Jihad Recruiting Effort May Explain Missing Somalis in Minneapolis Area

[Grande]

FBI Investigates One of ‘The Missing’ as Possible Somali Suicide Bomber
Created: Tuesday, 25 Nov 2008, 7:05 PM CST

MINNEAPOLIS—The FBI is investigating a 27-year-old man who was possibly involved in a suicide bomb in Somalia last month. The investigation began when young Somali men are vanishing off the streets of the Twin Cities. More than 20 have left in the last few months, and the community fears they’ve gone back to Somalia to fight in a holy war.

Ahirwa Ahmed’s sister says she believes her brother is alive, but she has not heard from him in more than a year.

There were five simultaneous suicide bombing happened October 29 in the northern breakaway provinces of Somali and Al-Qaeda-backed insurgents are suspected. Ahmed is believed to be one of the suicide bombers in Bhutland.

From multiple sources in the Somali community, FOX 9 has learned eight men are believed to have left on August 1, and another ten on November 4.

Flight itineraries discovered by their families show they left Minneapolis to take the winding trip back, through Dubai, Nairobi and Malindi, Kenya, where they’re believed to have entered Somalia by boat.

One of the local sheiks tells FOX 9 they're concerned about who is financing these trips.

At least one mother has received a phone call from her son. He told her he was in Somalia, but would not tell her what he was doing there.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,461865,00.html

[Grande]

Jihad Recruiting Effort May Explain Missing Somalis in Minneapolis Area
Thursday, December 04, 2008
By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

Dozens of young Somali men in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area have disappeared in recent months, causing community members and U.S. intelligence officials to fear that they are joining jihadist groups in Somalia.

Officials are especially concerned that some of the men may be destined to return to the U.S. after they have received terrorist training.

The missing young men have been the focus of some attention since late October, when Shirwa Ahmed, a naturalized U.S. citizen, died in a suicide bombing in northern Somalia. Ahmed was a 1999 graduate of Minneapolis's Roosevelt High School.

The Twin Cities media have reported that a number of other young Somali men — estimates range from six to 40 — have disappeared from the area. Multiple sources within the local Somali community and U.S. government fear that these men may have returned to Somalia to train, or to participate in jihad against the country's secular transitional federal government (TFG).

The TFG has lost ground to Islamist insurgents since early 2007; its primary protection comes from Ethiopian forces that intervened in Somalia in late 2006.

"I've come across 10 to 15 mothers crying because their sons are missing," said Omar Jamal, executive director of the Minneapolis-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center.

A senior U.S. military intelligence analyst said the number may be even higher, since not all of the families whose sons have gone abroad will report it.

Jamal said the Somali community has seen young men disappear in a number of countries across the world, including Canada, the Netherlands and Australia. Multiple sources within the Somali community have corroborated this account.

Dahir Jibreel, who previously served as the TFG's permanent secretary in charge of international cooperation, said, "Other young Somalis went missing in Europe, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere." Jibreel said many of the disappearances occurred simultaneously.

The Somali men who have vanished in Minneapolis are diverse in their education level and job prospects. Some were reportedly linked to Somali gangs, while others have been described as intelligent and studious. Some attended college and appeared to have good job prospects.

There is little evidence that these men were radicalized when they entered the U.S.

Abdiweli Ali, an associate professor of economics at Niagara University and a former adviser to the TFG, said young Somalis are being targeted for indoctrination.

"There's a huge underclass," he said, "and the kids get involved in gangs and drugs. So every time a kid goes to hang out in the mosque, the parents see that as good. They encourage their kids to go to after-school programs with religion, to youth groups at the mosque."

The youths are susceptible to "brainwashing," Ali said. "They are very young, susceptible to any kind of indoctrination. All you need is one rogue imam who tells them the wrong things, and they are susceptible to that."

A senior American intelligence source confirms that Somalis have vanished in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia, adding that some people from the Caribbean also appear to have left for Somalia. And not all of the people bound for training or jihad in Somalia have a Somali background, the source said.

