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NBC INVESTIGATIONS
12
minutes
ago
Somali terror group has 20 American members, prone to strike outside Somalia
REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic
Women carrying children run for safety as armed police hunt gunmen who went on a shooting spree in Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi September 21, 2013.
By Robert Windrem
Investigative Producer, NBC News
The Somali terror group that stormed a Kenyan mall, killing more than 60 people, has a larger U.S. contingent than any other al Qaeda offshoot, said U.S. officials, and is now more prone to mount deadly attacks on targets outside Somalia.
Al Shabaab's attacks on foreign targets include an attempt to kill a U.S. congressman visiting Mogadishu in 2009. Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., was uninjured in the mortar attack.
Via Twitter, al Shabaab has claimed that five of the jihadis holding hostages at Nairobi’s Westgate mall are Americans, and provided names for individuals from Minneapolis, Kansas City, Maine and Arizona.
Senior officials said that U.S. law enforcement has run the list of U.S. persons who were named on Twitter as involved in the Kenya mall attack against the list of U.S. persons* known to be affiliated with Al Shabaab. They have found no match at this time.
Officials said it was possible that the names were of individuals unknown to them, or that they were aliases acquired after U.S. jihadis arrived in Somalia, or that the Twitter information was false.
There were about 250 foreign nationals in al Shabaab in 2011, said officials, including Arabs, European converts and ethnic Somalis who were legal citizens of the U.S. and European countries. About 50 al Shabaab fighters were U.S. passport holders, including many young Somali-Americans from Minnesota and infamous Arab-American jihadi rapper Omar Hammami.
American members of al Shabaab carried out three suicide bombings in Somalia between 2008 and 2011. All were from Minnesota.
But in 2011, al Shabaab began losing on the battlefield, and losing badly. After Kenyan, Ugandan and African Union troops drove al Shabaab from Mogadishu, the Somalia capital, and a stronghold in the coastal city of Kismayo, the numbers of foreign nationals plummeted.
“Our rough estimate of U.S. passport holders in al Shabaab is now about 20,” said a U.S. official. “And in terms of where they are in the hierarchy, there are some Americans who are military commanders, but they will never be emir or deputy emir.”
But the official cautioned that “these are guys we know about, guys who we have full ID’s on,” and there remains a concern that there are U.S. citizens “who we didn’t track.”**
Many of the U.S. fighters were recruited in American cities with large concentrations of Somalis, particularly Minneapolis-St. Paul, where as many as 90,000 Somalis live, the highest concentration outside the home country. Much of the early recruiting was done at a single mosque in Minneapolis, but officials said it was often done “peer to peer” rather than by a single recruiter.
While non-Somali recruits from around the world were usually fighting for Islam, said an official, the ethnic Somalis were also susceptible to a nationalistic appeal. They were urged to come home to fight the armies of Somalia’s neighbors, including Ethiopians, an ancient enemy. As one U.S. official said, “The pitch was, ‘Your father fought against the Ethiopians. What are you doing?’”
An official said some foreign nationals were killed. At least ten Minnesotans have died fighting for Shabaab. Other foreign nationals left Somalia to join up with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda’s robust Yemeni arm. Yemen is a few hundred miles across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia. Some of the U.S. jihadi recruits just went home.
No American, including Hammami, has ever risen high enough in al Shabaab’s ranks to be on the U.S. government’s terror target list, said officials. American-born AQAP cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was on that list, and was killed in a U.S. air strike in Yemen in 2011.
A U.S. official said, however, that al Shabaab’s misfortunes on the battlefield have only made it more dangerous outside Somalia’s borders. Prior to 2011,much of the group’s energy was spent trying to run the country and enforce strict adherence to fundamentalist Islam.*
“They have lost so much power in Somalia,” said the official, “that instead of having to do governance and enforcing sharia, now they can do external attacks.”
The official also said that al Shabaab has begun to regroup, and recover from its military setbacks, even as 4,000 Kenyan troops continue to occupy southern Somalia.
