the jihadist next door 2009

8/14/2019 The Jihadist Next Door 2009

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The Jihadist Next Door

Left, Omar Hammami as a freshman in high school. Right, in a Shabab propaganda video released in March 2009.

By ANDREA ELLIOTT

Published: January 27, 2010

ON A WARM, cloudy day in the fall of 1999, the town of Daphne,

Ala., stirred to life. The high-school band came pounding down MainStreet, past the post office and the library and Christ the King

Church. Trumpeters in gold-tasseled coats tipped their horns to the

sky, heralding the arrival of teenage demigods. The star quarterback

and his teammates came first in the parade, followed by the

homecoming queen and her court. Behind them, on a float bearing

leaders of the student government, a giddy mop-haired kid tossed candy to the crowd.

Omar Hammami had every right to flash his magnetic

smile. He had just been elected president of his sophomore

class. He was dating a luminous blonde, one of the most

sought-after girls in school. He was a star in the gifted-student program, with visions of becoming a surgeon. For

a 15-year-old, he had remarkable charisma.

Despite the name he acquired from his father, an

immigrant from Syria, Hammami was every bit as

Alabaman as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman

who sprinkles her conversation with blandishments like

sugar and darlin. Brought up a Southern Baptist,

Omar went to Bible camp as a boy and sang Away in a

Manger on Christmas Eve. As a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and

Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo. In the thick of his adolescence, he was fearless,

raucously funny, rebellious, contrarian. It felt cool just to be with him, his best friend at

the time, Trey Gunter, said recently. You knew he was going to be a leader.

A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise in the most unimaginable way. Some

8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern edge of Africa, he has become a key figure in

one of the worlds most ruthless Islamist insurgencies. That guerrilla army, known as the

Shabab, is fighting to overthrow the fragile American-backed Somali government. The

Left: From The Hammami Family

The Terror Trail

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An interactive timeline that

includes home videos, family

photos, journal entries and

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rebels are known for beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and

stoning women accused of adultery. With help fromAl Qaeda, they have managed to turn

Somalia into an ever more popular destination for jihadis from around the world.

More than 20 of those fighters have come from the United States, many of them young

Somali-Americans from a gritty part of Minneapolis. But it is Hammami who has put a

contemporary face on the Shababs medieval tactics. In a recent propaganda video viewed

by thousands on YouTube, he is shown leading a platoon of gun-toting rebels as a

soundtrack of jihadi rap plays in the background.

He is identified by his nom de guerre, Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, the American, and speaks

to the camera with a cool, almost eerie confidence. Were waiting for the enemy tocome, Hammami whispers, a smile crossing his face. Later he vows, Were going to kill

all of them.

In the three years since Hammami made his way to Somalia, his ascent into the Shabab s

leadership has put him in a class of his own, according to United States law-enforcement

and intelligence officials. While other American terror suspects have drawn greater

publicity, Hammami exercises a more powerful role, commanding guerrilla forces in the

field, organizing attacks and plotting strategy with Qaeda operatives, the officials said. He

has also emerged as something of a jihadist icon, starring in a recruitment campaign that

has helped draw hundreds of foreign fighters to Somalia. To have an American citizen

that has risen to this kind of a rank in a terrorist organization we have not seen that

before, a senior American law-enforcement official said earlier this month.

Not long ago, the threat of American-bred terrorists seemed a distant one. Law-

enforcement officials theorized that Muslims in the United States by comparison with

many of their European counterparts were upwardly mobile, socially integrated and

therefore less susceptible to radicalization. Perhaps the greatest proof of this came with the

absence of domestic terrorist attacks following 9/11, a period that has brought Europe

devastating homegrown hits in Madrid and London.

America is now at a watershed. In the last year, at least two dozen men in the United

States have been charged with terrorism-related offenses. They include Najibullah Zazi,

the Afghan immigrant driver in Denver who authorities say was conspiring to carry out a

domestic attack; David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American from Chicago who is

suspected of helping plan the 2008 attacks in Mumbai; and the five young men from

Virginia who, authorities say, sought training in Pakistan to fight American soldiers in

Afghanistan.

These cases have sent intelligence analysts scurrying for answers. The American suspects

come from different backgrounds and socioeconomic strata, but they share much in

common with Europes militants: they tend to be highly motivated, even gifted people

who were reared in the West with one foot in the Muslim world. Others may see them as

rigid or zealous, but they envision themselves as deeply principled, possessing what Robert

Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, calls an altruism gone wildly wrong.While their religious piety varies, they are most often bonded by a politically driven anger

that has deepened as Americas war against terrorism endures its ninth year.

The presence of Western troops in Afghanistan and Iraq has brought those conflicts closer

for many Muslims in America. Through satellite television and the Internet, the distance

between here and there between Fort Hood, Tex., and Yemen, between Daphne, Ala.,

and Somalia has narrowed. For Omar Hammami, the war in Iraq provided a critical

spark as he turned toward militancy.

In an e-mail message in December, Hammami responded to questions, submitted to him

through an intermediary, about his personal evolution and political views. We espouse

the same creed and methodology of Al Qaeda, he wrote. OfOsama bin Laden, he said,

All of us are ready and willing to obey his commands. Did Hammami, like bin Laden,

consider America a legitimate target for attack? Its quite obvious that I believe America

is a target, he wrote.

OMAR HAMMAMIS SISTER, Dena, is a petite 28-year-old woman with silky brown

hair and a graceful manner. She lives with her husband and their baby daughter in an

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airy house overlooking a small American city, which she asked that I not identify for their

protection. The walls are decorated with Denas whimsical paintings, which draw

inspiration from Kandinsky. Wind chimes dangle over the front porch, by a sign that

reads, Hippies use side door.

One morning in September, she was sitting in her kitchen when she opened her laptop,

logged on to Facebookand saw a message that read, Rolling farting leotard. Her heart

began to race.

