Somali suicide bomber from the heartland

Steven Stanek, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: March 23. 2009 8:30AM UAE / March 23. 2009 4:30AM GMT

Abdirahman Sheikh Omar Ahmad, right, the imam of the Abubakar as Saddique Islamic Center is blamed by at least one family member for his nephew's disappearance. Allen Brisson-Smith for The National

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA // The remains were flown back from Somalia and buried in a small town 25km south of here. A simple Muslim funeral was held on a cold December day.

It took sophisticated DNA testing conducted by the FBI to confirm that the bone fragments – all that was left after the bomb blast – belonged to Shirwa Ahmed, 27, a naturalised US citizen who had graduated from a nearby high school about a decade ago.

Few had questioned – at least not in a public way – why he had left mysteriously for his native country in 2007. But now his sombre homecoming had many asking the same thing: what drove him to become a suicide bomber?

Since news spread of Ahmed’s death – the FBI says he was responsible for one of six blasts in two northern Somali cities in October, killing 30 – several other families have come forward to report their sons missing. Community leaders estimate that about 15 young men, many of them college students, have gone to Somalia. The FBI is investigating what it believes has been recruitment by al Shabaab, an Islamic militant group in Somalia with links to al Qa’eda.

Nobody knows what caused the young men to leave this community of as many as 80,000 ethnic Somalis, the largest in the United States. Some believe the young men were radicalised here, perhaps in a local mosque; an outsider must have financed their trips, people say, as the men could not have afforded to travel so far on their own.

But others believe such stories have been exaggerated by government officials and the media, and firmly deny that someone in this midwestern US city is teaching young men radical Islam.

Exaggerated or not, the truth is this: some men have simply disappeared. According to testimony delivered at a Capitol Hill hearing recently, among them are: Mohamud Hassan, 18, who was studying engineering at the University of Minnesota; Jamal Aweys, 19, an engineering student at nearby Normandale Community College; Mustafa Ali, 18, who attended Harding High School in neighbouring St Paul, and Burhan Hassan, 17, a straight “A” student who had ambitions of going to an Ivy League university.

“Two months before he left, his dream was the American dream; two months later, he disappeared,” said Mr Hassan’s uncle, Osman Ahmed, who testified before the Senate homeland security committee this month. He described his nephew as shy and religious. “He did not tell anybody he was travelling,” he said.

Mr Hassan did not show up to school on Nov 4, but his family assumed he was at the local mosque. When he did not return the following morning, his family drove around Minneapolis looking for him at hospitals and at the airport.

His mother searched his room and discovered that his luggage, clothing and laptop were missing, as was his passport, which she kept in a locked drawer. The family called the police.

According to a travel itinerary that was later found by the family and obtained by Newsweek magazine, Mr Hassan boarded a series of flights that took him through Chicago, Amsterdam and Nairobi. The last leg of his journey was by boat to Kismaayo in Somalia.

Mr Hassan has since called his family from Mogadishu, the Somali capital. His words sounded forced, family members said, as if someone was telling him what to say. He said he was safe, but that he could not talk; he was using someone else’s phone. His family peppered him with questions, but he hung up abruptly.

Mr Ahmed, his uncle, said he believes the young men were radicalised in a local mosque, and he has pointed his finger at the Abubakar as Saddique Islamic Center – the largest mosque in the Twin Cities, where Mr Hassan and the other young Somali-Americans spent much of their time.

“There is a human being brainwashing, financing and arranging for the [plane] tickets. It is very clear,” said Mr Ahmed, who suspected the mosque’s involvement when leaders went on the defensive after the disappearances. “They immediately defended themselves instead of shedding tears for the parents and the community.”

But local religious leaders, such as Abdirahman Sheikh Omar Ahmad, the imam of Abubakar, called the allegations against his mosque “absolutely baseless”.

“We did not tell anybody who attended here to go to Somalia,” said Mr Ahmad, a soft-spoken man with a wiry beard and a brimless hat. “They disappeared from us the same way they disappeared from their families and from the community, so that is a big lie.”

