Somali community looks at cutting terror-recruiting ties

It was the sort of frank conversation that was once considered off-limits in the local Somali community: the continued flow of young men and women of East African descent to join violent jihadi groups in the Middle East.

On Thursday, at a gathering at the Sabathani Community Center, a group of Somali parents, law enforcement officials, legislators and community leaders met to talk about extremist recruitment. They hope the meeting, the fourth of its kind this year, will mark a turning point in what has been a turbulent relationship between Somali immigrants and law enforcement, as both sides look for ways to stem the flow of recruits from the Twin Cities to overseas battlefields.

The arrests of numerous young men over the past two years on charges of conspiring to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was a wake-up call for many in the community who had been reluctant to come to grips with the problem, leaders said. Groups like ISIL and Al-Shabab, they said, were once only talked about in hushed tones and behind closed doors.

Several speakers also mentioned the need to address the generational gap in the Somali community.

"I know there's so many mothers, I don't want to say denial, but at the end of the day we need to talk," said Farhio Khalif, founder of Voice of East African Women and one of the event's organizers.

Law enforcement officials also sought to reassure the several dozen Somali parents who gathered in the auditorium that they share the same goal of stopping extremist Muslim recruiters from luring away their children.

"These programs, this pilot program, has nothing to do with spying on the community," said U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Andrew Luger, referring to a Justice Department pilot program unveiled earlier this year intended to stop the recruitment. "If we wanted to use these programs to spy on the community, why on earth would we be up here talking about them?"

Critics have argued that the federally funded program, formerly known as Countering Violent Extremism, unfairly stigmatizes Somalis and is a clandestine effort to collect intelligence on the community.

Authorities have strongly denied those claims, saying the programs are intended to provide job training, mentoring and after-school programs for Somali youth, alleviating some of the underlying causes of radicalization that lead young people into extremist groups, they say.

"They're murderers, they're rapists, they enslave people, they commit atrocities on a daily basis. To put it more simply, they're just a bunch of thugs that have chosen to have a more twisted view of Islam to justify their behavior," said Richard Thornton, special agent in charge of the FBI's Minneapolis office.

Any solution, the speakers agreed, would involve Somali mothers, who play a significant role in Somali culture.

"The mother in the Somali-American community is very strong, is very assertive in engaging the Somali-American community in an open dialogue," said Abdirizak Bihi, a longtime community activist. "If the Somali mothers get engaged like this, I think we can see a huge reduction of those vulnerabilities of our youth."

Bihi, whose nephew was one of at least 22 young men who left the state nearly a decade ago to join Al-Shabab, Al-Qaida's offshoot in Somalia, has been vocal in the past about the specter of jihadi recruitment, often drawing criticism from community leaders and imams.

Roughly a dozen people have left the Twin Cities area to join jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq, and several have died.

The Minneapolis area is home to the largest concentration of Somali immigrants in the United States and the community has been a target for terror recruiters: In addition to those recruited by ISIL, more than 22 men have left the state since 2007 to join Al-Shabab in Somalia.

A congressional report released earlier this year revealed that Minnesota had provided the most would-be recruits of any state. The scathing report went on to accuse the United States and western countries of failing to disrupt the flow of combatants to the Middle East. More than 250 Americans have attempted or succeeded in reaching Syria and Iraq to fight with terrorist groups, according to intelligence estimates.

"Unfortunately yes. This is the way it works. It's not the way I think a lot of people imagine," Thornton said in response to a question from the audience about the presence of an on-the-ground ISIL recruiter. "There isn't some guy hanging around outside the community center, basketball court recruiting our kids."

Authorities have long maintained that most of the recruitment was "peer-to-peer," conducted over secure online platforms.

"This is not a problem that the community can solve by itself, nor is it a problem that law enforcement can solve on its own," Thornton said. "Part of protecting people of Minnesota is protecting people from themselves. Every person we stop from traveling to join ISIL is a life we save."

Libor Jany • 612-673-4064