Ahmed al-Najafi (played by Taleb Adlah) is a Muslim associate of Christopher "Chris" Moltisanti. He always appears with his friend Muhammad.
Background[]
Muhammad and Ahmed, together known as "The Arabs" to most, live in Brooklyn, New York and were involved in Christopher and James "Murmur" Zancone's credit card scam. Specifically, they are the buyers of the card numbers, which Muhammad and Ahmed use for fraudulent use online without being traced. They are frequent customers at the Bada-Bing, but according to Tony, they had disappeared for a while before resuming their visits, at which point they began to regularly mingle with men in "head gear and the beard, the whole fundamental bit". In their first speaking roles, Ahmed and Muhammad meet with Christopher to buy credit cards taken in the names of customers to various DiMeo family fronts and ask him about acquiring TEC-9 semi-automatic pistols with extended magazines for a "family situation" involving Muhammad's former brother-in-law. They also gave well wishes to Tony's recent discharge from the hospital and handed over some dates as a gift.
Tony suspected them of being an Al-Qaeda sleeper cell. Tony passed their names and Ahmed's cell phone number to the FBI and later passes details of their merchant bank to Agent Dwight Harris hoping to gain information on Philip "Phil" Leotardo's location in return. Harris later stated that the FBI could only weakly link the duo to funding of terrorism, solely based on their suspicious financial activities, not disclosing whether he was aware that these were only related to Muhammad and Ahmed's white-collar crimes. The last time Muhammad and Ahmed are mentioned is in "The Second Coming", during a meeting at Satriale's between Tony and Agents Harris and Ron Goddard, where they ask Tony to confirm the men's identities via their passport photos, with the FBI mentioning that they may be out of the country by now.
Christopher shared Tony's suspicions but also stated that he thinks they were just "gun nuts", mentioning Ahmed criticized the riots in response to "those Danish cartoons" (referring to the 2005 controversy over caricatures of the Muslim prophet Muhammad) as putting Islam in a bad light, though he still agreed with their grievances.
Trivia[]
- Ahmed's phone number relayed to Tony has the area code 973, which is for northern New Jersey rather than New York.
- Throughout the series, Ahmed and Muhammad were consistently described as simply "Middle-Eastern", similar to Matush. Characters variously link them to Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, though notably not Afghanistan, despite Agent Harris joking the pair might just be "harmless pistachio salesmen". Unlike Matush, they are never heard speaking a foreign language that could tie them to any of these countries by dialect.
Appearances[]
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| Season 6 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |