Waada Alwan and Mohanad Hammadi. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Marshal’s Service)
Until this morning, I didn’t have the time to watch the Nightline Exclusive about how those two Iraqi refugee terrorists, arrested in Bowling Green, KY in 2011, were exposed.
It is really a fascinating piece if you haven’t watched it.
We reported the ABC News report on the story here, two days ago.
Go here to watch the whole thing! The investigation is continuing into whether there are others like Waada Alwan and Mohanad Hammadi who got into the US with American blood on their hands after checking boxes on their refugee application that they had not been part of any terrorist action in Iraq.
We have written an awful lot on the case, if you type ‘Kentucky Iraqi terrorists’ into our search function, most of those earlier reports should be archived with those key words.
By the way, I noticed in the Nightline piece that there was some consternation by officials interviewed about why Bowling Green. Bowling Green is a preferred refugee resettlement site for the US State Department and its nine federal contractors and has been for probably two decades.
How does a city become “preferred?” First, it has to have some big companies nearby in need of cheap labor (chicken processing in this case), available public housing, and then it must have a low number on the squawk index! What is that you ask? That’s my terminology for whether there develops a cadre citizens in the community who ask what the heck is happening to our city? No (or little) squawking=more refugees will be resettled there!
Whenever the US State Department sends out a representative to praise a local community (and spin the media) about their good work in resettling refugees, I suspect something is going horribly wrong. In fact, Buffalo has graced our pages with many problems over the years.
Here is one post from May of 2012 where we learned that the Christian and Jewish populations of that part of New York are declining as the Muslim population increases through refugee resettlement. We began that post with this:
US State Department rep Henshaw: Buffalo is “fantastic”
[If you are interested, here is a databaseto help you figure out who is coming to your town.]
Before reading on, you might want to check our archives on Buffalo here. Wow! We have a lot of stories from Buffalo! It was just two weeks ago we read about the Somali father who beat his young son to death in Buffalo over homework.
Here is the glowing report yesterday from Buffalo’s WBFO:
Given the high number of refugees the federal government has helped resettle in Buffalo, officials with the U.S. State Department were in town this week to assess the program.
Read and listen yourself to Simon Henshaw, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary with the Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration tell us about how immigrants are rebuilding the economically distressed community. Then here is Henshaw gushing about the culturally diverse school system (is that where the problem is?).
“I don’t remember how many different nationalities they said, but it was 20-30 different nationalities.
We watched the kids leaving the school all in different dresses, all with different ethnicity. And it was just so great to meet the leadership of the school…and listen how they’re integrating, how they’re working, how they’re maintaining the cultures of the different students that are there and also making them apart of their community,”said Henshaw.
If anyone sees more recent news from “welcoming” Buffalo, please send it my way. I’m wondering if Buffalo has signaled that they need a break like so many other cities?
Wedenesday, Nov. 3, 2010. Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud and Issa Doreh are accused of supplying funds to a terrorist group. Drawing courtesy of Krentz Johnson.
Including an Imam from a local Somali mosque.
This is the culmination of the story we’ve followed since 2010.
When I search RRW for ‘San Diego Somali terrorists’ I get pages of posts, so here is an idea, maybe now that ABC News has re-discovered investigative journalism (see Iraqi refugees yesterday), this might just be a new and fruitful avenue of investigation for them!
Below is most of the FBI’s press release from this past Monday (highlights are mine):
SAN DIEGO—Basaaly Saeed Moalin, a cabdriver who was convicted by a federal jury of providing material support to the terrorist group al Shabaab, was sentenced today by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey T. Miller to 18 years in prison.
Also sentenced at the same hearing were Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, the imam at a popular mosque frequented by the city’s immigrant Somali community, to 13 years in prison; and Issa Doreh, who worked at a money transmitting business that was the conduit for moving the illicit funds, to 10 years in prison.
In sentencing Moalin, Judge Miller acknowledged the defendant’s considerable support from the Somali community, his childhood scars from violence in war-torn Somalia, and his philanthropy as a naturalized American. However, he noted Moalin’s virtuous behavior “is substantially offset” by his collaboration with al Shabaab and one of its most prominent leaders—Aden Hashi Ayrow.
Judge Miller said he imposed part of the sentence consecutively—making it three years longer—because Moalin went beyond financial assistance and provided a house to Ayrow. Judge Miller described that action as “an offense of a different magnitude,” noting that Moalin personally offered the home in Mogadishu to advance the agenda of al Shabaab and to help hide weapons. “This count went beyond financial support and entered into another realm,” Judge Miller said.
At trial, the United States played for the jury a recorded telephone conversation in which Moalin gave the terrorists in Somalia permission to use his house, telling Ayrow that “after you bury your stuff deep in the ground, you would, then, plant trees on top.” Prosecutors argued at trial that Moalin was offering a place to hide weapons.