Years earlier, Dena had put a note in her little brothers school binder, trying to crack him

up. She told him to picture a fat girl in a leotard, rolling across the floor and passing gas. It

had become one of their many inside jokes. Now, she realized, it was her brothers way ofreaching out from Somalia, of saying, Its really me. He had created a fictitious

Facebook profile, listing his alma maters as Stanford and Harvard.

Things are pretty good, he wrote. He and his new Somali wife (the wifey, he called

her) had a baby girl. Sometimes marriage is up, he wrote. Sometimes its down. The

lifestyle is not exactly normal for most.

Hammami wouldnt say where he was, but he urged Dena not to worry about him. He

was prepared to meet death, he said. I dont do anything too dangerous except once every

month or so, he added. Its all in Gods hands.

Hammamis life in Somalia appears to be more precarious than he let on. He spends much

of his time shuttling between villages in southern Somalia, where many of the Shababs

camps are based, according to Somali intelligence officials. In addition to his role as a

military tactician, they said, Hammami helps guide the Shababs recruitment strategy and

management of money exercising surprising power after landing in Somalia as a 22-

year-old rookie. The Somali government is seeking increased American aid to fight the

Shabab and may have reason to play up the threat of foreigners like Hammami. But they

were adamant about his role. This guy is dangerous, says Abdullahi Mohamed Ali, the

Somali minister of national security. Hes a threat to the region. I want him to be

eliminated.

When Hammami engages in combat, he makes an impression on other militants, said aformer Shabab commander, Sheikh Mohamed Sheikh Abdullahi Sheikh Mohamed. He

doesnt blink in the face of the enemy, said Mohamed, who recalled four battles in 2008

and 2009 in which he and Hammami took part. In combat, Hammami used a

sharpshooters rifle, firing calmly and with precision, said Mohamed, who spoke to me by

telephone this month from a government compound in Mogadishu after defecting to the

governments side. Somali officials said they were keeping him there for his protection.

Until recently, the few visible images of American jihadis were of young men on the

margins: John Walker Lindh, a Californian loner who wandered into Afghanistan to join

the Taliban; or Adam Gadahn, now a Qaeda spokesman, who grew up home-schooled on

a goat farm and channeled his teenage energies into death-metal music. If OmarHammami followed his own compass, others followed him. Years later, more than one of

his classmates compared him to the incongruous high-school hero of the 1986 film Ferris

Buellers Day Off.

Hammamis journey from a Bible Belt town in America to terrorist training camps in

Somalia was pieced together from interviews with his parents, sister, best friends and law-

enforcement officials, as well as hours of home videos and passages from his e-mail

messages, journal entries and hundreds of his postings on an Internet forum. If anything

has remained a constant in Hammamis life, it is his striving for another place and

purpose, which flickered in a poem he wrote when he was 12:

My reality is a bore. I wish, I want, I need the wall to fall and the monster to let me pass,

the leash to snap, the chains to break. . . .

I ve got a taste of glory, the ticket, but where is my train?

DAPHNE SITS ALONG Alabamas serene Mobile Bay, just north of the Gulf of Mexico.

The town seems stopped in time. Colonial-style cottages and gazebos dot the bluffs. The

wide, blacktopped streets are shaded by pecan trees and Southern maples. At dusk, the tide
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4/15

slaps the docks as fishermen loll, casting silhouettes against a golden sky.

Shafik Hammami was searching for a quiet American town when he left Syria in 1972. He

was reared in Damascus, the oldest of nine children whose father ran an import-export

business. Shafik wanted to study medicine and heard that small colleges in less-populated

parts of the United States were best suited for immigrants, so you dont get lost in the

shuffle, he told me recently. By chance, a translator working in Damascus handed him a

brochure for Faulkner State Community College in Bay Minette, not far from Daphne. He

looked no farther.

At Faulkner, Shafik, then 20, stuck close to the handful of other Middle Eastern students,

part of a wave of Arab immigrants who were ushered into the United States by looserimmigration laws. With wavy black hair and halting English, he stood out in a place that

was historically suspicious of outsiders. One evening, while driving through nearby

Mobile, he came upon a group of men wearing white cones on their heads and asking for

money, his first brush with the Ku Klux Klan.

But Alabamas conservative Christian culture agreed with him. Most of the women he

encountered didnt drink or smoke. Those were the first things he liked about Debra

Hadley, a perky high-school senior he met through friends. The daughter of a butcher, she

had rosy cheeks and a fluttering laugh and rarely missed a Sunday service. Soon Debra

and Shafik were engaged.

It did not violate Shafiks Muslim faith to marry a Christian. Debra got her mothers

blessing after promising never to convert to Islam. They had a church wedding, followed

by a Muslim ceremony in the reception hall. They each wondered if, eventually, the other

might cede ground.

By the time Omar was born eight years later, his parents and sister had moved into a

ranch house in Daphne, a town of 19,000 where cotton fields have given way to

subdivisions with names like Plantation Hills. Shafik had become a civil engineer and was

working at the Department of Transportation. Debra taught elementary school.

The first years of Omars life followed the cues of his mothers Southern upbringing.

Freckled and blond, he answered to Omie. He spent summer afternoons on hisgrandparents farm in nearby Perdido, shelling peas and eating watermelon on the porch.

He lost himself in Tom Sawyer. His uncles taught him to hunt deer.

On Sundays, Omar, Dena and their mother settled into the wooden pews of Perdido

Baptist Church, a tiny congregation whose preacher warned of hellfire and damnation. At

first, Shafik had no idea. Debra told the kids to keep their churchgoing a secret. They also

attended Bible camp in the summers (Omar won $10 for rattling off the names of all the

books of the Old Testament). When he was 6, he voluntarily walked to the front of the

church to be baptized. I believed it; I wanted it, he later told his friend Trey Gunter.

