The World's Most Dangerous Place (42 page)

Nimco Ahmed attended Roosevelt High with several of the volunteers. Shirwa Ahmed, the first suicide bomber, was one of her best friends.

‘He was the most quiet, humble kid you could meet – clever and responsible, not troubled at all. He loved to live life to the full. I was devastated when I heard . . . I never thought he’d hurt a fly.’

Nimco was the personification of Somali diaspora success: 28, demurely beautiful, and a career Democrat party worker, whose office walls were plastered with photographs of her arm-in-arm with Barack Obama. She worked downtown at City Hall as a policy advisor to a senior councillor, Robert Lilligren, a liberal politician with a flamboyant ponytail who liked to boast that his aide had the president on speed-dial.

She took me to a coffee shop in a nearby mall where the barista – young, female, white – shyly told Nimco that she liked her headscarf. It was difficult to tell if she understood that the scarf was not, or at least not primarily, a fashion item. Nimco in any case
accepted the compliment with a filmstar’s grace. Once we had sat down she revealed that she had only been wearing it for a year.

‘I only used to cover my head during Ramadan, but after the New York mosque affair,
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I wanted to show that I’m not afraid of letting people know that I’m Muslim . . . I am very political,’ she added with a smile.

She said there had been nothing Muslim at all about Shirwa’s appearance when they graduated from Roosevelt High together in 2000.

‘He wore cool clothes in those days: sneakers, saggy jeans, you know . . . He was big into basketball. He was just a regular dude.’

They both got their first jobs out at the airport: she worked in a gift shop, he as a wheelchair pusher for NorthWest Airlines.

Sometimes he made the girls laugh, at work, by flipping up the collar of his porter’s uniform and affecting a goofy swagger.
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‘We used to leave work early on Fridays and go for a movie at the Mall of America, or eat dinner, or just hang out together,’ said Nimco. ‘He was fun to be around.’

For a moment I felt almost sorry for the people responsible for security in the city’s public places. Shirwa went on to become the first American suicide bomber, but no amount of profiling would have picked him out back then.

Soon after graduating, though, Shirwa began to change. He started to pray regularly, five times a day, including at the Abubakar mosque. He grew a beard and wore a kufi cap. The sagging jeans were replaced by shalwar, the baggy, pyjama-like trousers worn in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Shirwa wore his
shalwar short, above the ankle, the style favoured by traditionalists because, it was said, that was how the Prophet had worn them. He didn’t hang out at the mall with Nimco any more. Sometimes she saw him on the street, preaching to other Somalis and encouraging them to pray. Had someone radicalized him?

‘Radicalized?’ said Nimco. ‘The Feds are always asking that for their profiles. I still don’t know what the word means.’ She paused, thinking about it. ‘What I would say is that Shirwa found God, and that he was in a good place. The hugs stopped; he wouldn’t even shake hands with a girl any more. But he always acknowledged me when I saw him, even without my headscarf. And he never preached to me.’

Nimco was still struggling to bridge the gap between the friend she had known – including the later, Islamicized version – and the Shirwa who blew himself up in Bossasso.

‘Someone must have told him some gibberish to make him do that,’ she said.

But she also remarked, as Abdirizak Bihi had done, that the majority of the Minneapolis recruits had been raised without a father, an upbringing that she thought ultimately made young men more vulnerable to manipulation.

‘Men have egos, so they won’t go looking for help or advice when they need it. But they will respond if a mentor approaches. Girls are different.’

A ‘mentor’ didn’t have to be someone they actually knew. Online jihadist propaganda, she was sure, had played a crucial role. The sermons of the Yemeni-American cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki were ‘legendary . . . And Al-Amriki – that half-Lebanese guy from Mississippi? He’s clever. Everyone has seen his videos. He’s one of the guys who
made
al-Shabaab.’

Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, the nom-de-guerre of Omar Shafik Hammami – actually half-Syrian, and from Alabama, not Mississippi – had joined al-Shabaab not long before Shirwa, and had risen through the ranks to become one of the insurgency’s best-known commanders. He was famous for the rap lyrics of his recruitment videos which were aimed directly at all young American Muslims, not just Somali ones.

