The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

Matt McAllester: TRIBAL WARS

FROM Details

SHAFI AHMED WAS 5 YEARS OLD, too young to understand what a tribe was or why the men in these tribes had turned his city into a war zone where, without warning, you could be pulled from your car and shot dead. He and his seven siblings could hear the explosions and crackle of gunfire coming from the streets outside their house in Mogadishu. His mother was terrified, his father desperate to protect the family.

It was January 1991 and the Somali civil war, a conflict that continues to this day, had just started. With the ousting of President Mohamed Siad Barre, Somalia’s long-simmering tribal rivalries had erupted into extreme violence-many people were fleeing Somalia, driving south to the safety of Kenya. Shafi’s family was running out of food. So his father decided to make a dash to the store. He barely made it through the front door. A bullet tore into his chest, and he bled to death on a dusty street of the capital, among the first to die in a conflict that, according to Human Rights Watch, has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Two days later, Shafi, his mother, and his seven siblings fled. As they walked through Mogadishu, some neighbors passed them and offered to give the family a ride out of the city. From there they took a bus to Kenya. Eight years later-most of them spent in refugee camps-Shafi Ahmed and his family made it to America.

Seven years after that, in the early hours of May 29, 2006, Shafi was dead. Like his father, he was gunned down in the street in what appears to have been part of a Somali tribal war. But this time the killer likely came from a new kind of tribe: one of the Somali gangs of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

OFFICER JEANINE BRUDENELL WORKS for the Intelligence Sharing and Analysis Center of the Minneapolis Police Department and has come to know more about Somali gangs in Minnesota than probably anyone else in the Twin Cities law-enforcement community. She strongly believes that the situation needs to be addressed before it escalates.

“It’s going to be like when we decided to ignore the African-American gangs when they came into Minneapolis and we pretended we didn’t have gangs,” she says. “It will grow into a more organized crime syndicate.”

While Somalis currently constitute a small percentage of the Twin Cities’ gangs (African-Americans make up the largest portion, police sources say), Brudenell believes that if the cities’ Somali community-which some Somalis estimate to number as many as 60,000 people-continues to grow and the local authorities don’t start paying attention, the problem could spiral out of control.

“A lot of very young people were involved in the civil war,” says Shukri Adan, a community leader who was commissioned in 2006 by the city of Minneapolis to write a report on Somali youth issues. “They witnessed extreme violence.”

This is confirmed by officials within the justice system. When young Somalis are arrested and enter the juvenile detention center in Minneapolis, they are given a medical examination. “A lot of Somali youth suffer from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder],” Chris Owens, the director of Hennepin County’s Juvenile Probation Division, tells me. “They’ve seen a lot of horrible things. [In America] they just jump back to whatever violence they observed in their formative years.”

The Minnesota Gang Strike Force, a combined-law-enforcement group that combats gang activity in the Twin Cities, now has 52 Somali gang members listed on its classified roster-but law-enforcement officials and Somali community leaders say that figure is only scratching the surface. One federal agent who has significant experience investigating immigrant gangs says that he has rarely come across a closer-knit, harder-to-penetrate gang culture. Very few ethnicities are structured so strongly along tribal lines.

Somalis, who made up the largest percentage of refugees admitted to the United States in 2004, 2005, and 2006, have turned Minneapolis into the Mogadishu of the Midwest. In 2006, 25 percent of all refugees to come to the United States were Somalis. What worries Brudenell is that the gang problem isn’t being addressed. Another 4,000 to 6,000 Somali refugees are expected to show up in the United States during 2008.

Government officials and Somali community leaders estimate that the majority of these new arrivals will head for the Twin Cities because of the area’s well-established Somali tribal networks. At first the Somali refugees gravitated toward San Diego, but word spread before long that Minnesota-Minneapolis in particular-was the place to go. Its people were tolerant; the city and state welfare systems were comparatively welcoming; there were lots of good jobs in meat-packing plants and on assembly lines for which you didn’t need more than a few words of English; and more and more in the Twin Cities and throughout the state of Minnesota, there were familiar and friendly faces from back home. Only California is the initial home to more Somali refugees than Minnesota-and not by much; the difference is only two percentage points.

Many of the arriving Somalis are expected to be young: In 2006, nearly 42 percent of Somali refugees coming to the United States were age 17 or under-which makes them more likely to be recruited by gangs. And among them are Somalia’s very own lost boys-who see violence as the norm.

