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Welcome to the watch floor. I'm Sarah Adams. Today I'm going to show you what an Al Qaeda sleeper looks like, who's based right here in America, how he was selected, how he was trained, how he moves covertly, and why. This lone wolf explanation keeps on failing us. We're going to focus on just one terrorist. Not because he acted alone, but because he didn't. Please meet Ollie Kalaf. Ollie did not need to commit an attack himself to matter. But he will if we don't stop him. He already played a key leadership role in an event already carried out by another terrorist. An event you know very well. That terrorist is Shamsuddin Jaber. He carried out the attack on New Year's Day in New Orleans on January 1, 2025. You know, we were told in the immediate aftermath of that attack that, oh, Shamsuddin Jaber was inspired and he was a lone wolf. But then just four months later, this interesting press piece came out that was all across the mainstream media and it said, oh, a terrorist operative belonging to ISIS got detained in Iraq for his role in the New Orleans attack. So him being a lone wolf was a false narrative from the start. And this is a really, really frustrating thing when you think of it, because then not only are we behind the curve, but we have not gone after Shamsuddin's cell since that happened. Right? That's been an entire year where this cell has been doing heavens knows what in our backyards. Now, when we talk about Ali, he was the US leadership layer of Shamsud Din's cell. So if you want to look at it this way, he would been like the US Based commander for Shamsuddin. And then he reports to the external operations commander or the overseas commander of the cell. And at the time, that commander's name was Abdullah Maki. He at the time was leading kind of the military commission, ISIS out of Iraq. He was killed last March. But that's kind of how the leadership structure goes. But we'll talk a little bit more about the cell as we move on. Now here's the part that's most concerning. Besides the fact that I just told you the cell was directed by the ISIS military commission. Ali wasn't chosen by isis. Ali was handpicked by. By the Emir of Al Qaeda. Yes, Hamza Bin Laden, the son of Osama bin Laden. This selection wasn't random. Ali was chosen because of bloodline access and trust. Ali is Somali and he's an active member of the terrorist organization Al Shabaab, which is a direct affiliate, of course. Of Al Qaeda. But it's not exactly what begins with him that's important. Okay. He is a second generation terrorist, which means there is someone who came before him that matters in Al Qaeda. So who is that person? That person is Sheikh Fahd. Mohammed Khalaf. So Ali is his nephew. If you don't know Fahd, he's a senior Al Shabaab commander. He sits on the Al Shabaab's Shura committee. And he's historically had a long but very quiet role in external operations on behalf of both Al Shabaab and Al Qaeda. He's not, though, just a battlefield commander. I want to walk through a little bit of his biography so you understand. So. So before he rose in the ranks of Al Shabaab, Fahd spent more than a decade in Sweden. What was he doing in Sweden? He was operating as an imam in Stockholm and Gothenburg. And in those places, he was focused on radicalizing young Muslims, raising funds to ship off to the global jihad, promoting terrorist ideology, mostly in the name of Al Qaeda, and then helping terrorists get get into foreign fighter pipelines to grow abroad to both train and commit attacks. So he has a long role in external operations. Right. That matters. Al Qaeda has always valued these leaders who don't just hate the west, but they understand how it works. They have lived there. They understand the people, they know how this society functions, and they are the best at figuring out, how do I get operatives to blend in. Fahd later returned to Somalia after his 10 years in Sweden, and he rose through the Islamic Courts union. If you don't know about this, it was something within the union. He took a role in pushing forward militarized education for children, essentially jihadist training for children. That was his big hook in this organization. So they would set up schooling programs, but in those programs, children would be trained to fight. I mean, that's a horrible thing, but it's really what happened. So then the ICU collapses, and he ended up becoming a top official within Al Shabaab. He's been one of the key leaders these last few years, leading the Al Shabaab operations in Putin. And then he was one of the key commanders that led, like, Al Shabaab's invasion into Ethiopia in 2022. So Foud has long been this key player for Al Qaeda, and that is why his nephew matters. But even though we spent a lot of time on the Somalia piece, Foud has long spoken publicly, even back to 2014, and he said jihad would expect extend beyond East Africa, first to neighboring countries like Ethiopia, and ultimately to the United States. Right. This is a decade long strategic intent of his. Right. That is not rhetoric. When these people say these things, we need to be listening. Now he's given up his own nephew. Heck, the Bin Ladens wanted his nephew. That kind of profile matters within these jihadist circles. So when we have a second generation terrorists, it's very important. First off, they're viewed as more reliable. They