Al Shabaab has mounted small attacks in Nairobi, often using hand grenades, but was thwarted in two larger schemes. Kenyan authorities said they had stopped a terror plot aimed at Nairobi in 2012, and U.K. authorities disrupted a potential al Shabaab conspiracy in London in its early stages.
In 2009, before African troops pushed them out of Somalia’s population centers, al Shabaab tried to kill Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., head of the House Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee on Africa, with a mortar attack in Mogadishu. Al Shabaab took responsibility for the failed attack, which came just days after U.S. Navy SEALs killed Somali pirates who had taken a U.S. ship captain hostage in the Indian Ocean.
Three Somali men who were charged with taking part in the conspiracy to kill Rep. Payne were arraigned in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn today.
In 2010, more than 70 people were killed in an al Shabaab attack in Uganda on fans watching the World Cup soccer final.
The al Shabaab hostage standoff at the Westgate mall in Nairobi is now in its third day. The death toll is now at 68, with 175 injured, and a number of hostages are still being held by jihadis. While U.S. citizens were among the injured, no Americans have been confirmed dead.
A U.S. official said, however, that information that al Shabaab issues via Twitter, whether it is promising external attacks or claiming specific U.S. members, should be taken with a grain of salt. Last month, al Shabaab claimed via Twitter to have killed CIA officer Gary Schroen, who led CIA operations in Afghanistan after 9/11. Gary Schroen is alive and well.
More from NBC News Investigations:
Video suggests al Qaeda and al Shabaab alliance
Born in the USA, but now among Somalia's Islamist terrorists
Behind the scenes of Ann Curry's Tehran interview
US watches Iran's president-elect for signs of moderation
Follow NBC News Investigations on*Twitter*and*Facebook*
0comments
Bill Dedman
Investigative reporter Bill Dedman of NBC News is always looking for good investigative story ideas and documents. Bill received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, and has written full time for NBCNews.com since 2006.
Michael Isikoff
Michael Isikoff joined NBC News in July 2010 as national investigative correspondent. He had been at Newsweek since 1994 as an investigative correspondent. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the Abu Ghraib scandal, campaign-finance and congressional ethics abuses, presidential politics and other national issues.
Amna Nawaz
Amna Nawaz is Bureau Chief/Correspondent for NBC News' Pakistan bureau. She reports for all NBC News platforms from across the country and the region. Previously, she reported for the network's investigative unit.
Mike Brunker, Investigations Editor, NBC News
Mike Brunker is the investigations editor at NBCNews.com. He's worked for the site (formerly msnbc.com) as a reporter and editor since August 1996. Before that, he was an editor at the San Francisco Examiner and Hayward Daily Review in California.
Azriel James Relph
Azriel James Relph is a researcher for NBC News Investigations. He is a graduate of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and was a reporter for several years at the Hunts Point Express -- a South Bronx newspaper serving the poorest Congressional District in the United Sates. He has written for Newsweek, The Daily Beast, and MSNBC.com.
Robert Windrem
Robert Windrem is investigative producer for special projects at NBC Nightly News. He is also a Fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. He has worked at NBC News for more than three decades, focusing on issues of international security, strategic policy, intelligence and terrorism.
M. Alex Johnson, Staff Writer
M. Alex Johnson is a reporter for NBC News specializing in national affairs, technology and data analysis. He joined NBC News in 1999 from The Washington Post.
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© 2013 NBCNews.comhttp://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/23/20660841-somali-terror-group-has-20-american-members-prone-to-strike-outside-somalia?lite
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NBC INVESTIGATIONS
12
minutes
ago
Somali terror group has 20 American members, prone to strike outside Somalia
REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic
Women carrying children run for safety as armed police hunt gunmen who went on a shooting spree in Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi September 21, 2013.
By Robert Windrem
Investigative Producer, NBC News
The Somali terror group that stormed a Kenyan mall, killing more than 60 people, has a larger U.S. contingent than any other al Qaeda offshoot, said U.S. officials, and is now more prone to mount deadly attacks on targets outside Somalia.
