The World's Most Dangerous Place (40 page)

Ten years had passed since the attacks of 9/11, but it was as though they had only just happened at New York’s Newark airport, where I stopped to change planes for Minneapolis. A soldier in full combat gear was stationed at the main terminal entrance, his legs apart and his rifle cradled in his arms, an alert and aggressive reminder from the government to the people that America remained a country at war. The New Jersey Port Authority, apparently fearful that al-Qaida would mark the 9/11 anniversary with another Twin Towers-type strike, had plastered the terminals with posters exhorting the public to be vigilant. One of these depicted a hooded figure with a rucksack over his shoulder, slipping into a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, above the shouted headline ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ and a phone number to call.

There seemed, at least to my European eyes, to be quite a lot wrong with the picture. Wasn’t there enough paranoia in
America’s airports already, without encouraging its citizens to spy on one another in this Orwellian way? It felt like an affront to civil liberties in this supposed Land of the Free. The Port Authority’s determination to avoid any accusation of racial profiling was also laughable. The figure in the poster’s foreground conscientiously phoning the cops was an indeterminate brown, while the suspect in the background was white. He looked to me less like a terrorist than a naughty teenager looking for somewhere to smoke an illicit cigarette.

But however exaggerated the reasons for fear and suspicion might have been, I knew they were not groundless. Support for al-Qaida – or for its affiliates, such as al-Shabaab – was real enough in the US, above all in the city to which I was headed. A Minneapolis Somali called Omer Abdi Mohamed had only recently pleaded guilty to a federal charge of conspiring to recruit fighters for the insurgency.
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The case of ‘Brother Omer’ had been cited by Congressman Peter King – who was fresh back in Washington from his address to British MPs, and about to chair another Homeland Security Committee hearing into extremism among American Muslims – as evidence that ‘jihadi sympathizers’ were still active in the Minneapolis community.

‘With al-Shabaab’s large cadre of American jihadis and unquestionable ties to al-Qaida, we must face the reality that al-Shabaab is a growing threat to our homeland,’ he said.
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In 2008 when the FBI launched Operation Rhino, as they called their investigation in the Twin Cities, they quickly discovered that many of the young men who had gone missing in Somalia had known each other, either because they had once been friends at the same school, or else because they had prayed together at the same south central mosque, the Abubakar as-Saddique Islamic Center. It
was this last detail that really alarmed the FBI. Were the young men recruited by militant Muslims preaching at the Abubakar? If so, how had these preachers managed to operate in the heartland of America for so long, wholly undetected by the DHS, the vast, multi-agency Department of Homeland Security, which had been created a decade ago specifically to ensure that 9/11 could never be repeated? In the Twin Cities, it seemed, America’s worst nightmare was in danger of coming true.

Between 75,000 and 100,000 Somalis live in Minneapolis and St Paul, comfortably the largest concentration in the States, although it was not immediately obvious why. Minnesota’s legendary winters, where temperatures routinely drop to minus 15°C and snowfalls of eight feet have been known, are the planetary opposite of the desert heat of the Horn of Africa. It was, as the locals joked, a very cold place for a hotbed.

Their presence, I eventually discovered, was down to the Lutherans. Minnesota’s first settlers were farmers from Germany and Scandinavia, and Lutherans still run the state’s social services with an efficiency and generosity of spirit of which the Great Reformer himself would have approved. A number of voluntary Somali migrants, mostly professionals with ambitions to study or to set up businesses, had been drawn to the Twin Cities even before the civil war by the abundance of jobs and social housing on offer, at a time when the local economy was conspicuously booming. Word soon spread of the good life to be had in Minnesota, making the state the destination of choice when the main refugee exodus began in the early 1990s. The US Immigration Department had a policy of distributing new arrivals evenly around the country, but the Somalis, with their long nomadic tradition of scouting out the greenest pastures, seldom stayed put in a place that didn’t
suit them, and a wave of secondary migration took place.
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There was no shortage of work for the newcomers, even when they didn’t speak English. Many of them began their life abroad on an assembly line at companies like 3M, a manufacturing conglomerate headquartered on the edge of St Paul, or at the IBM computer plant at Rochester, 90 miles to the south. Many others did as the first wave of Somalis had done, and set up their own businesses. By 2008 there were some six hundred Somali-run businesses in operation in the Twin Cities. It seemed, on the face of it, to be a remarkably successful immigration story. Where had it gone wrong?