EVEN THE SOMALI KIDS WHO WERE DEEPLY involved in the closed-ranks violence of the Twin Cities Somali gangs (the Murda Gang, the Hot Boyz, the Somali Outlaws) knew Shafi Ahmed was a good kid. He was proud and studious, a little nerdy. He would memorize the Koran while his Somali classmates were finding other, less safe ways to combat the intimidation and violence they encountered as non-English-speaking refugees in an American city.

It was, to the first wave of refugee kids’ surprise, the African-American kids who beat up on them the most. (“Go back to Africa, animals,” some of them would say.) The Mexicans and the Asians got their licks in too. Shafi was occasionally beaten up by African-American kids, just like everybody else, his mother says. But he turned to his studies and his religion for succor.

His prom photo, from 2004, shows a good-looking, clean-cut young man. He has a slim face with high cheekbones. He’s wearing a gray polo shirt with a white T-shirt underneath. Nothing about him could be described as gangsta, but he was encountering rivalries nonetheless-as do many young Somalis.

“I don’t hate blacks,” one former Somali gang member tells me. “But for us Somalians, blacks put us through hell. They didn’t like how we looked-they never accept us as black like them.”

The African-Americans’ hostility did not prevent Somali kids from imitating their tormentors. There’s nothing more embarrassing to a Somali kid than to be called a “Flight 13” by other Somalis. Flight 13 was a legendary early plane load of Somali refugees. To be a Flight 13 is to be fresh off the boat. Not American, not hip-hop.

SOME PARTS OF THE TWIN CITIES seem like they could be a short subway ride from downtown Mogadishu. The Starbucks on Riverside Avenue and Highway 94 in Minneapolis has been turned into a meeting point for Somali men, many of them elders of different tribes; it is rare to see a non-Somali customer. There are mosques, a community center, restaurants, food stores, and the run-down towers of the Cedar-Riverside projects.

Most Somali of all are the malls. To enter the Village Market mall in south Minneapolis is to step into a bustling corner of Mogadishu, with narrow corridors lined with racks of long, colorful skirts and scarves; barbers and travel agents and restaurants where men play dominoes; and windowless stores that sell everything a Somali home might need.

I have arranged to meet a woman named Kali in one of these stores. There isn’t much to see of Kali, just her dark eyes and her hands. The rest is covered by the black and maroon folds of a devout Muslim woman’s garb. The voice-mail message on her cell phone is a long sermon by a Muslim preacher.

Kali is 26. She came to the United States when she was 9. That makes her part of the early wave of Somali refugees-and one of the first generation of Somali gang members.

“All I knew is war,” she tells me when I ask her what she remembers of Somalia. “It was hell. I saw a lot of death. I saw bodies on the streets.”

At her new school in Minneapolis, Kali found herself the target of bullies. They’d call her names, beat her up, steal her money, and threaten to strip her naked or pull her head scarf off, exposing her hair. There was a group of kids at her high school, Roosevelt, called RTS. Rough Tough Somalis. Kali joined. They would tell their attackers, “We kill our own. You think we care about you?”

Some gang members started routinely carrying weapons, but Kali did not go that far. She had her own tactic, something she’d learned in Africa.

“One day I got jumped, really bad,” she says. “And they cut my chest. So I went to the hospital. I was in for a month.” Kali was patient as she planned her revenge against the African-American girls who had stabbed her. She waited until she was fully recovered. Then, one winter day after school, she and a friend followed the two girls who Kali says had attacked her onto a bus. The bus stopped and the girls got off.

“Let them beat me all they want, but I’m going to get their face,” Kali told her friend.

She carried five razor blades in her mouth. Kali says that they cut a little, but she had numbed the pain with alcohol. She nestled one blade in each cheek, a third under her tongue, a fourth on her tongue, and the last pressed against the roof of her mouth. She used an oil to lubricate the blades and make them easier to spit out.

On the street she confronted the girl she says had stabbed her. “When she tried to hit me I spit at her,” Kali says. The blade sliced near the girl’s eye, as planned. “She couldn’t see. She was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’”

Kali caught up with the second girl, who had started running. “I [spit] like four razors in her face.”

Both girls were on the sidewalk, blood from the cuts blinding them. “They were crying like a baby bird,” Kali says.

She ran before the police came.

Eventually Kali dropped out of high school, and her mother threw her out of the house, she says. She had several troubled years and a couple of kids with a man she’s no longer with before she got straight. Now Kali spends as much time as possible talking with younger Somali gang members, persuading them that joining gangs is a big mistake.

