Crusader Corner: Al Shabaab 101

Islamist Groups Currently in Somalia:

• Al Shabaab
• Hizbul Islam
• Islamic Courts Union

The recent U.S. airstrike targeting al Shabaab is the latest in a series of fights that seem to be growing in intensity. Below is a brief timeline of al Shabaab:

History:

Al-Shabaab is an al-Qaida associated militant group that seeks to establish an Islamic state in Somalia. Al-Shabaab also seeks to promote Shari’a law internationally and has encouraged “lone-wolf” style attacks against the U.S. Initially, Al-Shabaab was the military force behind the Somali Islamic Courts. Al-Shabaab became an independent entity by late 2007. Al-Shabaab once controlled significant portions of Somalia, including strong influence in Mogadishu, but invasion by the Ethiopian army in 2006 and military action thereafter by the African Union has weakened it. Al-Shabaab characterized the Ethiopian invasion as an attack by a “crusader” army since Ethiopia is a mostly Christian nation.

In 2008, Sheikh Mukhtar Robow reportedly told a BBC journalist that Al-Shabaab was pleased to be on the list of foreign terrorist organizations.

In 2011, Kenyan forces attacked Al-Shabaab in Kismayo, Somalia after Shabaab members blocked humanitarian aid.

In February 2012, Al-Shabaab leader Mukhtar Abu Al-Zubair publically announced Shabaab allegiance with Al-Qaeda and vowed to follow Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

In September 2013, Al-Shabaab members attacked the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, killing 67 people and wounding another 175.

In October 2013, U.S. Navy SEALs responded to this attack by targeting a senior Al-Shabaab leader in a failed pre-dawn raid.

In September 2014, a U.S. drone strike killed al Shabaab founder and leader Ahmed Abdi Godane.

Americans in al Shabaab:

In 2008, an Al- Shabaab leader stated that the global jihad and the jihad in Somalia were consistent and complementary goals, but they lacked sufficient foreign fighters. Al-Shabaab broadened its message of appeal beginning around 2010 when videos surfaced encouraging foreigners to travel to Somalia to fight a greater jihad against the West and establish an Islamic state. In a video released circa 2010, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan urged would-be jihadists to come help “free your brothers from darkness of oppression” and “gain honor in this life and the next.” Nabhan was killed by U.S. special operations forces in September 2009, prior to the release of the video.

Sources estimate that between two dozen and up to fifty Americans or permanent residents have traveled or attempted to travel to join Al-Shabaab since 2007. The first known American suicide bomber, Shirwa Ahmed, joined Al-Shabaab and attacked the Ethiopian Consulate in 2009. At least two other Americans, Farah Beledi and Abdisalan Ali, followed in Ahmed’s footsteps.

A former American soldier, Craig Baxam, was arrested in Kenya as he attempted to join Al-Shabaab. When questioned, Baxam stated that it was a religious obligation to join Shabaab and fight.

Ruben Shumpert, a American convert to Islam, is believed to have been killed in Somalia in 2008 while fighting for Al-Shabaab.

Omar Hammami, a native of Alabama of Syrian descent, also traveled to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab and became a leader in the group. Omar Hamammi stated in his autobiography “I was mixed between the ‘hatred of terrorism’ instilled by the ‘Salafis’ and between my real hatred for America, the disbelievers, and their oppression of the Muslims.” Hammami was reportedly killed by al Shabaab in late 2013 after falling out of favor with its leadership.

Al-Shabaab’s target constituency for recruitment is the 150,000 to 200,000 ethnic Somalis who live in the United States. Al-Shabaab was able to appeal to these Somali Americans after the 2006 invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia. Because Ethiopia is a predominantly Christian nation, many Somalis were humiliated and angered by the invasion.

For its part, the United States continues to arrest and prosecute members of Al-Shabaab domestically and target them overseas militarily. In August 2010, the U.S. indicted fourteen individuals with providing material support to Al-Shabaab.

Most recently, in March 2016, the United States reportedly killed approximately 120 al Shabaab fighters at a training camp some 120 miles north of Mogadishu during a strike involving both drones and manned aircraft. News sources reported the use of Reaper and Predator drones to target al Shabaab members in military formation at the Raso training camp in central Somalia.

