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Somalia’s ‘Lost Boys’ in US prime targets for terror recruiters

Kenyan officials say 2-3 of the terrorists who attacked a Nairobi mall may have been Americans, who had “lived in Minnesota and one other place.” In 2009, Post reporter Maureen Callahan traveled to Minneapolis to investigate “the new lost boys of Somalia” – children adopted by Christian families in Minnesota. Some of these youth, aliens in their new homes, were recruited by terrorist group al-Shabab and sent back to Somalia to fight. Her report: 

MINNEAPOLIS – One by one, 18 months ago, they began disappearing: Young boys, academic overachievers, the caretakers in large families, responsible and conscientious all. A few months later, three or four, from St. Paul, Minn., like the others, simultaneously went missing. Then, last Nov. 4, seven or eight young men – whose families assumed they were out in the streets, celebrating the election of Barack Obama – vaporized.

One of them was 17-year-old Burhan Hassan. “My sister calls me,” says Burhan’s uncle, Abdirizak Bihi. “I ask, ‘Did you vote?’ ” Most Somali-Americans do not get involved in the American political process, something Bihi is working hard to change. “She says, ‘Yes, but Burhan . . .’ ” His sister did not know where her son was. “I told her, ‘Don’t worry, he’s [celebrating],’ and she is relieved. But I was not sure.” At three in the morning, Burhan’s mother woke and peered into her son’s room. He was not there. “Everything that belonged to him was gone,” says Bihi. “His laptop, clothes, valuables. She breaks down the locked cabinet for his passport – it’s gone. She calls the police; I call the hospitals. Then someone from the local travel store says, ‘Yes, we sold tickets to these people.’ And we say, ‘How could you? They’re small kids!’ ” The boys were accompanied by a man who claimed to be their uncle and paid for the tickets in cash.

“We immediately rushed to the FBI,” says Bihi. “We knew.” About a week later, Burhan, his friend Mustafa Ali, 17, and about five other boys – like those gone missing before them – resurfaced in Somalia, where it is believed they are being trained, most against their will, as terrorists by an al Qaeda-linked group called al-Shabab (“the youth” in Somali).

MORE: AMERICAN STARS IN TERRORIST RECRUITMENT VIDEO

Burhan’s disappearance came one month after a young Somali-American from Minneapolis, Shirwa Ahmed, smashed a car packed with bombs into a crowd in Somaliland (which declared its independence from Somalia in 1991 but remains unrecognized). The October bombing was part of the first coordinated terrorist attack in Somalia, a highly sophisticated tactic that the FBI says bears the fingerprints of al Qaeda. Ahmed is the first suicide bomber ever from the United States.

In all, 20 to 30 youths, all US citizens, have been taken to Somalia. The FBI says they will not release the names of the missing, and they will not comment on anything having to do with the investigation. Nor will they confirm the grand jury investigation rumored to be taking place in Minnesota right now. But Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, recently said that the radicalization of young Somali-American men is “a potential threat to this country.” The worry – in the Somali-American community and the FBI – is that these missing boys may return to the US and be activated here, as sleeper cells.

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These are the new Lost Boys of Somalia: The first wave, largely with the help of Lutheran and Catholic charities, relocated to America in the ’90s, when Somalia was in the throes of civil war. These were families fleeing rape and genocide, living in abject poverty in refugee camps until they could be placed somewhere in America.

There are several areas of the US populated with Somalis, among them Boston, Arlington, Va., Portland, Maine, Columbus, Ohio, and the Cedar-Riverside area of St. Paul, Minn., which houses the largest population of Somalis outside from Somalia itself. There are between 40,000 and 70,000, though no one has done a full census. The first immigrants, granted refugee status, worked two to three jobs to earn the money to bring more relatives over. The relocation of these families would seem to be a happy thing, a satisfying conclusion to a harrowing narrative. But for these families, especially the children, adjusting to life in America comes with a specific set of traumas.

