This article originally appeared in Al Jazeera.
NEW YORK – When an attack happens in the United States, the first thing that passes through Zaid Nagi’s mind is a prayer: “Please, don’t let them be Muslim.”
Nagi, the vice president of the Yemeni American Merchants Association in New York, says each time an attacker turns out to be a Muslim, he knows that his life and the lives of those in his community will only get harder.
“They look like us; they sound like us,” Nagi said, “but they do not represent us.”
On Wednesday evening, Nagi joined around 200 other New Yorkers for an interfaith vigil to remember the eight people killed and 12 injured in Tuesday’s attack.
Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old man, originally from Uzbekistan, allegedly drove a rented pick-up truck into a busy bicycle path on the city’s West Side Highway.
Police said that Saipov, who had entered the US in 2010 and was a permanent resident, carried out the attack in the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).
Muslim immigrants, Nagi said, are doubly affected by such attacks, which serve as a reminder of the violence that drove many to leave their countries of origin, and also increase their own insecurity in the US.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo labelled the attacker a “lone wolf”, but Saipov’s apparent sympathies with ISIL have many within the Muslim community fearing heightened Islamophobia.