Abdi Warsame might be the only city council member in the nation who lies awake at night thinking about how to fight ISIL. Fighting terrorism half a world away wasn’t what brought the 37-year-old to politics—he’d originally hoped to fix employment and education disparities, create affordable housing and transportation and give his community a voice in local politics. Yet just months after he took office in 2014, the first Somali-American elected to the Minneapolis City Council, members of his south-central ward began to disappear, lured to the Mideast to join the brutal and ambitious terrorist group. By summer, the first Minnesota man had been killed fighting for ISIL; two more would die by the end of the year in Syria.
The local radicalization problem led former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman to dub Minnesota in April, “the land of 10,000 terrorists,” a phrase that set off a firestorm of criticism locally. “The Global War on Terror is not taking place in some amorphous ‘over there’ any longer,” he wrote. “It is taking place in our own back yard, in the heartland of America, and it’s a grave danger to our state.”
Terrorist recruitment was unfortunately not a new problem for the Twin Cities’ Somali community, which had struggled since 2008 as Somali-American teens—many of whom had never visited East Africa—left to join the Al Qaeda affiliate known as al-Shabaab, fighting in their ancestral homeland. ISIL, though, represented a new, more insidious threat—there were no nationalist or ethnic ties, no obvious appeal to the young men and women leaving Minnesota for a vicious war in the Mideast. Yet authorities believe more than 20 Minnesotans have left for Syria and Iraq in the past two years, and the fight against ISIL has put Warsame’s community at the forefront of a national effort to combat radicalization efforts. Warsame and the Minneapolis Public Schools system were front and center at a White House summit on countering violent extremism earlier this year, where they presented an innovative school-parent intervention program meant to head off the appeal of online terrorist recruiters.
Now, midway through his first term as a city council member, Warsame finds himself balancing foreign policy with local problems, like fixing potholes on Cedar and Riverside avenues or improving taxicab ordinances in the wake of a new legalizing the app-based companies, like Lyft and UberX. In many ways, Warsame understands the alienation and isolation that can breed radicalization. As he has said, “I have children growing up in the city who are no different [from] those young individuals that left.” But more than that, he himself has lived this bifurcated identity. He with his family, after all, has over the past two decades made the opposite journey—fleeing political persecution in Somalia as a child and growing up on social welfare in London before landing in the Twin Cities.
The Twin Cities were for Warsame and tens of thousands of Somalis like his family meant to be a fresh start—and, in many ways, they have been—but unfortunately, the refuge community has also found that they haven’t been able to leave the wars and unrest behind.
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Warsame’s birthplace of Mogadishu and the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis he represents today feel much closer than the 8,000 miles that technically separate them. The neighborhood forms the core of the largest Somali population in the United States, an estimated 100,000 Somalis and East Africans who began streaming into the country in the 1990s. On a recent warm sunny afternoon during Minnesota’s all-too-brief summer, Warsame sat at a coffee shop in the U.S. Bank Plaza that towers over his downtown Minneapolis City Hall office as he painted a picture of his past and present. “My dream was to be successful,” he says, “to fulfill my mother’s dream—that we could be whatever we wanted to be, that we could excel in life, take responsibility for our lives.”
Warsame came to Cedar-Riverside through a winding path that started in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, where he was raised in a middle-class lifestyle until he was 8. He says his success is owed to two important people in his life—his mother Kaha Ali, an ex-midwife, and his stepfather Mohamed Mohamud Guled, who became a distinguished politician after the collapse of the Somali government and held important ministerial posts in various administrations in Somalia, which took its independence from Italy and Britain in 1960.
But the Mogadishu that Warsame knew in the 1980s is far different than what it is today: A city submersed in anarchy and chaos with episodic suicide bombings and gun rampages by al-Shabaab fighters. During Warsame’s years, Mogadishu was a glamorous city with growing economic prosperity, military power and improved infrastructure. But in the late 1980s, the East-African country began to crumble as a consequence of the 1977-78 territorial war between Somalia and Ethiopia. Somalia lost the war; its once-strong economic muscle debilitated. This created a national mood of despair, leading to the birth of organized and armed opposition against the totalitarian regime of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, who had ruled the country for more than two decades in a grip of steel.