Shafik tried to teach his children Arabic and later Islam, but the lessons held little

resonance. Syria remained a distant backdrop amid the Fourth of July fireworks,

Halloween costumes and shrimp gumbo of their American youth. Omar had gone from

calling his father Babba Arabic for father to Bubba. Still, the Hammami home

remained culturally Muslim. They left their shoes at the door. Koranic inscriptions

decorated the walls. Pork was forbidden. It was like two different schools of thought

under one roof, Dena says. Thunder and lightning.

The children learned to adapt. So did their parents. In one of the familys home videos,

shot on Oct. 8, 1992, Shafik points the camera at a cake. Today is Debras birthday, he

says in a Syrian accent that has acquired an Alabaman lilt. Were fixin to celebrate her

birthday in a few minutes. In the next shot, Debra stands by the cake, smiling brightly, as

a Lebanese love ballad echoes through the house. Eight-year-old Omar licks frosting off

the candles as his mother opens presents. She lifts a bottle of perfume to her nose.

Thats worth getting old for, aint it? Debra says with a laugh.

I reckon, Shafik answers from behind the camera.

A smirk crosses Omars face as he repeats, mockingly, Ah reckin.
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That trademark smirk the same one that would later appear in the Shababs

propaganda hinted early at Hammamis delight in causing trouble. He was exceedingly

smart but easily bored and short-tempered, once turning over his desk in second grade.

His teachers tired of his endless questions. He had a big mind in a small-minded place,

Dena says.

Hammami finally found a kindred soul in middle school. Kathleen Hirsch, his teacher in

the gifted-student program, was a quirky Jewish woman who wore Ugg boots before they

became popular and drove a bottle green Jaguar convertible. She turned her classroom

into a salon, replacing the desks with sofas, brewing coffee and filling the shelves with

Dylan Thomas and Gertrude Stein. She taught Hammami to think outside of the box, helater wrote.

He began to read voraciously, losing himself in The Catcher in the Rye and 1984 and

even the dictionary. A natural debater, he was fiercely competitive, chiding himself for

finishing second in a countywide speech contest. He went over and over every minute

detail, continually asking me what he had done wrong: How was his posture? Eye

contact? Hirsch, who taught Hammami for six years, recalled in a recent e-mail

message. He hated to lose.

She found him introspective for his age; a seeker of weighty subjects. In a journal he kept

at school, Hammami wrote: I dont believe war should exist. It doesnt have a point. In

a later entry, on April 13, 1996, he described the Oklahoma bombing as stupid, adding, I

wish violence would vanish clear from the earth.

LOOKING BACK ON their childhood, Dena remembers a pestering little brother who

followed her like a shadow. She wore hemp necklaces and Birkenstocks and thought

nothing of cutting class. Hammami, who idolized her, soon followed her lead, getting high

on marijuana and mushrooms by eighth grade, friends recalled.

Shafik was always a strict father (he once washed out his son s mouth with detergent,

causing him to throw up). But as the kids entered adolescence, Shafik became consumed

with trying to keep his daughter on what he saw as a respectable path. He forbade her

from talking on the phone unsupervised. He ruled out prom and even insisted that shewear leggings during soccer practice to avoid exposing her legs.

Dena did her best to flout the rules, with her brother as her ready accomplice. He helped

her trade phone calls with boys and sneak out of the house. She and Omar shared the

intimacy of twins; each was the other s witness to an upbringing that only they could

understand.

Finally, when she turned 16, Dena decided she could no longer bear her fathers rules. She

hugged her brother tightly as she left.

Sorry I cant take you with me, she told him.

She moved in with a friends family and returned only years later, to visit. The episode

forced Hammami, he later wrote, to think for myself and make my own way.

That fall, Hammami claimed his place as one of the more popular kids at Daphne High

School. The jocks found him funny; the nerds, literary; the skateboarders, alluringly

rebellious. Though he was short and rail thin, girls were drawn by his cocky bravado. He

soon won over Lauren Stevenson, one of the most beautiful girls in school. He could just

command people with his energy, she says.

Yet for all of his social triumph, Hammami was consumed with a profound internal

conflict. He didnt know whether to be Muslim or Christian. On rare trips to Damascuswhen they were little, Omar and Dena were warned by relatives that they would go to hell

if they werent Muslim, Dena recalled. In Perdido, their mothers family insisted that hell

was reserved for non-Christians.

When he was 12, Hammami wrote in his journal, Sometimes I get confused because the

Bible says one thing and our textbooks and Darwin say another. He had a hard time

understanding how God could have a son. That same year, his father began urging him to
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study Islam.

Shafik had experienced his own religious renewal after drifting from his practice during

college. There were no mosques in Daphne (the Chamber of Commerce lists 43 churches).

But in nearby Mobile, the University of South Alabama had given rise to a small Muslim

community ofPalestinian, Pakistani and Egyptian professionals. By the time Omar was in

high school, his father had become an active member of a growing mosque, the Islamic

Society of Mobile, and helped found the areas first Islamic school.

A trip to Damascus the summer before Hammamis sophomore year would make a

lasting impression on him. He loved the order of things: how his aunts waited on him,

how his male cousins shared a cohesiveness of brotherhood, Stevenson, his high-schoolgirlfriend, recalled. In photos of the trip, Hammami had traded in his khakis and polo

shirts for a long cotton tunic and a prayer cap. A family video shows him bowing to Mecca

in prayer one evening.

When he got back to Daphne, Hammami remained conflicted. One night before he went

to sleep, he turned to God for guidance. Slowly I started to incline toward Islam, he later

wrote to his sister, and my heart became tranquil.

But Hammamis conversion was neither smooth nor straightforward. He was the

president of his sophomore class. He treasured his Friday-night routine the football

game, the meal at Waffle House and the marathon session of GoldenEye on Nintendo. He

would smoke a cigarette and then feel guilty. He was smitten with Stevenson yet stopped

holding her hand. Soon Hammami began taking off on Fridays to attend his fathers

mosque. He finally got permission to pray at school, kneeling opposite a cinder-block wall

in the library as students stole wide-eyed glances.

