Al-Shabab Recruiting in the United States
Al-Shabab, a fundamentalist militia with ties to Al-Qaeda, has been known to recruit individuals from the Somali immigrant community in the United States, particularly in Minneapolis. Between 2007 and 2009, more than twenty young Somali immigrants traveled to Somalia to join Al-Shabab, drawn by various factors such as alienation from American society, a desire for adventure, and a commitment to their homeland amid ongoing conflict. The Minneapolis area has one of the largest Somali communities in the U.S., and some recruits emerged from both marginalized backgrounds and those with college aspirations, reflecting diverse motivations for their involvement.
The recruitment process reportedly began around 2005, centered at the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, which became a gathering place for young Somali men. Many recruits were known to maintain contact with friends back in the U.S., encouraging further enlistment. The situation raised concerns among law enforcement about the potential for establishing domestic terrorist cells, although no evidence of this was found at the time. The complex interplay of personal identity, community dynamics, and geopolitical events, such as the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, contributed to the radicalization of some young men seeking to assert their identity and purpose. While recruitment has diminished in recent years, Al-Shabab remains a significant presence in East Africa.
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Al-Shabab Recruiting in the United States
Summary: In what law enforcement officials described as the largest instance of jihadist recruiting in the United States by a group affiliated with Al Qaeda, more than twenty young Somali immigrants living in Minneapolis returned to Somalia in the period 2007-2009 to fight for the fundamentalist Al-Shabab militia. The Somali militia was listed as a terrorist group and was regarded as the most prominent fundamentalist organization battling the Transitional Federal Government. Evidence as of July 2009 was that all the recruits left the United States for Somalia, where some died, including the first known American suicide bomber. News accounts quoted FBI sources as expressing concern that the system of Al-Shabab recruitment, seemingly concentrated in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, could also result in a domestic cell of terrorists awaiting instructions from Al Qaeda, although no evidence of such a cell had been uncovered as of July 2009.
In small numbers since late 2007, as many as twenty Somali immigrants to the United States, ages seventeen through twenty-seven, returned to Somalia to fight with the radical Al Shabab militia to establish a fundamentalist Islamist regime. Al Shabab was thought to have close ties to Al Qaeda and, in the summer of 2009, was regarded as the strongest threat to the fragile Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu. (See separate Background Information Summaries on Al Shabab and Somalia, in this database.)
The existence of an apparent organized recruiting scheme targeting Somalis in Minneapolis, which was home to around 30,000 Somali immigrants in the early 2000s, one of the largest Somali communities in the United States, emerged in news reports in late 2008. These reports said that by the summer of 2009, there had been two waves of emigrants, one in late 2007 and the second about a year later. The recruits were described as coming from two distinct parts of the Somali community: alienated youths who had joined street gangs, dropped out of school, and were in generally low-paying entry-level jobs, and a second group comprising college students who appeared to have prospects of advancing to a middle-class lifestyle.
Most of the recruits had come to the United States as children in the early 1990s, around the time Somalia began its decline into anarchy after the overthrow of dictator Siad Barre. Since that time, Somalia has been wracked by civil war, sometimes pitting rival warlords against one another and sometimes pitting the warlords against an Islamist movement intent on overcoming tribal rivalries with a common allegiance to Islam. The Islamist movement, in turn, has been divided, and one of its early leaders in 2009 became president of the TFG, pitted against Al Shabab.
Most of the American recruits lived in the Somali community of Minneapolis in a poor neighborhood near the Mississippi River called Little Mogadishu. There, older members of the Somali community maintained national traditions in a largely closed neighborhood. Teenage Somalis who attended public schools found themselves torn between attachment to their families and their strong ties to their homeland and contemporary American urban culture, which offered its own set of challenges. The Somalis, although Black, did not appear to fit well with native African Americans or with White society. News accounts unrelated to the terror recruiting have described deprecatory language by White officers lumping all Blacks with a foreign accent together as indistinguishable "Somalis" who were subjected to random identification checks and other forms of petty harassment.
A key event in the radicalization of some young Somalis was evidently the invasion of Somalia by neighboring Ethiopia in December 2006. This was widely viewed as a case of a predominantly Christian nation, Ethiopia, invading and occupying a Muslim country. Ethiopia also had long been engaged in a prolonged battle with ethnic Somalis living in its eastern Ogaden region, just west of Somalia, where a Somali army fought Ethiopian troops in 1977-1978 in an unsuccessful attempt to annex Ogaden to Somalia. Some news reports suggested that the fact that Ethiopia was an ally of the United States and was widely viewed as acting as a proxy for the United States in trying to combat the Islamic Courts Union government that controlled most of Somalia in the second half of 2006, combined with a sense of alienation from American society in encouraging the young Somalis to sign up with the Al Shabab.
Several news accounts said the recruits spent many hours at one mosque in particular, the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, the largest Somali mosque in Minneapolis. There, recruiters from Al Shabab first appeared in 2005 and began recruiting young, sometimes disaffected, Somalis to go back to their homeland and join the fight to establish a fundamentalist Islamic regime. Once in Somalia, some of the recruits kept in touch with friends in Minneapolis, encouraging them to come, too.
The first recruits left for Somalia in the autumn of 2007. Among them were a medical technician, a former waiter, and a car-rental employee. In at least one case, they left with the excuse of traveling to Saudi Arabia for a pilgrimage (hajj), instead appearing the next spring in Somalia. News reports said many of the emigrants paid for their trips in cash, probably supplied by outsiders, according to relatives. Although the recruits sometimes left in small groups, they booked separate planes, flying via Chicago or Boston. Most appeared to have Somali passports. In at least one case, the manager of a Minneapolis travel agency used by earlier emigrants alerted people at the mosque, who then tried to dissuade the young men from leaving the United States.
A lengthy account of the Somali recruits published by The New York Times in July 2009 painted a picture of young men torn in several directions. Some felt alienated from American society. Some were motivated by a desire for excitement and adventure. Others had gone from concern about their homeland, especially after the Ethiopian invasion, to becoming devout Muslims.
The Times account said the case had "forced federal agents and terrorism analysts to rethink some of their most basic assumptions about the vulnerability of Muslim immigrants in the United States to the lure of militant Islam," long regarded as a problem among the large Muslim communities of Western Europe. It quoted the FBI agent leading an investigation as saying: "This case is unlike anything we have encountered."
Young men of Somali descent continued to be lured to fight in Somalia throughout the mid-2010s, and though it appeared to have abated in the 2020s, with concern over an Al Qaeda cell in the US diminished, Al-Shabab remained an active organization in the East Africa region.
Bibliography
Al-Shabaab. (2022, Dec. 6). Council on Foreign Relations. Retrieved Oct. 9, 2023, from https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/al-shabaab
Elliott, Andrea. "A Call to Jihad, Answered in America." New York Times, July 12, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/12somalis.html?scp=1&sq=A%20Call%20to%20Jihad%20Answered%20in%20America&st=cse
Ephron, Dan, Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff, Scott Johnson. "Call for Jihad?" Newsweek. 153:5 (February 2, 2009). 2p. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=36294527&site=isc-live
Temple-Raston, D. (2015, Feb. 18). For Somalis in Minneapolis, Jihadi recruiting as a recurring nightmare. NPR. Retrieved Oct. 9, 2023, from https://www.npr.org/2015/02/18/387302748/minneapolis-st-paul-remains-a-focus-of-jihadi-recruiting