Saado Ali Warsame

2. Saado Ali Warsame was born in Somalia in 1950. By the time she was a teenager, Ms. Warsame had become famous throughout Somalia for her singing and especially her songs about human rights and social justice. She stood up to tyranny, corruption, injustice and nepotism during Siad Barre’s military regime with songs and poetry. Her famous song "Land Cruiser,” which ridiculed the military junta for exchanging donations of corn for expensive cars, led to Ms. Warsame’s arrest and is largely credited for taking down the Barre regime. She was one of the few Somali female musicians to go on stage without covering her

Case 1:15-cv-09623 Document 1 Filed 12/09/15 Page 3 of 24 Clickhere to download the Case Court file of Newyork

head and she sometimes wore pants, which is unusual for women in Somalia.

the United States. She lived in New York, where her son Harbi was born, and then moved to Minneapolis. She returned to her homeland of Somalia in 2012 to run for office, and was elected to the Somali Federal Parliament, representing northeastern Puntland.

4. Dahabshiil has for some time been closely associated with al-Shabaab, and it is a longtime financial supporter of the group and its terrorist activities. For example, according to a United Nations report, Dahabshiil financed "a large scale assassination operation” in Mogadishu by the Amniyat, al-Shabaab’s elite intelligence unit, which involved a "wave of assassinations of national intelligence officers and members of the Federal parliament.”1

5. One of Ms. Warsame’s better known songs was a protest against Dahabshiil and its support of al-Shabaab. The song, called "Dhiigshiil ha dhigan,” contains a play on words. The name of the defendant, "Dahabshiil,” means "gold smelter.” Ms. Warsame changed this to "Dhiigshiil,” which means "blood smelter.” The translation of the title is "Don’t Do Business With The Blood Smelter.” The lyrics she sang include these:

They call him "Blood Smelter” to manipulate the public
He has lot of money to make sure Mogadishu will never be at peace He is the enemy of Somalia
Somalis, do not deposit your money to his banks
He is real tribalism; he is destroying our land
The money he is making from us will kill our children
Somalis, do not deposit your money to his banks

1 Report of the Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea pursuant to Security Council resolution 2060 (2012): Somalia, available at: http://repository.un.org/bitstream/handle/11176/ 24077/S_2013_413-EN.pdf (last checked December 1, 2015).

The music video for this song includes images of Ms. Warsame singing.

It also includes images of protesters holding a sign that reads "Dhiigshiil Stop Genocide,” with a photograph of Ms. Warsame inset on the screen.

Ms. Warsame’s music video also includes a graphic showing the defendants’ name, "Dahabshiil,” dripping with blood, under an assault rifle, with the word "Dhiigshiil” (blood smelter) underneath.

6. In response to her song, "Don’t Do Business With The Blood Smelter,” Dahabshiil placed a multi-million dollar bounty on Ms. Warsame’s life.

7. On July 23, 2014, during the holy month of Ramadan, Ms. Warsame was murdered by two al-Shabaab operatives. She was being driven to her hotel in Mogadishu’s Hodan district when two gunmen pulled up to her car in a drive-by attack and opened fire. Ms. Warsame and her driver were both killed.

8. Abdulaziz Abu Musab, the spokesman for al-Shabaab’s military operations, claimed responsibility for the assassination of Ms. Warsame on behalf of al-Shabaab. Two al- Shabaab operatives – Shu’ayb Ibrahim Mahdi, 27 and Farah Ali Abdi, 30 – were convicted of killing Ms. Warsame by a Somali court. They were sentenced to death and executed in May 2015.

Shu’ayb Ibrahim Mahdi and Farah Ali Abdi, the al-Shabaab Operatives Who Killed Saado Ali Warsame

9. Ms. Warsame’s son, Harbi Hussein, is a citizen of the United States domiciled in the State of Minnesota. He brings this lawsuit on behalf of himself and as a representative of the estate of his mother Saado Ali Warsame, also a U.S. citizen. The murder of his mother by international terrorists has caused him severe mental anguish, extreme emotional pain and suffering, and the loss of his mother’s society, companionship, comfort, advice and counsel. He alleges that Dahabshiil’s provision of material support to al-Shabaab, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, constitutes an act of international terrorism in violation of 18 U.S.C.
§§ 2339A-2339C, for which he seeks treble damages under 18 U.S.C. § 2333(a). 

Who is Karima Bennoune ?

Karima Bennoune is a professor of international law at the University of California–Davis School of Law. She grew up in Algeria and the United States and now lives in northern California.

The topic of Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here is a very personal one for her. Mahfoud Bennoune, her father, was an outspoken professor at the University of Algiers who faced death threats during the 1990s, but continued speaking out against fundamentalism and terrorism. In writing this book, Karima set out to meet people who are today doing what her father did back then, to try to garner for them greater international support than Algerian democrats received during the 1990s.