NO ONE WAS more struck by Hammamis transformation than his mother.

On a recent morning, Debra skipped about her sun-filled kitchen fixing a plate of grits. A

chatty woman with lively brown eyes, she was well into her third cup of coffee. In the

next room, an oak table was permanently set for dinner, a nod to her Southern

upbringing. The cranberry walls of her tidy neo-Colonial were free of Christian relics and

family photographs, in keeping with Muslim tradition.

Debra learned to walk a fine line when it came to religion. But Christianity remained the

compass of her life. She called Shafiks mosque his church and the Koran his bible. She

wasnt going to let her son defect without a fight. Where are the verses about love in your

bible? she prodded him. Theyargued and argued and argued, she recalled. Then he

said, Thats enough.

Like his mother, Hammami was stubborn. When he became convinced of something, he

turned to convincing others. At Daphne High, he managed to persuade a handful of

students, including his girlfriend, to explore Islam a striking development at a school

where Christian teenagers routinely gathered at the flagpole for prayer.

He would say, So if Jesus is God, who does he pray to? recalled his friend Bernie

Culveyhouse. And if you said, God, hed say, Doesnt that make Jesus a narcissist?

Culveyhouse soon converted. Stevenson decided it was not for her, and Hammami broke it

off. His other friendships were already strained when, one afternoon in 2000, the subject

in class turned to Osama bin Laden. Then a relatively obscure terrorist, bin Laden had

claimed responsibility for the 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and

Tanzania. One boy in the class suggested that bin Laden should be shot dead.

What if I said that about Billy Graham? Hammami demanded.

Billy Graham is a peaceable preacher, the boy, a Christian, recalled saying. Osama bin

Laden is a terrorist.

One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter, Hammami replied.

By his junior year, Hammami had become a spectacle. He made a point of praying by the

flagpole outside school yet refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance, friends recalled. In class,
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he swore at Hirsch, his longtime teacher, assailing her for being Jewish. That spring, in

another class, Hammami tried to choke a student who interrupted him as he was reciting

the Koran, students recalled. Hammami was promptly suspended. With high grades and

an A.C.T. score in the 93rd percentile, he skipped his senior year and enrolled at the

University of South Alabama. There, he no longer prayed alone. He could walk to the

mosque from campus, and he soon took over as president of the fledgling Muslim Student

Association.

Soon after, the hijackers struck on 9/11, and local reporters began calling Hammami for

comment. Publicly, he struck a measured tone, telling the school paper, Its difficult to

believe a Muslim could have done this. But he was caught off guard by the attacks and

felt insufficiently knowledgeable about Islam, friends recalled. He set out to deepen his

study and soon fell under the influence of Tony Salvatore Sylvester, a 35-year-old convert

and preacher who was new in town.

Sylvester wore a thin blond beard and was missing his two front teeth. Brought up

Catholic in the rural town of Doylestown, Pa., he found Islam in his early 20s while

working as a jazz-fusion guitarist in Philadelphia. He had come to Mobile with his wife

and six children, hoping to land a job at the Islamic school. By then, he was considered a

prominent voice in the American Salafi movement.

SALAF, IN ARABIC, means ancestors. Followers of the movement, who are

sometimes likened to Calvinist Protestants, advocate a strict return to the fundamentals of

Islam. To purge their practice of modern influences, they try to emulate the founders of

the faith the contemporaries of the Prophet Muhammad and the two generations that

came after his death in A.D. 632. Young Salafis, for example, often dress in sandals and

robes like those thought to have been worn in seventh-century Arabia.

The Salafist interpretation of Islamic doctrine tends to be literal and originalist. They

remind me a lot of Scalia in their approach to texts, says Bernard Haykel, a professor at

Princeton University. The movement is most prevalent in the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt

and Jordan but has also won adherents in the West among second- and third-generation

Muslim immigrants who are seeking a more authentic Islam than that of their

assimilative parents.

In the United States, the trend can be traced to a handful of Middle Eastern scholars who

began preaching in the 1980s, gaining a small but vocal following in places like Arlington,

Tex., and Syracuse, N.Y. Their teachings spread among prison converts and found

footholds in Philadelphia and Detroit, where in the 1990s Tony Sylvester managed what

was then the headquarters of a leading Salafi organization, the Quran and Sunnah

Society.

Several of Sylvesters students said in interviews that he subscribed to a nonviolent school,

one that represented the majority of American Salafis. They tend to believe that Muslims

should remain politically disengaged and take up arms only when called to duty in a

Muslim-governed country; anything else represents rebellion against the government,which violates Islamic law.

But the Salafi movement also has its share of revolutionaries the so-called Salafi jihadis

(including Osama bin Laden), who argue that rebellion is permissible. Some members of

Sylvesters original circle broke with the group over the issue of rebellion, including Ali Al-

Timimi, who was convicted in 2005 on terrorism-related charges in what is sometimes

known as the Virginia paintball case.

Hammami plunged headlong into Salafism, mastering its nuances and lexicon. The

movement gave him a new sense of brotherhood and discipline. But it was, above all, an

excuse to disobey his father, recalls Joseph Stewart, a Muslim convert who became close

to Hammami.

Shafik Hammami was by then the president of the Mobile mosque. In many ways, he

embodied the Muslim-American mainstream. He held a comfortable job and wore a suit

and tie to work. His son, meanwhile, began striding around campus in a scarlet red turban

and a thobe, the ankle-length gown used by gulf Arabs. He spent his free time with a

group of white Salafi converts whom immigrant Muslims at the mosque dismissed as the
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Dixies. The circle included Stewart, a burly 29-year-old who had started a carpet-cleaning

business, and Bernie Culveyhouse, Omars friend from Daphne High.

