San Diego mosque attack: Muslim community mourns, seeks safety after hate crime

A gunman opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego on Monday, killing a security guard, a mosque store manager, and a man who ran to help. The attack, which targeted a school with about 140 children and 20 staff, is being investigated as a hate crime.

Teacher’s assistant Iman Khatib was administering tests in an elementary school classroom inside the center when she heard gunfire. She locked the door, turned off the lights, silenced her phone and walkie-talkie, and crawled under a desk with a co-worker.

Nearby, preschoolers aged three and four followed lockdown protocols, remaining silent and hiding in corners. Outside, first-grade students were at recess when the first shot rang out.

“We were so grateful that we made it out alive,” Khatib said two days later. “None of us are sleeping. We don’t want to relive the things that we saw.”

During evacuation, staff and students passed the body of security guard Amin Abdullah, who lay in front of the mosque. Abdullah had radioed a lockdown, returned fire, and prevented the two teenage gunmen from reaching the children and staff.

Also killed were Mansour Kaziha, manager of the mosque store, and Nader Awad, who ran from across the street after hearing shots; his wife is a kindergarten teacher at the school.

At a press conference the day after the attack, Abdullah’s daughter Hawaa stood before cameras with her siblings. “My dad was my role model and my best friend,” she said.

She noted she had just received her teaching credentials last week, but her father could not attend because he was working. “He was even afraid to go take meal breaks because he was afraid something would happen if he stepped away from the Islamic center,” she said through tears.

Abdullah, a father of eight who converted to Islam, had been the first face seen at the center for years. His dedication reflected the ethos of the Islamic Center of San Diego (ICSD), one of the most deliberately welcoming Muslim institutions in the country.

“It’s a very, very close-knit, welcoming community,” said Khatib. “Everybody that has come to ICSD has felt at home here.”

The ICSD is the largest mosque in San Diego County, serving thousands of congregants from more than a dozen nationalities. It runs a preschool through third-grade school, holds five daily prayers, and has spent two decades building an extensive interfaith network.

The mosque broke ground in 1986 in Clairemont, a working-class neighborhood, and opened three years later as Masjid Abi Bakr Al Siddiq. In 1991, during Gulf War mobilization, a defective bomb was planted there; no one was hurt.

Imam Taha Hassane arrived from Algeria in 2001, weeks before the September 11 attacks. Three years later he led a congregation under the shadow of the worst terrorist attack on US soil. His response was to open doors wider.

“We have failed to identify ourselves, to introduce ourselves to our neighbors,” Hassane told NPR on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. “We have failed to build strong bridges of understanding and respect.”

He began hosting interfaith meetings, joined civic groups, served on the San Diego police department’s Muslim American advisory board, and joined the district attorney’s interfaith advisory board. Friday sermons are conducted in English to serve a global congregation.

On the morning of the shooting, a group of non-Muslims was inside the center on a tour learning about Islam.

“American Muslim institutions almost uniformly aspire to openness, to be a good neighbor, connecting with others, working on the common good, and it is part of the inheritance of Muslims building religious life inside a pluralist society,” said Hatem Albazian, director of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at UC Berkeley. “But very few have committed to it as completely, as publicly, and for as long as ICSD.”

Albazian has known Hassane and visited the center many times. “The doors are literally unlocked between prayers. These are deliberate choices sustained over decades, in the face of considerable institutional and increasing societal pressure to retreat behind security perimeters.”

Pressure intensified sharply after October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people, triggering an Israeli military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians – a toll advocates say is likely undercounted – and a wave of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian sentiment in the US.

Imam Hassane reported students being bullied at school because of their names or because they were Muslim or Palestinian. In 2023, more than 50 anti-Muslim fliers were posted on trees and fencing across the campus. Hassane and his family faced sustained criticism over social media posts about the Gaza war.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recorded 8,683 anti-Muslim complaints in 2025 – the highest annual total since tracking began in 1996. After Monday’s attack, investigators found hate speech on one of the weapons and racial ideology in a suicide note.

Albazian, who has documented Islamophobia for decades, said the threat has changed since the post-9/11 years. Then, backlash was largely government-driven – watchlists, surveillance, immigration enforcement. Street-level violence was real but scattered, and officials stayed rhetorically distant from vigilantes.

“The rhetoric that was previously confined to the fringe – that Islam is not a religion, that Muslims are a civilizational threat, that mosques are forward operating bases – is now spoken openly from the floor of Congress,” he said. The internet has made radicalization faster: two teenagers exchanged manifestos and turned ideology into a mass shooting.

When San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria stepped to the podium at Monday’s press conference, a woman in the crowd interrupted. “This is a direct result of your leadership,” she shouted. “Our Muslim brothers and sisters have been talking to you for how long?”

The outburst reflected frustration after Gloria declared after October 7: “San Diego stands with the people of Israel” – a statement Muslim advocates said ignored rising Islamophobia and Palestinian civilian deaths.

“In the last few days, other centers have received threatening voicemails and hate messages,” said Tazheen Nizam, executive director of CAIR San Diego. “There are 22 other mosques in San Diego county. It is imperative for elected officials to come forward – not just with the physical aspect of security, but the human and the manpower aspect as well.”

Nizam raised concerns about federal security funding, noting that San Diego mosques received no money in the last cycle of the Department of Homeland Security’s grant program. In a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin after the shooting, CAIR called for briefings on steps to protect mosques. “The agencies owe us this support,” Nizam said. “I’m demanding what is rightfully mine. As a taxpayer, these services are ensured to us.”

Two days after the shooting, staff returned to the mosque in pairs to retrieve personal items left behind. They walked through broken doors and past scattered school supplies. Children’s backpacks and lunchboxes remained on the playground.

Afterward, staff gathered at the home of the kindergarten teacher – whose husband was killed in the parking lot – and sat together on her couch. Amin Abdullah’s sister, a police officer who had worked security at the mosque, was also there. The staff thanked her for her family’s sacrifice.

“Being together was exactly what we needed,” Khatib said. “We didn’t realize it until we were just hugging each other.”

That night, hundreds gathered at Lindbergh neighborhood park for an interfaith vigil organized by ICSD and CAIR San Diego. Faith leaders, Imam Hassane, and elected officials honored the three men.

“Hate and bigotry arise from ignorance,” said Nizam, a longtime congregation member. “Come to an Islamic center. Learn about Muslims. We’re trying to put a roof over our heads, send our kids to school. We’re just your neighbors.”

On Wednesday, the mosque resumed five daily prayers, but the administration office, playgrounds, and school remain closed. A community fundraiser for victims has raised more than $3 million.

Khatib said staff plan to reunite children with their belongings and are taking steps to move forward. Classes are effectively canceled for the remainder of the year, but staff are committed to ensuring children leave with positive memories for closure. “The ones who pay the ultimate price are the children,” said Khatib. “This is not a world that children should have to live in.”