Suburban moms turned terrorism sponsors eye decades in prison ‘Their motivations were bloodlust for al-Shabaab’

Two women with Seattle ties face decades in prison for fundraising money for al-Shabaab, a Somalia-based terrorist group with ties to al-Qaida. Above, a victim of a terror attack is carried away from the Ambassador Hotel after a car bomb exploded on June 1, 2016 at a Mogadishu hotel. Al-Shabaab was chased out of the capital Mogadishu in 2011 but remains a dangerous threat in both Somalia and neighboring Kenya, where it carries out frequent attacks. less Two women with Seattle ties face decades in prison for fundraising money for al-Shabaab, a Somalia-based terrorist group with ties to al-Qaida. Above, a victim of a terror attack is carried away from the ... more Photo: AFP/Getty Images Photo: AFP/Getty Images Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Suburban moms turned terrorism sponsors eye decades in prison 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

Two suburban mothers joined by their tragic flight from Somalia and a shared admiration of terrorists still killing there have made a last bid for leniency.

Hinda Dhirane, a Somalian refugee living in the Seattle area, drew on hundreds of supporters who vouched for her character even as federal prosecutors asked that she be sentenced to 20 years in prison. A second woman with Seattle ties – Muna Osman Jama – faces an identical sentence for her role in a geographically large, financially small fundraising effort supporting al-Shabaab, an al-Qaida-associated militia in Somalia.

Convicted of providing material support for a designated terrorist organization, Dhirane, 46, and Jama, 36, were sentenced Friday morning by a federal judge in Virginia. Dhirane, of Kent, Washington, was sentenced to 11 years in prison while Jama, of Reston, Virginia, was sentenced to 12 years.

Federal prosecutors say Dhirane and Jama are cold-eyed, remorseless supporters of terrorists bent on killing “infidels” in Somalia and abroad. Writing the court, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Gillis said intercepted communications showed them celebrating terrorist attacks in the United States, Somalia and Kenya, where al-Shabaab has killed dozens in attacks on civilian targets.

“Their motivations were bloodlust for al-Shabaab and its tactics, regardless of the consequences to children or other innocent civilians, as is evident in virtually every conversation among themselves and their co-conspirators,” said Gillis, who prosecuted Jama and Dhirane alongside Assistant U.S. Attorney Danya Atiyeh.

Jama, Dhirane and their supporters describe them wholly different women. Broken badly by experiences in Somalia and as refugees, they claim to have seen themselves as patriots for Somalia rather than supporters of terrorism.

In a show of support for Dhirane, 400 Somali-Americans associated with one Seattle-area group signed a letter asking that she be shown leniency.

“As a community, we denounce all kinds of violence and aiding terrorist organizations,” members of Kent-based Somali-American Parents Association said in the letter. “We will look after her, and help her stay on track. We believe that Mrs. Dhirane has learned from this experience, and will stay out of trouble in the future.”

Prayers for ‘heavy rain’

Borrowing a phrase from the apostle Paul, Gillis said outsiders can only watch terrorism money move “as if through a glass, darkly.” A clear picture is hard to come by.

Jama and Dhirane were first caught on secret electronic surveillance in March 2012. Investigators obtained warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows for the capture of communications for national security and counter-intelligence purposes.

The women were part of an informal organization known as the “Group of 15.” It operated through an online chatroom, and was comprised primarily of expatriate Somali women who wanted to send money to al-Shabaab. They knew no national boundaries, working with money brokers around the globe. Money raised by the group moved through the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Kenya; in the United States, they used brokers in San Diego, Seattle, Minneapolis and Virginia.

The scheme as described by prosecutors was vast, including conspirators on three continents and 10 countries before the FBI broke up the operation in July 2014. The FBI worked with foreign partners to identify members involved in the ring; investigators captured hundreds of conversations, as well as thousands of text messages and emails amounting to terabytes of data.

Neither woman is thought to have raised much money for al-Shabaab. By their attorneys’ tallies, Dhirane was found to have provided just $1,700 to al-Shabaab while Jama sent $4,600.

“This was a loosely organized group of women located in various parts of the world and there was no leader or any organizational structure,” Dhirane’s defense attorney Alan Yamamoto said in court papers. “They would meet once a month or so in an internet chatroom on PalTalk to discuss the contributions, if any, they could make that month to send to support al-Shabaab in Kenya or Somalia and to discuss the events in Somalia.”

What little money they raised funded an al-Shabaab safe house and prop up their al-Shabaab chatroom.

To raise it, prosecutors claim they deceived members of the Seattle area’s large East African community. Other Somali refugees giving Dhirane and Jama what they had were told they would be supporting schools, mosques and war orphans back in Somalia.

“These crimes were about … calculatedly lying to women who thought they were supporting orphans, not terrorists,” Gillis said in court papers. “The defendants’ crimes involved providing money for no purpose other than violence – the kind of violence that was targeted against civilians in shopping malls and courthouses, that encouraged 14-year-old children to use their bodies as bombs, and that rejoiced at any ‘heavy rain’ that fell upon those whom they hated, included the deluge that was visited upon the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing.”

After horrors in Somalia, a new start in Seattle

Like many of the allegations surrounding Jama and Dhirane, their enthusiasm for terrorism remained in dispute even as the prosecution concluded.