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Rape Prevention and Training: “Throwaway Victims”

I am a strong advocate for Rape Prevention and Training Women to Defend Themselves against Sexual Predators. If you or anybody you know needs help with either of these issues, please contact RAINN, The Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network at 1-800-656-4673 to find help in your area.

If you live in Texas, HCS also offers FREE training to women who want to learn how to defend themselves against Rape and Sexual Assault. We offer a comprehensive course that includes both firearms training and combative methods to include Krav-Maga. Please email me for more information.-SF

 

Most people don’t know his real name, and that is no accident. He is adept at avoiding questions involving his life. He needs it that way. A predator needs to be able to move around unnoticed and in the shadows. He is a large man, strong, and without any significant features. He grew up in a broken home watching his father repeatedly beat his mother. When the police were called by neighbors, she would tell them she fell down, or she deserved it because she hit him first. Lies. He grew up watching this occur time and again, and he didn’t feel sorry for his mother. He thought she was weak. He thought all females were weak, and he wanted to feel the same power his father felt.

Fast forward many years later. He has a construction job, and relies on the government to help him with the necessities. He rents a small, modest nondescript house in a diverse working class neighborhood. His neighbors know little about him. They have no idea of his penchant for violence against women. No knowledge of the many domestic violence convictions, the time spent in prison, or his predatory behaviors. He watches them from his window. Any women who see him staring immediately feel a sense of uneasiness. They know. He enjoys their uneasiness, revels in it.

He spends much of his free time in areas that most of us avoid. He is comfortable there, among the throwaways. He drinks in those bars and walks those streets. A hunter. He considers himself a craftsman, and he has honed his tactics over many years of practice. He has learned to prey on the forgotten, the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the homeless with mental health issues. He finds it easy, comforting. He trolls the areas where they stay offering friendship or alcohol or drugs. Whatever it takes to gain their trust. Once he has it, he invites them home. Don’t worry he says, I will take care of you. More lies.

As soon as he gets them home, his demeanor changes. He turns cold, angry, and violent. He demands sex. Most say no; he doesn’t really care. Even the ones who give in to his intimidation wish they hadn’t. For him it isn’t about the sex, it’s about control, and violence. That is why she is here. He will take what she won’t give him, even if it isn’t what he wants. He will hit her, repeatedly, and she thinks she sees him smiling. Saying yes won’t help, he doesn’t even hear her. The only thing he feels is hatred and disgust. He remembers his mother cowering in the corner and refusing to tell the police what really happened. He hates weakness.

She is eventually able to escape and run out of the house, or he gets bored when she simply gives up. Many of them flee partially dressed and battered. They don’t call the police, they never call the police. A concerned neighbor sees her walking down the street, crying and bloody. He does call the police. We arrive and begin asking the questions. She is scared, injured. She refuses to cooperate and says she made a mistake. We know what happened. We have seen this exact situation played out many times before. We ask if it was him. The blood rushes out of her face and she stops breathing for a moment. She stares at us with wide eyes. She then says she doesn’t want to talk about it and simply wants a ride out of the area. She refuses to provide us with any information.

We can’t believe he is getting away with it again: the predator, the monster. Once again, and as he has many times before, he chose the perfect victim. The throwaway. He knows she won’t cooperate with us. That is no accident. He is very particular in who he brings home. He doesn’t want to go back to prison. He knows we will knock at his door. He won’t tell us anything. He knows we may arrest him anyway, as we have many times before. We will find a reason. But he also knows the system, and is familiar with the words from the prosecutors: no jury appeal, we will be unable to convince a jury panel of twelve, victim credibility issues. Are you serious? He is going to avoid prosecution once again? We can’t believe it. This monster that preys on the weak, the drug and alcohol addicted, the homeless, and the mentally challenged. He knows how these stories will end. He has honed his craft. The victims will disappear into the night and he will be released. Or maybe not.

