A slow, isolated descent to jihad

How Phoenix man came to embrace radical Islam

Elton Simpson sought meaning from his life and the acceptance of others, and he found it in a north Phoenix mosque and in the social-media plaudits from violent extremists.

Courtney Lonergan, who met Simpson at that mosque about 10 years ago, said the north Phoenix resident was willing to die to defend his faith. It fits a pattern seen in social-media posts by violent jihadists and in research by experts who track them.

A string of Twitter posts before and after Simpson and fellow Phoenix resident Nadir Soofi were shot dead May 3 as they clutched automatic rifles in

Garland, Texas, link Simpson to Islamic State, or ISIS, militants halfway around the world. The messages encouraged him and praised him for attacking a group that lampooned the Prophet Mohammed in cartoons.

“There are other Elton Simpsons out there,” FBI Director James Comey told reporters in a press briefing Thursday.

“Few will move to violent action. How many are ideological sympathizers? Many,” said Clark McCauley, a Bryn Mawr College psychology professor, who has researched extremists and written a book called “Friction: How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us.”

But how many, and the scope of any connection such people may have with ISIS, remains murky. Less murky, but open to interpretation, is how much stock to place in ISIS’ claims of responsibility for the attack and in reports of homegrown U.S. recruits.

About 10 percent of U.S. Muslims told pollsters that suicide bombings can be justified in defense of Islam, said McCauley, whose research has been supported in part by the Department of Homeland Security. Half, he said, believe America’s war on terror is an assault on their religion.

What is clear is that ISIS runs an effective propaganda operation online, and its sophisticated use of social-media accounts connects in significant ways with supporters in the West, counterterrorism experts widely agree.

The influence of social media in ISIS inspiring attacks marks a departure from the methods of alQaida and traditional terrorist groups. Historically, such groups would recruit, train and indoctrinate their supporters, then support their operations.

In contrast, ISIS is less structured, and that, say experts, makes it harder to track and stop.

Unlike the hierarchy of al-Qaida, which relies on recognized leaders for tactical and strategic direction, ISIS provides the spiritual backdrop. Traditional Islam teaches that believers must take concrete actions in their lives, said William Braniff, executive director of the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism institute, or START, a consortium of international counterterrorism researchers based out of the University of Maryland.

“In ISIS, they believe that every foot soldier in Iraq and Syria should be venerated. There are 20,000 propagandists, recruiters and cell leaders all on Twitter and other social-media sites,” he said. “It’s much more intimate when you’re following somebody’s exploits on the battlefield.”

“Elton Simpson is a symptom of a social movement,” he said.

Before the attack

Leading up to the incident in Garland, Simpson used a Twitter account called “Sharia is Light,” authorities say.

He used Twitter to echo ISIS’ calls for violence, including threats against the Garland contest organizer, Pamela Geller, the New York Times has reported.

Ten days before the event in Garland, Mohammed Abdullahi Hassan, who left Minneapolis for Somalia as a teenager, tweeted a link to the event and called for jihadists to follow the example set by the Charlie Hebdo shootings, according to Minnesota Public Radio.

“The brothers from the Charlie hebdo attack did their part. It’s time for brothers in the #US to do their part,” Hassan tweeted.

Simpson tweeted a response to Hassan, who MPR reported had been indicted on terrorism charges in 2009, that if there were jihadists like that in the U.S., people would not draw Mohammed.

Their interaction continued days later when Simpson tweeted at Hassan to send him a direct message, NBC News said.

While not all devout Muslims consider images of the prophet to be an affront, Simpson fit the pattern of those who would. Lonergan, a 40-year-old convert to Islam who has attended the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix where Simpson worshipped, remembers him by his conversion name, Ibrahim. She’s known him for a decade and shares close friends, she said.

She recalled a man for whom the mosque was everything. A star highschool basketball player, he would shine in his role playing pickup games with kids who admired him, she said.

“He was one of those guys who would sleep at the mosque,” Lonergan said. “The fact that he felt personally insulted by somebody drawing a picture had to come from the ideological rhetoric coming out of the mosque.”

Mosque leaders have said repeatedly that they don’t preach radical views and they have kicked out extremists who use their building to recruit followers.

But Simpson’s closeness to the mosque increasingly cut him off from those outside, including some friends, Lonergan said.

“He was in a pattern of feeling isolated, a pattern of feeling marginalized by society,” she said.

So when he sought a Muslim wife, Simpson turned to the men in the mosque to find a suitable woman, and his way of earning their respect was to show his devotion to Islam by quoting teachings verbatim.

His life fits the patterns that researchers and counterterrorism experts see in extremists.

“Like all true believers, they may be attracted by a simple black-andwhite, us-versus-them belief system,” wrote Brian Jenkins, a senior adviser at the RAND Corporation, who advised former President Bill Clinton on terrorism issues.

“Poverty and oppression may explain why people in some countries embrace violent extremism,

See JIHAD, Page 13A