You can’t find someone more happy than a shaheed

He got everything but one thing he requests and pleads

To come back and fight, and fight and be killed

And keep coming back and getting killed if only Allah willed

But we don’t need that, the youth are coming and bold

Every martyr being replaced by a hundred fold

I was already familiar with the narrative of Shirwa’s short life, from ‘regular dude’ to suicide bomber. Counter-terrorist experts had analysed every detail of it, hunting for the shove that pushed him down the slippery slope towards Islamic martyrdom. The clues to the tragic outcome were all discernible in the beginnings of the story. Fatherlessness was a clue. A youthful attachment to rap music, and the gang culture it celebrated, was another. Both spoke to a deep-seated crisis of identity caused by the trauma and dislocation of war.

Zuhur Ahmed, another twenty-something graduate of Roosevelt High, was a specialist in the psychology of young Somalis. For the last four years she had presented a local radio show called Somali Community Link,
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which had emerged as one of the most important forums for the discussion of youth issues. Her recording studio was almost across the street from the Riverside Plaza.

‘In Somalia, the parenting style is to rely a lot on the extended family, but that doesn’t work so well in America,’ she said. ‘A lot of kids end up with guardians or very loose foster parents, and eventually get kicked out and, often, made homeless. There’s a lot of neglect out there – a lot of depression and mental illness. I talk to them all the time on my show.’

Like Nimco, whom she knew well, Zuhur had been at school with many of the al-Shabaab recruits. One of them, Abdillahi Farah, was still fighting for al-Shabaab. She recounted how she had gone on holiday that summer to Burao, Somaliland’s second city, to stay with relatives, and had been astonished to receive a Facebook message from Farah the moment she arrived.

‘I was freaked,’ said Zuhur. ‘I was like: how did he know I was there? I didn’t tell anyone I was going.’

She added, rather primly, that she had since ‘defriended’ him from her list of Facebook friends.

She was naturally more in touch than Nimco with the darker side of the Somali youth community, a seedy world of drugs and gangs and violent crime. In her experience, the line between joining a street gang and signing up with al-Shabaab was a fine one: a conclusion that the rap-recruiter Al-Amriki had obviously drawn too.

‘They’re just street boys who want to belong somewhere,’ she said. ‘Of course al-Shabaab looks attractive to some of them.’

This was also almost exactly what Abid Raja, the SO15 officer, had told me in London.

Zuhur had the facts to back her theory. In October 2007, she had interviewed Zakaria Maruf who, in the 1990s, had dropped out of college to become a founding member of a Somali gang called the Hot Boyz. But then he found God, repented, became a
shelf-stacker at Walmart and, eventually, a youth leader at the Abubakar mosque. Like Shirwa Ahmed, he was often seen in the streets around Riverside Plaza, preaching to other young Somalis, offering himself as an example of redemption. Zuhur still had a recording of Maruf describing the neglect he once suffered at home, and how Allah had saved him from sin and a life of crime. Two months after this interview he vanished, along with Shirwa: part of the first wave of al-Shabaab recruits from the city. He later became notorious for his attempts to persuade others to join him in the jihad by telephone from Kismayo. He particularly targeted young Somalis who prayed at the Abubakar, many of whom he used to drive to weekly football practice. He was reported killed in July 2009.

Zuhur had watched Minneapolis’s gang culture mutate over the years. At Roosevelt High in the 1990s, she explained, the prevailing culture was ‘African-American: all saggy pants and “wassup” slang’. The Somali boys tried to copy them, but the African-Americans couldn’t stand that, and there was constant fighting. The first Somali gangs such as Maruf’s Hot Boyz were, she said, formed for self-protection against the African-Americans. Like other street gangs, the early Somali groups were often involved in petty crime and drug-dealing. By 2006, however, some of them had developed into serious and often violent criminal enterprises. Indeed, Zuhur had set up her radio show in response to the FBI’s busting of a thirty-strong Somali sex-trafficking ring. Girls as young as thirteen were being abducted from mosques and schools, and sold to Somali men in Columbus, Ohio and as far away as Nashville, Tennessee.

‘This was something very shocking for us . . . it was such a very un-Somali thing to do,’ Zuhur said.