A civil society campaigner, Guled went toe-to-toe against the military government, demanding justice and democracy. Guled, as a consequence, was imprisoned. At 8, Warsame and his family moved to London in 1987, fearing they would to fall victims to Barre’s worsening political repression that employed imprisonment, torture and punishment against those engaged in organized resistance and their families.
“My mother was smart enough to get us out of Mogadishu,” Warsame says, his British accent a memento of his London upbringing. “She understood that the fighting was to happen and would separate our families.”
In London, life unfolded with a dreadful beginning for the Warsame family. “It was a difficult situation because we went from having a comfortable life … to being poor, being asylum seekers, having a single parent in a country that I was not familiar with,” he recalls. “My mother didn’t speak English. She had to raise six kids by herself. We had no relatives. We were probably some of the earliest Somalis. It was difficult. We basically grew up on social welfare.”
Warsame was also the father-figure for the family: By the time he was 10 in London, he helped raise his siblings. He took his brothers to parent-teacher conferences and served as an interpreter for his mother when she had doctor’s appointments, among other responsibilities.
Warsame, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in London, met a Somali-American woman from Minnesota in London through family. The two later, they got married, and Warsame joined her in Minneapolis.
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When he arrived in Cedar-Riverside in 2006, he found a neighborhood in the midst of a remarkable transformation. A century before, most residents here were Scandinavian immigrants, working in the milling and lumber industries on the Mississippi River. That tradition is still visible in pockets of his ward, which also houses the Swedish American Institute, the Norway House and the American Indian Community Center, as well as the University of Minnesota, Augsburg College and Fairview Hospital. But by the 1960s and ’70s, Cedar-Riverside had emerged as what one city planning document called “a beehive of hippies, intellectuals, actors, artists and musicians.”
It was into this community that Somali immigrants began to flood in the 1990s. The majority of the Somalis here escaped when the seething political tensions—the tensions that Warsame and his family dodged by leaving in the 1980s—erupted into a prolonged civil war in 1991, killing thousands and displacing thousands more.
The first wave of refugees fleeing the war initially sought refuge in California’s San Diego, says Ahmed Ismail Yusuf, author of Somalis in Minnesota. At the time, San Diego had the largest Somali population in the country because of the warm climate. But as more and more unskilled Somali immigrants chose to be closer to the already-established community in San Diego, finding employment became a struggle. Eventually, they relocated in Willmar, a rural Minnesota town surrounded by turkey farms. “They found job opportunities [in Willmar] that nobody else was taking,” Ahmed explains. “The turkey processing plants did not require previous job experience or knowing the English language.” Then from Willmar, which is just about two hours away from Minneapolis, the Somalis spilled into the Twin Cities metro area, including, eventually, Warsame’s ward in Minneapolis, which over time has become the center of the community.
In just two decades, the neighborhood has grown and shifted to become one of the most diverse areas in the states, though it’s also seen widespread racial segregation. In 2010, according to a recent study by the University of Minnesota, the Twin Cities area had more than 80 schools with 90 percent nonwhite students. Public housing, institutions and social gatherings were often racially segregated as well. “Since the start of the twenty-first century, the number of severely segregated schools in the Twin Cities area has increased more than seven-fold; the population of segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods has tripled,” the report states. “The concentration of black families in low-income areas has grown for over a decade.”
Here at the intersection of Cedar and Riverside Avenues, many businesses and services, such as the popular 400 Bar—which was recently converted to a mosque—are geared toward the Somali and East African community. Adjacent to the mosque are stores that sell traditional African women’s clothing and jewelry. Facing the mosque is a busy menu-less halal restaurant serving rice, pasta, chicken, fish, goat meat sandwiches, pancakes, juice and tea. Likewise, grocery stores, barber shops, beauty salons and travel agencies aimed at East Africans are scattered throughout the neighborhood. “It’s a vibrant working-class ward, made up of traditional Americans, new immigrants,” Warsame says. “It has the largest East-African population in the United States and the largest Muslim population in Minnesota.”