These were young men who did not know how to operate a light switch, because they had no idea what electricity was. Same thing with a toilet, a cellphone, a car. With no education, their parents wound up taking low-level blue-collar jobs, two or three at a time to pay the bills and have money left over to send home, or to save up for sponsoring a relative to come to the US. After the elation of escaping warlords and genocide wears off, dislocation and alienation sets in, and many of these immigrants fall into deep depressions. The Somali-Americans who have relocated to Minnesota find integration particularly difficult; the state is predominantly white, the weather very cold and harsh. The Somali-American community is among the poorest in the nation, let alone the state – the average yearly household income is $14,700.

How are they to integrate now, with their young men being recruited by terrorist groups?

“Even today, it is very difficult to grasp,” says Burhan’s uncle, Bihi. A counselor at the Brian Coyle Community Center, Bihi also works in community outreach, helping immigrants find low-income housing and encouraging new citizens to take part in American politics. In this way, his nephew’s disappearance is particularly painful; Bihi sees it as a personal betrayal. He spent months traveling back and forth to Africa, lobbying disinterested congressmen, spending everything he had and borrowing $15,000 more to bring his sister and Burhan to the States. “When they came here, I had everything ready for them – an apartment, food. To see my sister and her children safe . . . that was the happiest day of my life.” The family has heard from Burhan since he disappeared. He called his mother, telling her he is in Somalia, that he is fine. Bihi doesn’t believe it, and neither, he says, does Burhan’s mother, who is still in shock.

“My nephew was an A+ student,” says Bihi. “He wanted to go to Harvard Medical School. How could the guy who came to my home, who took my little daughters out . . . he was unusually responsible.” This is the profile of all the young men who have disappeared from Minnesota: kind, conscientious, the men of the house, most raised by single mothers. That last part is key: It is at the mosque – the only other resource, aside from the community center, available to single parents – where these young men found strong male role models.

“These boys are not safe,” says another relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They don’t know anybody in Somalia. They are hostages. If they try to escape from al-Shabab, there is nowhere to go.”

Al-Shabab, which has been named as a terrorist group by the US State Department, is a militant arm of the Council of Islamic Courts (now called the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia). Right now, Somalia has, as president, a moderate Islamist who is reaching out to Europe and the US. Al-Shabab is thinking more along the lines of a caliphate. They are in league not just with al Qaeda, since Osama bin Laden established training camps there, but Somali pirates, from whom they take a cut.

“The al-Shabab goal in America is the same as al Qaeda,” says one of the relatives. “They are connected. It is the same ideology: to crush the West. To crush the infidels.” Bin Ladin’s most recent tape, released just last month, was called “Fight On Champions of Somalia.” He encouraged support for the Jihad “until it is liberated from the invaders and the hypocrites and the state of Islam is set up in it, Allah permitting.” For al Qaeda, the Somali youth are a propaganda tool – Americanized Muslims who speak better English than Somali, a chance to show that allies can be found everywhere.

The families of the missing boys worry that their children are being used as cannon fodder. From their own experiences, they know that an injured soldier will be cast off to wander the streets alone.

Yet many family members – mothers, especially – have remained silent. According to the family members who spoke to The Post, they are feeding on the false hope that silence and compliance will buy their sons’ safe return. Sometimes al-Shabab gets word back that the US government will throw any family member who talks in Guantanamo, forever. A relative who recently testified in Washington, DC, said that al-Shabab was watching his hearing before the Senate: “They know everything.” How does he know? He says his missing nephew called to complain. “He said, ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you saying my name?’ ” Other times, he says, it’s clear his nephew is trying to send him a message, to ask for help, but that somebody is always on the line: “They will say, ‘I want to tell you something,’ and then right away say, ‘Oh, forget it.’ ” Before the issue attracted the attention of federal investigators (with the October suicide bombing and the Election Day exodus, which led to a tip that al-Shabab was planning an attack in the US on Inauguration Day), family members were calling local press conferences. Al-Shabab knew about them before they happened.

“Prior to one press conference, most of the boys [in Somalia] called,” says Bihi. “This was about 30 minutes before. They were laughing, like they were playing with each other in the local park. And 10 minutes later, 70% of the families called us to say they can’t come.” He pauses. He is a reedy man, careworn. This conversation, no matter how many times he has it, makes him sad.

