What I Heard at the Terrorism Trial
11th August 2025
Minnesota is home to the largest Somali community in the United States. What do Minnesota’s Somali citizens think of us? We know amazingly little about the community, probably because we are afraid to ask the relevant questions. We know they are mostly Muslim — we can see the hijabs, we are familiar with the many local controversies to which their faith has given rise over the past 35 years — but are they loyal residents or citizens of the United States? In the conflict between the United States and Muslim terrorists, for example, whose side are they on?
Acting United States Attorney Joe Thompson observed at the sentencing of Abdiaziz Farah last week for his food fraud crime spree that Farah treated us as “suckers.” That is certainly true, but it expresses the problem in almost reassuringly familiar terms. I wonder if the problem doesn’t run deeper than that.
For years I was told by federal law enforcement authorities that their biggest concern was represented in an ongoing investigation of foreign support for terrorism. Some Somali Minnesotans supported the terrorist group al-Shabaab with their money. Some supported it with their sons. The investigation consumed the local FBI office for a matter of years and resulted in a string of guilty pleas involving local Somali men supporting al-Shabaab. Investigators believed at least 21 Somali men have left Minnesota to join al-Shabaab. In 2011 two “Minnesota women” were convicted of providing material support to the group after a 10-day trial before Judge Michael Davis.