David Axe and John Masato Ulmer

How young Somali immigrants searched for belonging, and found jihad. Last of a three-part series. Part I can be found here. Part II can be found here.

Somali-American terror recruits have common roots in an impoverished, neglected and sometime oppressed immigrant community. Their feelings of impotence and isolation -- and their desperate searches for structure -- are not new. But for the most part, any violent impulses simmered under the surface until late 2006, when the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia gave American Somalis -- and their kinsmen all over the world -- a cause on which to hang their dissatisfaction.

In December of that year, thousands of Ethiopian troops streamed into neighboring Somalia, supported by fighter jets and columns of tanks. The attack was aimed at preventing what Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi called the "Talibanization" of Somalia by the Islamic Courts Union, at the time the umbrella group for Al Shabaab and other Islamists.

Quietly assisting the Ethiopians was a handful of American Special Forces, aircraft and aerial drones. "Ethiopia's interests at the moment fully coincide with America's security interests in the region," Zenawi said. But at the time, what amounted to the third front in the Bush administration's "War on Terror" received very little attention in most of the U.S.

Not so in Minnesota, as well as other states with large Somali immigrant communities. Here, the reaction to the Ethiopian invasion was powerful. Ramla Bile, a United Somali Movement member, recalls feeling "helpless."

"We felt that if we didn't do anything, there wouldn't be any Somalia, just the Somali people," says an acquaintance of one of the "travelers" who gave only her first name, Najma.

"The primary motivation for such travel was to defend their place of birth from the Ethiopian invasion," FBI Associate Director Philip Mudd said, "although an appeal was also made based on their shared Islamic identity."

Community leaders like Omar Jamal and Abdirizak Bihi insist that the travelers are basically troubled, "a-political" kids who were "lured into the ideology of Islamic militants and concepts of jihad," in Jamal's words. But others say the travelers made a clear, conscious decision to go to war. And even among the young Somali-Americans who haven't joined Shabaab, there's a widespread patriotism. "I love this country," 17-year-old Ackowme Abokar says, "but I love my homeland more."

But Abokar was just a child when his family fled Somalia. How well could he possible remember it?

That ignorance plays a big role in the travelers' recruitment. Shabaab agents portray Somalia, and jihad, as a form of paradise, according to Bihi. "They create this lovely Utopia in their minds, through the years," says Bihi.

In fact, Somalia barely exists as a country, says Dr. Ahmed Samatar, a dean at Macalester College and a Somalia expert. "The Somali people have gone further than any people in committing national suicide."

Indeed, many of the jihadists quickly discovered that the real Somalia was far different than the one they imagined, and that they were in way over their heads. Shabaab recruiters might portray the terror group as victorious freedom fighters on the winning side of a glorious war. But the reality is quite different.

In truth, Shabaab appears to be losing its cohesion, and quickly. Since the Ethiopians pulled out in January this year, Shabaab has been left to do battle with the "transitional federal government," a loose alliance of clans and former Islamists with a substantial popular base and strong support from the U.S., the U.N., the African Union and the European Union.

During Shabaab's peak in 2007, the group neither needed, nor wanted, help from foreigners. That sort of national pride is a typically Somali trait. Shabaab’s recruitment of foreigners escalated as the group's ranks of local fighters was depleted in bloody combat with the Ethiopians and the transitional government.

By early 2009, new recruits from the U.S., Britain, Kenya and Arab countries accounted for as much as a third of Shabaab. But even these desperately needed reinforcements were neither fully trained nor fully integrated into the group. Instead, they were treated as cannon fodder, receiving "light training, after having freshly arrived from America, before going to the battlefield," according to Mohamed Omar Hussein, a reporter for Somali Weyn in Mogadishu who has investigated the American travelers.

When fully equipped and adequately motivated, Shabaab at times fields a fearsome army capable of threatening the transitional government. About that, most Somalis are ambivalent. The country has seen so many "governments" in the past 20 years that they begin to look interchangeable.

It's off the battlefield that Shabaab has worn out public patience. Terror tactics and crime have turned most everyday Somalis against the group, especially in Mogadishu.

The American travelers might have dreamed of liberating Somalia as part of Shabaab. But they've found themselves minimally reinforcing an increasingly unpopular group in a desperately war-weary country. It's no wonder, then, that many of the surviving travelers are now trying to come home.

One 22-year-old man returned to Minneapolis and went underground to avoid potential reprisal. "He simply didn't like what he saw over there," Jamal said, adding that at least one more traveler has joined the man in hiding.

Authorities nabbed two other returning travelers. Abdifatah Yusuf Isse and Salah Osman Ahmed returned to Minnesota in December 2008 and were quickly picked up by the FBI. In July, a federal court indicted the two men for "conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim or injure persons in a foreign country."

With the Ethiopians out of Somalia, Shabaab possibly in decline and many of the travelers actively trying to escape back to the U.S., the worst of the crisis may already have passed. Media attention and government surveillance have made it harder for potential recruiters to escape wide notice.

But the FBI's Mudd, for one, is hedging his bets. "It remains unclear whether the allure of Somalia as an active conflict zone has diminished in the wake of Ethiopia's withdrawal," Mudd said in Senate testimony last March. "There are several gaps in our understanding," he admitted.

Regardless, community leaders in Cedar-Riverside say it's time to improve conditions for Somali-Americans, to prevent the feelings of isolation that contributed to the travelers' vulnerability. First, city, state and federal authorities must do a better job of policing the community -- and not just to nab suspected immigration violators.

More publicly funded facilities and programs that might provide alternatives to gangs and hardliners' sermons are also needed, Bihi says. During the school year, Cedar-Riverside's lone community center closes at around the same time that school gets out. With no place to go, and with their mothers working long hours, "kids are literally thrown out into the streets," according to Bile.

Their only choice is a gang or the mosque -- or both. Going it alone is not really an option due to white gangs that make easy prey of those Somalis who try.

In many ways the streets of Cedar-Riverside echo the urban wilds of Somalia, where fatherless youths gravitate towards gangs and hardline religion for protection, a sense of belonging and, at times, just something to do. But from these beginnings, some have drifted into warfare, and even terror.

Shabaab recruiters paint Somalia as a paradise, compared to Cedar-Riverside. The truth is just the opposite. Compared to Somalia, Minneapolis is truly paradise. Minnesota's challenge, and America's, is to convince young Somali-Americans of that.

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.

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

Source: World Politics Review| 18 Sep 2009

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