“This organization,” he says, “is extremely sophisticated. So daring you cannot even imagine.”

*

So: Who in Minnesota is recruiting these young men?

Suspicion, within and without the community, has fallen on local mosques – two in particular. There is the largest and oldest, Abubakar As-Saddique in Minnneapolis, and a smaller, newer one, the Islamic Da’wah Center of St. Paul.

Both are simple brick buildings that bear no resemblance to what one would think of as a mosque. Aside from the signage, from the outside they could pass as grammar schools or bowling alleys. Inside, both are similar: dirty industrial carpet, a warren of offices, larger rooms for prayer and celebration. The women at both wear the traditional hijab, a swath of fabric covering their heads and entire bodies. In the presence of Western men, they promptly cover their faces. Men do not touch women, as women are unclean.

It is from both Da’wah and As-Saddique that several of the men have disappeared, though both As-Saddique’s Sheikh Omar and Da’wah’s imam, Hasan Mohamud (also an adjunct professor at the local law school) say there is no way their mosque is promoting radicalization or Jihad.

“This is a witch hunt,” says Mohamud, who is known in the community for making incendiary comments about suicide bombers (acceptable in the case of Palestinians doing it to the Jews) and America (“hell”). He is getting ready to conduct a lesson on whether technology is evil, via PowerPoint. “You will not find any fingerprints relating to this here. Zero. Unless it is a framing.” He will concede that at least one of the boys who went missing on Nov. 4 was a member of his mosque. But, he says, “We don’t know when they left and why they left.” Pause. “Some of them left for health reasons. They have a type of mental illness, and, uh, here the doctors could not help, and that’s why they take them to Somalia. Because they have an original way to cure that. He is coming back, by the way.” The families aren’t buying any of it. They are convinced that these places, institutions they trusted more than any other, have been brainwashing and radicalizing their young men.

“Do you see the women here, how they dress now?” Bihi asks. Most of the Somali-American women in Cedar-Riverside dress in the hijab. “We have never dressed that way. These people, from Saudi Arabia” – and he says Sheikh Omar is one, a former colonel in the Saudi special forces – “are the kind of people who will not give you water if you are dying, unless you change your ways. They are not interpreting the Koran [as it should be].” He does a Google image search and pulls up a picture of Sheikh Omar: tall, languid, smiling serenely, hands folded. “This guy,” he says. The contempt is palpable. Some in the community stop just short of calling Omar an al-Shabab operative. “He was a good friend of ours. Now he is calling Burhan a gang member. Burhan was the brightest student at the mosque.”

*

What happens if and when these boys come back? There have been rumors, unsubstantiated, that at least one young man has returned and was spotted at the local mall. But this seems to be urban myth, and is repeated among members of the Somali community not with fear but hope.

“Al-Shabab is here,” says Omar Jamal, executive director of St. Paul’s Somali Justice Advocacy Center. “And they are taking people.” “They look for kids who have an identity crisis,” he continues. “Kids who have an emotional connection with their family, who haven’t fully integrated.” Jamal is one of the community’s most vocal activists. He has lost no family members or friends, but is a Somali-American and deeply concerned about radical Islam and the threat it poses both to his homeland and to America. He is developing intimate relationships with producers and reporters at CNN, Fox News, NPR. He’s attracting serious attention to the two Minnesota mosques, driving men like the imam, and al-Saddique’s Sheik Omar, nuts.

“This has been repeated over and over again,” says Sheikh Omar, denying Jamal’s claims. “We do not talk politics in here.” Omar maintains that al-Shabab is a creation of the US, deployed for geopolitical control. Of the missing boys – several of whom disappeared from his mosque – he offers a tautology: “When a person does something, it’s very clear that a person has been convinced to do that thing.” On one point, the sheikh and the family members agree: These boys, if they are being trained, are most likely going to fight in Somalia, not the US. Yet.

“That they will get trained to come back here and blow us up . . . maybe,” Sheikh Omar says ominously. “Most Somalis don’t think that. But, if that happened . . .” He smiles. “As I told you, this world is full of surprises.”