Somali Americans in Minneapolis-Saint Paul have heard so much bad news lately that it’s become hard to separate fiction from fact. Encircled by tales of missing youth and violence at home and abroad, the tight-knit community is wrestling with outside scrutiny and internal strife.
“When you turn on the radio and you turn on the T.V., and there’s something bad about the community on, it kind of hurts,” said Zainab Hassan, an activist who emigrated from Somalia in the 1980s. “And people feel that they have the responsibility to do something about it.”
In 2008, media outlets raised alarm about a pattern of local youth abruptly disappearing and then turning up in Somalia, apparently engaging in military activities.
One of the youth, 26-year-old Shirwa Ahmed, reportedly departed for Mecca in late 2007, after he had grown increasingly religious and socially isolated from friends. Last October, according to news reports, he died in a suicide bomb attack in northern Somalia. This summer, Minneapolis teen Burhan Hassan and 20 year-old Jamal Bana were reportedly killed in Mogadishu after mysteriously leaving the city last winter. More than 20 youth have supposedly vanished over the past two years.
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