`Calls for violence are too strong` for some young expats --- SOMALI TERROR PLOT
Drew Warne-Smith, Stuart Rintoul
The Australian
August 05, 2009

 
Police search a car at a Melbourne suburb after a pre-dawn raid at one of 19 locations Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2009, in Australia. Some 400 officers from state and national security services took part in 19 pre-dawn raids on properties in Melbourne, Australia`s second largest city following a seven-month surveillance operation of a group of people allegedly linked to al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda -linked Somali extremist organization that has been fighting to overthrow Somalia`s transitional government.

THE COMMUNITY

FOR a number of years Abdurahman Osman has lamented the creeping fundamentalism of Melbourne`s Somali community; the preaching of separatism in the mosques, and the pockets of sympathy for extremist Islamic groups seeking to overthrow the government back home.

In his regular spot on community radio, the president of the Somali Community of Victoria even warned his fellow expatriates in recent weeks to be ``alert`` for terrorist activity.

So it is with some chagrin that Mr Osman concedes that while the community is shocked, it wasn`t entirely unexpected that Australian Somalis could be implicated in an alleged terrorist plot (as well as Lebanese), or that two of them had allegedly returned to Somalia to train for it.

�Ninety-nine per cent of Somalis in Australia are against terrorist attacks. But I have been saying we must stay on alert. It is a great worry. If al-Shabaab comes to Australia, we are in danger. This is what I believe,� Mr Osman told The Australian.

Just two years after an Islamic scholar warned that Somalis were being influenced by radical Lebanese from a hardline Wahhabi group, it is a sentiment shared by several of the community leaders who preside over the 16,000-strong Somali population in Melbourne, where the overwhelming majority of Somali refugees have settled since fleeing a civil war which began in 1991.

A more hardline approach to Islam is taking root among some Somalis in Australia, and violent, extremist groups like al-Shabaab have found sympathy and support.

Even the Somali religious leader, Sheik Isse Musse, yesterday acknowledged that his people could �easily� be recruited to radical Islam.

�This is a fallout from what is happening back home, in Somalia. Radicalisation can happen anywhere in the diaspora,� Sheik Musse said.

And clearly, some already have been -- at least ideologically.

Aden Ibrahim, secretary of the Somalia Australian Council of Victoria, says that it is not uncommon for supporters of al-Shabaab to voice their opinions in public.

�They are open. They are saying -- I am with them and I will fight with them if I have to,� says Mr Ibrahim, �Some of them make a loud noise and they are empty, but others are genuinely with them, fundraising and whatever.�

Mr Ibrahim says this support has its roots in the clan-based civil war.

Somalia`s transitional federal government -- aligned to the Daarood clan -- was overthrown in 2004 by the sharia law-supporting Islamic Courts Union, comprising mostly the rival Hawiye clan.

But when the ICU was defeated by the TFG in late 2006 with the help of US-backed forces from Ethiopia, its former members founded an insurgency now known as al-Shabaab.

In other words, al-Shabaab has a historical wellspring of support from the Hawiye clan, many of whom are refugees in Melbourne and living in the Heidelberg area.

�Like any expat community, what happens in Somalia is also happening here, those tensions are reflected,� Mr Ibrahim says. �Every clan or group fighting in Somalia has someone here who supports them.�

And the power of the internet cannot be underestimated either.

Somalis are able to follow the bloody events back home through websites such as Hiiraan Online.

Sheik Musse, a blind Islamic moderate who arrived in Australia in 1993, told The Australian any young person with a computer was vulnerable to radicalisation.

�People access these websites and they see all kinds of opinion, people who are not educated in Islam. People put their ideas there and the younger people can easily pick up these ideas�, he said.

It is also no secret that young men often return home to Somalia, sometimes to fight.

The Australian revealed in 2007 that up to 40 Somalis had gone back to take up arms against the government forces. Among them was Ahmed Ali, who was believed to working as an interpreter for al-Qa`ida before being killed in the fighting.

But what remains unclear is how many do so to participate in jihad against the west, or whether it is out of loyalty to a clan and support for family members swept up in the bloodshed.

It is also increasingly common for Somali elders to dispatch young male refugees home for several months if they have lost their way in Australia and have started turning to a life of crime, drugs or ill-discipline.

�This is what we don`t always know, why they go back and who they are with. But to think that someone might want to attack in Australia, this is a very different thing,� Mr Ibrahim said.

Like Mr Osman, Mr Ibrahim has also counselled his community in recent weeks that while they can voice their opinions about the conflict in Somalia, they must do so within the law.

�If they bring something like what happened in Jakarta, the price will be large for every Somali here in Australia. We will lose the tolerance of the larger majority of the Australian community,� says Mr Ibrahim.

With Somalis often sending money back home to relatives, two years ago the Australian Federal Police also launched a wide-scale investigation into whether some people were in fact funding terrorist organisations. No charges were laid.

But that same year an Islamic scholar from Sydney, Dr Hirsi Hilowle, warned that a terrorist strike in Australia was possible as young Somalis in Melbourne were being influenced by radical Lebanese from a Wahhabi group.

Dr Hilowle reportedly said that extremists from Somalia visited in 2006 to gather money and support, and that they were supported by a Somali mosque in North Melbourne.

