One winter day two years ago, the phone rang in a West Seattle townhouse appointed with a thick carpet and wall hangings featuring Arabic script. It was 23-year-old Abdifatah Yusuf Isse phoning home with some surprising news. His family thought he was visiting his girlfriend in Minneapolis during an extended break from studying economics at Eastern Washington University. In fact, he revealed, he was calling from Somalia.
Demian Johnston
Suspected terrorist Isse.
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Isse didn't know exactly where he was, he told his mother, Amina Ali. It was some campsite in the woods, where he was being kept up all night by the sound of hyenas and his fear of snakes.
He said he wanted to leave, but was stuck. The people who had lured him there with a free ticket and a chance to visit a homeland he hadn't seen since he was 8 had confiscated his passport.
Ali considers her son, essentially, to have been kidnapped. The federal government, however, views him as having participated in terrorism.
The people who flew him to Somalia were operatives of al-Shabaab, an extremist Islamic group backed by Al Qaeda that has kept the country in a prolonged state of violent chaos. Isse stayed at an al-Shabaab safe house when he got to Somalia, was issued an AK-47 assault rifle, and helped build a training camp for a week or two before sneaking out and finding relatives in nearby towns.
He returned to the United States the following spring. Five months later, Shirwa Ahmed, a Somali American who had traveled with Isse to the al-Shabaab camp, drove an explosive-laden Toyota truck into a government office in northern Somalia as part of a coordinated string of suicide bombings that day that killed 20 people. U.S. authorities began investigating Ahmed's peers, and this past February they arrested Isse at Sea-Tac Airport as he was about to board a flight back to Somalia. He said he was going to work for an uncle there.
Isse has since pled guilty to a charge of providing material support to terrorists, and is in jail in Minneapolis awaiting sentencing. His attorney declines to discuss details of the case, saying he is forbidden to by court orders sealing much of the relevant information due to an ongoing federal investigation.
Isse is cooperating with that investigation, which has discovered approximately 20 young Somali Americans who in the past three years have traveled back to their country of birth to become entangled with al-Shabaab. At a press conference in Minneapolis last month announcing the indictment of eight of these men, federal authorities stressed the danger of this first wave of homegrown terrorists. (Last week came news of a second wave, with the arrest of five young Americans in Pakistan suspected of plotting terrorism in Afghanistan.)
"The national-security implications are evident—Americans with U.S. passports attending foreign terror camps," said Ralph Boelter, special agent in charge of the FBI's Minneapolis field office, according to an Associated Press report.
In the FBI's field office in downtown Seattle, David Gomez, assistant special agent in charge, elaborates: "The question is whether there's a potential for someone to go over there and then come back and commit a terrorist crime back here"—or, he adds, in Europe, where American passports usually guarantee easy access. He calls the investigation of Somali terrorists "among the highest priorities in anti-terrorism" since 9/11.
For his office, he says, "our major investigative concern is to determine whether or not a recruitment network exists in Seattle."
The most recent indication of such a network came with the Sept. 17 suicide bombing of an African Union peacekeeping base in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, which killed 21 people. A Somali-language Web site called Dayniile.com identified one of the terrorists as a Seattle man, according to CNN. Local Somalis tell the Weekly they have spoken to the man's father since then. A resident of the Rainier Valley, he tearfully acknowledged his 18-year-old son's death, these sources say, although the FBI is still working on confirming the suicide bomber's identification. (The Weekly could not reach the father directly for comment.)
Seattle has one of the three largest Somali communities in the country, along with Minneapolis and Columbus, Ohio. While the U.S. Census does not track Somalis specifically, a report using data from 2006 through 2008 documents approximately 22,000 East Africans in the Seattle metropolitan area. Local Somalis believe the current number is as high as 40,000.
They have grappled with the news of terrorists from their community in different ways, with some trying to downplay the threat and others sounding the alarm. Many feel as if they're under increased scrutiny in their new home. "We are a community under investigation, basically, for a few bad apples," Halima Dahir told some 100 Somalis gathered at the Rainier Vista Boys and Girls Club on Oct. 20. The forum was organized by a coalition of Somali groups that came together in the wake of revelations about a local terrorist connection.
About six months ago, for example, law-enforcement authorities caused a stir when they showed up at a parking lot outside a South Seattle apartment building populated by Somalis. The officers were showing pictures of Somali men and asking residents if they knew them, according to Arsalan Bukhari, executive director of the state branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Bukhari, who received a call from a disturbed resident, says he doesn't know what agency the officers were from or who the men were in the pictures.
