The Matrix

December 2, 2019·24 min·2 clips

A white American in camouflage speaks for Al-Shabaab in a 2007 video, hiding his face but not his identity from his Alabama hometown.

The tape opens in uncertainty. A thin man sits in a Somali field, camouflaged, with a grenade on his pocket and a green scarf over most of his face, speaking for Al-Shabaab. Back in Alabama, people recognize him. The shock is not only that he seems to be American. It is that they know him as Omar Hammami. The old version of him suddenly stops making sense. Bernie remembers the boy who helped him learn to pray, and he cannot fit that memory beside innocent people being hurt. Then another video makes things worse. Omar appears in footage tied to an ambush, talking about small-arms fire and calling martyrdom a victory. Bernie watches his friend through a brutal new lens. With the sound off, the footage almost looks like the same magnetic high school kid, just dressed for another life. The host follows the route anyway. He spends four months with Bernie, visits their high school and Walmart, and goes to Toronto to see where Omar and Bernie once lived. Egypt is where the split happens. Bernie comes back to the United States, while Omar disappears and later surfaces in Somalia with Al-Shabaab. The reporting had already led to a Current TV account, but the host admits that mapping the route from Alabama to Canada, Egypt, and Somalia still did not answer the harder question. He wanted the reason under the itinerary. Finding Omar looked impossible, especially when even U.S. intelligence did not seem able to locate him. Then the story flips. Two years later, the host learns he did not need to find Omar because Omar needed to find him. The ending tightens the danger. Omar, now afraid for his life, has contacted documentarian Christoph Putzel, and his parents are about to learn that the contact is happening. The moral distance stays uncomfortable. A kid raised in Alabama, around McDonald's and Chick-fil-A's, has become known as an Islamic terrorist, and the episode does not let that change feel neat.

As heard by us

A careful hometown-to-war story that leaves room for doubt.

The episode starts with an Al Jazeera broadcast from 2007 and pulls it back into Daphne, Alabama, where people who knew Omar Hammami are left trying to square the boy they remember with the militant on screen.

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Why you'd press play

For when one propaganda video sends you back through a whole life.

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