“These men willfully sent money to a terrorist organization, knowing al Shabaab’s extremely violent methods and knowing the U.S. had designated it as a foreign terrorist organization,” said U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy. “Months of intercepted phone conversations included discussion of suicide bombing, assassinations, and jihad. We are satisfied that because of this investigation and prosecution, we have furthered our mission to safeguard national security by blocking financial support to this dangerous group.”
FBI Special Agent in Charge, Daphne Hearn, stated, “I want to commend the work of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, who worked countless hours to successfully investigate and prosecute this case. As demonstrated in this case, the multi-agency partnerships which make up the JTTF continue to play a critical role in the day-to-day protection of our communities and our national security.”
“Today’s sentencing underscores HSI’s commitment to aggressively investigate those who engage in or attempt to support the financing of foreign terrorist organizations,” said Nick Annan, acting Special Agent in Charge for ICE HSI in San Diego. “I commend all of our partners on the San Diego Joint Terrorism Task Force for their exhaustive efforts to dismantle the plot that aimed to provide support to terrorists who wish to harm us.”
Moalin and his co-conspirators were found guilty during a three-week trial in February. The United States presented evidence that Moalin, Mohamud, Doreh, and a fourth defendant, Ahmed Nasiri Taalil Mohamud, conspired to provide money to al Shabaab, a violent and brutal militia group that engages in suicide bombings, targets civilians for assassination, and uses improvised explosive devices. In February 2008, the U.S. Department of State formally designated al Shabaab as a foreign terrorist organization.
At trial, the jury listened to dozens of the defendants’ intercepted telephone conversations, including many between Moalin and Ayrow. In those calls, Ayrow implored Moalin to send money to al Shabaab, telling Moalin that it was “time to finance the jihad.”
Ayrow told Moalin, “You are running late with the stuff. Send some and something will happen.” Ayrow was subsequently killed in a missile strike on May 1, 2008.
According to evidence at trial, the defendants conspired to transfer the funds from San Diego to Somalia through the Shidaal Express***, a now-defunct money transmitting business in San Diego.
*** We wrote about funny-money business at the Shidaal Express here as early as 2009. These Somali money transfer businesses are spread throughout America.
For more on how we came to have so many Somali refugees, see this 2008 post.
One final thought and I should have said it yesterday in the post about Iraqi terrorists in the US: long term the greatest threat to our way of life is not the isolated Islamic terrorist sneaking in, but the cultural and societal changes that a growing population of Muslims will bring to America which we often refer to as the quiet Jihad.
You betcha! I am continually amazed at how long it takes the mainstream media to catch up with the blogosphere. I don’t want to brag, but heck we wrote about this now old news way back in June of 2011.
Senator Rand Paul has been asking from day one why are we permitting so many Iraqis into the US. ABC doesn’t mention his name.
And, it cannot go unmentioned—-Senator Rand Paul was, and still is, the only US Senator I’ve seen in the last 6 years to have the guts to ask why the h*** are we doing this?
See here for just one of many posts about Paul’s demands for answers about how this Kentucky case happened. Isn’t it interesting that this lengthy ABC News investigation doesn’t even mention his name!
We have admitted 19,491 Iraqi refugees to the US in 2013 alone!
Thanks to all who sent the story today, including Judy who sent former Rep. Allen West’s poston the story and Brenda Walker at Limits to Growth for her write-up. Walker has been on top of the story from day one as well!
Good Morning America: Exclusive: US May Have Let ‘Dozens’ of Terrorists Into Country As Refugees
Several dozen suspected terrorist bombmakers, including some believed to have targeted American troops, may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the United States as war refugees, according to FBI agents investigating the remnants of roadside bombs recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The discovery in 2009 of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky — who later admitted in court that they’d attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq — prompted the bureau to assign hundreds of specialists to an around-the-clock effort aimed at checking its archive of 100,000 improvised explosive devices collected in the war zones, known as IEDs, for other suspected terrorists’ fingerprints.
“We are currently supporting dozens of current counter-terrorism investigations like that,” FBI Agent Gregory Carl, director of the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC), said in an ABC News interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News’ “World News with Diane Sawyer” and “Nightline”.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were many more than that,” said House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul. “And these are trained terrorists in the art of bombmaking that are inside the United States; and quite frankly, from a homeland security perspective, that really concerns me.”
As a result of the Kentucky case, the State Department stopped processing Iraq refugees for six months in 2011, federal officials told ABC News …. [But, of course the refugee agencies and their contractors are making up now for lost time. Iraqis were the largest group of refugees resettled in 2013.—ed]
The now imprisoned pair were resettled in Kentucky:
In 2009 Alwan applied as a refugee and was allowed to move to Bowling Green, where he quit a job he briefly held and moved into public housing on Gordon Ave., across the street from a school bus stop, and collected public assistance payouts, federal officials told ABC News.
