A Call to Jihad, Answered in America

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

More than 20 young Somali-Americans, many of them raised in Minneapolis, left the United States to join a militant Islamist group in Somalia.

MINNEAPOLIS — The Carlson School of Management rises from the asphalt like a monument to capitalist ambition. Stock prices race across an electronic ticker near a sleek entrance and the atrium soars skyward, as if lifting the aspirations of its students. The school’s plucky motto is “Nowhere but here.”

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The New York Times

A screenshot of the Facebook profile of Mohamoud Hassan, one of a group of Minneapolis men who left for Somalia to join in a militant Islamic movement last November. Mr. Hassan went by another name, Bashir Maxamed Caydid, on his Facebook account.

For a group of students who often met at the school, on the University of Minnesota campus, those words seemed especially fitting. They had fled Somalia as small boys, escaping a catastrophic civil war. They came of age as refugees in Minneapolis, embracing basketball and the prom, hip-hop and the Mall of America. By the time they reached college, their dreams seemed within grasp: one planned to become a doctor; another, an entrepreneur.

But last year, in a study room on the first floor of Carlson, the men turned their energies to a different enterprise.

“Why are we sitting around in America, doing nothing for our people?” one of the men, Mohamoud Hassan, a skinny 23-year-old engineering major, pressed his friends.

In November, Mr. Hassan and two other students dropped out of college and left for Somalia, the homeland they barely knew. Word soon spread that they had joined the Shabaab, a militant Islamist group aligned with Al Qaeda that is fighting to overthrow the fragile Somali government.

The students are among more than 20 young Americans who are the focus of what may be the most significant domestic terrorism investigation since Sept. 11. One of the men, Shirwa Ahmed, blew himself up in Somalia in October, becoming the first known American suicide bomber. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert M. Mueller, has said Mr. Ahmed was “radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota.”

An examination by The New York Times, based on interviews with close friends and relatives of the men, law enforcement officials and lawyers, as well as access to live phone calls and Facebook messages between the men and their friends in the United States, reveals how a far-flung jihadist movement found a foothold in America’s heartland.

The men appear to have been motivated by a complex mix of politics and faith, and their communications show how some are trying to recruit other young Americans to their cause.

The case represents the largest group of American citizens suspected of joining an extremist movement affiliated with Al Qaeda. Although friends say the men have never thought of carrying out attacks in the United States, F.B.I. officials worry that with their training, ideology and American passports, there is a real danger that they could.

“This case is unlike anything we have encountered,” said Ralph S. Boelter, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis office, which is leading the investigation.

Most of the men are Somali refugees who left the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in two waves, starting in late 2007. While religious devotion may have predisposed them to sympathize with the Islamist cause in Somalia, it took a major geopolitical event — the Ethiopian invasion of their homeland in 2006 — to spur them to join what they saw as a legitimate resistance movement, said friends of the men.

For many of the men, the path to Somalia offered something personal as well — a sense of adventure, purpose and even renewal. In the first wave of Somalis who left were men whose uprooted lives resembled those of immigrants in Europe who have joined the jihad. They faced barriers of race and class, religion and language. Mr. Ahmed, the 26-year-old suicide bomber, struggled at community colleges before dropping out. His friend Zakaria Maruf, 30, fell in with a violent street gang and later stocked shelves at a Wal-Mart.

If failure had shadowed this first group of men, the young Minnesotans who followed them to Somalia were succeeding in America. Mr. Hassan, the engineering student, was a rising star in his college community. Another of the men was a pre-med student who had once set his sights on an internship at the Mayo Clinic. They did not leave the United States for a lack of opportunity, their friends said; if anything, they seemed driven by unfulfilled ambition.

“Now they feel important,” said one friend, who remains in contact with the men and, like others, would only speak anonymously because of the investigation.

The case has 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. For years, it seemed that “homegrown” terrorism was largely a problem in European countries like Britain and France, where Muslim immigrants had failed to prosper economically or integrate culturally. By contrast, experts believed that the successful assimilation of foreign-born Muslims in the United States had largely immunized them from the appeal of radical ideologies.

The story of the Twin Cities men does not lend itself to facile categorizations. They make up a minuscule percentage of their Somali-American community, and it is unclear whether their transformation reflects any broader trend. Nor are they especially representative of the wider Muslim immigrant population, which has enjoyed a stable and largely middle-class existence.

