DAVID AXE AND JOHN MASATO ULMER

How young Somali immigrants to the U.S. searched for belonging, and found jihad. First of a three-part series. Part II will appear next Saturday.

On Oct. 29 last year, Shirwa Ahmed drove a car full of explosives up to a government compound in Puntland, a region of northern Somalia, and blew himself up. The blast -- apparently orchestrated by al-Shabaab, an Islamic militant group with ties to al-Qaida -- was part of a coordinated attack in two cities that killed more than 20 people. A BBC reporter described body parts flying through the air. 

The attackers were "not from Puntland," said Adde Muse, the regional leader. He couldn't have been more right. For most of his life, the Somali-born Ahmed had lived in Minnesota, where he was more accustomed to frigid winters than to the dry, yellow sands of East Africa. The 26-year-old former truck driver with the fluffy beard -- "as American as apple pie," according to one acquaintance -- was the very first American suicide bomber, and a harbinger of a looming crisis. Since Ahmed sneaked into Somalia in late 2007, potentially scores of other young Minnesotans have followed him.

By all accounts, Ahmed hadn't come to Somalia to die. His motive was apparently to help Shabaab defend Somalia against an invading Ethiopian army. The defense of Somalia was a popular cause among many Somalis living in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East -- especially among young people. On the long, winding journey from Minneapolis' streets and parks to Somalia's bleached sand and searing sun, Ahmed's original impulses had gotten tangled up with Shabaab's al-Qaida-style religious extremism. 

But it's possible that even the Ethiopian invasion was just the political cause that gave shape to Ahmed's deeper desires. Many of the young men recruited by Shabaab got their start in Minneapolis street gangs that mix Somali patriotism, religious fervor and an almost familial structure. The gangs give young men a sense of belonging they can't find at home, at school or in the community. That belonging was a powerful and dangerous thing for Minnesota's Somali recruits, for it cloaked a radical political sensibility that eased the men into jihad. Radical mosques perhaps only reinforced that indoctrination. "They've been disillusioned, indoctrinated and misled," says Omar Jamal, a civil rights advocate in Minneapolis.

Shabaab's savvy recruitment videos, widely available online, probably played a role in convincing young men to take that final step, and board a plane ultimately bound for Somalia. But community leaders as well as friends and family of the recruits say there are also Shabaab agents -- most of them men, apparently, and veterans of the civil war -- hiding out in Minneapolis, perhaps connected to hardline mosques. 

But by the time recruiters reached them with their mixed message of patriotism and holy war, Minnesota's Somali boys had already been primed for desperate deeds, by years of taunting, harassment, even physical assault in their hometown. American society has made it difficult for Muslim, African immigrants to find security and a sense of belonging. So they sometimes go looking for these things in gangs and extremist churches.

In other words, the Twin Cities' jihadists did not spring from a vacuum. They are, in part, products of an America that mostly rejected them, leaving the belonging that comes from holy war as an attractive alternative.

In the last two years, Shabaab's mysterious terror recruiters have found fertile ground in Minneapolis' Cedar-Riverside. The Somali immigrant neighborhood is anchored by the Abubakar As Saddique mosque where many Somalis worship, the Towers apartment complex where they live, and the local Wal-mart where they work. More than a third of the roughly 200,000 Somalis in America live in Minnesota -- and many of those live in Cedar-Riverside. It's a verdant, sometimes frigid, slice of Mogadishu in the heart of the American Midwest.

No one's sure exactly how many Americans have gone back to Somalia to fight. Special Agent E.K. Wilson of the Twin Cities FBI says that nationwide, they number in the "tens." Jamal pegs the number in Minneapolis at 17 or 18. Some trusted Somali sources say even the FBI's count is too low. "More than accounted for, are there fighting," said one Somali resident of Minneapolis. He requested anonymity, for fear his comments might draw reprisal from some of his neighbors, who are unhappy seeing their community's business dredged up by the press. 

Regardless of their precise numbers, the "travelers" -- the FBI's term for the jihad recruits -- have the U.S. government worried. It's not that war is anything new for Somalis. Their homeland has suffered decades of violence. The current round of fighting began in 1991, when clan armies overthrew brutal dictator Siyad Barre. Somalia subsequently splintered as warlords, crime gangs and pirates divvied up slices of the former British and Italian colony. Hundreds of thousands died, some from the fighting, some by starvation. Periodic foreign interventions have punctuated the clan bloodshed. In 1993, 18 American soldiers died during a botched peacekeeping operation. 

But for all the suffering and brutality -- and despite the occasional al-Qaida foray into Somali clan politics -- until that day in October, no Somali had blown himself up. Suicide attacks were "completely nonexistent" in Somalia before Ahmed's blast, according to Jamal. "Somalis have been fighting along clan lines a long time, but never has it occurred to someone to carry out a suicide bombing." A radicalized American helped elevate Somalia's violence to levels seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Part II of this World Politics Review three-part series will explore the conditions in the U.S. that helped prime the Somali travelers for recruitment.

David Axe is an independent correspondent, a World Politics Review contributing editor, and the author of "War Bots." He blogs at War is Boring. His WPR column, War is Boring, appears every Wednesday.

John Masato Ulmer is a freelance journalist.

Photo: A Somali coffeeshop in Minneapolis, August 2009 (Elliot Dodge deBruyn).

WORLD POLITICS REVIEW| 04 SEP 2009

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