6 Somali-Americans Arrested in ISIS Recruiting Case

By Scott Shane
Monday, April 20, 2015

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WASHINGTON — Federal authorities said Monday that they had broken up an Islamic State recruitment ring in Minnesota, arresting six young Somali-American men who tried for months to travel to Syria to join the terrorist group.

Some of the men persisted in attempting to get to the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, even after they had been prevented from flying out of Kennedy International Airport in New York and one of their friends was arrested and charged.

All of those charged were Somali-Americans ages 19 to 21 from Minneapolis, where four were arrested on Sunday. The other two were detained in San Diego, where officials said they had driven to obtain fraudulent travel documents, hoping to cross into Mexico and continue to Syria from there.

Andrew M. Luger, the United States attorney for Minnesota, said at a news conference that a linchpin in the recruitment effort was a young man, Abdi Nur, 21, who left Minneapolis in May and successfully reached Syria. Mr. Nur, whose story was recounted by The New York Times last month, was “an active recruiter” who offered both inspiration and practical advice to those who wanted to follow his path, Mr. Luger said.

In a 10-month investigation, the F.B.I. managed to penetrate the circle of friends and relatives who met regularly to plot their departure. During that time one young man had a change of heart and approached the F.B.I. He became an informant and recorded some of the discussions, Mr. Luger said.

The top F.B.I. agent in Minneapolis, Richard T. Thornton, praised the informant and others in the Somali community who assisted the agency in trying to stop the recruiting, calling them “courageous” for acting against a terrorist group he called “evil at its core.”

Some speculation about Islamic State recruiting in Minneapolis had surrounded a local man, Amir Meshal, 31, who had been expelled from two mosques and publicly accused of radicalizing young Muslims. Mr. Meshal had vehemently denied supporting the terrorist group, and neither he nor anyone else outside the group of six young Islamic State admirers was charged.

Instead, Mr. Luger said, the recruitment was “a peer-to-peer operation” in which friends compared notes on how to raise money for airline tickets, evade F.B.I. scrutiny and connect with Islamic State travel facilitators in Turkey.

Arrested in Minneapolis were Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman, 19; Adnan Farah, 19; Hanad Mustafe Musse, 19; and Guled Ali Omar, 20. The two men arrested in San Diego were identified as Abdirahman Yasin Daud, 21, and Mohamed Abdihamid Farah, 21. All were charged with conspiring to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization.

Mr. Daud, Mohamed Abdihamid Farah and their friend who had become an informant, who was not named, drove together in Mr. Daud’s car to San Diego, according to court documents. The informant had said he knew someone who could provide them with forged passports.

In November, Mr. Abdurahman, Mr. Musse and Mohamed Abdihamid Farah traveled by bus to Kennedy Airport but were prevented from boarding. Their companion, Hamza Ahmed, 19, was removed from a plane minutes after boarding and was charged in February, and his would-be fellow travelers were identified then by the initials “H.M.M.,” “M.F.” and “Z.A.”

Even after that encounter with the authorities, Mr. Luger said at the Minneapolis news conference, “they never stopped plotting to find a way to get to Syria to join ISIL.”

The court documents identify another Minneapolis man, referred to as “Y.J.,” who flew to Turkey in June and called his family from the same telephone number used previously by Mr. Nur after he arrived in Turkey.

A few dozen Americans have traveled or tried to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State. Those whose plans were discovered by the F.B.I. have been arrested, usually at an American airport as they tried to board a flight, and charged with supporting a terrorist organization.

Americans trying to join the Islamic State have been a diverse group, including many women, with ages ranging from the early teens to late 40s, and comprising both converts to Islam and children from Muslim immigrant families. The largest single group, however, has consisted of Somali-Americans from Minnesota, a community that experienced a previous wave of young men departing to fight with Al Shabab, the Qaeda affiliate in Somalia.

The F.B.I. has been intensively investigating how the Islamic State recruiting has worked, and whether the sophisticated social media campaign of the terrorist group is supplemented by face-to-face recruiting on the ground in the United States.

For the first time on Monday, officials underscored their suspicion that Mr. Nur played a prominent role in recruitment. Mr. Nur periodically posted online photos and messages about his life with the Islamic State on Twitter, Ask.fm and other sites. Shortly before Mr. Nur flew from Minneapolis late in May, his friend, Abdullahi Yusuf, then 18, was prevented from boarding his flight.

Both men were charged in November with attempting to provide material support for terrorism, but their fates have diverged sharply. Mr. Yusuf has pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing. Over prosecutors’ objections, a judge has permitted him to live in a halfway house under close supervision, and advocates are working closely with him in what is seen as a national test case for deradicalization.

In a pattern seen in other cases as well, Mr. Nur and Mr. Yusuf each suddenly obtained about $1,500 cash that they used to buy airline tickets. A central question in their case was whether they got the money from a well-heeled Islamic State recruiter. But Mr. Luger said the six men arrested on Sunday “helped each other with funding,” selling a car and emptying a college financial aid account.

The number of Islamic State recruits from the United States remains small in comparison with Western Europe, where more than 3,000 people are believed to have traveled to Syria to join the group. But law enforcement and intelligence officials have tracked and tried to disrupt the travel in part because they were concerned that Americans could train with the Islamic State and then return to the United States to carry out attacks.

In the first case of its kind, a 23-year-old Somali-American from Columbus, Ohio, was charged last week with training in Syria — whether with the Islamic State or another group was left unclear — and being directed by a cleric there to go home to the United States and carry out an attack.

The authorities say that the man, Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, 23, a naturalized American citizen whose brother was killed last year fighting in Syria with another militant group, the Nusra Front, spoke of wanting to attack a military base but never did so before his arrest in February.

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