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[excerpt]
city-journal.org
Ryan Thorpe, Christopher F. Rufo
“The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer”
How some of the state’s welfare funds ended up in the hands of a terror group

Our investigation reveals, for the first time, that some of this money has been directed to an even more troubling destination: the al-Qaida-linked Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab. According to multiple law-enforcement sources, Minnesota’s Somali community has sent untold millions through a network of “hawalas,” informal clan-based money-traders, that have wound up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab.

According to Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who spent 14 years on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Somalis ran a sophisticated money network, spanning from Seattle to Minneapolis, and were routing significant amounts of cash on commercial flights from the Seattle airport to the hawala networks in Somalia. One of these networks, Kerns discovered, sent $20 million abroad in a single year. “The amount of money was staggering,” Kerns said.

Kerns’s investigation eventually expanded to Minnesota, where he realized the same thing was happening. “I worked on it for five years,” Kerns said. “We had sources going into the hawalas to send money. I went down to [Minnesota] and pulled all of their records and, well shit, all these Somalis sending out money are on DHS benefits. How does that make sense? We had good sources tell us: this is welfare fraud.”

Kerns then investigated the hawalas in Somalia that were receiving the money transfers. He determined, primarily through human sources, that significant funds were being sent from America to Al-Shabaab networks in Somalia. Whether the money was intended for Al-Shabaab or not, Kerns said, they were taking a cut.

A second former official, who worked on the Minneapolis JTTF, confirms the story’s general structure. This former official, who requested to remain anonymous, worked on two terrorism cases that intersected with Minnesota’s Somali community and has studied the flow of funds from Minnesota to Somalia.