A towering, lanky boy with sky blue eyes, Culveyhouse met Hammami playing basketball

in fourth grade. He was brought up by a single mother who drank heavily and fashioned

herself a Harley honey, disappearing into the night dressed head to toe in black leather.

By the time Culveyhouse came to Islam, he was fighting marijuana and Ecstasy habits

and failing out of school.

Everyone in the group took a new name. Culveyhouse chose Suhayb. Stewart called

himself Yusuf. Hammami sometimes went by Abu Hafs, one of the venerated

companions of the prophet. They distanced themselves from the mosque, meeting weeklywith Sylvester to parse theology and questions of moral conduct.

Hammami soon began denouncing the militant Islamists he once defended. He came to

believe that Muslims were suffering because they had lost their religion, Culveyhouse and

Stewart recall. The solution, Hammami now argued, was not to take up arms but to

engage in a spiritual jihad, practicing the faith with greater devotion. He and his friends

ordered their lives around a strict code: they could not look at women, listen to music, be

photographed or sleep with their backsides facing Mecca.

No one in the group was more dogmatic than Hammami. He insisted on eating with his

bare right hand, as the prophet had, and wearing his pants above the ankle, a popular look

among Salafis. Shafik found some of his sons new convictions theologically debatable.

The conflict between them, which had been simmering for some time, blew open when

Omar refused to pose for a family photograph in April 2002. Shafik ordered him to move

out.

In a town where 9/11 had prompted a thick canopy of American flags, Omar devoted

himself to da wah, the practice of spreading the Islamic faith. His style was to provoke

inquiry. He strolled through Wal-Mart and Arbys in his robe, hoping to attract questions

from strangers. He drove a red Honda Civic with a sign on the back that read: As

Muslims we believe in one God. We don t worship rocks, trees or men.

More often than not, he and his fellow converts were met with disbelief.

Everybody looked at us as if we were Satan, Culveyhouse recalls.

One afternoon, a group of young men in a pickup truck approached Hammami and

Culveyhouse near a pier south of Daphne, where they sometimes read the Koran.

This is the stick I have for boys who wear dresses, one of the men warned them, waving

a miniature baseball bat.

In a flash, Hammami reached into his car and grabbed the broken-off handle of a wooden

shovel, Culveyhouse recalls.

And this is the stick I have for faggots, he shot back.

Throughout his religious transformation, Hammami kept much of his former self intact.

Some nights, he and Culveyhouse darted around the mosque in their robes, sparring with

invisible light sabers in homage to Star Wars. He continued to run red lights and rack up

speeding tickets, refusing to rise for a judge in traffic court.

Above all, he remained close to his sister, Dena, who was dating a dreadlocked Deadhead

(she later married him barefoot, wearing a crown of daisies). When Dena and Omar spent

time together he in his tunic, she in her Jesus sandals they seemed blind to their

differences, reverting to their sibling code of inside jokes and silly songs. I wanted to keep

how we always were, she says.

But aside from his sister and mother, Hammami had nothing to do with women. Much of

the time, he and his friends were tormented by sexual frustrations, two of them recall.

Hammami would stare at a woman on the street and then chastise himself for hours,

Stewart says. He surfed Islamic Internet forums in search of a wife. His father promised

to help him marry a Syrian woman provided that Hammami completed his degree in


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computer studies. But in December 2002, he dropped out of college, saying that he could

no longer bear to be in the company of women.

Over the next few years, Hammami, Culveyhouse and the other Mobile Salafis traveled

around the country attending Islamic conferences. With Sylvester, they opened a small

Muslim bookstore in Mobile, opposite a storage lot. Hammami worked to master Arabic

and talked of becoming an Islamic scholar. In the meantime, he had to earn a living, and

few jobs meshed with his piety. He loaded trucks, cleaned carpets and sold light bulbs.

For a time, Hammami and Culveyhouse took inventory at Wal-Mart. Their boss, an ex-

Marine, tolerated their odd look (they tucked their pants into their socks), but he was

frustrated by their demands: they refused to touch alcohol, pork, Christmas cards andeven dolls. The boss finally assigned them to the womens clothing section.

I looked at Omar and said, Man, we cant do anything in life, can we? Culveyhouse

recalls. They quit that day. Soon after, Culveyhouse left for the bustling Muslim crossroads

of Toronto, where he had found a wife. The following year, Hammami joined him, hoping

to do the same.

HAMMAMI FOUND TORONTO with its labyrinth of mosques, Islamic bookstores

and halal grocers enthralling. He took an apartment near Culveyhouse in the western

part of the city and found a job delivering milk to Somali housewives. Living in Canada,

Hammami began to see his country through a new lens. The war in Iraq was deeply

unpopular at the mosques and coffee shops he frequented. Being an American invited a

stream of questions and commentary for which Hammami felt unprepared, Culveyhouse

recalled.

For years, Hammami had tuned out current events, dismissing politics as dunya a

worldly distraction from his Islamic practice. One afternoon in April, he and Culveyhouse

dropped by an Islamic bookstore. The owner, an Afghan, told them to pray for the people

of Fallujah. Months earlier, the U.S. military had invaded the Iraqi city, an insurgency

stronghold, for the second time.

Whats going on? Hammami said.

Over the next few months, Hammami became consumed with events in Iraq and

Afghanistan. He began subscribing to conspiracy theories about 9/11, Dena and

Culveyhouse recall. He soon found himself rethinking his nonmilitant Salafi stance.

I was finding it difficult to reconcile between having Americans attacking my brothers, at

home and abroad, while I was supposed to remain completely neutral, without getting

involved, he wrote in the December e-mail message responding to questions posed to him

through an intermediary.