She graduated from a joint program in law and Middle Eastern and North African studies at the University of Michigan, earning a J.D. cum laude from the law school and an M.A. from the Rackham Graduate School, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies.

In 1995, she served as a Center for Women’s Global Leadership delegate to the NGO Forum at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing where she provided legal advice to the Tribunal for Global Accountability for Violations of Women’s Human Rights. From 1995 until 1999 she was based in London as a legal adviser at Amnesty International.

She came to UC Davis from Rutgers School of Law – Newark where she was Professor of Law and Arthur L. Dickson Scholar, and taught international law and human rights for ten years. In 2011, she was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award at Rutgers University–Newark. Professor Bennoune has also been a visiting scholar and visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School where she won the L. Hart Wright Award for Excellence in teaching.

Her publications have appeared in many leading academic journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the Berkeley Journal of International Law, the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, the European Journal of International Law, and the Michigan Journal of International Law. They have been widely cited, including on Slate, in the Nation magazine, the Dallas Morning News, and the Christian Science Monitor, as well as by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and the UN Special Rapporteur on protecting human rights while countering terrorism. Her article, "Terror/Torture,” was designated one of the top 10 global security law review articles of 2008 by Oxford University Press.

Bennoune’s topical writing has been published by the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Guardian Comment is Free, the website of Al Jazeera English, The Nation, Reuters, Open Democracy and the Huffington Post.

She has lectured around the world, including at the Harvard Law School, NYU School of Law, UC-Berkeley School of Law, the University of Chicago Law School, the University of Virginia School of Law, the Yale Law School, UCLA Law School,  the Loyola University Marymount Center for Religion and Culture, the International Peace Institute, the International Humanitarian Law Dialogs,  Aloud: Library Foundation of Los Angeles, the Southern Festival of Books, and the Texas Book Festival in the U.S., as well as for the UN Department of Political Affairs, the University of London, the London School of Economics, the University of Oslo, the Shia Ismaili Council for Edmonton and the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, the University of Alberta, the European Foundation for Democracy,the National Conference of Tunisian Intellectuals against Terrorism, the Fondation Chokri Belaid, the 19th Salon International du livre d’Alger,  the El Khabar Forum, the Feminist Leadership Institute in Senegal, CODESRIA (The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa), at TEDxExeter, the Sydney Writer’s Festival, the Australian National University and the Second Istanbul Conference on Democracy and Global Security.

In 2015, Bennoune taught in the summer program in international human rights law at Oxford University, organized jointly by Oxford’s Human Rights Program and the George Washington University School of Law.

She has been invited to lecture about Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here in Algeria, Australia, Belgium, Egypt, France, Italy, Kenya, Poland, Tunisia, Turkey, Senegal, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, as well as around the United States by Muslims for Progressive Values, the Women’s Learning Partnership and the Levantine Cultural Center (The Markaz), the World Affairs Councils of Austin, Houston, Maine, New Hampshire and Sacramento, the University of Georgia, the University of Michigan and at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Making frequent media appearances, Bennoune has been a guest on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, as well as on MSNBC, Fox Business News, National Public Radio, Pacifica Radio, Sirius Radio, the Australian Broadcasting Service, BBC Radio 4, CBC-Radio, HuffPost Live, and the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour, and has been interviewed by U.S. News and World Report, the Christian Science Monitor, NBC.com, the International Herald Tribune, the Edmonton Journal, Deutsche Welle, and the Guardian..

In 2007, Professor Bennoune became the first Arab-American to win the Derrick Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools Section on Minority Groups. She has served as a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law and on the board of directors of Amnesty International USA. Currently, she sits on the Board of the Network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws and on the Scholar Advisory Board of Muslims for Progressive Values.

Karima Bennoune has also been a consultant on human rights issues for the International Council on Human Rights Policy, the Soros Foundation, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, and for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Her human rights field missions have included Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Fiji, Lebanon, Pakistan, South Korea, southern Thailand, and Tunisia. In 2009-2010 she was one of a group of international experts assembled by Leiden University, under the auspices of the Dutch Foreign Ministry, to develop a new set of policy recommendations on counter-terrorism and international law. In October 2011, she volunteered as an election observer during the Tunisian constituent assembly elections with Gender Concerns International.  In 2015, she served as an expert at the African regional summit on countering violent extremism, held in Nairobi.

In 2014, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for non-fiction. It was also selected as the best social science book of 2013 by the American Library Association’s Booklist.  The first TED talk based on the book—"When People of Muslim Heritage Confront Fundamentalism”—has garnered over 1.3 million views.