Monday October 5, 2015
By Jason Tan
Somali-American community in America is target of terror group recruiters
MINNEAPOLIS — When Andrew Luger became the United States Attorney for Minnesota in February 2014, the problem of young Somali men in the community leaving America to join the radical Islamist insurgent group Al Shabab in the civil war in Somalia was easing off, only for a new form of terror recruitment to surface.“I actually thought I can be US Attorney and not focus on terror recruiting,” said Mr Luger. “Instead, we found out relatively quickly after I came into office that with the rise of ISIS (Islamic State), recruiting had come back.”
The extent of the problem soon became clear. In April this year, six Minnesota men of Somali descent in their late teens and early 20s were charged with conspiring to aid and support the Islamic State, in what is described as the biggest such case to date in the US. According to prosecutors, the youths had planned to travel to Syria and Iraq to join the terror group but were detained before they could do so. They were influenced by a common friend, Mr Abdi Nur, 18, who had slipped out of America last year.“From his locale in Syria, Mr Nur recruits individuals and provides assistance to those who want to leave Minneapolis to fight abroad,” according to court documents.
Three of the youths have pleaded guilty while the other cases are still before the courts. Such radicalisation is of grave concern to American authorities and Minnesota’s 100,000-strong Somali-American community, the largest in the US.
These Somalis had come to the US in the 1990s as refugees, with most settling in the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in this mid-western state. Many arrived with little education and struggled to keep a grip on their America-born children, who are caught between their old and new worlds.
Families and law enforcement agencies alike find it hard to comprehend why these young men who have never been to the Middle East are drawn to a terror group there, particularly as Somalis have no national or ethnic ties to Syria and Iraq. Those ties had been a factor behind the decisions of dozens of young Somali-Americans who had gone to fight with Al Shabab — Al Qaeda’s affiliate in the Horn of Africa — when Ethiopia invaded Somalia in 2006.
“The people doing the recruiting for ISIS saw the success of Al Shabab had in the Somali population and decided to focus their efforts there. That’s greatly distressing, both to the community and law enforcement. This is something we are working with the community to turn around,” said Mr Luger, who noted that for those who were radicalised, the Islamic State held a different appeal from Al Shabab.
“It’s a broader appeal — come help your Muslim brothers in Syria and Iraq who are being persecuted either by the Assad regime or by the West, as opposed to the days of Al Shabab where it was a case of come support your country,” he added, referring to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
BUILDING COMMUNITY RESILIENCE
As part of its response to counter violent extremism, or CVE, the US government last year launched a pilot programme in three cities: Minneapolis, Boston and Los Angeles. The aim is to address root causes of extremism through community engagement and undermine attraction to terrorist activity. It is a preventive counter-terrorism programme that seeks to build awareness in communities and intervene when young people are believed to be falling under the influence of extremist groups.
In Minneapolis, Mr Luger started implementing the programme early this year, with his office committing nearly US$1 million (S$1.4 million) to a Building Community Resilience plan through a public-private partnership.
“This is what the Somali community here asked me to do. One of the priorities is to build up resources within the community to fight terrorism,” he said, adding that since his appointment, he had reached out to Somali Muslim community leaders across the state to try to understand their concerns. The CVE programme was shaped directly by the issues they raised to him and will be led by a taskforce of 15 Somali Americans and a community grant-making organisation.
“We need to engage more with our youth. We need our youths to be talking more openly. With parents, with religious leaders, with each other. And we need them in an open relationship with law enforcement.”
For a start, the CVE initiative includes a mentorship project for Somali youth as well as programmes aimed at creating educational and professional opportunities among the Somali Muslim community in Minnesota. The goal is to prevent youth recruitment by overseas extremist groups such as Islamic State.
The chair of the CVE taskforce, Abdimalik Mohamed, said that it was encouraging for law enforcement officials such as Mr Luger to go out of their way to engage the Somali community. “We still have a long way to go when it comes to building relationships between the Somali community and law enforcement. But it’s better in 2015 than it ever has been,” he said.