also are already ideologically stable. Right. They grew up with their fathers who taught them the importance of jihad. They're less likely to defect. Right. This is a family business. Right. This is blood. And they're a lot safer to deploy on sensitive missions overseas. They're not going to be the type that really has loose lips. This is in their blood. They have been trained since almost childhood to cover up their role within these activities. Ollie was not recruited. He was pre vetted by lineage. You know, from Hamza Bin Laden's perspective, Ali brought something rare. It was this family legacy like his that was aligned with promoting attacks against the West. It was a bloodline that had proven history over the decades. And it was a background that bridged Africa, Europe and then these global jihadist networks. This matters to because Al Qaeda doesn't want to just carry out an attack on their own. They want to bring in partners and other alliances. And while Ali is a member of Al Shabaab, Ali also has jointly operated with and worked on like coordinated operations with isis. Right. So ISIS trusts Ali as well. And he has worked under both Al Qaeda's operations and ISIS operations. And that makes him incredibly compelling as we move forward in this like united landscape. The terrorists have put together, they call it the United Resistance Council. It has a lot of different names, but it's just the fact that, hey, we have to find ways to work together against our enemy, especially like the west, us, Israel, et cetera. Like there needs to be a point where we put together, put away our differences and fight together. It's a really interesting initiative that's been discussed for many years. Even Osama bin Laden wanted to do in the past, but now, you know, his sons have really brought this to fruition. And you see that in these terrorists they're choosing. So when they chose Ali, you know, he was asked, hey, we want you to go be a commander in the United States for a future homeland attack directed by us. Right, the bin Ladens. And he said yes to that. So you have to understand the type of character this really is. Now we're going to go a little into the foreign fighter pipeline of how Ali actually got from Somalia and then ended up here in America. It was in 2022 that Ali was chosen for this assignment and his role in the homeland attack. As we've brought up previously, the plotting for the homeland attack started in December 2021. So it's 2022 and Ali needs to travel and go get his external operations training because you really can't get that well within camps in Somalia like Al Shabab's camps don't have a strong focus on that. So he's now going to travel to Afghanistan to train with Al Qaeda. So what he first does is he ends up traveling to the port of Karachi. From there he's facilitated by the Pakistani Taliban. So it was the tricky Taliban, Pakistan, you know, they pick him up in Karachi and then they move him to Afghanistan. Now this is where it gets even more interesting. I told you how he was chosen, right, by one of the sons of Bin Laden. When he got to Afghanistan, he had an official invitation as well. That invitation was from Hamza's brother in law, Suraj Shaheen Haqqani. Right. So he's the head of the Haqqani network, but he was also the Minister of Interior in Afghanistan. So Ali came in with all the bona fides, as you can imagine, to enter into Afghanistan. And he had immediate respect. You know, this matters because Afghanistan hasn't just become a safe haven again for Al Qaeda. It's really the base of global terrorism again. And we have to be honest about that. It's not just Al Qaeda being involved in it or the Taliban being involved in it. Right. Everybody's doing their piece to really cement this world and this training ground. And it's a really concerning thing. Now let's actually talk about the training he had. So Ali goes into like an Al Qaeda external operations training camp. The interesting thing is when he goes into that camp, the focus isn't exactly the homeland attack. There's a small piece of the cadre learning about the homeland attack. And then the largest percentage of fighters at the camp were being trained for the Syrian blitzkrieg. I mean, this is 2022. That doesn't occur till November 2024. It just shows you what how far in advance. They were already training operatives for Syria. So he goes into this camp and he learns a few important pieces of tradecraft. He first learns suicide operations. Not exactly because he is going to be a suicide bomber himself, but he is going to come to the United States and he's going to lead a number of different terrorist cells and some are going to have suicide bombers. As we talked about how at least Al Qaeda plan, plan their homeland attack, about 10% of the terrorists involved are trained as suicide bombers. And we have to keep that in mind because that is something the United States is not used to. Right, A suicide bomber. The other thing he was trained in, of course, is in different constructions of explosives. You need to know how to build these, you need to know how to make them work. You need to know how to make some bombs not even look like bombs. And then he was trained a lot in operational tradecraft. This was very important to Al Qaeda because over the years they've had so many terrorists who really gave up. Oh, I trained in Afghanistan. Here's who I trained