Somali immigrants in Norway fear that violent extremism is taking root in the community after reports of young Somali-Norwegians traveling abroad to join jihadist groups.
One of the gunmen in a Nairobi mall attack that killed 67 people last month has been identified in Kenya as Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow, a 23-year-old Norwegian citizen who returned to Somalia in 2010.
Norway's Somali community was still coming to terms with that news when they were struck by another startling development: Two teenage sisters — 16 and 19 — had left their family in Norway to join the civil war in Syria.
"It is very shocking," said Mohamed Husein Gaas, a Somali-born East Africa expert at the Fafo research foundation in Oslo. "No one thought two young girls would travel to a place where they don't have any connection."
It's not clear how exactly the sisters from suburban Oslo, who have not been named, planned to participate in the Syrian war.
But they told their family they wanted to take part in jihad, said Bashe Musse, a Somali community leader and local politician in Oslo.
Musse said he had been in contact with their father, who traveled to Turkey in hopes of finding the sisters in the Turkish-Syrian border area where the Norwegian police say they were last spotted.
He reached one of his daughters by phone, but she told him it was too late to stop them from joining the "jihadists," Musse said.
"I don't have words to express how difficult this was for the" Somali "community," Musse said. "In so short time, two cases ... there's a signal that there's a challenge. It's kind of a wakeup call."
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