As the community has grown, it’s slowly begun to flex its political muscle. In 2010, the community elected Hussein Samatar to the Minneapolis school board. Warsame, though, had his eye on a higher office. He first made his connection with the community here as the executive director for a public housing tenant association, representing more than 4,500 residents in the Riverside Plaza. It’s one of the region’s best-known landmarks—the complex of high-rise apartment buildings, with their distinctive pastel panels painted in red, yellow, blue and white, is hard to miss from nearly any location in Minneapolis.
Before he decided to run for office, Warsame first got involved in local politics in an effort to unite the scattered voices of the Somali community in one ward. So, he founded the Citizens Committee for Fair Redistricting in 2012 to change the way ward boundaries were drawn—and to boost minority representation in the City Council. At the time, only one of the 13 council members represented a racial minority even though Minneapolis is 40 percent minority. Warsame and his team successfully changed the map, putting the majority of the Somalis in one ward.
A year later, Warsame ran to represent the newly established Ward 6 where his fellow Somalis dominated. Warsame, who had been in the country for seven years at the time, soundly defeated incumbent Robert Lilligren in 2013. The historic event—which made Warsame one of just two Somali city officials in the nation—marked a coming of age for the refugee community. “We campaigned hard, we organized well and we believed in ourselves,” he acclaims, giving a soft smile as he recalled that cold election night, which brought out a large cheering crowd, many of them Somalis, at a victory party at the Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis. Warsame’s election in November 2013 wasn’t the only shift in the City Council that year; the same election brought in the first Hmong council member and the first Latina, a sign that the once-homogeneous city was increasingly reflecting the diversity it now encompasses.
“I felt a great of deal of responsibility,” Warsame says. “I never thought too much about the historical importance. What mattered was that I become the best council member that I could be. And that I serve the whole city of Minneapolis, and not just Somali-American population.”
Jacob Freys, who recently worked with Warsame on the taxicab ordinance, praised him for his leadership and his commitment to getting things done. “He’s extremely strategic and result-oriented,” he says. “Many people are in office because they want to be in office. But Abdi is in office to make change. Everybody and their mother has a vision. But executing on that vision requires a certain talent strategy and relationship building, and there is where Abdi really excels.”
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The Somali constituents who Warsame represents in Minneapolis face many of the pressures familiar to immigrant communities nationwide—high unemployment, language and cultural barriers—but their migration to Minnesota came with a new set of pressures too. Just as the community was establishing itself in the Twin Cities, the spread of social media and technology allowed the wars of their homeland to reach them here in ways never before possible.
In 2006, the same year that Warsame arrived in Minneapolis, Omar Shafik Hammami, a 22-year-old Alabama man who had converted to Islam and married a Somali-Canadian woman in 2004, abandoned his family and left to join the jihad movement of al-Shabaab in Somalia. Hammami, who took up the name Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki and later was named to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists, became one of the group’s highest-profile leaders and helped pioneer the use of social media and flashy Web videos to reach recruits far from Somalia’s battlefields.
The glories of battle shown in videos by al-Shabaab and the romanticized idea of fighting to defend their ancestral homeland helped persuade disaffected Somali youth in Minnesota to journey back to a land many of them had never known firsthand. Since 2008, as fighting heated up in East Africa and al-Shabaab’s recruiting techniques matured over the Internet using videos, message boards and chat rooms, dozens of young Somali-Americans have abandoned their families in the Twin Cities for the perilous journeys to unknown territories in Somalia and the Middle East.
In addition to selling the glories of dying in battle, the terrorist recruiters preyed from afar on the very real pressures many families faced in the Twin Cities, where many Somali families struggled to achieve their American dream. Even though the Twin Cities actually overall boasts one of the nation’s lowest unemployment rates and is booming as a region economically, joblessness in the Somali community runs high. Single parents head nearly 35 percent of Somali families in Minnesota; 40 percent of the community’s young people are high school dropouts; 35 percent of Somali-Americans 16-year-old or older are unemployed and 55 percent live in poverty, according to a University of Southern California report by the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events.
“The community has been under-resourced for years,” says Abdirizak Bihi, a longtime youth leader, standing outside his Riverside Plaza home. “People like Abdi Warsame stood up to serve this community and these kids. But we need to do more,” he says, suggesting that the city invent in creating jobs, youth programs and a community center that services at-risk Somali youth.
