“We are stumbling blindly,” concluded a report released by the 9/11 Commission in 2010.
The few programs that exist are untested and disparate. There is Mohamed Elibiary, a self-described “master of the last-ditch save” from Texas who helps law enforcement agencies de-radicalize known extremists. There is Imad Hamad, who runs a monthly program in Dearborn, Mich., that brings together imams and FBI agents. There is the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which sponsors trips for teenagers to Hollywood so they can learn about a quintessentially American place often demonized by Islamist groups.
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And then there is Bihi, who said his only chance at success is “to do everything to build up every part of these kids’ lives.”
He concentrates his work in a square-mile area that residents refer to as “Little Mogadishu.” It consists of five cinder-block apartment towers, four mosques, three community centers, several Somali restaurants and a Somali record store. Most people are Sunni Muslims who immigrated here in the past 20 years after fleeing war, and they speak almost exclusively in Somali. Men gather each morning at Starbucks to argue about African clan politics. Women tuck cellphones under their hijabs to create impromptu headsets.
It is the epitome of what the FBI describes as a “vulnerable community.” More than half of households are headed by single mothers, 70 percent of families live in poverty and almost 25 percent of adults are unemployed.
“There are a lot of people who are angry and hopeless,” Bihi said, making it an ideal setting for a radical recruiter.
Bihi came to the United States on a fake passport in the late 1980s to escape the country’s chaos, spent five years as a rental-car jockey in Washington and then moved into one of the high-rise apartments in Minneapolis to be closer to relatives. He earned legal residency, obtained a green card and took a job interpreting for Somali patients at a hospital. In 1995, he returned to Africa to retrieve his sister and her toddler son from a refugee camp in Kenya and brought them home with him.
His nephew, Burhan Hassan, seemed to adjust well to life in the United States, mastering English, earning A’s and B’s at Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School and studying newspaper box scores to memorize the names of NFL teams. He joined a youth group at Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, started to dress in more traditional clothes and woke to pray in the middle of the night.
Bihi was ecstatic. Of all the ways an American teenager could go, he thought, this kid was moving closer to his faith.
On Nov. 4, 2008, an administrator phoned from Roosevelt High to say Hassan had ditched school. Bihi went to his nephew’s apartment and found that his clothes and passport were missing. Hassan’s laptop was still on the table, loaded with video sermons from radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi, Bihi said.
Hassan called home a few days later to explain that he had traveled to Somalia with six friends to join al-Shabab. Don’t worry, he said. He was killed in the fighting four months later.
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