In contrast to the gang of followers who used to gather here, the only people present this afternoon are the occasional customer and a chatty, 21-year-old Somali store assistant named Samira Ibrahim. She says she did return to Somalia three years ago—not to join al-Shabaab but to visit relatives and postpone an arranged marriage her parents had planned. She was stuck there seven months, after the Ethiopians invaded and the airports closed.
She describes a variety of harrowing experiences there: seeing police under the then-Islamic regime beat a man and a woman walking together on the street, in seeming violation of strict Muslim morals—although they were actually mother and son, she learned through talking to them; a hasty marriage to a local that ended badly; and an arduous drive, while pregnant and suffering from malaria, to ironically, Ethiopia, where she enlisted the help of the American embassy to come home.
Demian Johnston
Suspected terrorist Isse.
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"I went through a rough, rough time, when I should be kickin' it with my friends," she says. When her parents recently offered to take her to Kenya to see relatives, she declined, saying she never wanted to go to that part of the world again.
While it might seem that Shangani Bandiri Groceries and Deli is not now a breeding ground for terrorist repatriates, FBI and police officers have made a point of stopping by. "This place has some history," Muhidin says he was told by a police officer, who suggested that the proprietor prove to law-enforcement officers that it had changed. So about six months ago, he invited the officer and a colleague to lunch.
Muhidin appears not to mind the law-enforcement attention. He says he wants to get some kind of program for Somali youth off the ground, and plans to ask the FBI agent who came around for help.
Local Somali blogger Abdirahman Warsame also doesn't object to law enforcement's investigation of his community. In fact, he'd like more of it. "I happen to believe there is a cell here," he says, although he cannot point to proof beyond the several known cases.
His blog, Terror Free Somalia Foundation, regularly broadcasts the latest horrors of Somali terrorism to an English-speaking audience. Assembling stories and pictures from other media, he chooses the most graphic descriptions and images he can find. His blog's coverage of a Dec. 3 suicide bomb at a university graduation in Mogadishu showed the limp body of a government minister drenched in blood. A September story on al-Shabaab's enforcement of Islamic law features pictures of amputated hands and feet—belonging to thieves—hanging on telephone poles.
He says he's trying to alert the West to brutalities in Somalia that are not fully appreciated. And he forecasts that this is just the beginning. "There is going to be another Taliban just like there used to be in Afghanistan—not only in Somalia but in the Horn of Africa," says Warsame, a clean-shaven 38-year-old who works at Fisher Plaza.
When Dayniile.com implicated a Seattle man in the Sept. 17 bombing, Warsame tracked down his father at a Somali store and coffee shop on Rainier Avenue. "I'm sorry about the loss," he says he told the 50ish man with a lame leg. The father confessed his grief and the FBI's recent visit to his house to take a DNA sample, to be compared with that of the suicide bomber. Warsame says he gave the father his card and told him to get in touch when he was ready to talk.
The blogger says he wants the father to explain how this could have happened. "I'm trying to figure out the face of evil," he says.
It's personal for Warsame. He says his parents ran a string of grocery stores in Mogadishu until the war. Like so many, he had to flee suddenly as thugs confiscated his family's house and stores. He escaped to Kenya by foot.
He seems settled now. He lives in a Bellevue apartment complex, near its pool, with his wife, a Macy's sales associate, and his children, a 9-year-old girl and a 6-year-old boy. On a recent visit, he pulls out a picture of his kids dressed up for Halloween as a Somali pirate and an American Marine—inspired by last spring's standoff near the Somali coast, an incident apparently independent of al-Shabaab terrorism. Laughingly, he makes his allegiance clear: He's a proud American.
But now he feels that the same forces that once purged him from his home—under the guise of al-Shabaab—are haunting him in his place of refuge. "They're following me," he says. "They're taking our kids."
nshapiro@seattleweekly.com
