Radical turn

In the late 1990s two teenagers, Douglas McAuthur McCain and Abdirahmaan Muhumed, were growing up in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Separated by ethnic background and four years of age, it’s unlikely they crossed paths as youths. Neither could have guessed how their lives would intersect on a battlefield 15 years later.

McCain, an African-American and high-school jokester, became an amateur rapper—even attending an underground rap show in Sweden. He moved to San Diego, Calif., where he worked at a Somali restaurant called African Spice.

Muhumed, one of about 30,000 ethnic Somalis living in Minnesota, worked from 2001 to 2011 at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, refueling and cleaning passenger airplanes. He enjoyed visiting the gym and discussing NBA stars, but could have a bad temper when talking Muslim politics, especially if he’d been drinking. He reportedly had at least eight children and separated from three wives.

So how did Muhumed, 29, and McCain, 33, end up reported dead 6,000 miles from Minnesota, in northern Syria, during a weekend battle in late August?

Both had been fighting on behalf of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—the first two Americans to die doing so. Islamic State has expelled Christians, raped women and girls, and executed hundreds or thousands of civilians and members of ethnic minorities, often by bullet shots to the head. It has filmed beheadings of kidnapped American journalists and British aid workers.

Members of the Free Syrian Army, a rival rebel group, found McCain’s body clothed in military camouflage and a flak vest, riddled with bullet holes in his head, jaw, and leg. He had his American passport and $800 in cash. The news reports shocked friends and relatives back home. “My cousin wouldn’t support a terrorist group like that,” Kanyata McCain told NBC News.

Muhumed’s parents received a photo showing what appeared to be their son’s body, shot in the head. (Beyond the photo, the State Department couldn’t immediately confirm Muhumed’s death.) A friend of Muhumed called his radicalization “very unpredictable.”

The two Minnesotans are among about 100 Americans who have joined or attempted to join militant Islamist organizations in the past few years—part of a disturbing trend of terrorist recruitment in the West. U.S. intelligence officials say they know of about a dozen Americans currently fighting in Syria with groups like Islamic State.

Why would young Westerners want to join a backward, bloodthirsty brigade? By one estimate, as many as 2,000 people from Western Europe or North America have become fighters in Syria and Iraq. Last month 19-year-old Chicagoan Mohammed Hamzah Khan allegedly planned to join Islamic State: FBI agents arrested him just before he boarded an international flight.

‘It can be a very powerful narrative to hear, for example, that you are a conquered person [and] have a duty to go back and save your brothers and your sisters in your homeland.’ —John Horgan, director of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell

Experts say some recruits might be intrigued by the group’s objective: to create a new Islamic caliphate ruled by fundamentalist Islamic law—Sharia. Others might believe they are giving their lives purpose by battling moderate Muslims and unbelievers.

It isn’t clear what, or who, convinced McCain and Muhumed to take their Islamic faith to an extreme: McCain in recent years posted militant images on Facebook, and sometime this year he traveled to Syria, tweeting, “I’m with the brothers now.” Muhumed in January posted a photo to Facebook of himself holding a rifle and a Quran. “Allah loves those who fight for his cause,” he wrote.

The Twin Cities region has proven prime recruiting ground for extremists (see “Overcoming the headlines,” March 8, 2014). Beginning in 2007, between 20 and 25 young men from Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community traveled to Somalia to join the al-Shabab terrorist organization—the group that besieged Westgate Mall in Kenya a year ago. (Caucasian al-Shabab recruit Troy Kastigar was a high-school buddy of McCain’s. He died in 2009.)

Now, social media are also influential. In May, Islamic State launched Al-Hayat Media, a propaganda machine for reaching non-Arabs. Al-Hayat produces Twitter feeds in English, German, French, and other languages. Its slick, documentary-style videos invite young men to seek glory on the battlefield of jihad.

