9 people stabbed in Minnesota Mall: ISIS takes credit.

This week officials are gathering in Washington to discuss how to counter extremist messages, particularly those from the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

ISIS has been luring thousands of Westerners to the battlefields of Syria and Iraq. The number of Americans who have traveled to Syria is still relatively small — in the neighborhood of 150 people — and a thin slice of that group, perhaps as many as two dozen Americans, are thought to have joined ISIS.

In the discussions at the White House this week, one city has focused minds: Minneapolis-St Paul. It had been ground zero for terrorist recruiters in the past, and is fast becoming the center of ISIS' recruitment effort in the United States.

"I know one guy who tweets the community all the time," said Abdirizak Bihi, the director of Somali education at a local advocacy group. "He left with my nephew 2008, and he's still alive. And he's been tweeting about who died in ISIS and where they come from, kind of maybe the new spokesman."

Bihi's nephew was a Minneapolis teenager named Burhan Hassan, who joined a handful of young men from the Twin Cities and traveled to Somalia to join a terrorist group there called al-Shabab. Hassan died there several years ago. Between 2006 and 2011, some 27 Somali-Americans from the community disappeared to fight in Somalia.

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...when the U.S. expanded air strikes against ISIS into Syria in September 2014, ISIS went a little nuts about that. Not to say they weren't nuts before. But they were super angry about those air strikes in Syria targeting them, to the point where their spokesman basically embarrassed himself in a public statement that he put out at the time.


It was an ISIS message specifically to Muslims living in the West, telling ISIS supporters around the world that in the name of ISIS, people should commit terrorist attacks in their home countries. Quote, “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European, especially these spiteful and filthy French or an Australian or a Canadian or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, then kill him in any manner or way, however it may be.”

Then we get to the specifics. “Smash his head with a rock or slaughter him with a knife or run him over with your car or throw him down from a high place or choke him or poison him.”

ISIS was so unnerved by the U.S.-led coalition air strikes that started against them in the fall of 2014 that their spokesman literally responded by putting out a statement telling people to find a filthy Frenchman and hit him in the head with a rock. It was a very strange statement, right, especially because of its weird specificity.

But however strange it was, it also marked an important tactical change for them as an organization, because in that statement, that angry, weird statement from ISIS saying how mad they were that all these Western countries were many booing them now, in that statement, ISIS stopped calling on their Western supporters to leave their homes and travel to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State, and they instead told their Western followers that they should stay where they are in the West and commit attacks there.

They also said, and this ended up being important, “Do not ask for anyone`s advice and do not seek anyone`s verdict.” Meaning, don`t ask for our permission. Don`t ask for anybody`s permission. Consider this to be your permission slip. Go ahead. Don`t tell us you`re going to do it, just do it.

So, that`s September 2014. Don`t come here, don`t ask us, you don`t need to hear anything from us other than this, just go do it, go kill civilians in your home country with any means that you have, even if all you have is a car or a rock. Do that, we`ll consider that you being an ISIS fighter and being part of our movement and helping what ISIS is trying to do. That was issued September 21st, 2014.

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