Federal authorities unsealed criminal charges Monday against eight suspects alleged to be part of a U.S. recruiting network that sent young men to fight in Somalia — one of the largest militant operations uncovered in this country since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The court documents disclosed how some older members of the Somali American community in Minneapolis are believed to have lured younger ones to fight in Somalia — some as suicide bombers — with an Al Qaeda-affiliated group known as Al Shabab, or “The Youth.”
The charges include providing financial support to fighters who traveled to Somalia, attending Al Shabab training camps and fighting with the group against the U.S.-backed transitional government there, as well as against Ethiopian government forces and African Union troops.
The recruitment of young people from Minneapolis and other U.S. communities “has been the focus of intense investigation for many months,” said David Kris, the assistant attorney general for national security.
The new charges bring the number of men accused in connection with the case in Minnesota to 14. Several of the newly disclosed defendants are believed to be outside the United States.
At least 20 men, all but one of Somali descent, are thought to have left the Minneapolis area and traveled to Somalia between September 2007 and October 2009, according to court documents and interviews.
Minneapolis is home to the largest Somali community in the United States, an estimated 60,000. Many arrived in the early 1990s as refugees, fleeing famine and a brutal civil war. A cluster of high-rise apartments and the surrounding neighborhood in eastern Minneapolis have come to be known as Little Mogadishu.
As with members of many refugee groups around the country, young Somalis have struggled with negotiating the conflicts between traditional culture and modern America. Authorities say Somali youths in the United States are more easily radicalized than other young Muslims because they are often extremely poor and more isolated from society as a whole.
Amid that struggle, some have come to admire Al Shabab, a hard-line Islamist militia that controls much of southern and central Somalia.
Even among the less militant in this country, there is broad opposition to the regime that was put in place after Ethiopia, backed by the United States, invaded in 2006 and overthrew an Islamic coalition.
The fighters from Minneapolis, according to authorities, were trained in Somalia in the use of small arms, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and military-style tactics. Authorities added that the recruits were also indoctrinated with “anti-Ethiopian, anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-Western beliefs.”
Authorities said one of the men, Shirwa Ahmed, attended Al Shabab training camps after leaving Minneapolis in 2007 and took part in one of five simultaneous suicide attacks on targets in northern Somalia in October 2008.
Until Monday, the public aspects of the investigation had focused on the Somalis who had gone overseas.
But the newly unsealed court documents provide a wealth of new details. Peers and elders recruited the men, according to the documents, in some cases by exhorting them to fight for their homeland and, in others, to fight for jihad, or holy war, against the West and what they described as its puppet government in Mogadishu.
“Instead of the kids going over there as cannon fodder, this identifies some of the recruiters behind them,” said one federal law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.
Federal authorities say they are particularly concerned that some of the men who receive training in guerrilla warfare and terrorism tactics in Somalia might return to the United States and launch attacks here.
They cited a recent case in which Australian authorities arrested at least four men of Somali and Lebanese descent who they charged with planning to use automatic weapons to carry out a suicide attack on a military base in the southern city of Melbourne.
According to Australian police, some of the men had trained with Al Shabab, but the group issued a statement denying it.
Federal authorities said they had been investigating support and finance cells for the network in several U.S. cities, including Boston, San Diego and Columbus, Ohio.
“It’s always troubling when you find indications of a terrorist recruitment and training operation with structure, organization and continuity, because those are the makings of an effective terrorist cell,” said Kenneth Wainstein, who tracked the threat of Somali Americans fighting overseas as the head of counter-terrorism and homeland security in the George W. Bush administration until earlier this year.
“And while that terrorism may be focused today in the Horn of Africa, which is troubling enough, that same operation could conceivably be directed at us or our allies in the future,” Wainstein said.
The documents unsealed Monday in federal court in Minneapolis show how FBI agents followed some of the suspected ringleaders for at least two years, using confidential informants who had quietly pleaded guilty to similar charges.
One of the informants said recruits stayed at Al Shabab safe houses and trained at camps with dozens of young ethnic Somalis from Somalia, elsewhere in Africa, Europe and the United States.
One of the accused, Cabdulaahi Ahmed Faarax, is said to have regaled young Somali Americans with tales of how he was wounded and experienced “true brotherhood” while fighting there, according to documents.
He told alleged co-conspirators “that traveling to Somalia to fight jihad will be fun and not to be afraid,” and that it was “the best thing that they could do,” according to FBI affidavits filed in support of the charges.
Faarax and Abdiweli Yassin Isse were charged in an Oct. 9 criminal complaint with conspiring to kill, kidnap, maim or injure persons outside the United States. An affidavit filed in support of the complaint said that in the fall of 2007, Faarax and others met at a Minneapolis mosque to telephone co-conspirators in Somalia to discuss the need for Minnesota-based fighters to go to Somalia.
Faarax was interviewed three times by authorities, the affidavit said, “and each time denied fighting or knowing anyone who had fought in Somalia.”
Another of those charged, Mahamud Said Omar, 43, is a permanent U.S. resident and Somali citizen accused of visiting an Al Shabab safe house in Somalia and providing financial support and personnel to Al Shabab — including donating money to buy AK-47 rifles for the men from Minneapolis. He was arrested two weeks ago in the Netherlands, and the Justice Department is requesting his extradition.
The Justice Department also announced Monday that four residents of Minneapolis had entered guilty pleas in connection with the investigation and that another defendant awaited trial on charges of making false statements to the FBI.
Ralph S. Boelter, the FBI special agent in charge of the Minneapolis field office, stressed that the investigation focused on “a small number of mainly Somali American individuals and not the broader Somali American community itself, which has consistently expressed deep concern about this pattern of recruitment activity in support of Al Shabab.”
The FBI began investigating the network after the disappearance of some young Somalis from Minneapolis several years ago.
At least three of the young men have been killed in fighting, and others have been arrested in Africa, Europe and elsewhere.
In recent years, Al Shabab has trained with and provided refuge for senior Al Qaeda operatives wanted in connection with the deadly bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and a 2002 hotel bombing in Kenya.
As part of its war with the transitional government, Al Shabab has attacked police stations, border posts, government facilities and civilian targets.
It also has launched suicide bombings and produced numerous jihadist propaganda videos, including ones showing decapitations of its purported enemies. It has declared that its ultimate goal is the imposition of Sharia, or strict Islamic law, throughout Somalia.
josh.meyer@latimes.com