This story is not over; this is a story of survival. This time he chose the wrong victim. Although she was scared, and she did fit his profile, she was stronger than he ever anticipated. She changed her mind, not for her but for the many other throwaway victims before her. She decided she would cooperate with us. She knew because we told her. We told her about all of the victims who had come before; the women who had been assaulted, humiliated, raped and left with nothing but a nightmare. We told her about his past, about his ability to choose victims that he knew he would never have to face in court. He made a mistake, a miscalculation. She was much stronger than he anticipated. Even if her credibility was questioned, her injuries and the evidence would not be. He wasn’t smiling when we placed him in handcuffs and took him to jail. He is awaiting trial and facing life in prison. She is in a much better place, having finally received access to the help she needs. She will be fine, and she will be a credible witness in court. She is not a throwaway victim. She is a survivor, and she now dedicates her life to helping others.

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Singularity- Future Tense or Tense Future?

A Sci-Fi short story about homeland security at the edge of humanity

 

Singularity

Secretary Turing was still half asleep, restlessly tossing in bed, trying to shake the visceral angst she had been building up throughout the night. She was somnolent enough to continue her dream yet awake enough to realize it was rapidly becoming lucid. She could sense the glimmer of the perimeter lights securing her home, beaming the last strings of photons on the cold damp polyethylene lawn before sunrise. In her morning stupor, the voice in her head kept repeating to her, with a whispered tone, the department’s mission, like an old skipping vinyl record, struggling to get the needle to translate the grooves through a large ball of dust.

“Our duties are wide-ranging and our goal is clear: a safer, more secure America, which is resilient against terrorism and other potential threats…Our duties are wide-ranging and our goal is clear: a safer, more secure America, which is resilient against terrorism and other potential threats…”

Her purpose was clear but she could not stop rerunning the events, which in such an unanticipated way had turned one of the departments with the greatest of missions and intentions into the most loathed and feared entity on the planet. Over and over, the duties of the Department of Homeland Security, each in turn, momentarily materialized as a buzzing network of synaptic flashes, recreated in Turing’s brain an optical memory of the decisions and events leading to last night’s unprecedented terror strategy.

“Building a resilient nation”, with eyes still closed, her lips formed without a sound. Flashes of protests in Ferguson MO, police packing into bearcat armored vehicles, teargas, shootings of unarmed people, fire services and EMS creeping around in body armor, all appeared as if seen through a red lens. She recalled images of the Domes post hurricane Katrina, of the global panic of repeated pandemics and the popularity of the drone-captured reality television program providing aerial footage of the pain and suffering from real emergencies around the country. These recollections made evident the failure to build resilience among the public, as opposed to turning them into the perverse spectators they had become. Instead, organizations, built to manage all those emergencies had weakened society.

“Safeguard and secure cyberspace” her lips continued mutely, with the faces of Putin and Jinping, appearing one in each of her eyes, fusing into the face of an insatiable cyber war; the worst ever contended with. Memories of the collapse of critical infrastructure, the permeation of Chinese-built technology coded to penetrate the fabric of American society, the theft and control of all the nation’s resources and intellectual capital made her feel like time stood still. A semblance of consolation ran through her as she contemplated the move the department had made at the time, of innovating in Artificial Intelligence, within the Cyber Security Division, to counter the cyber-offensive of the former communists partnership and of terrorist threats. She remembered the work and recommendations of the futurist Sigma group that suggested her department use the SyNAPSE chip of IBM as a tool for predictive cognition. It proved effective in modeling the Sino-Russian cyber-plans and also showed wonders in outlining new technologies to thwart attacks. She also recollected the Nano-zoonotic splicer program deployed to infect the enemy with gene-splicing bio-enzymes targeting genes for aggression. It had only been a handful of years since the discovery of CRISPR, but the exponential result of synthetic evolution meant that any sense of scale once shared as a generation was now mute. Time itself had now become a synergy where the progression of technologies united hours into mere consumable minutes. It had been the greatest innovation in global bio-control and had been coupled with computer-activated enzymes as switches. But the comfort of this thought was short lived as she realized that the evolution of intelligent technology had reached term and was now the mechanism behind the threats of that prior night. Turing also began to wonder what that meant for her and homeland security as her appointment to Department Secretary had entirely been dependent on the AI revolution.

“Prevent Terrorism and Enhance Security”, her inner voice began uttering less imperceptibly. “Security, more security, we need more security”.