The Somali culture can be vibrant in parts of Minneapolis; some say the ethnic neighbourhoods remind them of Mogadishu. Near the Riverside Plaza high-rises, a public housing complex where hundreds of ethnic Somali families live, women in fluorescent-coloured hijabs push baby carriages, men in galabeyas gather in coffee shops, and the scent of African spices and incense waft out of the ethnic stores.

Still, this is the heartland of America not the Horn of Africa and many are stunned by the thought of a terrorist group reaching halfway around the world, into inner-city neighbourhoods used to more conventional problems, such as gang violence, drugs and poverty.

“Some are still shocked; they still don’t believe it,” said Abdirahman Mukhtar, a local youth programme manager, who like many in this community, fled from the bloody Somali civil war of the 1990s. “I really struggle a lot of times with what went wrong here.”

Mr Mukhtar said he was stunned to learn that Abdisalam Ali, 19, whom he had mentored at a youth centre, was among those who disappeared. Mr Ali had been the president of the Somali Students Association in high school. He was studying biology at the University of Minnesota when he vanished.

“He was doing good,” said Mr Mukhtar, who has a portrait of Malcolm X, the 1960s civil rights leader, and Barack Obama, the US president, on the wall of his cramped office at the Brian Coyle Community Center.

“He used to be a one of a kind young man because he could have a conversation as an adult … He was one of the people that we wanted to be a role model for other kids.”

In many ways, Mr Ali was more American than he was Somali. He wore baggy clothes, listened to rap music and played basketball.

But Mr Ali was also connected to his religion. He prayed five times day and spent a lot of time at local mosques, including Abubakar, those who knew him said.

Farhan Hurre, the executive director of Abubakar, said the attendance of the men at the mosque, a converted warehouse in a residential neighbourhood of south Minneapolis, is not remarkable.

“We are the largest mosque in the Twin Cities,” Mr Hurre said, sitting in the mosque’s red-carpeted wedding hall, where flowing white drapes hang from the ceiling and ceremonies are held almost every weekend. “If a [Somali-American] never attended this mosque, that would be strange.”

Amid the scrutiny after the disappearances, threatening telephone calls and e-mails have flooded in to Abubakar. Mr Ahmad, the imam, said he has been placed on a no-fly list and was stopped in the Minneapolis airport in November on his way to the haj.

Many other Somali-Americans have complained about stepped-up airport security. Some say the delays are so long they miss their flights; others have cancelled trips out of fear that they will be denied re-entry into the United States.

“A lot of damage has been done to the image and reputation of this community,” Mr Hurre said. He added that those who attended the mosque have been questioned by the FBI and others have been subpoenaed.

“We never teach kids about Somalia in here; we teach them about their religion, about how to be a good Muslim and citizen in America. We serve the people in Minnesota. We don’t serve the people in Somalia.”

The FBI has not confirmed that the mosque is under investigation, but officials have met with mosque leaders.

The FBI has declined to reveal the exact number of suspicious disappearances, which it believes began as far back as 2006. Philip Mudd, associate director of the FBI’s national security branch, said in the Senate hearing that he believes “tens” of American Somalis from across the country have since been “recruited’’. Similar investigations have been launched in other cities, including Columbus, Ohio, and Boston. But officials say the most disappearances have occurred in Minneapolis. No one is sure why al Shabaab would recruit in the United States.

“We are aware that a number of young Somali men have travelled from Minneapolis as well as other parts of the country and that they have travelled to fight in Somalia and to potentially train with terror groups,” said EK Wilson, an FBI spokesman in Minneapolis, who declined to discuss the specifics of the federal probe.

Meanwhile, the relatives of the missing young men such as Abdirizak Bihi, another of Burhan Hassan’s uncles, are convinced that someone in this community is to blame.

“We know someone indoctrinated our kids because in the middle of the day our kids would not decide to leave us in secrecy,” Mr Bihi said. “All I can confirm is that there are missing Somali kids that have been brainwashed and radicalised somewhere in our midst.”