ABSTRACT
On 14 November 2012 Omar Shafik Hammami was added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s ‘Most Wanted Terrorists’ List.2 Sometime in 2006 Hammami, also known under his nom de guerre Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, had travelled to southern Somalia to join Al-Shabaab Al Mujihadin, a Salafist Islamist militia which initially emerged as the armed spearhead of the Islamic Courts Union confederation, but which rapidly carved its own violent path of guerrilla resistance to the Moghadishu government, Ethiopian and African Union forces as the resurgence of tribal and regional conflict, this time overlain with religious and geopolitical glosses, again engulfed Somalia in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Hammami was originally indicted in November 2007 on a charge of providing material support to terrorists – interestingly, this charge was filed prior to the US State Department’s designation of Al-Shabaab as a ‘specially designated global terrorist’3 – and was the subject of a further indictment in September 2009. Three years later, he had ascended to the top tier of international terrorism; at least as far as the United States authorities were concerned. Hammami himself acknowledged the accolade, commenting perhaps not entirely sarcastically on what appears to be his personal Twitter account that ‘amriki would like to accept the honor of most wanted list and thanks everyone’.4 Sarcasm aside, Hammami’s journey from his hometown of Daphne, Alabama to the Al-Shabaab heartlands south of Moghadishu5 has been one of the more intriguing trajectories thrown up by the challenge of violent Islamist extremism in the early decades of the twenty-first century, with multiple narrative levels: the bifurcated identity of the child of mixed ethnic and religious backgrounds; the difficulty, particularly in the charged atmosphere after the attacks of 11 September 2001, of being Muslim and Arab in the United States; the importance of modern communications technology both in Hammami’s radicalisation and in his subsequent propagandising on his own behalf and on behalf of Al-Shabaab. Juxtaposed against these intrinsically modern aspects to Hammami’s journey
towards a particularly recent form of Islamist extremism lie more perennial themes of politically-motivated violence and its practitioners: the role of foreign fighters, the ideological tensions between local preoccupations and global strategic concerns, and the internecine feuding and bloodletting that frequently characterises political movements engaged in violence. Notwithstanding his belated ascension to the FBI most wanted list, Omar Hammami had long been one of the best-known and most widely-recognised ‘homegrown terrorists’, both within the United States itself and in the Islamist internet demi-monde. The subject of alarmist and more thoughtful reports and profiles in print and television media, Hammami’s charisma, humour and excellent communication skills – when unburdened from the quicksand of complicated theological and ideological debates – made him both an obvious vector for Al-Shabaab’s western outreach strategy and an effective hook for American news media stories on the vexed political and military situation in Somalia and the more sensationalist narrative of a white southern American throwing his lot in with Islamist violent extremism. Between 2012 and 2013, Hammami was the focus of academic and public attention, featuring in the reports and communiqués of a number of think-tanks and scholarly bodies; Hammami himself apparently kept abreast of academic work within the field of terrorism studies, using a 2006 report RAND report, Beyond Al Qaeda, as the jumping-off point for his May 2012 video lecture, ‘In Defence of the Khilafah’, and following some academic and journalistic presences on the Twitter social network.6 As indicated by his frequent forays into the crowded field of jihadist internet videos, Hammami fully availed of the technological capabilities of even violence-ridden Somalia, with his video messages, speeches, sermons, an extensive autobiography and Twitter feed demonstrating the communicative urge readily identifiable in practitioners of political violence.7