Families and community leaders, like Warsame, have lived with the pain of losing these young people to such brutal organizations—and Bihi is no exception. In 2008, his nephew, Burhan Hassan, slipped away from his Riverside Plaza apartment when he was 17. He was “intelligent and a quiet boy,” Bihi remembers. At 4, Burhan arrived in the U.S. with his family in 1996. The only language he knew well was English and Minnesota was the only place he knew, he says of Burhan, who is presumed dead.
The disappearance created tensions when parents accused leaders of the Abubaka As-Sadique Islamic Center in Minneapolis of encouraging the recruitment because, Bihi argued, the men used to participate in programs at the center and the leaders supported the Islamists before the U.S. government designated them terrorists. When parents came forward against the mosque, he says, many in the community “ganged up on” Bihi who has been vocal about the issues. “They became a big political machine that continued to lie to the community,” he says of the mosque leaders. “They painted us as families who were trying to destroy the house of God. And you don’t want to be painted like that.”
At the time, families and friends of the disappeared young men avoided talking about recruitment in the community, fearing the negative stigma that comes with the association with terror suspects. Some even approached Bihi in an attempt to discourage him from speaking out against recruits, which he says, was happening before his Burhan’s disappearance, but families were fearful to say it publicly.
“We had a choice to be quiet about it, like those before us,” he says. “But that would have had a bigger cost. It might have been that our young people coming back to the country and doing some big harm without anybody knowing it. Or we would have lost hundreds and hundreds to terrorist organizations.”
From 2009 to 2011, at least 20 men from the Twin Cities were charged with crimes connected to al-Shabaab, according to federal authorities. Many of these cases are pending; others accused have either admitted to the crime before a judge or were convicted after trial.
Then, in 2014 came a sudden shift in destination: Instead of departing to Somalia to join al-Shabaab, recruits were going to Syria to join ISIL. “Clearly, something changed, not the people vulnerable to recruitment but the benefactors of the recruiters,” stated Erroll Southers and Jastin Hienz in their report, “Foreign Fighters: Terrorist Recruitment and Countering Violent Extremism Programs in Minneapolis-St. Paul.”
Speaking to a crowd of Somali-Americans at a recent community forum in Minneapolis, U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Andrew Luger said he had thought that the terror recruitment in Minnesota was over by early 2014. “But the sad reality for all of us is that terror recruiting is not a thing of the past,” he continued. “ISIS is recruiting throughout the United States and they’re recruiting here.”
Indeed, they are—and it’s raising a new set of problems for Warsame and his community. This spring, six Somali-American men from Minneapolis, all 19- to 21-year-olds, were charged with attempting to travel to Syria to join ISIL. Before their arrest, the men were allegedly plotting their trip with the assistance of a former Minnesota man, Abdi Nur, who left the country last year, and is believed to be fighting with ISIL. Nur remains in contact with individuals in Minnesota to provide guidance to those interested in fighting overseas, according to a criminal complaint. Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman, Adnan Farah, Hanad Mustafe Musse, Guled Ali Omar, Abdurahman Yasin Daud and Mohamed Abdihamid Farah are now in prison, pending trial.
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Community leaders and defendants’ attorneys worked together on a plan to release three of the men as they await trail. The proposal was meant to allow the men to attend de-radicalization programs as they remain under surveillance. Chief U.S. District Judge Michael Davis, however, rejected the release plan last month, saying the suspects were a threat to the public and posed a flight risk.
Abdisalam Adam, a public school teacher and imam from the Twin Cities, wants the judge to let the men into society as they await trial. He was among the leaders who proposed last month that the three men be reintegrated into the community. Adam regularly visits the youths in prison and says that’s gotten to know them well. He says he doesn’t believe that they represent a danger to the public; they talk and look like any other kids. “I don’t see radicalization or criminal intent in them,” he says. “They seem as if they’re people who want to go back to their community and integrate with their community.”
He and other leaders are working to improve the release plan. When it’s done, they’ll take it back to the judge for a second chance.