Street gangs were obviously as central to the Somali story in the Twin Cities as they were in London, a critical part of the radicalization jigsaw. And so a few days later I was pleased when I met Abdulkadir Sharif, who had been a gang leader for twelve years. Fortunately for me, no doubt, he had turned his back on street crime when he found God in 2007. These days he helped out at the Islamic Da’wah Center in St Paul, sandwiched between a Cash-‘n’-Pawn shop and an auto-repair business on one of the city’s main arterial routes. I found him marshalling traffic in the mosque parking lot which, it being a Friday, was filling fast with cars full of Somalis come to attend the Jumu’ah prayer service.

‘Zakaria Maruf? Yeah, I remember Zak,’ he rasped, when I asked. ‘He was a pussy, man.’

Sharif’s nickname was Chino, on account of his high cheekbones and narrow eyes. His Damascene moment had come when he was stabbed in the neck during a street fight and almost killed. The damage to his voice box meant that he would for ever speak in a hoarse whisper.

‘If I’d known he was planning to go and fight for al-Shabaab, I’d have tried to stop him. Those guys are just so lost . . . What Shabaab are doing? That ain’t Islam.’

I had been directed to Chino by the imam at the center, Sheikh Hassan Mohamud, who liked to hold him up as proof of the redemptive power of Islam. He was an exceptionally tall man of thirty-two, who moved about the car park with a rolling, loose-limbed swagger. There was a raw, barely suppressed energy about him, like a coiled spring. His hands moved ceaselessly as he described his former life.

‘I was a top dog,’ he said. ‘The Feds couldn’t catch me. No one could stop me. Only God did that – know what I’m saying?’

He pushed back the hood of his anorak, revealing a grubby kufi cap, and tilted his head, inviting me to look more closely at the scar that curved around the side of his neck to his throat.

‘Give me some skin!’ he said suddenly.

I gave him some skin; and he grinned at me with his mouth full of bad Somali teeth.

‘You from London,’ he said. ‘They have gangs in London?’

‘Sure.’

‘An’ they got guns, or knives?’

‘Mainly knives, I think.’

‘Yeah that’s what I heard!’ he said, flicking his fingers in delight. ‘Here, we got guns. I got me a rack of them: Uzi, M-16, AK, nine mil – everything. You come to my place, I could show you. I keep them in a special closet.’

‘You’ve still got them?’ I said, confused. ‘Don’t you think you should . . . hand them in or something?’

‘Um, yeah . . . I have been meaning to.’

Chino looked around contemptuously as a pair of police cruisers howled past on University Avenue. His rehabilitation suddenly seemed an uncertain thing. This ex-gangster top dog reminded me of a rescue greyhound my family once owned, a graceful but mercurial animal that we never quite managed to house-train. Years of unknowable abuse had damaged the puppy’s psyche so deeply that the risk of recidivism in the adult had become permanent.

I had been in the Twin Cities interviewing Somalis for a week now, long enough that I recognized one or two of them as they arrived for the Friday service. I said hello to Omar Jamal, in his trademark tweed fishing hat. He had two small children in tow, with hair combed and braided, their clothes clean and pressed for
mosque. Jamal was, incongruously, the First Secretary of the Somali Mission to the United Nations. I nodded, too, at Mohammed Hassan, a planning official at Hennepin County Council, who held the interesting theory that it was not just the youth in exile but the Somali nation as a whole that was suffering an identity crisis. Traditional Somali culture, he had observed to me, was steadily being subsumed by an Arab one. It was a source of private regret to him that his father had named him Mohammed rather than giving him a traditional Somali name, like Warsame or Diblawe or Roble, as he was sure he would have been in his grandfather’s time.

‘At least Mohammed is a Muslim name,’ he said. ‘A lot of Somali girls these days are named after Saudi pop stars like Aseel or Waed, names that have nothing at all to do with our culture.’

Chino had certainly split with Somali tradition. Zuhur had described how some of her contemporaries tried to copy the black street gangs. Chino had gone a step further and actually joined one of them. He was originally from Beledweyne in central Somalia. His father had sent him and one of his sisters to America in 1996, when Chino was seventeen; his mother, he said, was dead. The Immigration Department settled him and his sister, unusually, in North Dakota, but the two fell out, and he left soon afterwards for the bright lights of Minneapolis, where he lived on the street. One night he was attacked by an African-American gang known as the Vice Lords.
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Chino fought back with a tenacity that so impressed its leader, ‘Mr Rico’, that he was recruited on the spot.