That’s not rhetoric. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s exactly what has been happening for the last ten years in Minnesota, as it has been revealed that the largest source of funds for the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.
The Somali fraud rings have sent huge sums in remittances, or money transfers, from Minnesota to Somalia. According to reports, an estimated 40 percent of households in Somalia get remittances from abroad. In 2023 alone, the Somali diaspora sent back $1.7 billion—more than the Somali government’s budget for that year.
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.
“Every scrap of economic activity, in the Twin Cities, in America, throughout Western Europe, anywhere Somalis are concentrated, every cent that is sent back to Somalia benefits Al-Shabaab in some way,” the former official said. “For every dollar that is transferred from the Twin Cities back to Somalia, Al-Shabaab is . . . taking a cut of it.”
A third source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the close links between the Somali-American community in Minnesota and Islamic terror groups abroad. Ten years ago, the source was recruited as an “independent contractor” for a three-letter agency investigation into the “Minnesota men” who had joined, or attempted to join, ISIS. That year, a Homeland Security task force report found that Minnesota led the nation in the number of Americans who had joined, or attempted to join, ISIS. Of the 58 Americans who had done so, nearly half came from Minnesota.
Scott Johnson, who has covered these and related stories for years, attended several of those men’s trials, reporting on them for City Journal. He noted that the Minnesota men “gave the outward appearance of American assimilation”—including being “sophisticated users of social-welfare benefits.”
The relationship is ongoing. “This is a third-rail conversation, but the largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer,” the third source said. “There is an issue here that is real, and if there is ever an event that is traceable back to these funds, or to people from this area, then this situation will take on a whole new set of optics.”
If, at this point, you still believe in civic nationalism, mass immigration, or human equality, there is no excuse for you. You’re just being willfully retarded and clinging to your outmoded Enlightenment values while keeping your eyes firmly closed to the obvious consequences of your beliefs.
Intelligent people only need to see a conclusive proof or a solid falsification once in order to grasp objective reality. What does it say about the intelligence of educated, well-informed people that they continue to deny the obvious and the observable repeatedly over a period of decades?
Every single Enlightenment value is inverted. The democracies actively work to thwart the will of the people. Equal rights are used to justify transfer payments from natives to foreigners. Posterity is redefined to benefit everyone except the actual Posterity. It would be maddening if we didn’t know exactly where all that inversion is coming from.
The proof is there, but it takes courage, both moral and intellectual, to look at it long enough to accept it.