IPT News
December 6, 2011

U.S. policymakers need “to take al-Shabaab seriously” when the Somali terror group talks about targeting the United States, longtime federal prosecutor W. Anders Folk told the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

He emphasized that Al-Shabaab, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the larger al-Qaida organization share a common ideology: one marked by virulent hostility towards America.

Al-Shabaab’s ideology “is almost word for word similar to what we heard from al-Qaida pre-9/11 and what we have heard post-9/11. What we hear is an ideology that endorses murder of innocent civilians,” Folk said in an interview. “We see al-Shabaab training their recruits in tactics and techniques similar to what recruits learn in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

As with al-Qaida, al-Shabaab recruits receive military training and Islamist religious indoctrination. They are taught skills that “have been constants from terrorist training camp to terrorist training camp,” Folk said.

According to an investigative report issued in July by the House Homeland Security Committee’s majority staff, Shabaab-related federal indictments “account for the largest number and significant upward trend in homegrown terrorism cases” filed by the Justice Department, with at least 38 cases unsealed since 2009.

Folk, who prosecuted many of those as an assistant United States attorney for Minnesota from 2005-10, joined the Minneapolis law firm Leonard, Street and Deinard. He emphasized that al-Shabaab’s strategic goals are not limited to seizing power in Somalia.

The July 2010 twin bombings in Kampala, Uganda which killed 76 people demonstrated that al-Shabaab “is operational outside Somalia,” Folk said. “They have actively sought out through the Internet and other digital media recruits from the West, [and] we’ve heard at least one of these recruits discussing a call to jihad by individuals in the United States.”

Folk was referring to Abdisalan Ali of Minneapolis, identified by al-Shabaab as the suicide bomber in an Oct. 29 attack in Mogadishu that killed 10 people. “My brothers and sisters, do jihad in America, do jihad in Canada, do jihad in England, anywhere in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in Australia,” Ali said in an audiotape message released by al-Shabaab.

He was the third Somali-American since October 2008 to blow himself up while fighting for al-Shabaab. The House Homeland Security Committee concluded that 40 or more Americans have joined the group, with at least 15 of them dying while fighting alongside al-Shabaab. “Nowhere near that number of Americans have been killed fighting with any other foreign terrorist group,” the panel said. “At least 21 or more American Shabaab members overseas remain unaccounted for and pose a direct threat to the U.S. homeland.”

Read More:

http://www.investigativeproject.org/3323/prosecutor-warns-not-to-ignore-al-shabaab-threat