A man who appears to be Caucasian and is aligned with the Somalia-based terrorist group Shabaab can be seen in a recent jihadist video, and another gave an interview with al-Jazeera (though he wore a facemask when doing so). The source said that at least three African-Americans from the Minneapolis area also are suspected of traveling to Somalia to join jihadist groups.

While Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area have been puzzled by the simultaneous disappearances in multiple countries, the intelligence source says it can be explained by the reopening of certain training facilities in Somalia, such as those in Ras Kamboni. "School is open for business, so the demand has gone up," he said.

The intelligence source said there is a transportation network in place to move fighters to Somalia, including Ruben Luis Shumpert (a Seattle-area barber who was killed this year while fighting for the Shabaab) and Daniel Joseph Maldonado (a U.S. citizen who was arrested in 2007 for undergoing terrorist training). The network apparently has provided forged passports on some occasions, he said.

It is not clear is who is funding the expensive cost of traveling to Somalia. Virtually all of the Somalis who have disappeared in Minneapolis are from impoverished backgrounds.

The size of the recruiting network in the U.S. isn't known, and estimates vary widely. But a major concern is what will happen when these young men return to the U.S. after having undergone terrorist training or participated in combat.

"Ethiopia has announced that they are planning to withdraw from Somalia," said the intelligence source. "So this problem is just going to get worse."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,461865,00.html

[Gladys Kravitz]

The minute I heard about this story I said "uh oh". I pray that our Homeland Security/FBI know where these guys are and are monitoring them!

[Faith]

FBI Believes Missing Men Joined Somali Terrorists


Listen Now (javascript:NPR.Player.openPlayer(101777030,%20101 777015,%20null,%20NPR.Player.Action.PLAY_NOW,%20NP R.Player.Type.STORY,%20'0'))

Morning Edition, March 12, 2009 · Young Somali-Americans in Minneapolis have been vanishing without warning for the past year and a half. On Wednesday, for the first time, the FBI hinted at an answer to the mysterious disappearances: There are recruiters operating in Minnesota helping young men make their way to Somalia. The young men who left are believed to have joined the ranks of a Somali terrorist group called al-Shabab.

"We do worry that there is a potential that these individuals could be indoctrinated by al-Qaida while they are in Somalia and then return to the United States with the intention to launch attacks," Andrew Liepman, the deputy director of the National Counterterrrorism Center, told a Senate committee Wednesday. "They could provide al-Qaida with trained extremists inside the United States."

Here's one piece of worrisome evidence. A college student named Shirwa Ahmed disappeared about 18 months ago. Last October, he rammed a car full of explosives into a crowd in Somaliland, in the Horn of Africa. Twenty-eight people died in the attack. The bombing was attributed to al-Shabab — the group linked to the missing Minneapolis boys. Ahmed was the first American citizen to become a suicide bomber.

Abdullahe Hussein was a friend of Shirwa Ahmed's. We sat down with him recently at the student center at the University of Minnesota. He was wearing a Yankees baseball cap. He said he learned about his friend's death on the local news last fall. "I got home, turned on the TV and his picture was on there," he said. Hussein can't believe the person who did those things was the person he knew.

Which, of course, is what most of the Somali families in Minneapolis find themselves thinking — the boys who left all seemed so normal. Community leaders searched for an explanation. They suspected two local mosques were involved. One of them was the Dawah Islamic Institute of St. Paul. Videos on the institute's Web site worried them. They appeared to be urging kids to sign up for jihad, to prove they were sufficiently Islamist.

"My life, my death is for Allah," began one of the Internet videos. "Who of us can say that? Who of us? We all can say we're Muslims, but can we say that, that statement right there?"

The FBI hasn't accused the Dawah mosque of any involvement in the disappearances. And, as inflammatory as the rhetoric might be, FBI Assistant Director Philip Mudd said videos aren't enough to actually recruit someone. "The Internet often is a tool that helps someone along a path but not the proximate cause to get someone to buy a ticket to Mogadishu."

