Somali-Americans Fight With Al-Qaeda-Linked Group, FBI Says

March 11 (Bloomberg) -- There has been an “active and deliberate attempt” to recruit young Somali-Americans living in Minneapolis to travel to Somalia to fight and train with a group linked to al-Qaeda, according to the FBI. Since late 2006, an unspecified number of people have traveled from the U.S. to Somalia and were linked with al- Shabaab, a militant group, said Philip Mudd, associate executive assistant director of the national security branch of the FBI, in prepared testimony to be delivered today in a Senate hearing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is concerned those Somalis may return to the U.S., where they are citizens, and plot terrorist attacks. Those fears were heightened in October when a Somali-American living in Minneapolis went to the African nation and became the first known U.S. citizen to carry out a suicide bombing, according to Mudd. “While there are no current indicators that any of the individuals who traveled to Somalia have been selected, trained, or tasked by al-Shabaab or other extremists to conduct attacks inside the United States, we remain concerned about this possibility and that it might be exploited in the future,” Mudd said in written testimony for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Vanished At least 17 young men have vanished during the past two years from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and are believed to be in Somalia now, said Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, a legal-aid organization, in an interview last week.
The FBI said it has been interviewing relatives of the missing and monitoring other cities with large Somali populations such as Columbus, Ohio, and Seattle, Washington, for reports of disappearances.
Authorities haven’t identified who recruited Somali- Americans in Minneapolis, or what tactics were used.
“In Minneapolis, we believe there has been an active and deliberate attempt to recruit individuals -- all of whom are young men, some only in their late teens -- to travel to Somalia to fight or train on behalf of al-Shabaab,” Mudd said in the testimony. The majority of them likely were motivated by a desire to “defend their place of birth,” though “an appeal was also made based on their shared Islamic identity,” Mudd said. Violent youth crime, gang activity and “tensions over cultural integration” may have contributed to the youths’ recruitment, he said. Concerns Raised Some of those recruited from Minneapolis come from single- parent homes, possibly “making them more susceptible to recruitment from charismatic male authority figures,” according to Mudd. Jonathan Evans, a counterterrorism official in the U.K., recently raised concerns in a newspaper interview that residents there had trained in camps in Somalia and returned to Britain. U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops entered Somalia in 2006 to support a transitional government that was under threat from Islamist and clan-based opposition militias. The militias began a guerrilla war against what they saw as an Ethiopian occupation. Ethiopian troops withdrew from Somalia in January after failing to end Somalia’s civil war, leaving much of the southern part of the country under the control of al-Shabaab.
Al-Shabaab was designated as a terrorist group last year by the U.S. ..more..http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aY6xgiUcNQX4&refer=us