LINGERING MISTRUST
Even at this early stage of the CVE programme, it has engendered some hostility within the local Somali community. There is distrust of the seemingly direct involvement of the attorney general’s office, as well as funding from the federal government. Those opposed also think the programme’s emphasis on violent extremism does not accurately reflect the problems facing the community — such as gang violence — and could further pigeonhole Somali Muslims in America as a problematic, violent population requiring special attention and funds.
“I think these efforts are misguided to begin with, as more than 90 per cent of terrorism in the US is committed by white men,” said Mr Mahmoud Mire, a Somali-American who is also president of the University of Minnesota’s Muslim Student Association.
Ms Page Fortna, chair of the political science department at Columbia University, said that the percentage of Muslims in America who are at any risk of being recruited to an extremist organisation is tiny. She believed CVE efforts in Minneapolis would likely backfire because they would make the Somali Muslim community there “feel more alienated from American society”. “A lot of the suspicion among Muslim Americans is driven by the fear that … this kind of effort reinforces in other Americans’ mind that Muslims are terrorists,” she said.
Mr Mohamed Farah, executive director of Ka Joog, a community group that works with Somali youths in Minnesota, said the issue of Islamic State recruitment has been “magnified to be bigger than it is”. “More young people have died in gang violence than (with) ISIS or Al Shabab. There’s a lot of other issues in the community that people don’t talk about but they magnify this (terrorism) issue,” he said.
Others in the community worry that law enforcement officers will use the community outreach programmes to covertly gather intelligence, said Mr Paul McEnroe, a veteran investigative journalist at The Star Tribune in Minneapolis who has covered terror recruitment and social justice issues. Such intelligence gathering was allowed and in fact encouraged during the administration of former president George W Bush, although this has been stopped by the Obama government. To assuage the concerns of the Somali community, Mr Luger’s office and the Somali American taskforce signed a memorandum of understanding that the CVE programme will not be used for surveillance or to collect intelligence.
Mr Kyle Loven, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Chief Division Counsel in Minneapolis, said that the agency’s officers had disagreed with the previous directive by the Bush administration and refused to comply with it because “it did not make any sense”.
“This will destroy all the work we’ve done in the past couple of years,” he said, referring to efforts by local FBI officers in building ties with the Somali community. “When it comes to the interactions with the community, we’re respectful … That’s why we are invited to various festivals, town hall meetings, and we make it a point to show up.
“This is not about targeting Somalis. This is quite literally about preventing young people travelling overseas and most likely meeting their deaths for these terror groups.”
Nearly 30,000 foreigners, including more than 250 Americans, have joined Islamic State and other militant groups to fight in Syria and Iraq, double the number a year ago, according to a US congressional study released last week.
Mr Loven said social media has been a game-changer in terror recruitment. “You no longer need a facilitator on the ground here to radicalise young men. They go to jihadist websites,” he said, adding that family and friends should flag any abrupt changes in behaviour of their loves ones. “When we have people who have gone from very fun-loving kids to very stoic (and) serious, those type of rapid personality changes … are possible indicators (of radicalisation).”
Another concern is the difficulty of detecting lone wolves planning to mount attacks in America, given that a clampdown on would-be foreign fighters is likely to make it more difficult for them to travel abroad.
“It’s very much an uphill battle … because you don’t know who’s sitting in front of the computer at night being radicalised online and with no affiliation to all the groups that we’re familiar with,” said Mr Loven.
To counter the threat, the FBI is adding a new squad of counter-terrorism officers in Minnesota to the three already deployed. Close collaboration between the authorities and the Somali Americans to build community resilience is critical in addressing the threat of Somali youths being radicalised, said Mr Luger.
“The way to address it is through collaboration and with sensitivity. This is not a problem the community created. This is a patriotic, peace-loving, entrepreneurial community. It just happens that people in Syria and Iraq are focusing on their youth and trying to harm them.”
He acknowledges that the CVE programme will take time to bear fruit. “That’s going to take time and work and collaboration. There’s no one button you push that answers the problem. And so, that’s why I spend so much time in the community, speaking, listening and trying to help. It’s the right thing to do. I hope it’s successful.”