Guled Omar: Trial, 35-Year Sentence, and Appeal

Guled Ali Omar is a Somali-American man from Minneapolis who is serving 35 years in federal prison for leading a group of young Twin Cities men who conspired to travel to Syria and fight for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. A federal jury convicted him on June 3, 2016, on five counts, including conspiracy to commit murder outside the United States and conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. The Guled Omar ISIS case was, at the time, the largest federal ISIS conspiracy prosecution in the country. Omar is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, with a scheduled release date of March 25, 2045.¹

What Omar Was Accused of Doing

Prosecutors described Omar as the leader of a cell of nine young men from the Twin Cities who plotted between 2014 and April 2015 to reach Syria and join ISIL. He organized regular meetings where members watched ISIL propaganda, recruited others, and set departure dates. He communicated with a self-described ISIL member in Turkey known as “Antar” about travel routes into Syria.²

Omar made three attempts to leave the country. In August 2012 he tried to fly to Nairobi, Kenya, and was stopped by airport security.¹ In May 2014 he tried to reach Syria by crossing the U.S.–Mexico border near San Diego, but family members intervened. In November 2014 he attempted to fly from Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport to San Diego, planning to cross into Mexico and continue on to Syria. FBI agents intercepted him before he could board. He had planned to fund that trip with federal financial aid intended for college.³

Prosecutors also alleged Omar conspired to build a smuggling route from Mexico into the United States that could later be used to facilitate ISIS attacks, and that he passed contact information for the Turkey-based ISIL member to co-conspirators.² Omar was 19 at the time of his arrest. He had grown up in Minneapolis in a family of 13 children after arriving from a Kenyan refugee camp at age two, and his older brother Ahmed had left for Somalia in late 2007 to join al-Shabaab.⁴

How the FBI Built the Case

The investigation was run by an FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force and turned on a paid confidential informant, Abdirahman Bashir, a 20-year-old Somali-American who had four cousins killed after they joined ISIL in Syria. Bashir began cooperating in late 2014 and, for roughly four months in early 2015, wore a hidden microphone to record the defendants at homes, mosques, malls, and in cars. The FBI paid him more than $100,000 for his work.⁵

Bashir also set up a sting. He told the group he had a San Diego contact, “Miguel,” who could produce fake passports. Miguel was an undercover FBI agent. In April 2015, two of the co-defendants drove with Bashir from Minnesota to San Diego, bought the fake passports at a warehouse, and were arrested on the spot. Omar and the rest of the cell were arrested in the Twin Cities on April 18 and 19, 2015.¹ Defense attorneys argued at trial that Bashir was “heavily paid and influenced by the government, and very well coached,” and that he had entrapped the defendants. Bashir was never charged, despite admitting to perjury and to his own earlier attempt to join ISIL.⁵

The Trial and Verdict

The case was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota as No. 0:15-cr-00049 before Senior U.S. District Judge Michael J. Davis.⁶ A second superseding indictment on October 21, 2015, added the conspiracy to commit murder outside the United States charge, which carried a potential life sentence.⁷

Six of the nine defendants pleaded guilty and cooperated. Omar, Mohamed Abdihamid Farah, and Abdirahman Yasin Daud went to trial together on May 9, 2016. The trial lasted about three weeks. Prosecutors called 26 witnesses and leaned heavily on Bashir’s recordings. In one, Omar spoke of wanting to be a “tank-hunter” for ISIL and of killing Turkish guards at the Syrian border.⁴ Cooperating witness Abdullahi Yusuf testified that Omar recruited him and that the defendants understood joining ISIL meant “killing people.”⁸ Omar took the stand and told jurors he had been motivated by a desire for justice and by empathy for Syrian civilians, denying he was drawn to violence.

On June 3, 2016, the jury convicted all three defendants. Omar was found guilty on five counts:²

Conspiracy to commit murder outside the United States
Conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization
Two counts of attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization
Attempted financial aid fraud

Why Omar Got 35 Years

Judge Davis sentenced all nine defendants on November 16, 2016, sorting them by their level of cooperation. Omar received the longest sentence: 420 months, or 35 years, followed by lifetime supervised release.³ The presentence report had calculated a guidelines range of life imprisonment, and Davis varied downward.⁸ Co-defendants Farah and Daud, who also went to trial, each received 30 years.⁹

Davis pointed to Omar’s role as leader and to what the judge described as his continuing lack of candor. Told by Omar, “I always had energy for justice as a young man but I lost my way,”¹ Davis called Omar “manipulative” and “deceitful” and said, “Everything you have said here, I don’t believe.”⁴

The six cooperating defendants received substantially lighter sentences:¹⁰

Abdullahi Yusuf: time served with 20 years of supervised release
Abdirizak Warsame: 30 months with 20 years of supervised release
Zacharia Abdurahman: 10 years
Adnan Farah: 10 years
Hanad Musse: 10 years
Hamza Ahmed: 15 years

Before sentencing, Davis brought in Daniel Koehler of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-radicalization Studies to conduct individual risk assessments of the defendants who had pleaded guilty. That program did not apply to Omar, who went to trial. Davis said it was “not an alternative to incarceration.”¹¹

The Appeal

Omar, Farah, and Daud appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. They argued that the jury instruction on conspiracy to commit murder was defective because it did not require a “specific intent to kill”; that the trial court wrongly refused to instruct the jury on “combatant immunity” and “defense of others,” premised on protecting Syrian civilians from the Assad regime; and that their sentences were unreasonably harsh compared with those of the cooperating defendants.⁸

On August 10, 2018, a three-judge panel led by Judge Raymond Gruender affirmed the convictions and sentences. The court held that any imperfection in the murder instruction was “harmless beyond a reasonable doubt” given “overwhelming evidence” the defendants intended to fight and kill for ISIL.¹² On the defense-of-others theory, Gruender wrote that the defendants “never discussed killing in the context of defending individual Syrian civilians who faced an immediate and specific threat.” The panel also held that the sentences were “well below” the possible life terms and that the statutory concern with sentencing disparity looks to similar defendants nationally, not to co-conspirators in the same case who cooperated with the government.⁸

Post-Conviction Motion

In late December 2019, Omar filed a post-conviction motion to vacate or reduce his sentence, arguing that his trial attorney, Glenn Bruder, had been constitutionally ineffective. The motion, filed by attorneys James V. Ventura and C. Justin Brown, claimed Bruder failed to negotiate a plea deal in 2016 and failed to sequester family members who could have offered character testimony.¹³

Where Omar Is Now

Omar is held at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. His scheduled release date is March 25, 2045, at which point he would begin lifetime supervised release.¹

1
Counter Extremism Project. Guled Ali Omar
2
U.S. Department of Justice. Jury Trial Results in Conviction of Three Minnesotans
3
U.S. Department of Justice. Nine Twin Cities Men Sentenced for Providing Material Support to ISIL
4
MPR News. Path to ISIS: Minnesota’s Guled Omar
5
The Guardian. Somali Americans on Trial for ISIS Plot
6
GovInfo. United States v. Omar, 0:15-cr-00049
7
FBI. Grand Jury Votes Second Superseding Indictment
8
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. United States v. Farah
9
CBS News Minnesota. Appeals Court Upholds Terror Convictions
10
NBC News. Sentences in Minnesota ISIS Case Run From Time Served to 35 Years
11
MPR News. Deradicalization Expert Finishes Testimony in Minnesota ISIS Case
12
Star Tribune. Appeals Court Upholds Sentences for Three Twin Cities Men in ISIS Case
13
Sahan Journal. Minnesotan Sentenced to 35 Years in ISIS Case Says He Didn’t Get the Chance to Plead Guilty