Hammami concluded that his Salafi mentors had been hiding many parts of the religion

that have a direct relationship to jihad and politics, he wrote. He began searching for

guidance on the Internet, Culveyhouse says, discovering a documentary about the life of

Amir Khattab, a legendary jihadist who fought in Chechnya. The documentary traces

Khattabs evolution as a promising Saudi student who gave up a life that any young man

would desire to embrace a higher purpose. Hammami was mesmerized, Culveyhouse

recalls.

Once youve made that step, its a gateway, Culveyhouse says. Once youve legitimized

the jihad in Chechnya, youre compelled to legitimize the jihad in other places as well.

Back then, Hammami and Culveyhouse talked about jihad in the way that star football

players at Daphne High School dreamed about the N.F.L. The idea remained romantic

and hypothetical. Hammami assured friends, for instance, that he would go to Syria tofight if the United States ever invaded.

But action required the right set of circumstances. Hammami remained unimpressed by

most of the militant Islamist groups he studied: he still disapproved of how Al Qaeda

attacked civilians, and he saw the insurgency in Iraq as too secular, Culveyhouse said.

Only a pure jihad one that was carried out in defense of Muslim land with the purpose

of creating an Islamic state met Hammamis standard.
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Besides, Hammami had more pressing matters at hand. He was desperate to marry.

Culveyhouse arranged an introduction to his Somali sister-in-law, Sadiyo Mohamed

Abdille. A tall, wisecracking 19-year-old who wore skinny jeans and played basketball,

Sadiyo grew up in Toronto with Culveyhouses wife, Ayan, after their family fled Somalias

internecine violence. Hammami found her amusing and eager to learn more about Islam,

Ayan recalled. Within a matter of weeks, he persuaded her to socialize with only women

and to wear the abaya, a cloaklike garment. In March 2005, just two months after their

first meeting, they married in a small, spartan ceremony.

With limited prospects in Toronto, Hammami and Culveyhouse talked quixotically of

making hijra migration to a Muslim land. Culveyhouse proposed Egypt, where theycould study Islam at the revered Al-Azhar University in Cairo. In September, Hammami

and his pregnant wife boarded an airplane with Culveyhouses family, including his

formerly Harley-riding mother, who had also converted to Islam.

The two families settled in Alexandria, Egypt, which they found disappointingly secular.

When the applications to Al-Azhar fell through, Culveyhouse and his family returned to

the United States. I didnt want to continue down this fools path, he says. Hammami

felt betrayed, Culveyhouse recalls, and they drifted apart.

Alone with his young wife and newborn daughter, Hammami seemed overwhelmed,

Dena recalls. He found freelance work translating Islamic texts into English but had

trouble supporting his family. In the December e-mail message, he wrote that he was

yearning to live in a countrywhere Shariah was being implemented completely.

In April 2006, Hammami joined an online discussion forum called Islamic Networking.

Using the alias al-Mizzi, a relative recalls, Hammami began communicating with the

administrator of the forum, an American convert who also happened to live in Egypt. The

convert, Daniel Maldonado, was a 27-year-old from New Hampshire who moved there

with his wife and children the previous year.

Hammami and Maldonado soon met in person, relatives recall, and began venturing into

poor neighborhoods to attend underground mosques. That summer, Hammami wrote to

two Muslim friends, saying he had met a pious brother and was planning a trip. Heseemed to be communicating in code.

Our family members to the south need doctors, he told the friends, who described the

exchanges only on the condition of anonymity.

When Hammami discussed Chechnya with them years earlier, doctor was their word for

those who make jihad, one friend says. By the south, Hammami seemed to be

referring to Somalia; he had been sending them news articles about the remarkable events

unfolding there.

A BOOMERANG-SHAPED country on the Horn of Africa, Somalia had been consumed

by a catastrophic civil war since 1991. What was not destroyed by famine and drought was

plundered by warlords and pirates. Amid the chaos, an Islamist movement gave rise to an

insurgency that took control of Mogadishu in June 2006. The insurgents known as the

Islamic Courts Union promised a new unity under the banner of Islam and brought an

unfamiliar peace to the streets of the capital.

Officials in Washington found the developments troubling. The groups military wing

the Shabab, which means youth in Arabic was said to be sheltering foreign Al Qaeda

operatives. They were calling for a jihad against neighboring Ethiopia, a predominantly

Christian country and longtime enemy. Ethiopian troops gathered at the border,

threatening an invasion with backing from the United States. News of the conflict quickly

spread in jihadist chat rooms, as bin Laden called upon Muslims to join in Somalias fight.

From Egypt, Hammami followed the events closely. He was convinced that jihad had

become an obligation upon me, he wrote in his December e-mail message. He wanted to

help his captive brothers and sisters while helping himselfobtain the highest rank

available as a Muslim. (Jihadists believe that the greatest rewards in the afterlife are

granted to them.) On their Internet forum, Hammami and Maldonado made impassioned

pleas for action without directly referring to Somalia.
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Where is the desire to do something amazing? Hammami wrote on Aug. 7, 2006.

Where is the urge to get up and change yourself not to mention the world and other

issues further off?

Stop sticking to the earth, he continued, and let your soul fly!

Secretly, Maldonado and Hammami began planning to leave for Somalia, according to a

written statement Maldonado later provided to U.S. investigators. On the morning of Nov.

6, Hammami woke his mother, who was visiting from Alabama, and kissed her on the

cheek. He told her that he was going to Dubai for a few days to look for a job. I love you,

he said.

Several days later, he called his apartment in Alexandria and told his wife, Sadiyo, that he

was in fact in Somalia. Sadiyo, who agreed to answer my questions through her sister

Ayan, found the story odd. Hammami told her that he traveled to Somalia because he

wanted to meet her relatives. Indeed he was staying with Sadiyos grandmother in

Mogadishu. Yet he seemed in no rush to leave. In other phone calls, he told Sadiyo and his

parents that he was stranded because someone stole his passport.

