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Like the
Somali-American from Minnesota who was killed this weekend, Tawakal
Ahmed was recruited through mosques in Kenya to fight for Islamic
militants in Mogadishu.
Isiolo, Kenya,
July 18, 2009 – A smattering of wispy clouds dots the blue sky as
white-robed worshipers trickle into Taqwa mosque for Friday prayers. Our
car is parked outside the mosque, slightly hidden by a hedgerow of
tangled savannah brush that defines the mosque's perimeter. A cool, dry
wind blows across this arid town – refreshing against the equatorial
heat, but leaving a blanket of dust on the whitewashed buildings.
The car's tinted windows are rolled up to protect against the fine film
of dust – and to conceal me from sight.
Isiolo is smack in the center of Kenya, far from Somalia. But the sermon
pouring out of the mosque's loudspeakers is in Somali. We listen for a
few minutes before the driver abruptly pulls away.
"If they catch us spying on them, we'll be stoned," he says.
AFTER ATTENDING THIS MOSQUE and another near his home, Tawakal Ahmed, a
young Kenyan man of Somali descent, journeyed to Somalia. Last November
he blew himself up.
At least that's what his family and friends say.
Muslim militants have recruited from elsewhere in Kenya, seeking those
who will help them win control of Somalia. Until now, they've drawn from
Eastleigh (Nairobi's Somali enclave), Somali refugee camps in Kenya, and
areas along the Kenyan-Somali border. But if what Tawakal's family says
is true, he is one of the first known cases of recruitment in Kenya
outside those traditional hunting grounds.
Some analysts say this case in Kenya shows that the recruiting networks
of Somalia's insurgency may be more vast than once presumed. Similar
cases are also coming to light in the United States.
On Tuesday, a Somali-American 20-year-old engineering student from
Minnesota was reported killed in Somalia while fighting alongside
Islamic militants. His uncle, Omar Ahmed Sheikh, told Reuters his
nephew, was misled by clerics in Minneapolis and persuaded to go to
Somalia in November 2008. "They told him they would teach him Islamic
religion ... But they are terrorists and cannot claim they are Muslims,"
said Mr. Sheikh.
Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Centre in
Minneapolis, told Reuters Bana was one of 18 teenagers who ran away to
Somalia last November after attending a youth programme at a local
mosque.
ISIOLO SEEMS an unlikely place to recruit Islamic fighters. It has
always been a cosmopolitan town. For decades, there have been
intermarriages between tribes and ethnicities; churches and mosques
share the same streets; men with sticks herd their cattle past niqab-covered
women, their Muslim garb hiding everything but their eyes.
Somalis were first settled in this sleepy outpost by the British after
World War I. The descendants of soldiers became Kenyans, living in
shantytowns, marginalized by the Kenyan government but integrated
nonetheless into this diverse town.
In the 1990s, as the civil war in neighboring Somalia intensified,
refugees began streaming deeper and deeper into Kenya. Eventually they
arrived here – and started to fill the mosques. With them came a new
ideology, one that would change this moderate Kenyan community and the
fate of at least one of its young men.
TAWAKAL'S FAMILY and friends say they know which path lead to his death.
But they don't know exactly how he died. They've heard different
stories, from different sources. They've been told that Tawakal strapped
on an explosive belt and walked onto the base of African Union
peacekeepers in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu. They've also been told
that he was killed while fighting with Al Shabaab insurgents trying to
overthrow the Somali government or slaughtered when he tried to escape
them.
The only thing of which they are certain is that one day in November
2008 the phone rang in their home in Isiolo. Someone speaking Somali
said: "Your son is dead. May his soul rest in peace. He died in the
cause of Allah."
THE YOUNGEST of his siblings, Ta wa kal Ahmed was born into the Harti
clan and a Somali family that had lived in Kenya for three generations.
Orphaned at a young age, he was raised by his aunts and older cousins.
As a child, his friends were a mix of Kenyans – some Muslim, some
Christian, some ethnic Somalis, some of the Bantu and Turkana tribes.
Together, they played soccer and chewed khat, a stimulant illegal in
many countries but a staple in Somali society.
Tawakal's family and neighbors are Muslims, but not strict adherents.