He also said a group affiliated with the ICU, named al-Ansar, had been closed by Australian intelligence and security agencies and that its members had gone into hiding in the community.

They are words that seem prescient today.

Police are expected to formally brief Somali elders and community leaders at a meeting in Coburg this afternoon, while Mr Osman is organising a rally for the Somali community to express its opposition to terrorism.

� Copyright 2009 News Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Somalia to Sydney, jihad does not rest
The Sydney Morning Herald
August 05, 2009

WHAT does Somalia have in common with Australia? Until recently, almost nothing. The two nations, if Somalia can still be called a nation, had basically zero historical, economic and cultural links until the Department of Immigration began accepting some Somali refugees to Australia. Now we are told by the Federal Police there is a direct link between the violent mayhem in Somalia and an alleged plot to attack and kill soldiers at the Holsworthy army base in Sydney.

Police are holding four Australian-born Muslim men who have been arrested for allegedly conspiring to commit a terrorist attack in Australia as part of the wider cause of global jihad. The Holsworthy base was allegedly targeted in symbolic retribution for the deployment of Australian troops to theatres of war in two Muslim countries, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The NSW Police Commissioner said the police acted after they perceived an attack was �likely imminent�. The arrests, coming so soon after two fatal terrorist bombings in Jakarta that targeted Australian civilians, are a wake-up call. Security at Holsworthy is casual, so the base is a soft target even though it is a military installation. While the American-led rhetoric of the war on terrorism has mercifully been put to rest, there is no rest in the desire by some to commit murder, justified as holy war, on behalf of Islam.

That threat is as real as it ever was. It takes the actions of only a rabid few to wreak terror on civilian populations.

The desire to wage jihad has become a global fashion among a minority of alienated younger men, and some women, living on the fringes of society. Like everything else in a globalised world, this desire to seek power through the intoxication of violence is mutating into new and borderless forms, helped along by the ease of communications. In this latest incident the initial indication is that there was a desire among those arrested to show solidarity with the jihadists in Somalia who are trying to take control of the failed state and turn it into a caliphate. It seems bizarre that Australian-born Muslims would want to attach themselves to obscure and distant medievalism.

Even if these arrests do not survive the scrutiny of the legal process, they are a reminder that our security services have a constant and difficult task of sifting through the mountain of daily communication and identifying danger. Yesterday was a reminder of what they are doing and why.

� 2009 Copyright John Fairfax Holdings Limited. www.smh.com.au

Al-Shabab among the most brutal of Somali militias
Paul McGeough Chief Correspondent
The Sydney Morning Herald
August 05, 2009

SOMALIA? It sounds like Afghanistan.

Geographically obscured on the Horn of Africa, its recent history is a faster-paced repeat of the more familiar tale of the international neglect in Central Asia � years of rule by chaotic warlords who, in turn, were overrun by brutal Islamist fundamentalists; who then split into warring factions as the country became an impoverished proxy battlefield for regional and world interests.

Al-Shabab, the group named in the terrorism plot uncovered in Melbourne yesterday, emerged as a Taliban-like insurgency that took control of swathes of southern Somalia and now holds all but a few blocks in the capital, Mogadishu � despite backing for the Government from Ethiopia, the US, the European Union and the African Union.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the word �Taliban` means �students�. In Somalia, �Shabab� translates as �youth�. The Somali group is the biggest and most brutal of a coalition of Islamist militias at war with a feeble central government.

The US National Counterterrorism Centre says al-Shabab is the militant wing of the more moderate Somalia Islamic Courts Council which briefly took control in 2006 and which reportedly has links with al-Qaeda through the perpetrators of the 1998 attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Little is known about the interior workings of the movement but analysts say it is well organised and hierarchical. Recruits are subjected to gruelling training before being sent to battle � or to Eritrea for advanced training in explosives and guerilla tactics.

Some of its most senior figures are said to have trained in Afghanistan and hundreds of foreign fighters have reportedly joined up. Its finances are opaque. But the movement is said to draw funds from the rampant piracy off Somalia`s coast and from governments in Eritrea and the Middle East.

Senior figures in al-Shabab draw parallels between the movement, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the insurgencies in Algeria and Chechnya, as they enforce their writ with beheadings, stonings and amputations and a crackdown on entertainment. Last month, its militiamen reportedly beheaded seven people in the town of Baidoa, on the grounds they were Christians and spies.

Like the Taliban`s demolition of the grand statues of Buddha at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, they have desecrated the graves of saints revered by the country`s dominant Sufi Muslims.

When Washington added al-Shabab to its terrorism list last year, the decision was welcomed by one of the movement`s leaders.

�Al-Shabab feels honoured to be included on the list. We are good Muslims and the Americans are infidels � we are on the right path,� Sheikh Muktar Robow told the BBC.

The alleged Australian plot might well be al-Shabab`s first foreign operation.

The organisation has been linked to piracy off Somalia and there was speculation that it engineered the assassination of a Somali exile in Britain last year.

But before the Melbourne arrests, the greatest anxiety about al-Shabab`s activities overseas was its recruitment effort in the US.

A tip-off to US security agencies that al-Shabab`s followers might seek to interrupt Barack Obama`s inauguration in January came to nothing.

� 2009 Copyright John Fairfax Holdings Limited. www.smh.com.au