Uighurs called for jihad, pulled out knives

"The imam then ended the prayers, adding: 'We will definitely not follow you. Get out!'" Good for him, although it is more likely that his disapproval was motivated by political expediency rather than by some deep conviction that Muslims must not wage war in the name of Islam -- after all, the Uighurs who have been fighting the Han Chinese, as well as the ones who ended up in Afghanistan and then in Guantanamo, must have learned about jihad somewhere.

"Uighurs called for 'jihad,'" from AFP, July 14 (thanks to James):

BEIJING - THREE Uighur men tried to incite other Muslims to launch a 'jihad' and attacked a mosque security guard before police shot and killed two of them, state media reported on Tuesday.

The incident began when around 150 Muslims were praying in a mosque in Urumqi, the capital of the northwest Xinjiang region on Monday, Xinhua news agency said, citing an unnamed imam who was giving a service at the time.

One man stood up and tried to take over the prayers but was stopped, the imam told Xinhua. A few minutes later the man reportedly stood up holding a green banner and started calling for a 'jihad'.

The imam then ended the prayers, adding: 'We will definitely not follow you. Get out!", according to Xinhua.

As the man was being ordered from the mosque, two other men took out three 50 centimetre long knives from a bag, Xinhua said.

Security guards then tried to stop the men. One of the guards, aged in his 40s who did not want to give his name, said the group chased him out of the mosque wielding the knives where they met patrolling police, Xinhua said.

Police fired warnings shots to try to stop the men before shooting at the three, killing two and injuring one.

A government statement released on Monday soon after the attack said: 'Police shot and killed two suspected lawbreakers and injured one suspected lawbreaker using legal means.' The statement said the three Uighurs were trying to attack another person from the Uighur minority group.

The government's statement and the Xinhua report conflicted with accounts by two Uighurs who said they witnessed the incident from 50 metres away and that three Uighur men had been trying to attack security forces. 'They hacked at the soldiers with big knives and then they were shot,' said one of the witnesses, who said the incident took place across the street from a mosque....

Al-Qaeda Operative Employed in States as Bosnian Muslim Diplomat

Sep 17th, 2008 | By De-Construct.net | In Current

Safet Catovic

Abdel Kadeer Moktari Abu Mali

Main Al-Qaeda Operative for the Balkans Enjoys a Diplomatic Cover

Al-Qaeda operative Safet Catovic [pdf. document] is employed as a counselor in one of three diplomatic-consular offices of the Bosnian federation in U.S., the experts for radical Islam said, as reported by the Serbian media.

The man regarded by the anti-terrorist experts as a key figure of the terrorist Islamic network in the Muslim part of Bosnia is considered a coordinator of all the extremist terrorist actions and operations conducted from the Balkan cells of the Islamic terrorist organizations.

“The key al-Qaeda operative for the Balkans, Safet Catovic works as an ‘adviser’ in a Bosnian Muslim diplomatic office in the United States,” said Darko Trifunovic, professor at Belgrade Faculty of Security.

“Together with Muhamed Sacirbey, Catovic was running the non-governmental organization Global Medical Fund, which was involved in bringing over [to former Yugoslavia] mujahedin mercenaries — the operation known under the codename Winter ‘94,” Trifunovic said.

El Mujahedin and Summer Jihad Camp in the Heart of U.S.

The El Mujahedin unit comprised of Arab mercenaries sent over to Bosnia-Herzegovina to help Izetbegovic exterminate the Serbs during Bosnian civil war counted 3,500 troops. Overall, it is estimated that there were 10,000-15,000 Muslim mercenaries from the Islamic countries operating in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 civil war. Many were promptly given citizenship by the Izetbegovic regime and settled on the property of the ethnically cleansed Serb population after the war.

“On August 2001, Safet Catovic organized the summer Jihad Camp at the place where one of the planes which targeted the twin towers was downed, together with imam Sirai Fahai, suspect in the first attack on New York Trade Center, in 1993″, Trifunovic explained.

One of Serbia’s main anti-terrorism experts isn’t the only one who raised the red flag over the man behind a Bosnian Muslim “diplomatic counselor”. Bosnia’s Dzevad Galijasevic also claims Catovic is an intruder, hiding behind the false identity.