Al Shabaab's attacks on foreign targets include an attempt to kill a U.S. congressman visiting Mogadishu in 2009. Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., was uninjured in the mortar attack.
Via Twitter, al Shabaab has claimed that five of the jihadis holding hostages at Nairobi’s Westgate mall are Americans, and provided names for individuals from Minneapolis, Kansas City, Maine and Arizona.
Senior officials said that U.S. law enforcement has run the list of U.S. persons who were named on Twitter as involved in the Kenya mall attack against the list of U.S. persons* known to be affiliated with Al Shabaab. They have found no match at this time.
Officials said it was possible that the names were of individuals unknown to them, or that they were aliases acquired after U.S. jihadis arrived in Somalia, or that the Twitter information was false.
There were about 250 foreign nationals in al Shabaab in 2011, said officials, including Arabs, European converts and ethnic Somalis who were legal citizens of the U.S. and European countries. About 50 al Shabaab fighters were U.S. passport holders, including many young Somali-Americans from Minnesota and infamous Arab-American jihadi rapper Omar Hammami.
American members of al Shabaab carried out three suicide bombings in Somalia between 2008 and 2011. All were from Minnesota.
But in 2011, al Shabaab began losing on the battlefield, and losing badly. After Kenyan, Ugandan and African Union troops drove al Shabaab from Mogadishu, the Somalia capital, and a stronghold in the coastal city of Kismayo, the numbers of foreign nationals plummeted.
“Our rough estimate of U.S. passport holders in al Shabaab is now about 20,” said a U.S. official. “And in terms of where they are in the hierarchy, there are some Americans who are military commanders, but they will never be emir or deputy emir.”
But the official cautioned that “these are guys we know about, guys who we have full ID’s on,” and there remains a concern that there are U.S. citizens “who we didn’t track.”**
Many of the U.S. fighters were recruited in American cities with large concentrations of Somalis, particularly Minneapolis-St. Paul, where as many as 90,000 Somalis live, the highest concentration outside the home country. Much of the early recruiting was done at a single mosque in Minneapolis, but officials said it was often done “peer to peer” rather than by a single recruiter.
While non-Somali recruits from around the world were usually fighting for Islam, said an official, the ethnic Somalis were also susceptible to a nationalistic appeal. They were urged to come home to fight the armies of Somalia’s neighbors, including Ethiopians, an ancient enemy. As one U.S. official said, “The pitch was, ‘Your father fought against the Ethiopians. What are you doing?’”
An official said some foreign nationals were killed. At least ten Minnesotans have died fighting for Shabaab. Other foreign nationals left Somalia to join up with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda’s robust Yemeni arm. Yemen is a few hundred miles across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia. Some of the U.S. jihadi recruits just went home.
No American, including Hammami, has ever risen high enough in al Shabaab’s ranks to be on the U.S. government’s terror target list, said officials. American-born AQAP cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was on that list, and was killed in a U.S. air strike in Yemen in 2011.
A U.S. official said, however, that al Shabaab’s misfortunes on the battlefield have only made it more dangerous outside Somalia’s borders. Prior to 2011,much of the group’s energy was spent trying to run the country and enforce strict adherence to fundamentalist Islam.*
“They have lost so much power in Somalia,” said the official, “that instead of having to do governance and enforcing sharia, now they can do external attacks.”
The official also said that al Shabaab has begun to regroup, and recover from its military setbacks, even as 4,000 Kenyan troops continue to occupy southern Somalia.
Al Shabaab has mounted small attacks in Nairobi, often using hand grenades, but was thwarted in two larger schemes. Kenyan authorities said they had stopped a terror plot aimed at Nairobi in 2012, and U.K. authorities disrupted a potential al Shabaab conspiracy in London in its early stages.
