Abdiwali Nur

Abdiwali Nur, often called Abdi Nur (born April 1, 1994), is a Somali-American former resident of Minnesota who joined the Islamic of State of Iraq and the Levant in May 2014 and was later charged in absentia with conspiring to aid ISIL. After arriving in ISIL territory he kept in touch with his friends back in Minnesota and inspired them to try to travel to Syria also, although only two actually made it there. Nur is believed to have died fighting for ISIL, but this has not been confirmed.

Background and joining ISIL Nur was a resident of Minnesota, born of Somali immigrant parents. He attended a community college outside Minneapolis and spoke of becoming a lawyer someday. In the months before his disappearance, he had become much more religious and told his family they should pray more and dress in Islamic clothing, and he also began talking about jihad. These changes coincided with the start of his attendance at a different mosque, the Al Farooq Youth and Family Center in Bloomington, Minnesota. Nur had a Twitter account and began posting more religious content around that time. In late March 2014 he posted a quote from jihadist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. On April 2, the day after his twentieth birthday, he wrote on Twitter, "If the sky would be proud of the existence of the stars, the land should be proud of the existence of the Mujahideen."

His sister reported him missing to the Minneapolis police on May 30. She also went to confront Nur's associates at the Bloomington mosque. He was also banned from a mosque in Minneapolis. Lawyer and terrorism expert Peter Erlinder described him as “like a pied piper.” Meshal is on the No Fly List but has never been charged with a crime. He has sued the U.S. government multiple times, claiming he is an innocent man wrongly targeted by federal authorities.

In November 2014, Nur and another Minnesota man he knew, 18-year-old Abdullahi Yusuf, were charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. Yusuf also tried to fly to Turkey to join ISIL on May 28, 2014, but was stopped at the airport. Authorities determined the car that dropped him off at the airport had been driven by Nur, and started looking for Nur on May 29, only to discover he had left the country that same day. The FBI investigated the possibility that an ISIL recruiter gave both Yusuf and Nur the money for their plane tickets, since neither man had a job or access to the necessary funds. In April, another six Minnesota men between 19 and 21 years old, all in Nur's friend group, were charged with trying to join ISIL: Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman, Abdirahman Yasin Daud, Adnan Farah, Mohamed Abdihamid Farah, Hanad Mustafe Musse and Guled Ali Omar. In December, an eighth man was charged: Abdirizak Mohamed Warsame. Authorities stated all the men had been recruited online by Nur.

Omar had a brother who had joined the Somali terror group Al-Shabaab. Omar and two other people tried to join ISIL via Mexico in May 2014, but the plan went nowhere as Omar's family stopped him from traveling. Yusuf Jama, one of the people who tried to leave with him, was able to leave on June 9, 2014, and is believed to have been killed in December. Omar made a second attempt to join ISIL on his own in November 2014, but was stopped at the airport. Mohamed Farah also made multiple attempts to join ISIL. He and Ahmed tried to fly out together, but were prevented from boarding their flights.

In August 2016, a ninth man, Mohamed Amiin Ali Roble, was charged with joining ISIL in 2015, funding his trip with money he'd gotten from a legal settlement. Roble had flown to Istanbul and then traveled to Syria in December 2014. He was supposed to be back by June 2015, but he never returned. While in Turkey he withdrew $47,000 from his bank accounts and used the money to support ISIL. Roble is Nur's nephew.

Yusuf testified against the other men at their trials. He mentioned Meshal and said that up to 30 young men, including many of the defendants, would have meetings with him at mosques and at his home. He said Nur was closest to him, and that Meshal's religious beliefs were so radical that the men he was meeting with initially suspected he was working with law enforcement as an agent provocateur and trying to entrap them. Ahmed was sentenced to 15 years in prison (later reduced to 10), Adnan Farah to 10 years in prison, Musse to 10 years in prison, Omar to 35 years in prison, and Mohamed Farah and Daud to 30 years in prison each.

In November 2017, Yusuf was released from the halfway house and moved back in with his parents. In 2018, Warsame was released from prison and sent to a re-entry center, and he was released to the custody of his family in the summer of 2019.

Nur is believed to have been killed in Syria, but details as to the circumstances of his death are unknown.