“Catovic is of African-Asian origin, most likely from Algeria. He is a member of the GIA (Group Islamic of Algeria). Safet Abid Catovic is a false identity he took from the Bosnian Muslim who died in 1992. He is a very important link in the chain, a link between the formal part of the [Bosnian Muslim] government and the informal organizational units,” Dzevad Galijasevic told Bosnian Serb Glas Srpske.

He added that Catovic is probably Abdel Kadeer Moktari Abu Mali, former commander of the Bosnian El Mujahedin unit.

However, Bosnian Muslim officials claim that after his arrival to war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, Safet Catovic was first issued documents on the name Halid Ibn Abdullah, after which he changed his last name first to Catic (Chatich) and then to Catovic (Chatovich), while all the other data in his documents remained unchanged.

Islamic and American Mercenaries Work Hand-in-Hand in the Balkans

Galijasevic further revealed that this al-Qaeda mercenary was approached in Bosnia by the members of the American mercenary organization MPRI — Military Professional Resources Incorporated — an unofficial Pentagon army with more four-star-generals than the official U.S. Army, for training and militarily aiding terrorists in civil wars around the world, involved on the Croat side in extermination of Krajina Serbs, on the Kosovo Albanian side in terrorizing Serbian police and civilian population to trigger the civil war, on the Bosnian Muslim side to push the Serbs out of most of Bosnia-Herzegovina, on the Georgian side to try to ethnically cleanse South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the recent assault, etc. At the request of a high U.S. official, Catovic was pulled to United States because of the information he possessed and, since then, he is officially an employee of Bosnian Muslim diplomatic-consular office.

“He’s an operative who links troops on the ground with the leadership, financial circles and headquarters. He is always in the positions of the informal nature, at the posts of the military attache, adviser, etc,” Galijasevic stressed.

Assertions [.pdf document] that Catovic is the key al-Qaeda operative for the Balkans, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, are not new. It is assumed that the American security services also possess the information about Catovic to whom Bosnian Muslim leadership issued false documents, conveniently providing him with the identity of a dead man.

Catovic was a deputy director of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Permanent Mission in the UN, and he was also a spokesman for two Islamic “humanitarian” organizations FBI closed due to terrorist activities: Benevolence International Federation and the Global Relief Agency.

According to the earlier information, it was Catovic who enabled Husein Zivalj and Hasan Chengic to get in contact with the international Islamic organization TWRA, Faith’s Third World Relief Agency, through which Bosnian Muslim regime started smuggling weapons for the Muslim army at the start of the Bosnian civil war, in 1992.

http://de-construct.net/e-zine/?p=2751

(Debka ist eine professionelle Informationsquelle zur Terrorbekämpfung)

New Jihadist Army Forming in Balkans

June 24, 2002, 5:12 PM (GMT+02:00)

The next radical Islamic terror attack in America could well originate in a corner of the Balkans, where a new jihad force is taking shape quietly and unhindered. In its last issue, published on Friday, June 21, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources reported that close to 20,000 fighters, battled-hardened veterans and eager young recruits, are already under arms, with more joining up all the time.

An Islamist bloc of nations (whose formation has been reported in the past byDEBKAfile) - made up of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, al Qaeda and Hizballah, with active Palestinian support - is behind the new Muslim Balkan army. Saudi, Iranian and Iraqi intelligence services and al Qaeda operations officers in Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Albania are tasked with recruitment, training and organization. The units are armed with modern weaponry, including missiles and artillery, while handpicked young Muslim recruits have been sent to sign up at private flying schools, especially in the CzechRepublic and Bulgaria, as the nucleus of an air force.

Having learned the lessons of the war in Afghanistan, planners and commanders keep their heads well down, their training bases and facilities well hidden.

Recruitment is brisk among the ethnic Albanian Muslim populations of Kosovo, Macedonia and Bosnia, as well as Albania proper. Hundreds of mosques are sprouting in these countries, funded from deep Saudi pockets. The mosques open cultural societies to attract boys aged 15 to 16 and enroll them at medressas which, like their Pakistani prototypes, integrate military training in their curricula. The result is an expanding recruiting pool for terrorists, the same as Pakistan’s medressas, before the US invasion of Afghanistan.