Somali-Americans Recruited for Al-Qaeda-Linked Group (Update3)

March 11 (Bloomberg) -- Somali-Americans in Minneapolis have been the target of “active and deliberate” recruiting to fight and train in Somalia on behalf of a group linked to al-Qaeda, according to the FBI. At least 10 young men have traveled from the U.S. to Somalia and have associated with al-Shabaab, a militant group, said Philip Mudd, associate executive assistant director of the national security branch of the FBI, at a Senate hearing today.
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 Men 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. Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent who is chairman of the homeland security panel, said a key question that needs to be answered is who influenced the young men to travel to Somalia and who financed their trips. The bureau is looking at “individuals who are sending kids in the wrong direction,” Mudd told lawmakers.
“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 prepared statement.
Shared Identity 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. 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.
Attack Investigated While al-Shabaab has focused its activities within Somalia, its aspirations may be expanding. The FBI investigated a possible threatened attack by the group that could have been directed at Washington, coinciding with President Barack Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration. ..more..http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=akGM0Du6ZUc0&refer=us
Somali-Americans Fight With Al-Qaeda-Linked Group, FBI Says