“According to the criminal complaint, the defendants had been in communication with an FBI undercover employee whom they believed was a supporter of ISIS ideology. These communications revealed the defendants’ desire to travel overseas in order to fight on behalf of ISIS or to conduct an attack within the United States if they were unable to travel,” DOJ said in a statement.
“Ultimately, the defendants purchased airline tickets to travel to Egypt, with the intention to travel on to Sinai and join ISIS. FBI agents arrested Mohamed and Hussein after they checked in for their flight at the Tucson International Airport in Arizona.
“According to court documents, both defendants came to the United States as refugees from Somalia. At the time of their arrest, Mohamed had obtained lawful permanent resident status and Hussein remained a refugee,” the statement said.
Somali migrants to the United States appears to be easy targets for ISIS recruitment. While this case is being heard in Arizona, the Somali community based in Minnesota has contributed largely to the ISIS, Al Qaeda and al-Shabab cause.
This area in Minnesota happens to be the congressional district of Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a naturalised US citizen who was born in Somalia.
Republican Sentator Rand Paul offered to buy Omar a plane ticket back to Somalia, echoing President Trump’s comments that the Minnesota Democrat and three other black congresswomen should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”.
Paul said: “I’m willing to contribute to buy her a ticket to go visit Somalia, and I think she could look and maybe learn a little bit about the disaster that is Somalia — that has no capitalism, has no God-given rights guaranteed in a constitution, and has about seven different tribes that have been fighting each other for the last 40 years.”
He added: “And then, maybe after she’s visited Somalia for a while, she might come back and appreciate America more.” Democrats once again cried “racism” after his remarks.
Omar told Al Jazeera last year that Americans “should be more fearful of white men” than potential Islamic terrorists, because “they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country”.
“We should be profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men,” Omar said. But FBI data shows that Omar’s notion of dangerous, murderous white men is not based on any factual evidence.
According to FBI data, altogether 45 Somalis joined the ranks of either the Somalia-based Islamic insurgency al-Shabab, or the Iraq- and Syria-based ISIS. Not only men sign up to fight for the terrorist group: Last year, a female was apprehended by US authorities on charges of supporting providing material support to Al Qaeda as well as arson, Townhall reported.
Counting from 2018, a dozen more were arrested with the intention of leaving the US to join up with ISIS, numbers far higher than those of alleged terrorists from other areas of the US.
Omar has called for abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and has strongly opposed the immigration policies of the Trump administration. Her daughter, Isra Hirsi, is one of the three principal organisers of the school strike for climate in the US.