with. Here's what we trained on when we did the mock attack, here's the building we attacked, like those type of things. And now Al Qaeda's like training them from the start. Like you are part of a covert operation. What does that mean? What do you need to know and how do you move forward safely in this environment so you don't give up operational planning? So this training, I mean, you heard the background on it. It's not indoctrination or ideological training. He didn't need that. He was from a terrorist family, right? He, he was already all the way in. This was purely deployment training. So his training program, those three kind of courses all together took six months. Okay, so then what happens after his training? He doesn't get sent back into obscurity right now he's going to be forward deployed, Right? Forward deployed to America because he was chosen to be involved in the attack here. So he first though, leaves Afghanistan and goes back home to Somalia. It's in Somalia where Al Qaeda hooks him up with the facilitation networks that are going to bring him illegally into the United States. So how that worked is he first went into Venezuela and criminal networks did his movements there. They brought him up obviously through Latin America into Mexico, where he was handed off there to Mexicans smuggling networks. He was then brought into the United States and he ended up settling in Louisiana. Right. That choice was actually not accidental. Louisiana offered certain things. One was port access. Another was those transnational criminals were already operating there. Obviously I'm talking about in this case, cartels. And so they were already based and cemented there, which made it a lot easier, as you can imagine, for Al Qaeda to, to get safe houses and different facilities. They needed to put the preparations in place for not only the homeland attack, but everything that goes along with it. Right. Some of the training and surveillance and even the bomb making that has to occur on U.S. soil, then there were already historic and existing terrorist social networks in the area. He can just come in and tap in to prior historic pipelines. And that really mattered because obviously one of his jobs here is he is going to run sleeper cells. So he has to be a little more forward leaning than most sleeper operatives because he is now managing this ecosystem within Louisiana. And then Louisiana was chosen because it had a lot lower scrutiny compared to the other border states, especially when it came to illegal alien. And of course he traveled here legally. So that was really important. Let's keep him under the radar, especially because he's really important to billing and managing our sleeper cells on U.S. soil. Right. This is like a kingpin level terrorist. Now in Louisiana, you know, there have been sightings of Ali. We know places he's operated in. The three key places are the Orleans Parish, St. Mary Parish and the Lafourche Parish. So these aren't just random locations. This kind of distributes his cell network in different areas. It helps them kind of stay away from exposure and definitely arrest, which they have done pretty successfully. And again, when I talk about these networks in that area, they are not just Al Shabaab, they're Al Qaeda and their isis. Right. That's an important point. You need to keep in mind this is a bigger cell structure than we've seen in the past. In the past, if Ali would be sent to United States, his cell would have only been Al Shabaab. That's not the case this time. This time there's members of HTS in his cell. There's Islamic State, Khorasan province members in his cell. There's Ansa, Asharia, Libya in his cell. And then of course isis, greater Al Qaeda. So keep that in mind. Now let's go back a little bit to when he crossed over the border illegally. So when Ali came to the United States, he did not use his real identity. This is a very consistent operational pattern that we've seen with a number of these terrorists who have come across. What they do is they come in with new documents. And so now they're under a different name, but on real documentation. And sometimes if they can blend well, they also come in under a different nationality. This creates a massive problem, as you can imagine, for US authorities. First they came in illegally. So there's no clean like paper or data trail. There's no visa file, there's no lawful entry record, there's no photograph and there's just no baseline to check. This individual against, heck, his identity isn't even real anyway if you wanted to try to do a background check on him. And then second, even when authorities know who they're looking for. So let's say we're looking for Ali. Well, they don't know the identity he's operating under in the United States. They don't know what nationality he's saying he is. Right. We have Libyans in the United States with Syrian passports. So you're not just looking for a person, you're looking for a person without a name, without documents, or real documents, without a fixed country of origin. So now you don't exactly have a partner country trying to help you. And then he's been here for a couple years now, so he's embedded in civilian life. Right. He has created a cover here in the United States with people who have no idea he's Al Shabaab. This isn't just an intelligence problem. This is a law enforcement problem. And it's why the