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MINNEAPOLIS () – A Somali-American 20-year-old engineering student from Minnesota was reported killed in Somalia while fighting alongside Islamic militants. His uncle, Omar Ahmed Sheikh, told Reuters his nephew, was misled by clerics in Minneapolis and persuaded to go to Somalia in November 2008. “They told him they would teach him Islamic religion … But they are terrorists and cannot claim they are Muslims,” said Mr. Sheikh.
Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Centre in Minneapolis, told Reuters Bana was one of 18 teenagers who ran away to Somalia last November after attending a youth programme at a local mosque.
MINNEAPOLIS (ABC News) Nov. 25, 2008 – The officials believe Shirwa Ahmed, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia, blew himself up in a suicide bombing in northern Somalia Oct. 28, 2008.
ABC News has learned that agents from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are investigating whether Ahmed had developed a recruiting network in the Minneapolis area where he had been residing before departing for Somalia.
More than a dozen young men of Somali descent, mostly in their 20s, from the Minneapolis area have recently disappeared, U.S. law enforcement officials tell ABC News. All are thought to be associates of Ahmed.
Many Somalis fled their homeland after factional fighting began in 1991; an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 live in the United States. Other Somali-American population centers include Seattle, San Diego, Atlanta and Columbus, Ohio.
In March, officials of the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center told Congress that “tens” of Somali-Americans, primarily from Minneapolis, had returned to Somalia to fight with al Shabaab.
Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in Minneapolis, told Reuters Bana was one of 18 teenagers who ran away to Somalia last November after attending a youth program at a local mosque.
“They (the clerics) convinced some of these teenagers to drop out of school, go back home and wage jihad,” he said.
Jamal said the families of the 18 youths were shocked when they heard they had run away to join al Shabaab.
It started about two years ago.
Somali-American youth in Minneapolis would suddenly go missing, telling their parents they were going out with friends or just off to do some laundry — only to board planes to Africa. About 20 young men have disappeared so far, and they are believed to have traveled to Somalia to join a terrorist group.
American counterterrorism officials’ worst fears are personified by a young Somali-American named Shirwa Ahmed. He left Minneapolis about 18 months ago to join an Islamic militia in Somalia called al-Shabab. Then, last October, he drove a car full of explosives into a crowd in Somaliland, killing 27 people.
Those kinds of stories worry Andrew Liepman, the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
“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,” he told the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee. “They could provide al-Qaida with trained extremists inside the United States.”
After a monthslong FBI investigation, grand jury indictments against two men from Minnesota were unsealed Friday. The indictment accused Salah Osman Ahmed and Abdifatah Yusuf Isse of providing material support to terrorists and with conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim and injure. Ahmed is specifically accused of traveling to Somalia to fight with Islamic militants, according to the indictment.
It was not known if Isse also went to Somalia, though at least one community leader has described the two as “foot soldiers” not involved in planning or recruiting.
Attorneys for Ahmed, 26, and Isse, whose age is not known, didn’t respond to phone messages or e-mails seeking comment. Both men are in custody, with Ahmed scheduled for a detention hearing. Family members told a community advocate they believed Isse was cooperating with authorities; neither prosecutors nor the FBI are talking about the case.
Hurre said he didn’t know either of the indicted men but couldn’t say for sure if either spent time at his mosque. But he said the community is relieved that indictments might help ease the mistrust that had been brewing between neighbors.
One day our luck runs out, these young Islamists will not be traveling to an overseas Jihad country but will enter a local mall in Minnesota and maximise terror with a deadly suicide attack.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."