They don't pray five times a day, and khat and cigarettes are an
integral part of daily life. Most of Tawakal's friends speak English
better than they do Somali or Kiswahili, Kenya's national language.
Upon graduating high school, where he was chairman of the Muslim
association, Tawakal tried unsuccessfully to find a job. He started the
process for getting immigration papers to find work in Europe.
But slowly, Tawakal's course changed. First he began frequenting a
madrasa, or Islamic school, in town. Within a year, he had memorized the
Koran.
Then one of his more religious friends took him to the local mosque,
Masjid al-Nur, just steps from his home. He began spending all his time
at the madrasa or at the mosque. He often disappeared, say family
members, for a month at a time. They say he was performing Tabligh, in
which Muslims travel from village to village, preaching while sleeping
in mosques.
He became so religious that he could no longer sit in the same room as
his family members – whose smoking and chewing of khat bothered him.
"He didn't like that company," says a cousin who does not want to be
named for fear of retribution by extremists in the community or by the
Kenyan government. "He never used to talk to anybody."
One day in 2006, Tawakal abruptly left for the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
Today, some family members recall that he went to look for a job. Others
say he went for religious studies. Some say that he just left, without
saying anything.
Family and friends disagree over where the indoctrination began – in
Isiolo or in Nairobi. But it's clear that when he returned to his
village, Tawakal was a changed man.
FOR TWO YEARS, no one heard from Tawakal. Friends say they finally
learned that he had been seen attending Beit al-Mal madrasa and
frequenting the Sixth Street mosque in Eastleigh, a crowded, poor suburb
of Nairobi, inhabited mostly by Somalis. Family members went looking for
him, without success. Then they heard he had gone to Somalia, where he
was using a different name and fighting alongside Islamists.
His disappearance coincided with a heightening of the conflict in
war-torn Somalia, where in late 2006, Ethiopian troops invaded to
overthrow a Union of Islamic Courts that had taken power. The
Ethiopians' success sparked a new wave of insurgents among the ousted
Islamists, who wanted sharia (Islamic law) installed and foreign troops
off Somali soil.
Tawakal would later tell an Isiolo village elder that he'd been fighting
"pagans" in Somalia.
According to the elder, Hussein Noor Roble, "He went to Somalia when the
Ethiopians came.... He said: 'I went to jihad.' He said he was fighting
with the Islamic Courts Union.... I said [to myself], 'The boy is not
the way he used to be.' "
Tawakal said he had been sent for training in the southern Somalia port
town of Kismayo. He was then deployed to the front line in the Dinsoor
area. But as government and Ethiopian troops continued gaining ground,
Tawakal was pushed back with his fellow fighters to the insurgent
stronghold of Raz Kamboni, the most southern tip of Somalia, on the
Kenyan border. Raz Kamboni fell to the new Somali government on Jan. 12,
2007.
IN THE SPRING OF 2007, Tawakal called home. His aunt was on her deathbed
and he was urged to come home. He showed up in Isiolo a few weeks later.
His aunt died the same day he arrived: April 1, 2007. He only stayed a
few days. He told his family that he regretted missing the chance to
speak to her, and participated in her burial service.
But he slept at the mosque, not at home. He regularly held long
telephone conversations in private.
He harangued his friends when it was prayer time. He criticized them
when they wore T-shirts portraying the American rapper Tupac Shakur and
when they listened to music.
"He started calling me some [derogatory] names," says his boyhood
Christian friend, Frank Metro, "and telling our friends: 'Don't listen
to him. He's a lost one.... He's a kafir [infidel].' "
Tawakal seemed to have more money than before. He had changed his entire
wardrobe to costly kanzus, the knee-length garment worn over trousers
cut above the ankle. He was more generous than usual, buying his friends
sodas.
He avoided the subject of Somalia with his family. But he did tell Kamar
Hussein, the village elder's wife and the mother of one of Tawakal's
closest friends, that he had gone to Somalia with 15 other Kenyans and
met another 20 there. "We were 36 in total from Kenya," he told her.
His family urged him not to go back. But within a week of his aunt's
funeral, he was gone again. He told his family he was going to Nairobi
to pick up a certificate from his studies. He said he'd be back in three
days.
