation by the African Union. The areas they control are all peaceful. Anyway . . . what’s your book going to be called?’

He frowned when I told him, and fell silent, looking out at the traffic-clogged freeway with a disapproving air.

‘I don’t think your title is true,’ he said eventually.

‘Well you’re not living there, are you?’ I observed.

‘That’s true. But I could if I wanted to.’

Warsame had lived in Minneapolis for eight years, and hadn’t been in Somalia since he was child. He looked at me wide-eyed when I told him I’d been in Mogadishu the previous month, and immediately asked if he could interview me for his website. He was typical of other diaspora Somalis I had met, in that his knowledge of current affairs back home was often second-hand. In Minneapolis, it was evidently so rare to come across anyone with recent experience of Mogadishu that even a gaalo’s impressions had value.

He was, in the end, an armchair nationalist, whose patriotism seemed badly misplaced. His view of the homeland had been sentimentalized and distorted by time, distance and the internet; perhaps especially by the internet. I suspected he would quickly change his mind about al-Shabaab if he ever went back to Somalia and saw for himself how they operated. He reminded me, rather, of NORAID, and all those green-spectacled Irish-Americans in the 1980s who outraged British public opinion by putting money in a bucket for the IRA during St Patrick’s Day parades in New York.
It was highly ironic that one of the best-known IRA supporters in those days was none other than the Irish-American congressman Peter King. The self-appointed champion of homeland security had rather more in common with the likes of Hassan Warsame than he perhaps realized. I glanced again at the laptop on the passenger seat next to Warsame, and was struck by the absurdity of taking anything he said too seriously. It seemed another measure of America’s paranoia that anyone did.

E.K. Wilson thought that Minneapolis’s al-Shabaab volunteers had recruited each other. In order to understand what was going on in their minds at the time, therefore, it followed that all I needed to do was to ask their old school friends. The friends, however, turned out to be as mystified as everyone else.