One 11½-minute video features Andre Poulin, a white Canadian in his 20s who joined the rebels in 2012. “Before Islam I was like any other regular Canadian,” he tells the camera, sporting camo and cradling a military rifle: “I watched hockey, I went to a cottage in the summertime, I loved to fish.” (He neglects to mention his Canadian arrest record for making violent threats.)

Poulin claims he had family, friends, and a street janitor job earning $2,000 a week in Canada. But he says Muslims can’t fully obey their faith living in non-Islamic nations, where their tax dollars “assist the war on Islam.” He calls Muslims of all stripes—fighters, engineers, doctors, construction workers—to come help build the new caliphate: “You’ll be very well taken care of here. Your families would live here in safety just like how it is back home.”

Next the video shows apparently authentic footage of Poulin fighting with Islamic State militants and firing an RPG. We hear an explosion, a high-pitched ringing, and see Poulin dead on the ground—a martyr for jihad who, an English-speaking narrator says, left the world behind “with the certainty of Allah’s promise.” (Muslims who die waging jihad are promised admittance to paradise.)

Other ISIS propaganda suggests an Islamic paradise on earth: One short Al-Hayat video shows men with rifles handing out pink cotton candy and pink ice cream to smiling children in town.

On-the-ground recruiters have held informal meetings in mosques or homes to persuade young Muslims of the virtues of jihad, or holy war. Such recruiters typically target “young people who to a certain extent are disaffected, they’re isolated, and really haven’t woven themselves into the fabric of society,” said Kyle Loven, chief division counsel at the FBI’s Minneapolis office. Recent Twin City recruits—including Abdi Mohamud Nur, 20, who left this summer to join militants in Syria, and may still be alive—have gone to Iraq and Syria.

Loven said the FBI has made a concerted effort in the past seven years to build a relationship with community leaders and cooperate with them to deter would-be extremists. He said “the overwhelming majority of the Somali community here in Minnesota abhors what is going on.” One local organization, Ka Joog, offers music, poetry, and drama programs to Somali teens who might otherwise roam aimlessly.

But Islamic State has proven adept at appealing to Muslims who may be “sitting on the fence” and longing to identify with a larger movement, said John Horgan, the director of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell: “It can be a very powerful narrative to hear, for example, that you are a conquered person [and] have a duty to go back and save your brothers and your sisters in your homeland.”

Recruits often come from traditionally Muslim families, but in other cases—like that of McCain—they are converts. Surprisingly, dozens of women, mostly from Europe, are also heeding the call. Many intend to marry jihadists, cook for them, tend the wounded, and bear children. In April two Austrian girls, ages 15 and 16 at the time, left their parents and traveled to Syria. They later appeared in online photos dressed in burqas, and are believed to have married Islamic fighters and become pregnant. In October their families reported the girls wanted to return home, but Austrian law bars them from doing so.

At least one 19-year-old woman from the Twin Cities left to join fighters in Syria in August. The FBI has not released her identity. German police intercepted three teenage girls from Denver who flew to Frankfurt Oct. 17 in an attempt to reach Syria. The girls, of Somali and Sudanese descent, returned home without charges.

A Colorado native, a Caucasian 19-year-old named Shannon Conley, planned to fly to Syria in April to meet a suitor and support Islamic State as a fighter or nurse. FBI agents arrested her at a Denver airport after spending months trying to dissuade her from jihad aspirations. Conley studied Islam on the internet and, according to investigators, possessed a book about guerrilla warfare written by an al-Qaeda leader.

Women who join Islamic State are in for a rude awakening. The group treats females as property, selling or rewarding captured women and girls to jihadis, according to witness and survivor accounts. One 25-year-old female Syrian defector from Islamic State recently told a reporter that female police with guns and whips ensure women cover their bodies and faces in accord with public dress codes.

Horgan is encouraged by local efforts like those in the Twin Cities, but does not think “the government is going to solve this problem. … At the end of the day, this is about building trust, it’s about community policing.” But he also spoke of “an urgent need for us to develop a longer-term strategy.”