'My son has joined al-Qa'ida'
Richard Kerbaj
Sunday, September 30, 2007
THE mother of an Islamic jihadist, who the Australian Government believes was killed fighting alongside terrorists in Somalia, says her son is alive and working with al-Qa'ida.
Khadra Nimale's son Ahmed Ali went missing in December in east Africa while fighting against the Ethiopian-backed Somalian military.
Ms Nimale said relatives in Somalia believed her 25-year-old son had changed his name and was working as an interpreter with al-Qa'ida.
She has broken her silence to tell The Australian that her son was radicalised by Melbourne-based hardline clerics.
She accused Mohammed Omran - the head of the fundamentalist Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jammah association, who believes Osama bin Laden is a "good man" - of turning Mr Ali into a hardliner.
Mr Ali went missing in the Somali capital of Mogadishu on December 22, two weeks after he arrived with his pregnant wife, Aisha, and one-year-old girl, Hafsa.
Mr Ali told his mother he was going to Dubai, where he and his family stayed for a week with friends before making the secret trip to Somalia. They have not spoken since.
On January 7, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed Mr Ali's death to The Australian.
But Ms Nimale said she refused to accept that he was dead because none of her relatives and government contacts back home had evidence to prove it.
She said her son began attending Sheik Omran's classes with some of his friends about six years ago.
"He was talking all the time about Sheik Omran," she told The Australian in an exclusive Arabic and English interview at her Braybrook home, in Melbourne's west.
"I lost him," Ms Nimale said as she cried.
She said Mr Ali would not have been radicalised had she and her 10 children remained in Somalia and not migrated to Australia in 1994, two years after her husband was killed in the African region while working as an army commander with the Somali Government.
"I wish I did not come to Australia because he got in trouble in this country ... they (radicals) took my son."
A spokesman for Sheik Omran rejected Ms Nimale's accusations against the spiritual leader.
"Sheik Omran is a popular person for people to blame for everything," said Abu Yusuf, who denied ever seeing Mr Ali at the cleric's classes.
"If she has evidence (that Sheik Omran radicalised Mr Ali), provide it to the authorities to shut us down."
Ms Nimale said relatives in Somalia told her al-Qa'ida had recruited her son as an interpreter because he spoke fluent English, and gave him a "secret al-Qa'ida name", which she did not want published.
"The extremists in Somalia or maybe the terrorist in Somalia, al-Qa'ida, they need someone with (a good) education," she said.
Ms Nimale, 48, said some relatives spotted Mr Ali working with the terrorist network several weeks after his wife, Aisha, gave birth to their son, Majahid ("holy warrior") in mid-January.
Ms Nimale said she isolated herself from Melbourne's Somali community following her son's disappearance.
Ms Nimale was angered by some community figures who expressed their sense of pride following news of Mr Ali's death while fighting jihad alongside the Islamic Courts movement.
"They said, 'Your son go to jihad, he's going to go to Jannah (Paradise)'," she said. "I said 'where is Jannah, where is heaven? Kismayo, or Mogadishu?"'
Ms Nimale said her son embraced Wahabism - a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam espoused by bin Laden - shortly after the September 11 attacks in the US in 2001.
She said at that time members of Melbourne's Somalian community whom she'd never met were urging parents to send their children to Islamic literature classes.
"They asked, 'You have boys. We need your boys'," said Ms Nimale, who thought it was a good idea to encourage Mr Ali to attend and learn more about the religion.
Mr Ali became an ultra-conservative within a year. He began wearing traditional Islamic dress and tore up all photographs he found of himself, claiming it was haram (forbidden) to appear in pictures.
He distanced himself from his moderate mother, whom he regarded as a kafir (an infidel), criticised his siblings at home for not following Wahabism, developed a deep resentment towards western values and gave up his TAFE studies in accounting and science to completely focus on religion.
"He was angry every day," said Ms Nimale, who rejected MrAli's hatred of the US and the West.
Mr Ali became an imam at Eight Black, a prayer hall mainly attended by Somalis in north Melbourne.
His brother Ismail, who occasionally attended the prayer hall, told The Australian that people's hardline views only surfaced at small gatherings.
"Eight Black as a prayer hall was okay," he said. "But what people do after is a lot different."
An imam at Eight Black, Sheik al-Somali, said Wahabism was not taught at the prayer centre, and played down Mr Ali's former role there.
"I didn't know of his ideologies or beliefs, but we were all saddened by (his disappearance)," he said.
Ms Nimale attacked her son's wife Aisha, a Muslim convert who married Mr Ali in a secret Wahabi ceremony in 2003, to which his family was not invited.
She said Aisha, 21, returned to Australia two months ago and married Mr Ali's close Wahabi friend Abdul Rahman. Ms Nimale said Abdul Rahman told the community Mr Ali had asked him to take care of the family if he died in his jihad mission.
Ismail said he wanted his brother's story to be told to help prevent other members of the Somali community from turning to Wahabism.
Source: The Australian, Sept 30, 2007
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Warnaagta nasiib badana oo nasiib darana, she should be saying alhamdulilah that her son was an imaam and practicing his deen. Unlike many of his peeers that would be involved in a life of sin and crime. May Allah give her patience for the disappearence or death of her son. Ilaahayna Janada kawarabiyo Wiilkeedana.