“Everywhere in the world, they all have gangs,” she says. “But Somalian gangs are more complicated because they go by tribe. There’s a D-Block gang, which is Darod, which is a tribe. There’s Hot Boyz, which is Hawiye, the ones who are running Somalia right now. There’s a lot of different tribes.”

And then Kali echoes what I’ve heard from law-enforcement officials: “What happens in Somalia is going on right here.”

Her words foreshadowed a tragic event. Just over a month after I met her last winter, Kali’s 27-year-old brother was shot dead in south Minneapolis, along with a distant 25-year-old relative.

Kali is unreachable, but I speak to her sister. I ask if her brother was a gang member. “When he was little-but he changed a lot,” she says. “He matured and [wasn’t] involved in gangs.” There has been no arrest, but police believe her brother’s killing was gang-related.

THROUGHOUT HIS TEENAGE YEARS, Shafi remained a good student and respectful son-at least that’s what his family observed. But many others I speak to noticed a shift in his behavior a few years ago. They say that he started to drink alcohol and began hanging out with the wrong kinds of people (Shafi’s family disputes this). Law-enforcement sources say that he was arrested in April 2005 while smoking marijuana in a parked car. The police gave him a citation and a small fine for possession of the drug. A few days later he was arrested for passing a forged check.

One day about a year later he turned up at a spoken-word event called Nomadic Expression, at the Profile Event Center, a community meeting place on University Avenue in southeast Minneapolis, with a Dell flat-screen monitor. A community leader who knew and liked Shafi asked him where the monitor had come from. He was selling it for a friend, Shafi said, “for gas money.”

“I was like, ‘Shafi, you’re better than this,’” the community leader says. “‘Why are you doing this? If you need gas money you can ask me, you know?’”

A young Somali woman who knew Shafi noticed the change in him in 2006. “He would come and always harass one of the girls that was working [at the Profile] and say, ‘Give me something to eat-I have money,’ and always yelling,” she says.

Shafi lived alone with his mother, who doesn’t speak English very well. All seven of his siblings had left home.

In early May 2006, the police investigated Shafi on a charge of indecent conduct-specifically, that he allegedly made lewd comments to an 11-year-old girl.

On Friday, May 26, the community leader from the center sat Shafi down. “I saw the pattern he was following,” he says. “The stolen monitor, and then the drink-I knew what was coming next.” The man gave Shafi a ride to where he was meeting his friends, taking the opportunity to try to talk some sense into Shafi, who was noticeably drunk.

No one I speak to knows for sure what turned Shafi from a quiet, studious boy into someone constantly on the verge of trouble. “Maybe he was going through hard times, or he wanted to see what life was like other than being in the mosque, being the nice guy,” the community leader tells me.

On the night before Memorial Day, there was a party at the Profile. Shafi was there. One room in the center was hosting a traditional Somali concert while a hip-hop show was going on elsewhere in the building.

The Somali who claims she had seen Shafi harassing a woman at the Profile was at the hip-hop party. Later, she heard that Shafi was drunk and had been telling a Somali gang that they were nothing compared with another group.

“When he [was] drunk he [talked] a hell of a lot,” she tells me.

PEOPLE AREN’T TELLING THE POLICE much about what happened that night, but what is known is that at about three on Monday morning someone shot Shafi dead on the street outside a local TV station. The shooting was just over the border between the Twin Cities, in St. Paul. Police were called to the scene, where they found a man with gunshot wounds. An employee at the TV station claimed that six shots were fired and that two young men drove away in a white van. Shafi Ahmed was pronounced dead at the scene by St. Paul Fire Department paramedics.

Law-enforcement officials tell me that it’s a case they expect will never be solved. “The suspects were never charged in the murder,” one official says. “And a lot of that has to do with the sheer fact that witnesses wouldn’t come forward. And I don’t foresee witnesses coming forward in the future. People in the community know who did it, but nobody wants to be a witness. There’s a lot of fear.”

TWO YOUNG SOMALIS I SPEAK WITH, Yusuf and Ali (not their real names), say they know what happened to Shafi Ahmed. We talk at a juvenile-probation facility in Minneapolis, in the presence of their probation officers. Yusuf and Ali decline to say what they have done to get in trouble. They insist that they are not in gangs, and that they don’t even like to use the term, preferring groups or brotherhoods. Yusuf, who says that as a child in Mogadishu he was hit in the neck with a piece of shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade, is dressed hip-hop-style. Ali is articulate and has a job at Target. I ask them what happened to Shafi.

“It was actually the [gang that] my brother was in,” Ali says. He adds that Shafi was a member of the gang. “They were both in it.”

So was he killed by a rival gang or members of his own gang?