That was the last time they saw him.
TAWAKAL'S TRANSFORMATION – "We didn't realize the magnitude of it," says
Mr. Metro – mirrors a radicalization within Isiolo and other parts of
Kenya.
Over the years, newcomers from Somalia made-over two of Isiolo's mosques
with their ideologies. Visiting Somali clerics and graduates of Saudi
Arabia's theological colleges spread a more conservative, fundamentalist
form of Islam.
Residents say they're now told not to consume "infidel" products, such
as Coca-Cola. Old traditions have been labeled un-Islamic. Last year, as
village women gathered to celebrate the birth of the prophet Muhammad,
according to the village elder's wife, a group of young boys from one
mosque stoned and beat the women with sticks, claiming that only God
should be revered.
The man who runs both Masjid al-Nur and Taqwa Mosque in Isiolo goes by
the name Dalai. He came to Kenya from Somalia some years ago, as a young
refugee. He was eventually appointed imam, though he was still a young
man in his early 30s.
Tawakal's friends and family hold Dalai's mosques responsible for
Tawakal's death. In his sermons, residents say, Dalai tells youths to
fight for their religion in order to go to heaven. They say the imam
likely influenced Tawakal to go to Nairobi and possibly connected him to
extremists there.
But analysts are skeptical that such recruiting is directed from
Somalia. The most militant insurgent group, Al Shabaab, is not a
monolithic entity with a clear hierarchical structure and does not
necessarily have strong links directly into mosques.
"Sometimes Al Shabaab's work is done for them by others, unwittingly,"
says Rashid Abdi, a Kenyan-Somali analyst at the Nairobi field office of
the International Crisis Group. "Al Shabaab is basically tapping into a
wave, a radicalization phenomenon which is happening in the Muslim
world."
Tawakal's family warned this reporter not to contact Dalai directly
because, she was told, it would be unsafe for a foreign journalist, and
for them.
According to Abdul Adam, the mosque's treasurer, Dalai denies any
responsibility for Tawakal's fate. "He says it was Tawakal's own wish,"
Mr. Adam says.
Analysts say this radicalization is happening across Kenya, but they
warn against reading too much into it. "I wouldn't place all the blame
on radical Somalis," says one diplomat in Nairobi. "It's more diffuse
than that.... Not every radical mosque is a hotbed for recruitment."
Still, some Isiolo parents now have private Koranic lessons for their
children at home, instead of sending them to the mosque. Some residents
are trying to raise money to build their own, less-strident Islamic
school.
"The danger is imminent because of the desperation level in all the
young people and the indoctrination that is going around," says
Tawakal's boyhood friend, Metro.
The relative wealth displayed by those who control the mosques also
leaves some residents suspicious. "Whether it's coming from the Middle
East or Mars, I don't know," says Milgo Ahmed, Tawakal's older cousin.
"But money is there. Money is being poured all over the place. That is
how our children are being used and taken away."
Asked if a hard-line message was leading Muslim boys astray, one of the
more moderate Isiolo sheikhs answers affirmatively, but then panics.
"Anyone who preaches against these people will be shot. I don't want to
be shot on the pulpit," he says.
He begins to suspect his interviewer is from Al Shabaab, or an agent of
Al Qaeda. He refuses to give his phone number, and then insists that he
not be identified in this story.
"If I die, it is you who killed me."
Despite their fear, Tawakal's friends and family say the only way to
fight this perceived encroachment on their town and their vision of
Islam is to speak out. "After losing him, we started to understand the
magnitude of this thing – of a young man being poached to do bad things
in the name of helping his family," Metro says. "It made us realize our
vulnerability."
Ms. Ahmed, Tawakal's cousin, worries for the five recent graduates in
her home who seem to have no opportunity for the future: "Tawakal is
dead. He will no longer come [back]. But many, many other Tawakals are
going to have the same fate if the international community does not take
action," she says.
Her family feels helpless, she says, with no protection from extremists
and nowhere to turn. Complaints to Kenyan authorities fall on deaf ears.
"We are in big trouble," Ahmed says. "We have nowhere to go…. Our
children are not safe." •
Source: The Christian Science Monitor, July 16, 2009
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