I caught a cab from Minneapolis airport to the Holiday Inn, a hotel I’d chosen for its proximity to Cedar-Riverside, a district where so many Somalis lived that it was known as Little Somalia. My room overlooked the Riverside Plaza, a multi-coloured complex of six high-rise apartment blocks built in a 1970s brutalist style, and home to the densest concentration of Somalis in the US. The Plaza had a poor reputation among white locals, who nicknamed it Little Mogadishu, the Ghetto in the Sky or, worse, the Crack Stacks. Yet I saw nothing to fear on an exploratory stroll down Cedar Avenue. There was no change of atmosphere as I approached the Plaza, no sense that I had strayed over some invisible line. The precise boundaries of this ghetto were strangely hard to discern.

It was a warm Sunday evening and the local football team, the Minnesota Vikings, had just lost a home match to their old rivals, the Detroit Lions. Their pasty-skinned and purple-shirted fans, many of them noisily drunk, had spilled on to the pavement from a cluster of bars and restaurants where rock music blared at the junction of Cedar and Washington. Barely a hundred yards further on, a strip began that was dotted with Somali-run snack bars, hawala offices, a grocery called Afrik and a restaurant called Masha’allah. Somalis sunned themselves outside coffee shops or passed up and down the pavement, laughing into their mobile phones. It all looked and felt far more relaxed – more
Americanized
– than I had been led to expect. The proximity of the drinkers up the street apparently presented no cultural difficulty at all. Directly opposite the Plaza there was even a ‘world pub’ called the Nomad. Could such a city really be the West’s leading exporter of Somali jihadis?

The following morning I went to the de facto parliament of the Somali community: a Starbucks, fifteen minutes’ walk away at the bottom of Riverside Avenue. This was where older men came to discuss clan politics and the war back home. Their banter was often so impassioned that the staff were said to have bought a decibel meter to ensure the noise they made remained within the legal limit.
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It was still early in the morning when I arrived, so the noise from inside was not yet ear-splitting, although it was easy to imagine how it might become so. I was later told that fifty-six of the estimated 140 clans, sub-clans and sub-sub-clans were registered as resident in the Twin Cities.
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Several dozen middle-aged Somali men were already congregated at Starbucks, with more joining them all the time, greeting each other with hugs and jolly slaps on the back. It was the nearest thing to a Mogadishu coffee shop that one could hope to find in America.

I had come to meet Abdirizak Bihi, whose 17-year-old nephew, Burhan Hassan, was one of the al-Shabaab recruits who never came back. Burhan was not the first to vanish from Minneapolis, but he was the youngest – and it was his disappearance, in November 2008, that first awoke the Somali community to the scale of the problem in their midst.

Bihi was one of those who were convinced that the leadership of the Abubakar mosque, where Burhan had once worshipped, was complicit in the tragedy in some way. At an earlier round of Congressman King’s hearings into Muslim extremism, in Washington in March 2011, he had insisted that his nephew had been ‘lured, brainwashed, radicalized’ in Minneapolis – and he continued to repeat the allegation in the media whenever he could. Securing an interview with him had not been difficult, therefore. Over the years he had emerged as a kind of spokesman for the local families of al-Shabaab recruits, although no one had elected him to that role, and not everyone liked or agreed with him. He was so vociferous, and some of his allegations were so outlandish, that some people thought Burhan’s death had affected his sanity. But although he conceded his nephew’s death had come at great cost to him personally – ‘I never thought my life would go in this direction,’ he told me – I found him sane enough.