Discounting his client’s statements praising terrorist attacks, Yamamoto said in court papers Dhirane had “no history of radicalism.”

“Her concern was her home country, Somalia,” said Yamamoto, a Virginia attorney who represented Dhirane alongside Paula Deutsch, a Seattle-based federal public defender. “She believed that al-Shabaab was the hope of the Somali people for national unity and a country free of greed and corruption.”

Dhirane and Jama know well Somalia’s history of greed, corruption and violence.

Dhirane was born in 1961 in western Somalia, an autonomous region known as Somaliland. Her family moved to Mogadishu when she was 6, and lived there while her father worked in Saudi Arabia.

The family prospered in those years. Her father owned a collection of businesses and houses. Her brothers went to university in Mogadishu while her mother ran a store out of their home. She attended school, played sports and became a primary school math teacher after graduating from high school.

Her father and mother died in quick succession in 1987, throwing family into disarray. War arrived in Somaliland the following year, as a dying military dictator in Somalia launched a bombing campaign targeting rebels.

As her country collapsed, Dhirane fled. She spent years bouncing between slums and refugee camps in the region before she was allowed to come to the United States in 1998.

Arriving first in Texas, Dhirane, her husband and children moved to Seattle’s Rainier Valley. She raised her six children while working occasionally as an airport shuttle driver. Her siblings are scattered around the world.

Her attorneys contend it was during a 2010 visit to Somalia that she became enthusiastic about al-Shabaab.

Al-Shabaab formed in the mid-2000s as part the armed wing of the Somalia Council of Islamic Courts, which then opposed the Somali federal government. Designated a terrorist organization in 2008 due in part to its leaders’ association with al-Qaida, al-Shabaab has been in decline since 2011. It continues to hold ground in Somalia while perpetrating high-profile terrorist attacks there and in neighboring countries, and has fought U.S. allies supported by American special operations troops.

‘A damaged young woman’

Like Dhirane, Jama claims she was drawn to al-Shabaab for patriotic reasons. As they saw it, al-Shabaab stood up for Somalians left to be abused by Ethiopian and Kenyan soldiers welcomed by the Somalia government.

“Muna Jama is a damaged young woman who experienced countless horrors during her time in Somalia,” Assistant Federal Public Defender Whitney Minter said in court papers.

“She is of a generation and a population that was primed to see al-Shabaab as liberators of the Somali people,” the defense attorney continued. “She learned of the horrors on the ground through the Somali social networks, which spread news primarily through oral and social means; the same horrors that she observed as a child while fleeing the civil war and while in refugee camps.”

Jama was born in Mogadishu in 1980, a decade before the eruption of a civil war still crippling Somalia. Her family left after a rocket-propelled grenade hit her school, fleeing the city in an armed caravan.

First arriving in neighboring Kenya, they were driven out of two refugee camps that were rife with starving, dying children. Minter said Jama was “liberated” from the camps by United Nations troops; she arrived in the United States in 1997, settling in Seattle after a month in Louisiana.

Jama suffered a serious head injury in 2003 and left the Seattle area in 2004, moving with her husband to Virginia. She had been a homemaker prior to her arrest.

‘Blessings’ that killed dozens

Federal prosecutors say the women’s claims of higher ideals are undercut by statements they made praising terrorist attacks, including the Boston Marathon bombing.

“The defendants are fervid followers of al-Shabaab ‘clerics’ who exhort their devotees to kill ‘infidels’ – not only abroad, but in the United States as well,” said Gillis, the federal prosecutor.

“It is not hyperbolic to characterize these defendants as vicious, unregenerate, and, until their arrest, active supports of a terrorist organization responsible for the slaughter of innocents simply because the victims’ religious beliefs differed from their own,” he continued in court papers.

In the September 2013, Dhirane was elated on learning al-Shabaab attack on a Nairobi mall that saw about 63 victims killed, children as young as 2 among them.

“How happy I was,” Dhirane laughingly told one associate. “We were on the clouds. We almost flew. We almost flew.”

In another 2013 instance, Dhirane spoke kindly of the Boston Marathon bombing and an al-Shabaab attack on a Somali courthouse that left dozens dead. The attacks, she said, were “blessings.”

“The fact that the defendants were not themselves wearing the suicide vests, shooting the AK assault rifles, or carrying out the attacks is of little moment,” Gillis said in court papers. “They financed the suicide vests and the machine guns; they fed, equipped, and gave shelter to the al-Shabaab fighters as they prepared to carry out their attacks; they provided the machinery that permitted the al-Shabaab fighters to return to kill again. …

“Rather than conform their behavior to the laws of the country that gave them shelter – that would have protected their First Amendment rights even to openly and vocally advocate for al-Shabaab – they gave money at the behest of al-Shabaab ‘clerics’ who exhorted their followers to kill the ‘infidels’ in whatever country they found themselves, including the United States, if travel to fight in Somalia was not possible.”

U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga sentence Jama and Dhirane on Friday morning in Alexandria, Virginia. Trenga found both women guilty in October of crimes related to providing material support for terrorism following a bench trial.

Seattlepi.com reporter Levi Pulkkinen can be reached at 206-448-8348 or levipulkkinen@seattlepi.com. Follow Levi on Twitter at twitter.com/levipulk.