A young man who came to Minnesota as a “refugee” from Somalia has been linked to Syed Farook, the shooter who, along with his jihadist wife, killed 14 Americans in San Bernardino less than a week ago.
Fox News contributor Rod Wheeler provided a key piece of information about the case, linking the San Bernardino shooters to Mohamed Hassan, a known terrorist recruiter who has been on the FBI radar screen for at least seven years.
What Fox did not report, however, is how Hassan ended up in the United States.
His family came into the U.S. as refugees from Somalia. The Somali refugee program has been going on for decades and has produced some of America’s most feared terrorists, even as the Syrian refugee program grabs most of the headlines.
As WND reported in May, Hassan also helped radicalize Elton Simpson, one of the two jihadists who tried to storm into a Prophet Muhammad drawing contest in Garland, Texas, on May 4. Their plans to kill the participants and behead free-speech activist Pamela Geller were foiled by an off-duty cop who engaged them in a gun battle before they could enter the auditorium where Geller was holding the art contest.
“One of the two shooters in last week’s terrorist attack on a free-speech event in Garland, Texas, Elton Simpson, was reportedly radicalized over the Internet by former Somali refugee Mohammad Hassan,” WND reported on May 11. “The radical Islamist had lived in Minnesota before traveling to the Middle East to join ISIS, but he continues to recruit new ISIS fighters in America, largely through social media. Hassan used the Twitter handle ‘Miski.’”
It was “Miski” who reportedly called for the Garland attack 10 days prior to it being carried out by Simpson and his Pakistani accomplice.
He tweeted: “The brothers from the Charlie Hebdo attack did their part. It’s time for the brothers in the #us to do their part.”
That tweet was followed by a link to Geller’s event in Garland, Texas.
Hassan left Minnesota for Somalia seven years ago to fight for Al Shabaab, an al-Qaida-linked terrorist organization in Somalia. He later joined up with ISIS but holds an American passport and could return to the U.S. at any time.
He is known as a prolific online recruiter for jihadist terror groups. He grew up in Minneapolis and attended Roosevelt High School. It was during his senior year of high school that Hassan left the U.S. While in Somalia he joined a group of jihadist fighters from Minnesota, one of whom was his cousin, according to a report by Somalia Agenda.
Law enforcement conducting the raid at Syed Farook’s apartment in Redlands, California, found evidence tying Syed Farook to Hassan, according to Wheeler’s report for Fox.
Hasson had lived in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area of Minnesota, which is home to the largest Somali refugee community in the United States. He is one of at least 50 Somali refugees or sons of refugees who have left the U.S. since 2007 to join the ranks of ISIS, al-Shabab or other foreign terrorist groups.
These Somali refugees have American passports and could return to the U.S. as battle-hardened terrorists.
Yet, the U.S. government under President Barack Obama continues to flood the U.S. with 500 to 700 new Somali refugees every month — 6,000 to 8,000 a year. A total of about 110,000 Somali refugees have been resettled in the U.S. since 1991.
“With all the talk in Congress and the media about Syrian refugees, we don’t hear anything about Somali refugees and they have one of the worst records of not assimilating and being accomplices to terrorist acts,” said Ann Corcoran, refugee watchdog who blogs for Refugee Resettlement Watch.
Corcoran said virtually all Somalis in the United States are refugees or children of refugees, although a few dozen enter illegally each year through the U.S.-Mexico border.
According to Department of Homeland Security data, 688 Somalis entered the U.S. illegally as asylum seekers between 2004 and 2013. WND reported on a busload of Somalis being transported from the southern border in May that was caught on video by a curious resident in Victorville, California.
“House of War: Islam’s Jihad Against the World” conveys what the West needs to know about Islam and the violent, expansionary ideology that seeks the subjugation and destruction of other faiths, cultures and systems of government
Hassan’s connection to the San Bernardino attack should be no surprise, Corcoran said, and surely was not a surprise to the FBI.
“This is no surprise for all of us following the Somali refugee terror activities here in the U.S. and abroad,” she said. “So let’s stop talking about Syrians for a minute and remember that we bring in at least 500 Somalis a month to live in your towns at this very minute.”
U.S. State Department brings in 85,000 foreign refugees a year, permanently resettling them in 180 U.S. cities and towns with little or no input from the local leaders and no notice given to the local populations. About 3 million refugees, almost all of them selected by the United Nations, have been resettled in the U.S. since 1990, about half of them coming from Muslim-dominated countries with active jihadist movements.
Most of the Somali refugees arrive in U.S. cities directly from the world’s largest refugee camp in Kenya, not far from the border with Somalia. This U.N. Dadaab refugee camp is known to be infiltrated by Somali terrorists, and the president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, threatened to shut it down in April, as reported by the Washington Post.
The Kenyan government said it had evidence to suggest that the terror attack that killed 147 Christians at a Kenyan college in April was launched from the Dadaab refugee camp.
Now the FBI is confirming that the Somali refugee-turned-American terrorist has been in communication over the last month or so with Syed Farook, who gunned down 14 Americans as they celebrated an office Christmas party last week in San Bernardino.
Hassan now apparently has the Garland, Texas, attack in May, and the San Bernardino attack last week, as notches on his belt.
