Posted by
Darko Trifunovic on Thursday, July 16, 2009 8:22:26 PM
A Call to Jihad, Answered in America
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
More than 20 young Somali-Americans, many of them raised in
Minneapolis, left the United States to join a militant Islamist group
in Somalia.
Published: July 11, 2009
MINNEAPOLIS — The Carlson School of Management
rises from the asphalt like a monument to capitalist ambition. Stock
prices race across an electronic ticker near a sleek entrance and the
atrium soars skyward, as if lifting the aspirations of its students.
The school’s plucky motto is “Nowhere but here.”
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While
“homegrown” jihadism has caused alarm in Britain and other European
countries, does the United States face challenges of its own?
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The New York Times
A screenshot of the Facebook profile of Mohamoud Hassan, one of a group
of Minneapolis men who left for Somalia to join in a militant Islamic
movement last November. Mr. Hassan went by another name, Bashir Maxamed
Caydid, on his Facebook account.
For a group of students who often met at the school, on the University of Minnesota
campus, those words seemed especially fitting. They had fled Somalia as
small boys, escaping a catastrophic civil war. They came of age as
refugees in Minneapolis, embracing basketball and the prom, hip-hop and
the Mall of America. By the time they reached college, their dreams
seemed within grasp: one planned to become a doctor; another, an
entrepreneur.
But last year, in a study room on the first floor of Carlson, the men turned their energies to a different enterprise.
“Why
are we sitting around in America, doing nothing for our people?” one of
the men, Mohamoud Hassan, a skinny 23-year-old engineering major,
pressed his friends.
In November, Mr. Hassan and two other
students dropped out of college and left for Somalia, the homeland they
barely knew. Word soon spread that they had joined the Shabaab, a militant Islamist group aligned with Al Qaeda that is fighting to overthrow the fragile Somali government.
The
students are among more than 20 young Americans who are the focus of
what may be the most significant domestic terrorism investigation since
Sept. 11. One of the men, Shirwa Ahmed, blew himself up in Somalia in
October, becoming the first known American suicide bomber. The director
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert M. Mueller, has said Mr. Ahmed was “radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota.”
An
examination by The New York Times, based on interviews with close
friends and relatives of the men, law enforcement officials and
lawyers, as well as access to live phone calls and Facebook
messages between the men and their friends in the United States,
reveals how a far-flung jihadist movement found a foothold in America’s
heartland.
The men appear to have been motivated by a complex
mix of politics and faith, and their communications show how some are
trying to recruit other young Americans to their cause.
The
case represents the largest group of American citizens suspected of
joining an extremist movement affiliated with Al Qaeda. Although
friends say the men have never thought of carrying out attacks in the
United States, F.B.I. officials worry that with their training,
ideology and American passports, there is a real danger that they could.
“This case is unlike anything we have encountered,” said Ralph S.
Boelter, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis
office, which is leading the investigation.
Most of the men are
Somali refugees who left the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in
two waves, starting in late 2007. While religious devotion may have
predisposed them to sympathize with the Islamist cause in Somalia, it
took a major geopolitical event — the Ethiopian invasion of their
homeland in 2006 — to spur them to join what they saw as a legitimate
resistance movement, said friends of the men.
For many of the
men, the path to Somalia offered something personal as well — a sense
of adventure, purpose and even renewal. In the first wave of Somalis
who left were men whose uprooted lives resembled those of immigrants in
Europe who have joined the jihad. They faced barriers of race and
class, religion and language. Mr. Ahmed, the 26-year-old suicide
bomber, struggled at community colleges before dropping out. His friend
Zakaria Maruf, 30, fell in with a violent street gang and later stocked
shelves at a Wal-Mart.
If failure had shadowed this first group
of men, the young Minnesotans who followed them to Somalia were
succeeding in America. Mr. Hassan, the engineering student, was a
rising star in his college community. Another of the men was a pre-med
student who had once set his sights on an internship at the Mayo Clinic.
They did not leave the United States for a lack of opportunity, their
friends said; if anything, they seemed driven by unfulfilled ambition.
“Now
they feel important,” said one friend, who remains in contact with the
men and, like others, would only speak anonymously because of the
investigation.
The case has forced federal agents and
terrorism analysts to rethink some of their most basic assumptions
about the vulnerability of Muslim immigrants in the United States to
the lure of militant Islam. For years, it seemed that “homegrown”
terrorism was largely a problem in European countries like Britain and
France, where Muslim immigrants had failed to prosper economically or
integrate culturally. By contrast, experts believed that the successful
assimilation of foreign-born Muslims in the United States had largely
immunized them from the appeal of radical ideologies.
The
story of the Twin Cities men does not lend itself to facile
categorizations. They make up a minuscule percentage of their
Somali-American community, and it is unclear whether their
transformation reflects any broader trend. Nor are they especially
representative of the wider Muslim immigrant population, which has
enjoyed a stable and largely middle-class existence.