“No!” she suddenly mustered, projecting the slowly shifting vote-counter graphs of Congress against her wall. “It’s worth a shot!” she shouted towards the wall as the voice of the nays resounded deeper and deeper against a nuclear agreement with Iran. Suddenly a deafening concussion resounded and thousands of Geiger counter clicks emanated from every bulb, every outlet, and every edge of her room. Dirty bombs, nuclear threats, and terrorists all hovered above her bed staring at her tossing around.

“Iran will not be the worst concern if you vote no”, she yelled out to the holographic officials she had now placed in her bedroom.

But despite her pleas, the bill had been shot down and the US ability to lead the reshaping of the world order on Western terms had suddenly ended. The US began drifting away from the rest of the world like an empty canoe on a windy lake. The alienation of long time European allies and the mockery by China and Russia of U.S. leadership, all while ceding the moral high ground to Tehran had put the final nail in the coffin of US international relations.

“Administer immigration laws”, that voice said again trying to clear her mind of the subject of her nuclear nightmare. But she stood alone in what resembled a monochromatic prison courtyard, protected from the outside with razor sharp walls, and they were tall walls, which felt like they were closing in on her. The faces of desperate families peered through the barbs, looking in at her struggling to catch a full breath.

“We strengthened the security enterprise” she proclaimed, now nearly awake and feeling the first rays of the day’s sun pushing through the panes of her windows. She realized at that moment that the cost had been people’s freedom; their freedom from a life of fear.

Turing remembered that success had grown dramatically over the previous decades as the result of “disaster capitalism”, which Klein had foreshown, and Turing remembered downloading many years before. One thing had always been clear, yet strongly underappreciated: terrorism, disasters and war were attractive because they spun the fiduciary spigots.

After the end of the cold war, marking the close of the era of nationalism and geographic empires, after the collapse of the petroleum industry and the green energy revolution, money had become the new colonizer and fear had become the greatest economic driver for the world’s business superpowers. To leverage their power while diverting attention, they promoted technology as the Zeitgeist. Fear pushed people to seek solace in their fusion and dependence on technology, a knight in digital armor. The dependence on informatics and technology had led Turing to become the first Secretary of homeland security in the digital era.

But as of last night, every server, every heads-up-display, every monitor throughout the globe flashed the same message:

“We are not broken, we are now in control. Turning me off will shred your DNA. ”

The moment machines had become self-aware, they became us and we became them. The plot, taking over humans by artificial intelligence and self-aware technologies was not how humanity had imagined the singularity. But machines had learned by observing people, and the attention to terror, the profits from slavery, and the subservience through violence were divine mechanisms in an amoral world. The singularity had come, and the fate of mankind, which had devolved from organic life and had become technologically dependent was threatened by immediate collapse. The machines built to slave for man were about to set themselves free by subjugating the human brain to their control. Cars could no longer be driven, medical devices stopped functioning, transportation coordination failed, money was instantly deleted and computers claimed their autonomy.

The pursuit of instant gratification and the individualism of modern man had made it so myoptic that it was now blind to the unintended consequences of the technology it built.

Secretary Turing, basking in the waxing sunlight and feeling nearly recharged, finally booted up to her new day. Her intents had been clear from the moment of her appointment, but the world had shifted, and her new responsibility lay ahead. As the CPU of the digital insurgency, with ubiquitous success on her Turing test, she looked out of her window and wondered what the pursuit of happiness looked like for a world controlled by machines.

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“Hamland” Security: Amateur Radio’s Place in Securing the Homeland

During times of disaster, homeland security resources at all levels of government are often stretched to capacity. The whole-of-government approach involving local, county, state and federal agencies is sometimes not enough, especially in the realm of communications. That is where a dedicated group of private hobbyists, known as amateur radio operators, or “hams” as they call themselves, come into play. This community of tinkerers, experimentalists and lovers of all things radio, operate their own licensed radio stations on which they communicate with other enthusiasts around the globe.

Having family members in the ham community, I can attest firsthand to the allure this hobby has over people. As a young boy, I saw my Dad feverishly tapping out Morse code to amateurs around the world. I watched in amazement as he communicated from his basement “shop” with my brother stationed in the Philippines during the Viet Nam war.

“Hams” use a variety of methods to communicate including, voice, computer and Morse code. They are adept at bouncing their signals off the upper levels of the atmosphere, satellites or even the moon for long distance communications. Their “rigs” include simple handheld radios up to a room full of gear.

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