May 7, 2015 | Quote

A Mysterious American ISIS Recruiter May Have Played a Role in the Texas Attack

One of the gunmen in the attack on a Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas on May 4th had interacted online with a jihadist recruiter well known to US authorities.

Hassan, who goes by the nickname “Miski,” was part of an initial wave of Minnesota-based youth who traveled to the Horn of Africa to fight alongside Al Shabaab, a jihadist group that initially formed to oppose the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006. Hassan left for Somalia in 2008 at the age of 17, joining an organization that rapidly morphed into one of the world's most successful recruiters of foreign jihadists.

At the time Hassan arrived, Shabaab largely consisted of fighters that had been members of the Islamic Courts Union, a fundamentalist Islamic political movement that the Ethiopian invasion had removed from power. In Somalia's stateless vacuum, Shabaab was able to create an extensive safe haven for foreign fighters and to develop one of Africa's most dangerous terrorist groups. The group's foreign connections allowed Shabaab to claim a notable jihadist milestone: the first American jihadist suicide bomber in history carried out his attack on Shabaab's behalf, in 2011.

It's unclear if Hassan has been directly involved in recruiting Americans from Somalia, or if any of the people he has contacted from Somalia ended up actually joining Shabaab or ISIS. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says that based on his observation of Hassan's Twitter feed, it's apparent that there was contact between him and Simpson prior to the Garland attack.

“I think the chance is overwhelmingly high that Simpson desired to go to Somalia and that Mohammad Hassan was his point of connection,” Gartenstein-Ross told Business Insider.

Al Shabaab ran one of the most extensive American jihadist recruitment networks in history.

What's less apparent is what this connection might indicate about Shabaab or ISIS's existing US recruitment network. Hassan's ISIS sympathies don't necessarily prove that Shabaab is moving towards ISIS: “There clearly is some pro-ISIS pull from within the group,” Gartenstein-Ross says. “It's also extraordinarily clear that the leadership is pro-Al Qaeda.”

Some experts have suggested that ISIS has co-opted Shabaab's once-vaunted US recruitment network, which brought dozens of American fighters to Somalia in 2007-09. A report prepared for the Department of Homeland Security by the University of Southern California has made exactly this claim. Relatedly or not, 6 Minneapolis-area men were arrested in March for attempting to travel to Syria to join ISIS.

Greenstein-Ross says that there's no smoking gun proving that ISIS has actually taken over this once fruitful recruitment network. The fact that the 6 arrested in March couldn't link to a recruitment network neither proves nor disprove the existence of an ISIS network in Minneapolis. 

Read the full article here.