“How do you have somebody that we now know was a known actor in terrorism overseas, how does that person get into the United States? How do they get into our community?” wondered Bowling Green Police Chief Doug Hawkins, whose department assisted the FBI.
One of the saddest parts of this whole story is that these creeps may well have helped themselves to American welfare after killing American soldiers from Pennsylvania:
The FBI secretly taped Alwan bragging to the informant that he’d built a dozen or more bombs in Iraq and used a sniper rifle to kill American soldiers in the Bayji area north of Baghdad.
“He said that he had them ‘for lunch and dinner,'” recalled FBI Louisville Supervisory Special Agent Tim Beam, “meaning that he had killed them.”
Read the whole ABC story for details. Most regular readers will note that we reported most of this “exclusive” story over the last couple of years.
This is our 596th post on Iraqi refugees, click here for the entire archive.
For first timers, who have no clue what ‘refugee resettlement’ is, go here for our fact sheet on how the program works. Also, Bowling Green is a preferred resettlement site for the contractors. Type ‘Bowling Green’ into our search function and learn more about the problems there over the years.
This may, or may not, still be the largest mosque in America, but since there are so many grandiose mosque-building projects on-going, I doubt it.
Update: Could there be terrorists among them, ABC says so!
Every time I see a glowing story like this one about the growing Iraqi “community” in Dearborn, Michigan, I’m reminded that there would never be a story about Americans with Western European origins living in a community that shares its cultural values without it being a story about racism, hatred, xenophobia and “unwelcoming” rednecks.
Conversely, it is absolutely fine and understandable, even celebrated, that Iraqis want to live with their kind.
BTW, there is a mention in here about an Iraqi resettled by the US State Department in Montana who bailed-out of that backwater as fast as he could and beat a path to Dearborn!
Driving through the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, one may easily confuse their surroundings with that of the Middle East. The city of Dearborn, which is surrounded on three sides by the economically embattled Detroit, Michigan, is often referred to as “little Iraq,” for its large Iraqi contingency. The Iraqi community in Dearborn has grown significantly since the onset of the Iraq war in 2003. While the new Iraqi diaspora in the United States is undoubtedly in a safer environment than their native country, it seems these communities have left a war-ravaged country, only to begin fighting a different battle: One of acclimation to a foreign country.
The Iraqi diaspora is now dispersed throughout the world – with the United States accepting well over 90,000 Iraqi refugees since 2003.Many refugees sent to the United States are moving to Dearborn, largely due to the fact that there is a large Lebanese community establishment there, as well as a “newer” Iraqi immigrant base that came to the United States in the early 1990s after the first Gulf War.
“It is no accident that many are finding their way to Michigan and carving a niche for themselves. I think there is a comfort in being in the vicinity of a large concentration of mostly Lebanese coreligionists,” said Dr. Hani Bawardi, a professor of History and Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan. However, “there is no evidence that, save entry level jobs in Lebanese-owned grocery stores and restaurants, that the two communities are coordinating some form of safety nets for newcomers,” Bawardi said. But, “being part of an Arab American population may have softened the blow, at least psychologically,” he added.
[….]
Flooding in
Since 2003, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 Iraqi refugees a year come to the Dearborn, Michigan area in search of social, economic and professional stability. Refugees are not given the choice of where to live, but, the U.S. State Department gives strong consideration to placing refugees into communities where some sort of support system is in place.
On this last point, a few years back the US State Department actually stopped overloading the Dearborn area with Iraqis (there are no jobs! as this article mentions), but it would seem that even the State Department social planners can’t engineer the human desire to want to live among people one is culturally compatible with.
Iraqis “community cushion” is a good thing they say, what about a “community cushion” for struggling white Americans? The hypocrisy is maddening.
Over 30 percent of the Detroit area’s residents are of Arab descent, which brings with it a strong sense of social, cultural and religious understanding. The streets of the Detroit area are lined with mosques, Arab restaurants, and businesses run by Arab-Americans. The community “cushion” eases the anxietythat most refugees feel, as they are expected to start working within 12 months of arriving to the U.S.. Particularly in areas like Detroit, which were hit hard by the collapse of the auto industry, the challenges of being a foreigner seeking employment are only amplified within the context of an embattled economy.
Iraqis have “not lost their unity in identity!”
Despite these years of tumult, Faily said that the Iraqi people have not lost their unity in identity. “The Iraqi identity is very clear,” he said, “they share the same culture, food, and history,” among other things. When you speak to an Iraqi, Faily said, “you ask them are you Iraqi?
They share the same culture, food, and history and wish to live among their kind, but if you are an American with a Western European background, no such wish is permitted to you!
For new and ambitious readers, we have 594 previous posts on Iraqi Refugees!