In 2009, before African troops pushed them out of Somalia’s population centers, al Shabaab tried to kill Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., head of the House Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee on Africa, with a mortar attack in Mogadishu. Al Shabaab took responsibility for the failed attack, which came just days after U.S. Navy SEALs killed Somali pirates who had taken a U.S. ship captain hostage in the Indian Ocean.
Three Somali men who were charged with taking part in the conspiracy to kill Rep. Payne were arraigned in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn today.
In 2010, more than 70 people were killed in an al Shabaab attack in Uganda on fans watching the World Cup soccer final.
The al Shabaab hostage standoff at the Westgate mall in Nairobi is now in its third day. The death toll is now at 68, with 175 injured, and a number of hostages are still being held by jihadis. While U.S. citizens were among the injured, no Americans have been confirmed dead.
A U.S. official said, however, that information that al Shabaab issues via Twitter, whether it is promising external attacks or claiming specific U.S. members, should be taken with a grain of salt. Last month, al Shabaab claimed via Twitter to have killed CIA officer Gary Schroen, who led CIA operations in Afghanistan after 9/11. Gary Schroen is alive and well.
More from NBC News Investigations:
Video suggests al Qaeda and al Shabaab alliance
Born in the USA, but now among Somalia's Islamist terrorists
Behind the scenes of Ann Curry's Tehran interview
US watches Iran's president-elect for signs of moderation
Follow NBC News Investigations on*Twitter*and*Facebook*
0comments
Bill Dedman
Investigative reporter Bill Dedman of NBC News is always looking for good investigative story ideas and documents. Bill received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, and has written full time for NBCNews.com since 2006.
Michael Isikoff
Michael Isikoff joined NBC News in July 2010 as national investigative correspondent. He had been at Newsweek since 1994 as an investigative correspondent. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the Abu Ghraib scandal, campaign-finance and congressional ethics abuses, presidential politics and other national issues.
Amna Nawaz
Amna Nawaz is Bureau Chief/Correspondent for NBC News' Pakistan bureau. She reports for all NBC News platforms from across the country and the region. Previously, she reported for the network's investigative unit.
Mike Brunker, Investigations Editor, NBC News
Mike Brunker is the investigations editor at NBCNews.com. He's worked for the site (formerly msnbc.com) as a reporter and editor since August 1996. Before that, he was an editor at the San Francisco Examiner and Hayward Daily Review in California.
Azriel James Relph
Azriel James Relph is a researcher for NBC News Investigations. He is a graduate of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and was a reporter for several years at the Hunts Point Express -- a South Bronx newspaper serving the poorest Congressional District in the United Sates. He has written for Newsweek, The Daily Beast, and MSNBC.com.
Robert Windrem
Robert Windrem is investigative producer for special projects at NBC Nightly News. He is also a Fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. He has worked at NBC News for more than three decades, focusing on issues of international security, strategic policy, intelligence and terrorism.
M. Alex Johnson, Staff Writer
M. Alex Johnson is a reporter for NBC News specializing in national affairs, technology and data analysis. He joined NBC News in 1999 from The Washington Post.
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Blasts heard at Kenya mall seized by terrorists
WATCH LIVE: Scene outside mall in Nairobi, Kenya
Shock and awww: Sad, weird Emmys made little sense
Why the cost of giving birth could make you cry like a baby
Budget showdown tops busy week for Washington
Gasoline prices drop closer to $3 and could keep falling
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Most popular posts
What we know about alleged shooter Aaron Alexis
Cop sneaked peek at dead Whitney Houston's naked body, says claim
Huguette Clark estate trial delayed 2 days to allow attempt at settlement
USIS, security firm that backgrounded Snowden, also checked Navy Yard shooter
DOJ hunts for possible fraud in background check of Navy Yard shooter
Proposed deal in Huguette Clark estate: Charity, relatives, lawyers win
Escaped killer sought in murder of US diplomat
About us
Site map
Terms & Conditions
Privacy Policy
© 2013 NBCNews.comhttp://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/23/20660841-somali-terror-group-has-20-american-members-prone-to-strike-outside-somalia?lite
