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Feds charge 20 “young Americans” with joining Al-Qaeda-linked Somali jihad group

Nov 24, 2009 7:12 am By Robert Spencer

“Young Americans” who doubtless despise America and pray for its downfall. “Charges Detail Road to Terror for 20 in U.S.,” by Andrea Elliott for the New York Times, November 24 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Federal officials on Monday unsealed terrorism-related charges against men they say were key actors in a recruitment effort that led roughly 20 young Americans to join a violent insurgent group in Somalia with ties to Al Qaeda.

With eight new suspects charged Monday, the authorities have implicated 14 people in the case, one of the most extensive domestic terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11 attacks. Some of them have been arrested; others are at large, including several believed to be still fighting with the Somali group, Al Shabaab.

The case represents the largest group of American citizens suspected of joining an extremist movement affiliated with Al Qaeda, senior officials said. Many of the recruits had come to America as young refugees fleeing a brutal civil war, only to settle in a gang-ridden enclave of Minneapolis.

The men named on Monday face federal charges including perjury, providing material support to a terrorist organization and conspiring to kill, maim, kidnap or injure people outside the United States.

Law enforcement officials are concerned that the recruits, who hold American passports, could be commissioned to return to the United States to carry out attacks here, though so far there is no evidence of such plots….

The disclosures are the government’s first public account of a recruitment operation that it says has largely focused on Somali-American men from the Minneapolis area. Those young men included Shirwa Ahmed, 26, who carried out a suicide attack in northern Somalia in October 2008, becoming the first known American suicide bomber. Since then, at least five other recruits have been killed in Somalia, relatives and friends say, and four defendants have entered guilty pleas.

The court documents, which included unsealed indictments and criminal complaints, provide chilling details about the experience of the recruits, who began to enlist in Al Shabaab in September 2007. They attended training camps in Somalia run by Somali, Arab and Western instructors, who taught them to use machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades and indoctrinated them with anti-American and anti-Israeli beliefs, according to one complaint. Two of the Minneapolis recruits took part in an ambush against Ethiopian troops, and many others were involved in combat, according to the documents.

One of the fighters, Cabdulaahi Ahmed Faarax, later returned to Minneapolis and emerged as a recruiter, officials said. A 32-year-old cab driver and divorced father of two, Mr. Faarax had sustained a leg injury while fighting with Al Shabaab, a senior law enforcement official said.

A cab driver named “Cabdulaahi”? Come on.

In the fall of 2007, he attended a meeting at an unnamed Minneapolis mosque in which participants spoke by telephone with co-conspirators in Somalia about the need for fighters, according to the complaint.

Mr. Faarax told potential recruits he had experienced “true brotherhood” while fighting in Somalia, that to “fight jihad will be fun” and “not to be afraid,” according to the complaint.

He is estranged from his family, a close relative said in an interview, and “seemed to have developed another family at his place of worship.”

Another man accused of recruiting, Abdiweli Yassin Isse, encouraged others to join the fight in Somalia, raising money for their travel through a fake charity, according to the complaint.

A third man, Mahamud Said Omar, is accused of helping to finance the recruitment. Officials said Mr. Omar, who was arrested in the Netherlands on Nov. 8, conspired with nine of the recruits, paying for trips to Somalia and providing some of the Minneapolis men with hundreds of dollars to buy AK-47 rifles.

Most of the young Somali-American men suspected of joining Al Shabaab had come to the United States as small boys or teenagers, after the 1991 collapse of Somalia’s last fully functioning government….

Friends of the men who left described them as having been driven by a mix of nationalist and religious fervor. Some wanted to defend their country against foreign invaders; other [sic] saw this “defensive jihad” as their religious duty, the friends said….

Since then, four of the other Minneapolis recruits have also died, including a 27-year-old convert to Islam, said friends of the recruits who received phone calls informing them of the deaths….

The friend, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the F.B.I.’s investigation had made an underdog out of Al Shabaab, which is aiding recruitment.

“They are reinforcing it,” the friend said.

Sure. Resist jihad, and you get more jihad. But if you don’t resist jihad, you get more jihad also. The “friend,” like many others before him, says this hoping that it will cause the resistance to cease. And it just might. But not here.

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Filed Under: Jihad in the U.S., Somalia Tagged With: Minnesota, Somalia


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