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!
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.
Instead of selling phoney asylum seekers seats on a potentially rickety boat to Australia they now have an air route and fake visas for them.
Iraqis are running the operation!
Iraqi national Abu Tarek
Before I get to the story, I see there is news this morning that more Rohingya have been caught in Indonesia headed for a another of those boat crossings. Indonesia is a Muslim country, so why aren’t the Rohingya satisfied to break in there and stay in their own culture zone, why Australia? (silly question!)
Where the heck are these destitute “refugees” getting $16,000 to pay for a ticket? From 9News:
People smugglers are selling asylum seekers passports and Australian visas for entry to the country by plane – offering them an alternative to a potentially deadly boat journey.
The ABC’s Four Corners reported that it secretly filmed people smuggler Abu Tarek in Malaysia talking about the deal.
The Iraqi man tells a potential customer that for $16,000 they get a passport with an Australia visa.
“The passport is from Oman or Bahrain, they get the Bahrain passport with the Australia visa in it, both official – not fake,” he said in a conversational secretly recorded by the ABC’s Four Corners.
“They use the passport to fly there and when they arrive safely, they tear it up and enter the country (Australia).”
He tells the person that when they enter the country they can then apply for refugee status.
His business partner Abu Saleh, also from Iraq, is accused of running his people smuggling business from an Indonesian prison with the help of corrupt prison officials.
One asylum seeker who dealt with him while he was in prison said he was “like a king”.
The photo is from a much more detailed story (found after beginning this post) about this illegal operation at ABC News Australia. Some of the flights are to New Zealand as well.
Protestors Nov. 15th with NO! OIC stickers and banners. Photo: AFP
The OIC, of course, is the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the Buddhists in Burma (Myanmar) believe they have come to their country to help facilitate the expansion of the Muslim population and Islam in the mostly Buddhist nation.
Here is the story in the Irrawaddy (one of many today) about protests that greeted OIC members from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Malaysia, Egypt etc. My view is that if they are so concerned about the “plight” of the Rohingya, then resettle them to their Muslim countries! (emphasis below is mine)
RANGOON — A high-level delegation from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) was greeted by an estimated 3,000 protestors Friday, when the group that includes foreign ministers from Islamic countries arrived in western Burma’s troubled Arakan State.
Monks: Get out OIC!
A group from the 57-member OIC arrived in Burma on Wednesday to meet with officials and investigate the situation of Rohingya Muslims, who make up the majority of the estimated 140,000 people displaced by two waves of violence in Arakan State last year. At least 192 people were killed in inter-communal violence between Arakanese Buddhists and Rohingya, who the government of Burma does not recognize as citizens.
Buddhists have staged demonstrations across the country this week accusing the OIC of trying to interfere in Burmese affairs.
On Friday, the delegation landed at about noon at Sittwe Airport, where angry demonstrators held aloft banners saying “Get Out OIC,” and “We Don’t Want OIC.”
“Our people arrived here at 7 am. We have over 3,000 people,” Tun Hlaing, an organizer of the protest, told The Irrawaddy. “We all shouted to them that we do not want them to come here.”
The Burmese government has approved the visit and reportedly guaranteed the security of delegates, who include OIC Secretary-general Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Malaysian, Saudi Arabian, Egyptian, Djiboutian and Bangladeshi officials.
Tun Hlaing said the group did not leave the airport, but was taken by Burmese military helicopters to parts of Arakan State where the population is majority Rohingya.
Having watched this situation evolve for nearly 6 years, I believe this is exactly correct:
Tun Kyi claimed the conflict between Buddhists and Muslims in Arakan State is stirred up by international involvement.
And, for the umpteenth time, Americans should be concerned because the federal refugee contractors want more Rohingya resettled in your towns and cities. Some are already here. See our Rohingya Reports category with its 158 previous posts to learn more.
Top photo is from this story (Radio Free Asia). The second photo is from the Irrawaddy.
