The carefree cynicism with which Jihadi Omar Hammami extols the virtues of young Americans joining the cause of killing as many nonbelievers as possible is offset by the sad resignation in his Syrian-American father’s voice when he says, “I realised it was the end of life as we knew it. It was devastating for both of us... He’s our only son. We only have one son, and now we have none.” This spoken against a video clip of a little boy running in a garden. With the same carefree cynicism, Omar Hammami, a.k.a. Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki (the last part of which which means The American), threw away his life in September 2013.
Being a NOVA documentary for PBS, they come at it from a scientific perspective, so there are lots of very learned talking heads and the odd chart and graph. But this is no classroom yawn, because writer, producer and director Miles O’Brien – who is also a PBS Newshour science correspondent – chooses to walk a very human path through the tale, by placing the story of one particular Jihadi at the centre, with everything else falling into place around that.
That jihadi is American Omar Hammami, born in Daphne, Alabama, deep in the US Bible Belt, to a southern belle mom and a Syrian Arab dad. Shafik Hammami never prayed or went to the mosque, though mom Debra, a former schoolteacher, takes the boy to church and urges him not to tell his dad. You have to think that Shafik may not have wanted his boy to become a fundamentalist, knowing where that can lead – so best to keep him out of Southern Baptist churches then. There’s food for ironic thought there.
In 8th Grade, young Omar heads off to Syria having accessed open source intelligence off the internet, what a commentator describes as “data hiding in plain view” – one of the key aspects of the new terrorism age that the documentary addresses. This is not when he becomes radicalised but the start of that journey. Even when two planes flew into the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center in 2001, he remained equivocal. But when the US army led coalition forces into Baghdad in 2003, the transition was done. He and a new friend in his home city, Daniel Maldonado/adopted Muslim name Daniel Aljughaifi, hook up in online chat rooms (another aspect of this new world the doccie explores) and they become best friends. He guides Omar/Abu on his journey to the point where Omar announces with glee, “I have become a Jihadi!”
Watch the official Netflix trailer:
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From here on, Omar is Abu, or sometimes his online handle of Abu M. What to do next but go to Somalia to join al-Shabaab, with whom he will have an uneasy relationship. By now suicide bombers have long been a factor in this new world thanks to their perpetuation by Tamil Tigers and, in Africa, by al-Shabaab, the continent’s deadliest terror organisation. The al-Shabaab leadership is at first very taken with the young American and is quick to tap into his mix of charisma, computer skills and fluency in Arabic, as O’Brien’s commentary tells us.
His makes his “debut” as a known terrorist on Al Jazeera as Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, saying, according to the New York Times:
“Oh Muslims of America, take into consideration the situation in Somalia. After 15 years of chaos and oppressive rule by the American-backed warlords, your brothers stood up and established peace and justice in this land.”
Video becomes his chosen vehicle. During an ambush at Bardale in Somalia in 2009, al-Shabaab releases a YouTube propaganda video tailored to recruit more Americans, in which Abu stares candidly into the camera while on bush patrol, and, with a wry smile, says, “We’re waiting for the enemy to come.” They’re going to try to blow up a vehicle, he says, “and kill as many people as we can.” He becomes a bit of a media sensation.
He pushes the social media bar further by penning a series of rap songs, in videos of him rapping while on patrol, with lyrics like, “We’re sending missiles through the streets/ Destroys tanks, ‘copters and Navy fleets”. As Peter Bergen, author of United States of Jihad, puts it, he promotes Jihad as a “normal career choice”.
Twitter, Facebook et al become ripe for exploitation. In Nairobi in 2013, during the Westgate mall atrocity, the attackers live-tweet as they kill, for hours, which becomes a social media turning point. Before this, the documentary observes, the right to freedom of speech trounced a perceived need to police such off-the-cuff tweeted content. For the first time, Twitter was actively deleting content as it was tweeted.
Islamic State then, the doccie observes, “took that concept and multiplied it by a million”. Facebook accounts would be closed but “repeat offenders simply opened new accounts again and again”. Facebook took a claimed zero tolerance approach, but a “tsunami of content” continued to be posted every day.
Facebook’s Monika Bickert, who is head of global policy management, is hardly convincing when she says, “We don’t allow beheading videos.” Because “persistent terrorists find a way”, as anyone who has viewed a beheading video knows.
Watch 15 Years of Terror: A Time Lapse of all terrorist attacks with more than 20 fatalities between 1.12.2000 and 13.11.2015 – The Daily Conversation