To actually get them on a plane to Somalia, recruiters need to talk to the young men face to face and find where they are vulnerable. There was a similar terrorism case that played out near Buffalo, N.Y., in 2002, known as the Lackawanna Six. It was an early effort by al-Qaida to recruit Americans. Peter Ahearn was the special agent in charge there. "They are skilled at their psychological overview of these kids," he said. "They can pick and choose the one they think are more of the followers rather than the leaders."

In Minneapolis, the FBI thinks the recruiters got the young men together to goad each other into action. And, as in the video, they used a classic recruitment ploy: questioning a young man's faith. That's what happened to a boy named Mustafa. His uncle Abdullah Man said someone had clearly started talking to him about his faith and questioning how good a Muslim he really was. "He was talking about some extreme interpretation of the Koran," his uncle said. "He said he'd go back and fight, and the people that believe this stuff, go around and teach kids this belief."

Looking back on it, he says in many ways Mustafa was more Minneapolis than Mogadishu. He didn't even speak the Somali language. But last August he got on a plane to Somalia. The day he disappeared, Mustafa told his mother he was going to do his laundry. No one has seen him since.

Looking at the Somali teenagers roaming the bright orange corridors of the Brian Coyle Center in East Minneapolis, it is easy to see them as vulnerable. There are teenage boys playing foosball ... while others settle into beanbag chairs to play video games on a big screen television. The center is clearly a second home for many of these teenagers. There's homework help in the afternoon, a computer lab and basketball courts for pickup games.

At the entrance to the gym, a young Somali carefully registers the boys on a roll sheet. He smiles, taps his clipboard, and says, "It's an alibi." If kids are accused of being in trouble outside the center, this is supposed to prove they were here.

Abdi Rizak Bihi is one of the Coyle Center directors. He says the boys who went to Somalia were tricked. He said the community has always suspected there was someone brainwashing their kids. "They were highly sophisticated," he said. "I don't believe and none of the families believe that they left willingly. A lot of people say was there a pistol or revolver to their head when they went to the airport? No. There was a bigger gun: Their mind."

Bihi is himself one of the worried relatives; his nephew Burhan vanished in November. When we spoke with him recently at the recreation center he said his nephew was much too naive to orchestrate a trip to Africa on his own. Even before the FBI talked Wednesday about the idea of recruiters, relatives had already assumed as much.

"The biggest shock came when we found out that people were with them at a local ticketing agent," Bihi said. "That was a big shock."

If the kids couldn't pay for the tickets themselves, someone else had to be doing it. The FBI's Mudd told senators on Wednesday how the process might work. "You have a ticket; you have someone at the other end who is a facilitator, someone who is in a general training camp with other folks. Given the vast amount of money, extensive amount of money raised in large diaspora communities here, I personally don't think it would be hard to skim some money and buy plane tickets for tens of people. Terrorism is cheap."

While the FBI inches closer to solving the mystery of how some two dozen young men have simply disappeared, for the parents in Minneapolis, the story is far from over. They want their children back.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101777030

[Grande]

Jun 16, 2009 10:32 am US/Central
Activist Says She Asked Missing Men To Stay

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) ― A Somali activist and volunteer at a Minneapolis mosque where about a dozen young Somali men worshipped before making plans to travel to their war-torn homeland says she tried to talk them out of making the trip.

The FBI is investigating whether the young men, who have gone missing, were recruited over the last few years in Minneapolis to join an Islamic militia in Somalia. Abia Ali is testifying Tuesday before a federal grand jury about her encounters with some of the men.

Ali tells Minnesota Public Radio she learned about plans by several of the young men when they visited a travel agent's office where she was working. She says she alerted the imam at the Abubakar As-Saddique mosque, who says he tried to convince the young men to stay in Minnesota.

http://wcco.com/wireapnewsfmn/Minneapolis.Somali.activist.2.1046575.html