Monday, January 19, 2009

Dream of Harvard evaporates amid Somali civil war

The FBI is trying to track Twin Cities youths who have mysteriously flown to an African war zone

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Tall and lean, with a wispy mustache and shy smile, 17-year-old Burhan Hassan chalked up A's last fall as a senior at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, vowing to become a doctor or lawyer. After school and on weekends, he studied Islam at the nearby Abubakar As-Saddique mosque. He joined its youth group. "He wanted to go to Harvard," said his uncle, Osman Ahmed. "That was his dream."

Instead Hassan has gone to Somalia, the anarchic East African nation that his family fled when he was a toddler. On Election Day, Nov. 4, Hassan and five other youths slipped away from their homes and, anguished family members now say, may have joined a Taliban-style Islamic militia that U.S. authorities call a terrorist organization.

The youths, who have U.S. passports, followed a well-trod trail from Minneapolis to Mogadishu. Another group took off in August. The FBI believes that over the last two years, up to 20 Minnesotans have gone to Somalia.

As a result, a joint terrorism task force led by the FBI is scrambling to determine if extremist Islamic groups are seeking recruits in Minneapolis, which is the nation's largest Somali community -- as well as in San Diego, Seattle, Boston and other cities.

"We're aware that these guys have traveled from Minneapolis and other parts of the country," said E.K. Wilson, an FBI spokesman. "Our concern obviously is they've been recruited somehow to fight or to train as terrorists."

Topping the FBI's concern is the case of Shirwa Ahmed, a bearded 27-year-old former Minneapolis resident who went to Somalia in 2007 -- and who may be what Wilson called "the first occasion of a U.S. citizen suicide bomber."

Officials believe the naturalized American was in a terrorist team that detonated five car bombs in two cities in northern Somalia on Oct. 29, killing at least 30 people, including U.N. aid workers.

A phone call, then death

Ahmed phoned his sister in Minneapolis a day before the bombings to say he would not see her again, according to a family friend. The next day, someone else called from Somalia to say Ahmed had "gone to paradise" as a martyr for Islam.

The FBI brought back bone fragments and other remains found in Bosaso, one of the blast sites, Wilson said. DNA tests established Ahmed's identity. He was buried in Burnsville on Dec. 3.

Ahmed had not been on the FBI's radar until the bombings. And his death raised fresh fears that someone trained in Somalia might import terrorist tactics to America.

"There is always a concern about spillover, bleed-out, call it what you will," said a U.S. official tracking the case who requested anonymity when discussing U.S. intelligence matters. "Especially if they were to return on a U.S. passport."

In early December, homeland security officials put the imam of the Abubakar As-Saddique mosque and the coordinator of its youth group on a no-fly list. They were barred at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport from leaving on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

The imam, Abdirahman Ahmed, did not respond to interview requests. In a posting on its Web site, the mosque said it "unequivocally condemns" suicide bombings and other terrorist acts. It blamed the travel ban on "false, unsubstantiated rumors."

The leader of another mosque under scrutiny, the Darul Da'wah center in St. Paul, denied rumors in the Somali community that the alleged suicide bomber and several other missing men were among his followers.

"Nobody who is part of my mosque left for Somalia except one man who went for his health," the imam, Hassan A. Mohamud, insisted in an interview last week.

It might seem odd to seek a restorative cure in a country that has been mired in war for 18 years and now is known for its pirates. But many Somalis in Minneapolis retain strong political and social ties to the intrigues and battles in their homeland.

"They each support a particular warlord back in Somalia," Omar Jamal, head of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, explained as he puffed on a huge hookah at the crowded Pyramid Cafe and Shisha Lounge in Columbia Heights.

Escaping famine and civil war

Somali refugees began flocking to America in the early 1990s when their homeland erupted in famine and civil war.

Like the Hmong refugees before them, many Somalis moved to Minnesota for good schools, community aid and unskilled jobs in meat processing plants and factories. A thriving Somali community, now estimated at about 60,000 people, has taken root in the state.

The largest group lives in and around a bleak cluster of high-rise apartments beside a busy highway in east Minneapolis, an area known as "Little Mogadishu."

Women in thick shawls scurry down the icy streets as men in skullcaps pray in storefront mosques and cluster at a local coffee shop. Jobs are scarce and school drop-out rates are high. According to police, gangs with names like Somali Mafia and Murda Squad killed seven people last year.

Saeed Fahia, a community activist and local historian, said many youths struggle with alienation in the cultural cross-fire of Somali tradition and American freedom.

"They're easy to manipulate," he said. Those who went to Somalia, he added, "are trying to find a mission in life. They're trying to find out where they came from and who they are."

Many local Somalis bitterly opposed the Ethiopian invasion of their homeland in 2005. The U.S.-backed force overthrew an Islamic coalition that had briefly brought peace and installed in its place an unpopular regime.

Among the rebel forces now fighting to seize power is al-Shabaab, "The Youth." The hard-line Islamist militia controls much of southern and central Somalia, and is considered the strongest insurgent faction.

Whether the still-missing Minnesotans have joined al-Shabaab or were radicalized at local mosques to join the jihad is unclear. But many family members and community activists believe just that.

Abdurahman Yusuf, a local Head Start worker, is convinced that his 17-year-old nephew, Mustafa Ali, was lured to Somalia to join the radical group. "He went to fight for the cause," Yusuf said.

Last summer the baby-faced senior at Harding High School in St. Paul embraced the extremist Saudi style of Islam known as Wahabbism and praised al-Shabaab as the "liberators" of Somalia.

His father was 'an unbeliever'

"I told him this is wrong; your father and your grandfather don't believe this," Yusuf recalled in an interview. "He told me they were ignorant. He called me an unbeliever."

On Aug. 1, Mustafa told his mother he "was just going to do his laundry," Yusuf said. "And he never came back."

The youth phoned his mother several days later to say he was in Somalia. He would not say who paid for his ticket or why he went. Other missing youths are said to have made similar calls home.

"Up to now, no one knows for sure who recruited them," said Abdisalem Adam, an educator who heads the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center around the corner from the high-rises. "But they obviously did not wake up one morning and decide to go."

At first, some community elders and clerics warned families to keep silent to avoid a repeat of the FBI raids, arrests and deportations that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But the wall of silence began to crumble in November, after the second group went missing.

When Burhan Hassan failed to come home Nov. 4, his worried mother checked his room and realized that his passport, laptop computer and cell phone were gone.

Family members also found paperwork showing he had nearly $2,000 in airline tickets from Universal Travel -- a tiny business tucked behind the high-rises -- even though he had no job or savings.

Hassan has called three times, but he hangs up quickly. His family is convinced someone monitors his calls, and that the bookworm who once hoped to attend Harvard is undergoing guerrilla training -- or worse.

"He sounds brainwashed," worried Abdirizak Bihi, another uncle. "He talks but doesn't answer questions. ... He just says he is safe and not to worry. But we are obviously frantic. Who could imagine such a thing?"

Source: LA Times, Jan 18, 2009

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