Ali says he doesn’t know.

The guys he thinks may have killed him “really hated” Shafi, Ali says, “especially the one that ran away, that we believe pulled the trigger. They really hated each other, them two.”

“And did he belong to a different group?” one of the probation officers asks. He’s referring to the killer.

“Yeah,” Ali says.

Whatever the circumstances, Shafi Ahmed was shot and killed in the street, like his father in Mogadishu; the perpetrator is still at large; and it’s unlikely that anyone will be charged with the crime.

DEK NOR, Shafi’s half-brother, opens his wallet and pulls out a folded piece of paper. We are in the living room of his mother’s house. He unfolds the paper and holds it flat. It’s a mug shot. A young Somali man stares impassively at the camera.

Nor reads out the name below the photograph: “Abdiwali Abdirazak Farah.” His date of birth: August 26, 1986. Just a few months after Nor’s murdered brother’s.

Farah is a suspect in Shafi’s killing (although he has never been charged), a law-enforcement source confirms. The only problem is that soon after the shooting, authorities believe, he got on a flight back to Somalia, en route to a relatively peaceful, semi-autonomous region called Puntland. No one expects him to return to the United States voluntarily, and the government of Somalia has more pressing matters to attend to than extraditing some kid back to America. Some people say Farah is now in Dubai.

Shafi’s family believes Farah was in Puntland, at least temporarily, because they faxed his picture to family members still living in Somalia, and someone in Puntland claimed to have recognized him in a store. If Farah was proved to be guilty, under tribal law, Shafi’s family in the United States could have sought redress from Farah’s family in Somalia. But, the family says, they held a meeting after Shafi’s death to discuss how they should respond to what had happened. They were in America now, they decided, and American laws would apply. They want American justice.

So they grieve, and once or twice a month someone from the family drives to a spot seven miles south of the Mall of America and visits a granite gravestone in the Muslim corner of a mainly Christian cemetery. A bronze plaque on the granite reads: SHAFI AHMED. APR. 29, 1986-MAY 29, 2006.

When I visit the grave it is early morning on a lovely fall day. People in the city are saying that the snow will come soon, and they’re bracing themselves for the hard slog through the crushing winter.

Gang members stay inside, like everyone else, during the cold. But when the summer arrives, trouble will follow. And with the influx of Flight 13s, with their limited English, their years in refugee camps, and their memories of violence, there could be a fresh crop of kids trying to prove themselves Flight 13s no longer.

“Most of the things happen in the summer,” Ali says. “Everyone comes out; it’s hot. There’s guns everywhere. It’s, like, shootings everywhere. One of these days I’m going to end up dead.”

MATT MCALLESTER was for thirteen years a reporter for Newsday. He was part of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. In 1999, he became the newspaper’s Middle East correspondent, based in Jerusalem. He has covered conflicts in Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Kosovo, Nepal, Nigeria, Macedonia, Pakistan, and Turkey. McAllester has published three books: Beyond the Mountains of the Damned: The War Inside Kosovo (2002), named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by Publishers Weekly; Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam’s Iraq (2004); and Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother’s Kitchen (2009). He has won several awards, including the Asia Society’s Osborn Elliott Award for excellence in Asian journalism, the George Plimpton Feature Writing Award, and three Overseas Press Club citations. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is a contributing editor at Details magazine.

Coda

Summer didn’t need to come for the killing to start again in the Twin Cities. On December 1, 2007, a few weeks after I left town, police found the bodies of two young Somali men at a house in south Minneapolis. One of the dead, Arie Musse Jama, was a rapper with a long criminal record. People called him Snoop. He had been in the Rough Tough Somalis. Snoop’s brother, Mohamed, apparently swore revenge, but seven months later, before he could even the score with the guy he believed killed Snoop, he too was shot dead. By that time the killing season had begun in earnest once more: Abdillahi Awil Abdi, aged eighteen, shot dead on April 11, 2008. And then, on September 29, twenty-two-year-old Abdishakur Adan Hassan, whose alleged murderer was Abdillahi Abdi’s cousin. That was five dead Somali youths in under a year. There were other shootings that did not result in fatalities.

In early 2009, I asked Jeanine Brudenell, who was now the Somali community liaison officer for the Minneapolis Police Department, if there were any updates on the Shafi Ahmed case. “He is still gone,” she said of Shafi’s alleged killer. “I don’t see that one closing any time soon.”

Brudenell told me that since October 2008 things had been quieter. It was the winter lull again, she said. “I am expecting an increase in the summer,” she said. “We shall see over the next few months.”