The Exclusive

December 9, 2019·25 min·2 clips

Omar Hammami, a former Alabama soccer player, now raps jihadist propaganda from Somalia's front lines.

Omar Hamami was already a contradiction. The narration goes back to the public version of him: normal Alabama kid, Baptist church, soccer team, prom days, then terrorist. That story never quite holds. Prosecutors call him the new face of terror, but the stranger image keeps pulling focus: Omar rapping about jihad from the front lines. Then the episode closes in. Omar says he is in danger, though the clues he says are hidden in his book stay just out of reach. The reporter believes him anyway. What he cannot tell is whether Omar wants out of whatever life he has in Somalia. Omar rejects turning himself in. His email answer is blunt and defiant: he did not leave America for a get-out-of-jail-free card into humiliation and torture. The reporter still thinks like television. A face-to-face interview in the empty house where Omar is hiding would make the story visible in a way messages cannot. Omar calls that naive. He says even he, the supposed poster boy, cannot travel without being hassled by al-Shabab. Every workaround dies fast. No Skype, no recorded video, no audio, and even meeting the reporter could put him in more danger. The fear is pointed. Omar thinks people are looking for excuses to get him out of the way, which the narration plainly takes to mean kill him. That leaves the reporter in a bad place: talking to someone who may be killed, with almost no clean way to check the truth. The closing voices make Omar harder to pin down. Memories of a boy who needed recognition sit beside his own question about whether he is a madman or a lost child.

As heard by us

A tense reporting chase that treats uncertainty as part of the story.

American Jihadi turns Omar Hammami into more than a neat headline. The episode stays with the reporting process itself, with Christoph Putzel trying to get a face-to-face conversation while Omar answers only through emails, clues, and warnings.

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Why you'd press play

You want a tense, face-to-face chase that keeps slipping back behind the screen.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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