Teacher’s assistant Iman Khatib was administering tests at the elementary school inside the Islamic Center of San Diego (ICSD) when she heard the bangs. She locked the classroom door, turned off the lights, silenced her phone and walkie-talkie, and crawled under a desk with her co-worker.

In the preschool classrooms nearby, three- and four-year-olds did the same – staying completely silent, hiding in corners, following the protocols they had been taught during drills. Outside, the first-grade class was 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.”

When police evacuated the staff and students, they passed the body of the security guard, Amin Abdullah, lying on the ground in front of the mosque. When the shooting started, he radioed the lockdown, returned fire, and kept the two teenage gunmen from reaching the approximately 140 children and 20 staff members who were steps away in the school.

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Also killed were Mansour Kaziha, the manager of the mosque store, and Nader Awad, who was across the street and ran over when he heard the shots; his wife is a kindergarten teacher at the school. The attack is being investigated as a hate crime.

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

She shared that she had just received her teaching credentials last week, and her father couldn’t be there because he was working at the center. “He was even afraid to go take meal breaks because he was afraid something would happen if he stepped away from the Islamic center,” Abdullah told the crowd through tears.

A father of eight who was a convert to Islam, Abdullah had been the first face anyone saw at the ICSD for years. His dedication to the community reflected the ethos of the center. For decades, the ICSD has kept its campus accessible as one of the most deliberately welcoming Muslim institutions in the country despite being tested by anti-Muslim backlash. Now it has been tested by the worst kind of violence.

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

The Islamic Center of San Diego is the largest mosque in San Diego county, serving a congregation that spans thousands and more than a dozen nationalities. It runs an elementary school from preschool to third grade, holds five daily prayers and has spent the last two decades building one of the most extensive interfaith networks of any Muslim institution in the country.

The mosque broke ground in 1986 in Clairemont, an inland working-class neighborhood, and opened three years later under the name Masjid Abi Bakr Al Siddiq. In 1991, as American forces mobilized for the Gulf war, someone planted a defective bomb at the mosque. No one was hurt.

Taha Hassane, imam and director of the ICSD, arrived in the US from Algeria in 2001 – mere weeks before the September 11 attacks. Three years later, he would lead a congregation still living in the shadow of the worst terrorist attack on US soil in American history. Hassane’s response was to open the doors of the mosque 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.”

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He began hosting interfaith meetings, joined civic groups, took a seat on the Muslim American advisory board of the San Diego police department and joined the interfaith advisory board of the San Diego district attorney’s office. He decided that Friday sermons would be conducted in English because no single immigrant language could serve a congregation drawn from across the world.

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,” Hatem Albazian, director of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at UC Berkeley, said. “But very few have committed to it as completely, as publicly, and for as long as ICSD.”

Albazian has known Hassane personally 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.”

That pressure intensified sharply after 7 October 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel that killed approximately 1,200 people, triggering an Israeli military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians – a death toll that advocates say is likely an undercount – and a wave of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian sentiment across the US.

Imam Hassane said he saw students being bullied at school because of their names, 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 war in Gaza.

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

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Albazian, who has spent decades documenting Islamophobia in the US, said the threat has changed shape significantly since the years after September 11. The backlash back then, he said, was largely driven by the government – watchlists, surveillance and immigration enforcement. Street-level violence was real but scattered, and officials at least kept their distance, rhetorically, from vigilantes.

What is happening now is different, he said: “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.” The internet, he added, has made radicalization faster and easier than anything that existed two decades ago: two teenagers exchanged manifestos and turned ideology into a mass shooting.

When San Diego’s mayor, Todd Gloria, stepped to the podium at Monday’s press conference, a woman in the crowd cut him off before he could finish his opening remarks. “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 captured a frustration years in the making. After 7 October 2023, Gloria declared that “San Diego stands with the people of Israel” – a statement Muslim advocates said centered on Israeli suffering while ignoring rising Islamophobia and Palestinian civilian deaths.

“In the last few days, other centers have received threatening voicemails and hate messages,” Tazheen Nizam, executive director of Cair San Diego, said. “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.”

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Nizam also raised concerns about federal security funding, noting that mosques in San Diego received no money in the last cycle of the Department of Homeland Security’s grant program. In a letter sent to the DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, after the shooting, Cair called on the department to brief Muslim community leaders on steps being taken 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 members returned to the mosque in pairs to retrieve personal items left behind during the evacuation. They walked through broken doors and past scattered school supplies. The children’s backpacks were still there. Their lunchboxes were still on the playground. Afterward, the staff gathered at the home of the kindergarten teacher – whose husband was killed in ICSD’s parking lot – and sat together on her couch. Amin Abdullah’s sister, herself a police officer who had worked security at the mosque, was also there. The staff thanked her for what her family had given the community.

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

The night after the shooting, hundreds of people gathered at the Lindbergh neighborhood park – just blocks from the mosque – for an interfaith vigil organized by the ICSD and Cair San Diego. Faith leaders from across the region stood alongside Imam Hassane and elected officials to honor the three men.

“Hate and bigotry arise from ignorance,” said Nizham, who has been part of the ICSD’s congregation for years. “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 morning, the mosque resumed its five daily prayers, though the administration office, playgrounds and school remain closed. A community fundraiser for the victims has raised more than $3m.

Khatib said the staff intended to reunite children with their belongings and was taking steps to move forward, one day at a time. While classes are effectively canceled for the remainder of the year, the staff is committed to ensuring the children are sent off with positive memories to help provide 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.”