He was a slight man with a sensitive face, a salt-and-pepper moustache, and natty, black-top glasses that he repeatedly pushed up on to his forehead as he spoke. I wondered privately if his campaigning was driven as much by guilt as by anger at what had happened. Did he secretly blame himself for not having been a better uncle, who might have spotted the signs of trouble and intervened before it was too late?

Burhan’s story was certainly tragic. A quiet, bespectacled boy
nicknamed ‘Little Bashir’, he was to outward appearances the most unlikely candidate for violent jihadism. He lived with his widowed mother Zienab, Abdirizak Bihi’s sister, in an apartment on the nineteenth floor of a Riverside Plaza tower block. He was a diligent student at Roosevelt High School, a short bus ride away, where he earned As for the calculus and advanced chemistry courses he took. He dreamed of studying medicine at Harvard.

But one day, Burhan did not come home from school. When Zienab searched his room, she found that his clothes, laptop and passport were missing. There was also a receipt from a local travel agency for an $1,800 air ticket to Nairobi. Burhan had no job, so could not possibly have afforded this. Who had paid for it? Three days after his disappearance, Burhan phoned home to say he was in Somalia and was safe, although he kept the phone call short and refused to give any further details. But it soon became clear that he had not travelled alone from Minneapolis. The word around town was that four other young Somali men, including two promising students at the University of Minnesota, had gone with him. Burhan’s family went to the police.

The week before Burhan left, five suicide car-bombers blew themselves up in a coordinated attack across northern Somalia that killed twenty-eight and injured dozens. One of the bombers, who ploughed into an office of the Puntland Intelligence Service in Bossasso, was identified as Shirwa Ahmed, 26, a graduate from Roosevelt High who had been among the first wave of Minnesotans who left for Somalia in December 2007. It was the first ever suicide bomb attack to be carried out by an American citizen. An investigation was already under way in Minneapolis because of Shirwa, but the news that a further five young Somalis had absconded from there sent the FBI into overdrive.
Somali-Americans everywhere began to be stopped and questioned at airports, shopping malls, or in their homes. Former classmates of the missing boys were subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury. For the first time, the Minneapolis community came under national and then international media scrutiny.

At first, many of the young men in Somalia kept in touch with their friends back home. Burhan, however, rang his mother. On one occasion he told her that, while travelling on a boat to an al-Shabaab base somewhere in southern Somalia, he had been so violently sick that his glasses had flown overboard. His mother sweetly fetched his prescription and read it out to him, in the faint hope that he could find an optician to replace them.
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Burhan was not the only one struggling in the warzone. Others complained to their friends about the heat, and the malaria. They missed things like McDonald’s, and coffee. They were soft, city boys, lost in a land far harsher than they had expected it to be.
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In early May, Burhan rang home and asked: ‘If I come back to America, will they arrest me and put me in Guantanamo?’ Sensing he had had enough, his family wired money to a relative in Nairobi, who agreed to meet him at the border, take him to the US embassy and try to get him home. By now, however, Burhan was famous – and al-Shabaab, according to Bihi, had much to lose if he were allowed to return to the US. He would undoubtedly spoil their recruiting efforts abroad by telling the world how unhappy he had been in Somalia. He could also reveal names and other important details about the mechanics of transporting young men half way around the world in secret.

The precise circumstances of his death in June 2009, seven months after he left home, have never been made clear. According to one report, he was killed in Mogadishu by a random bullet. His
uncle Bihi, on the other hand, was convinced that he was executed with a shot to the head when his al-Shabaab commanders learned that he intended to quit. However he died, the militants publicly described him as a ‘martyr’. The news came in an anonymous call to his mother, who threw her phone against a wall in her grief. Burhan died just two weeks before he was due to try to come home.

Bihi dismissed as ‘nonsense’ the idea that Burhan and the others had joined the al-Shabaab cause out of anti-Ethiopian nationalism. He said that more young Minnesota Somalis had gone back to fight after the Ethiopian withdrawal, in January 2009, than before it. Burhan and the others, he was sure, had gone to fight purely as jihadis. He was equally sure that they had absorbed the ideology necessary to do that in Minneapolis’s mosques.