Shafik and Debra scrambled to help their son, contacting the F.B.I. in Mobile, a local

congressman and the State Department. They were told nothing could be done because

the United States did not have diplomatic relations with Somalia. They tried to arrange for

Hammami to cross the border, into Kenya or Djibouti, where a new passport could be

issued.

Soon after, thousands of Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia and swiftly gained control of

Mogadishu. Leaders of the Islamic Courts Union fled the country, while their military

wing, the Shabab, retreated to the south and mounted a new rebellion aimed at driving

the Ethiopians out. Without a word to his family, Hammami vanished. It is not clear who

connected him to the Shabab, but in the December e-mail message, he wrote, I made it

my goal to find those guys should I make it to Somalia, adding that he signed up for

training. Meanwhile, his friend Maldonado, who had also enlisted with the Shabab, was

picked up by a multinational counterterrorism team along the Somalia-Kenya border. He

has since been convicted in the United States for receiving training from a foreign terroristorganization and is serving a 10-year sentence.

Over the next few months, Mogadishu descended into a hellish war zone. That May,

Hammami suddenly reappeared at the grandmothers apartment, asking for a phone

number to reach his wife, who had moved back to Toronto. Over the phone, Hammami

told Sadiyo that he was still trying to leave Somalia, Ayan said. A month later, he called

with a different story. He wanted his wife and daughter to join him.

He was saying: Its so wonderful. Theres going to be an Islamic state, Ayan recalled

Sadiyo telling her. He was making it this utopia of happiness.

THE PROMISE OF an Islamic state, and by extension a caliphate, or Islamic world

order, has long been the anthem of the global jihadist movement. It is central to the

ideology of Al Qaeda, which has allied itself with smaller militant groups as its financing

and core leadership have come under assault.

Al Qaeda offers these groups a powerful brand; the groups offer Al Qaeda an expanded

platform. Yet the exact nature and significance of Al Qaedas connection to the Shabab

remain unclear. The majority of the Shababs fighters are Somalis, many of whom were

drawn to the movement by nationalist fervor (including some of the first Somali-

American recruits). A smaller contingent of foreign fighters young men like Hammami

joined as part of the global jihad. Rookie recruits from the United States and Europe

would seem to offer little but cannon fodder to their battle-hardened Somali counterparts.But Westerners bring the Shabab prestige and possible financing from abroad. They also

bring their passports with which they could conceivably return to cities like Sydney,

New York or London to carry out attacks.

When Hammami joined the Shabab in late 2006, he had no known military training. Like

other foreign fighters, he quickly fell ill, probably with malaria, he told Dena in e-mail

messages and phone calls. He started reaching out to her the following summer, after his
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wife in Toronto asked for a divorce. He never disclosed what he was doing, but he seemed

to have little power: he had to ask permission to make phone calls, he told Dena.

But over time, Hammami caught the attention of his superiors. He brought an unusual

skill set: he was articulate, computer savvy, well organized and fluent in Arabic. He has

that charisma, says an American law-enforcement official. Hammami came to be seen

as an asset by two Qaeda-linked militants, the official said: Fazul Abdullah Mohammed

and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan.

Mohammed, who is also known as Haroun Fazul, is believed to be Al Qaedas longtime

chief in East Africa. A native of the Comoros Islands off Mozambique, he is accused of

organizing the 1998 bombings of American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that leftmore than 200 dead. He also is wanted for the bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel and the

unsuccessful attempt to shoot down an Israeli charter jet in Mombasa, Kenya. Nabhan, a

Kenyan of Yemeni descent, was also suspected in both attacks. He was killed in Somalia

last September in a daylight raid by a helicopter-borne team of American Special

Operations troops.

In October 2007 less than a year after Hammami landed in Somalia he made his

public debut as Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki. In an interview withAl Jazeera, he stared

confidently into the camera, a thin, green scarf concealing half of his face. Oh, Muslims

of America, take into consideration the situation in Somalia, he began in English. After

15 years of chaos and oppressive rule by the American-backed warlords, your brothersstood up and established peace and justice in this land.

Over the next two years, Hammamis stature in the Shabab continued to rise as the group

launched suicide attacks and ruled in fear. Where its rebels held sway, they carried out

public floggings, amputations and beheadings in the name of Shariah, alienating many.

Hammami gave no indication that he was troubled by such punishments. Human

rights, he said in an audio recording released by the Shabab last July, is the Western

form of democracy which cannot be reconciled with Islam.

By the summer of 2008, Hammami was leading military strikes in the field including a

deadly ambush on Ethiopian troops that the Shabab captured on the video now popular

on YouTube, American law-enforcement officials say. Among the fighters in the ambush

were several of the Somali-Americans from Minneapolis, officials said, including Shirwa

Ahmed, an aloof 26-year-old college dropout. Three months after the ambush, on Oct. 28,

Ahmed blew himself up in northern Somalia, becoming the first known American suicide

bomber. Senior American and Somali intelligence officials say that Hammami helped

organize that attack along with four others the same day that together left more than

20 dead.

The Shabab continued to lose support after Ethiopia withdrew from Somalia last January,

and a new president SheikSharif Ahmed, a former leader of the Islamist insurgency

began paving the way for a democratic Islamic state. Around that time, Hammami called

Dena with a stunning announcement. In the next video, Im going to show my face, hesaid. It makes more of a statement if my face is uncovered.

The 31-minute video, released by the Shabab last March, is a veritable homage to

Hammami. He is shown running in slow motion, a line of fighters behind him, as a

jihadist rap song plays in the background. He reads to them from the Koran, moving in

and out of Arabic while stroking his beard. He then lectures them in English, with what

struck his old friend Bernie Culveyhouse as an E.S.L. accent.

The only reason were staying here, Hammami tells the recruits, away from our

families, away from the cities, away from you know ice, candy bars, all these other

things, is because were waiting to meet with the enemy.

