Somalia-born Abdul Razak Ali Artan entered the United States with his mother and seven siblings in June 2014, about one year after applying for refugee status in a Pakistani refugee camp, where the family had been living for about seven years. He was about 18 years old when the family arrived in the United States and settled in Columbus, Ohio. During the period of 2013-June 2014, when the family was still in Pakistan and its refugee status application was under review, USCIS would have had ample time to conduct security vetting, interviews, and any necessary investigation.
Instead, some two-and-a-half years after the family’s arrival as refugees, on November 28, 2016, a campus police officer shot and killed Artan after Artan used a Honda Civic and a butcher knife to attack fellow students, injuring 11, on the Ohio State University campus.
FBI officials later decided Artan was motivated by the ideology of violent jihadism. Court records and reporting offer no timeline of precisely when Artan radicalized, but a reasonable presumption is that he was already radicalized in the Pakistani camp. Immediately following the attack, ISIS issued a statement describing Artan as a “soldier”. Facebook postings prior to the attack showed Artan was angry over the Burmese military government reprisals against militant Rohinga Muslims in October 2016, the month before Artan's attack. Investigators looked into a message posted on Facebook by Artan that contained inflammatory statements about being “sick and tired” of seeing Muslims killed and reaching a “boiling point”, a law enforcement source said.
“Stop the killing of the Muslims in Burma,” Artan said in the Facebook post, in which he also called Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born radical cleric linked to al-Qaeda’s Yemen franchise, “a hero”.
Still, while it was unclear whether USCIS refugee application vetting in Pakistan might have discovered Artan’s radicalization in 2013-or 2014, a post-attack Senate Judiciary Committee investigation under the leadership of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) concluded that security screeners in Pakistan did not properly vet Artan while he was overseas and under consideration for the refugee grant during 2013.
According to a letter to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson summarizing the committee’s findings, Sen. Grassley wrote that Artan’s mother’s claims that she feared persecution from the Somali terrorist group al-Shabbab should have triggered deeper questioning of her older children, including Artan. Grassley wrote that his investigation found such questioning never happened, citing immigration records his committee obtained from a whistleblower.
“Further questioning could have eliminated the possibility that the asylees had dubious ties to the terrorist group and could have allowed for more robust vetting and data collection,” Grassley wrote. “However, although common in these cases, no additional questioning was conducted.”