These de-radicalization programs have recently emerged in the Twin Cities as a model to integrate suspects into the community as they receive mentoring and counseling opportunities while they await trial. When Abdullahi Yusuf pleaded guilty of conspiracy to support ISIL, he wasn’t sent to jail as he awaited trial. Instead, Judge Davis ordered him to a halfway house in St. Paul, to participate in programs that would reintegrate him into the community. Later, Yusuf lost the chance after he apparently violated the release agreement. He was sent back to jail.
In 2013, two Minnesota women, Amina Farah Alis and Hawo Mohamed Hassan, were convicted for conspiring to send money to al-Shabaab through the informal remittance system that funnels money back to families still in East Africa. Ali was given 20 years in prison; Hassan, 10 years. Cases like theirs—and others around the country—have led the U.S. government to crack down on remittances sent back to Somalia, buffeting many refugees and expats in the Twin Cities who see such payments as a vital lifeline for the families they left behind; more than a $1 billion a year is sent back to Somalia by expats, a level of funding that eclipses all foreign and humanitarian aid to the East African country. Yet in February, Merchants Bank of California, which was responsible for handling more than half of U.S. payments back to Somalia, announced it was suspending such transactions under pressure from the government aimed at fighting money-laundering and terrorism financing.
Warsame has been at the center of the region’s intensifying terrorism and recruitment concerns on different levels: At City Hall, he works on finding ways to create programs and opportunities leading youth to a productive future. In the community, he works with parents to educate them about the realities of radicalization in the community and the need to be involved in their children’s day-to-day activities. And at federal level, earlier this year, Warsame was part of a delegation of Somali-American leaders from Minnesota that was invited to the White House’s Countering Violent Extremism summit. The summit was meant to highlight ideas and strategies to combat recruitment among the Somali youth in the Twin Cities.
President Barack Obama told the assembled crowd at the summit, “We have to recognize that our best partners in all these efforts, the best people to help protect individuals from falling victim to extremist ideologies are their own communities, their own family members.” As the president explained, “These terrorists are a threat, first and foremost, to the communities that they target, which means communities have to take the lead in protecting themselves.”
The federal government’s Countering Violent Extremism initiative—also known as CVE—has divided the local community. Warsame is one the leading supporters of the program, spearheaded by U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger. Warsame says that he thinks the program provides the youth with opportunities that would prevent them from falling into radicalization, which he says has a lot to do with lack of opportunities and integration.
Adam, the St. Paul teacher and imam, also supports the program. He explains that extremism exists in the community and that it’s not going to go away anytime soon. He says that the programs like CVE could help find and fight the root causes of radicalization. But he says it would be dealt with a “calculated and responsible” way.
Critics argue that the CVE programs, which will also be launched in Boston and Los Angles, institutionalize injustice against Somali and criminalize Muslim youth. “It stigmatizes and marginalizes the community by treating all of its members as suspects and holding an entire community responsible for the actions of others,” explains Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Minnesota, in an email.
That fear—that the government’s CVE efforts, which are known locally as efforts at “Building Community Resilience,” is just a cover for mass surveillance and harassment has led many in the Somali community to question the government’s trustworthiness. The fears led the U.S. attorney’s office to sign a memorandum of understanding with local community leaders promising, “BCR will NOT be used as a tool to conduct surveillance on the Somali Minnesotan community or to build intelligence databases about participants of the various programs under the BCR umbrella.”
The CVE and BCR efforts continue to rankle the Somali community, as both sides argue about the best way to prevent losing more of Minnesota’s youth to terrorist groups overseas. As the arguments continue, residents fear that more youth might get swept up in ISIL’s recruiting efforts; just last week, a young Mississippi couple was arrested by the FBI as they were supposedly leaving to join ISIL in Syria.
Warsame, though, sees his own story as providing a ray of hope for Somali teens struggling to fit into Minneapolis. As the story of radicalization highlights the unfortunate struggle of too many Somali-Americans in his community, Warsame says his political ascendancy in Minneapolis has a different narrative—a story of survival, hope and encouragement for the community that inspires young people. He hopes other youth in the community will follow his lead and help the community grow its power in the years ahead on the political scene. As he points out, he led a similar life as the youth in his neighborhood: Muslim, black, young, on the outskirts of a wealthier society. “I’m just like them,” he says. “I never had more benefit than they have.”
As he says, “They have no excuse.”