BACK IN DAPHNE, Debra Hammami stared at the video in shock.

She had long known that her son was in the wrong hands. Since Shafik first went to the

F.B.I. in 2006, he had spent countless hours answering their questions.

But it was something else to see Omar on her laptop. She studied his face, replaying the

same images again and again, trying to decode his mental and physical state. His cheeks
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were gaunt; his eyes, glassy. He looks like a homeless person, said Debra, whose

husband first spotted the video while searching a Somali Web site for news of his son.

Emotions in the Hammami house had run like a fickle stream, from anger to grief to

dread. Shafik talked about his son the way a parent talks about a child lost to a cult.

Terrorism, he says, goes against everything I taught him.

Bernie Culveyhouse was also at a loss. He said he could understand the logic of defending

Muslim land from invaders. But it was beyond him how Hammami had come to align

himself with a group that attacks civilians and supports Al Qaeda. Both he and Joseph

Stewart remained Muslim but not Salafi. They had grown up, as they put it. They were

back in school, pursuing professional degrees. Like the Hammamis, they kept quiet aboutthe F.B.I.s investigation, but they assumed it was only a matter of time before the case

became public.

The new Shabab video generated a burst of public speculation about the identity of the

mysterious American. Hammamis high-school girlfriend, Lauren Stevenson, caught a

glimpse of the video on the news in April and instantly recognized him, watching aghast.

He seemed like a shell of the guy who took her to homecoming, a boutonniere pinned to

his lapel. When you look in his eyes, it s just dead, she says.

The story finally broke on Sept. 4, with Fox News reporting that Hammami had been

charged with terrorism offenses in a sealed federal indictment. Reporters descended on the

Hammamis home and Shafiks mosque. The local newspaper swiftly identified Shafik as a

government employee. Waterboard him! one reader demanded on the papers Web site.

Shafik and Debra did their best to keep a low profile. One afternoon in October, they sat

opposite each other in their living room, picking at a silver tray of dates and baklava. Their

two religions, the ocean between them, had offered the same salve: the belief in Gods

preordained plan. You take solace in knowing that its in Gods hands, said Shafik,

sunken in his armchair, as Debra nodded. And there is nothing you could have done to

change it.

DENA SEES OMARin her dreams.

Sometimes he is emaciated and about to die, she said one recent afternoon, as her 19-

month-old daughter toddled about the house. Sometimes he is coming back to hang out

with me.

The last three years have also been something of a surreal dream. Dena has come to

expect the sudden rap of F.B.I. agents at her door. She suspects that her phone is tapped.

She is used to feeling exposed and, at the same time, walled off. The fact that my brother

is a terrorist its not something you can talk to anyone about, she said.

Ultimately, she said, you can either accept him or disown him. Those are the choices.

Dena chose to stay in touch, as much as she abhors violence. She found news accounts of

the Shabab deeply disturbing. On Oct. 27, 2008, Shabab militiamen dragged Aisha

Ibrahim Duhulow, a 13-year-old rape victim accused of adultery, into a stadium filled

with spectators and stoned her to death, according toAmnesty International.

Sometimes months would pass with no word from Hammami. When he reached out

through Facebook in early September, he told Dena that he hoped his infamy would

prompt people to ask, How did this guy become that?

They cant blame it on poverty or any of that stuff, he continued. They will have to

realize that its an ideology and its a way of life that makes people change. They will also

have to realize that their political agendas need to be fixed.

Dena tried to temper her reply.

I think its admirable to stand up for what you believe in, but it gets hairy when you

affect the lives of others, she wrote.

Hammami responded that he understood how strange it might seem to fight for beliefs,

especially as he had once been a liberal (under the influence, he wrote, of the teacher he
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14/15

still referred to as Mrs. Hirsch). But he had come to the realization that we dont live in

a utopian society.

When I came here I saw that firsthand, he wrote. There are villages that live in a

constant state of war between rival tribes. There are roads that people cannot pass except

with fear of being robbed or raped.

He and his fellow fighters, he wrote, are helping those people. Regardless of what the

media says, he added, we do not kill innocents.

Throughout the exchange, Hammami seemed to slide back and forth between the boy

from Daphne and the jihadi propagandist. He asked his sister for news about hisgrandmother in Perdido (Maw Maw, he called her) and signed offlater tater and I

love you.

They soon lost contact again. These days, his family and friends wonder what will become

of him.

There is no out, Dena said. Hes in too deep.

On Dec. 3, a suicide bomber disguised as a woman blew himself up at a graduation

ceremony for medical students in Mogadishu, killing nearly two dozen people, including

three Somali government officials. Somali and American authorities said the attack was

carried out by the Shabab. That same month, Hammami seemed more taken by his cause

than ever. I have become a Somali you could say, he wrote in the December e-mail

message. I hear bullets, I dodge mortars, I hear nasheeds Islamic songs and play

soccer. Sometimes I live in the bush with camels, sometimes I live the five-star life.

Sometimes I walk for miles in the terrible heat with no water, sometimes I ride in

extremely slick cars. Sometimes Im chased by the enemy, sometimes I chase him!

I have hatred, I have love, he went on. Its the best life on earth!

Andrea Elliott is a reporter for The New York Times. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for

feature writing for a series of ar ticles about an imam in Brooklyn.

Abdi Aynte contributed reporting to this story from Washington D.C.

More Articles in Magazine A version of this article appeared in print on January 31, 2010, on page

26 of the Sunday Magazine.

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'Shocked' Nigerians in U.S. Express Fears of Guilt by Association After Arrest (December 30, 2009)

Muslims Say F.B.I. Tactics Sow Anger and Fear (December 18, 2009)

NEWS ANALYSIS; The Call of Extremism, Echoing at Home (December 12, 2009)

F.B.I. Questions 5 Americans Detained in Pakistan (December 12, 2009)

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