immediate aftermath of a terrorist incident is so critical. After Shamsuddin Jaber carried out that attack in New Orleans, the priority shouldn't have been just the attacker. Right? We should have focused on the entire cell. We should have wrapped them up and fast. Ali should have been a top priority and put on the number one of the FBI most wanted list in January 2025. Every day that's passed has allowed him to potentially change identities again, shift locations, reorganize his network of sleeper cells, and then prepare additional operatives. He now saw one obviously go off and do an attack, which I don't think he followed the rules well. But regardless, they lost an attacker, you need to replace them. But also there was this immediate fear, you know, with Jobber that they're going to wrap up the rest of our cell. So to pad yourself against that, you needed to bring in a lot more terrorists and expand the network. So if some were captured, you had others to replace them them. So it actually helped grow the network. And this is how follow on attacks happen successfully. Right? Because if you just look at one terrorist and you don't look at all the interplay and all the pieces and all the connections around him, you're back trying to play catch up again. And that's never where you want to be. You don't want to deal with these problems after the fact. And remember, when we talk about Ali, he's really an intersection point, right? We got Al Shabaab, we got the Taliban, we got Al Qaeda, we got isis. Like he plays in all these neighborhoods. And in all these connections, even here on US Soil, I mean, this is a very dangerous operative. Now, I want to just step back for a minute, though, and talk about the external piece of this. So I already told you, the head of his cell structure was Abdullah Maki, who's dead. So Abdullah Maki had a deputy. And the deputy is really important because that deputy now is in charge of Ali and all his cells in the United States. And that deputy's name is Sheikh Khalid Al Shami. He's been in terrorism for a long time. He's a member of hts. He used to be Al Nusra Front. And his background is mostly training suicide bombers. The one thing, though, that matters the most is that he actually works for the Syrian Ministry of Defense. He runs a special operations unit in Homs for Syria's President, Abu Mohammed Al Jelani. Okay, so Ali's boss sits in Syria. So when we say Ali had Shamsuddin Jaber in his network, and then we know Shamsuddin Jaber carried out an attack, well, that attack then links back to the Syrian Ministry of Defense. And our government didn't even treat that attack as from a nation state. I mean, that's a very scary thing. Instead, they completely dismissed the whole Syria, Iraq, and even Afghanistan angles to this network. And that's a very dangerous thing to do. So now you know, at least Shamsuddin Jaber was not a lone wolf. You know, he acted within a network. Again, he didn't exactly follow all the rules. But everyone within that network then has some complicity. So Ali didn't, you know, pull the trigger per se, but he is directly connected to this attack. Right? Can be arrested on charges for that attack, and we can thwart some of his future activities if we charge him for his involvement in New Orleans. I mean, all the pieces are in place to do this properly. Now, today was really about talking about the enemy, but showing you that even when they're silent, they're deadly. Right, because you've never heard of Ali. These attackers like him. They're trained to blend in. They work normal jobs, they socialize normally. They don't go around broadcasting their intent and saying, hey, I'm going to do a terrorist attack in the United States one day. They seem like any other immigrant to this country. And so it's really important that you're looking for behavior that's specific, credible and concerning in that you're reporting that, you know, Ali is not an anomaly. If you actually look at his background, especially as a second generation jihadist, it's literally a template, right? He has multi group alignment. He has foreign training, he trained in Afghanistan. He has connections to these cartels and criminal smuggling routes. He has access to false identities. And then he's embedded within this greater US sleeper cell structure. You know, that has everybody concerned. I mean, we had, you know, NCTC Director Joe Kent tell us there's 18,000 Islamist terrorists that they know of in this country. So if they don't even know about ali, they have 18,001, right? I mean, this is a huge number when we talk about it. You know, Ali is already personally tied to an attack on U.S. soil. And he's running sleeper cell networks who plan to do others. He came here with a family legacy from his uncle of targeting the West. And we have to remember that legacy doesn't just disappear. It evolves. And now it's on the onus of the second generation to prove, hey, we're not as good as our forefathers. We're better. And that's what Ali's here to do. So if you think you see him, we'll show his picture again. Please report any sightings to law enforcement. Make sure you do to your local, your county, your state, and then also federal law enforcement. Public awareness matters. When you're silent about these terrorists. That's how they survive and they thrive. And that's when surprises happen. I'm Sarah Adams, and this was the watch floor.