US-Somali youth join Jihad in Somalia

[darrels joy]

US-Somali youth join Jihad in Somalia
Feb. 17, 2009
Abdi Hassan / The Media Line News Agency , THE JERUSALEM POST

Dozens of Somali children have left the United States in secret to join the Islamist fight against the foreign forces in Somalia.

The largest group comes from Somali families in Minneapolis and Minnesota.

Halima Abdi, a mother of five from Minneapolis describes how one of her children went missing in the US and then called her from Mogadishu.

Abdi says she was surprised when her son didn't come home after she sent him to school on November 2.

"I had returned from work and asked my other children where my son Mohamed Yasin was; but they said they hadn't seen him all day," Abdi says.

She reported the 14-year-old boy to the police as missing, but they could not find him.

After 10 days she gave up looking for him. One day, she says, a young boy called their phone from Somalia, saying, "Mum, it's your son Mohamed;

I came to Mogadishu to fight against the enemies of Somalia."

He hung up the phone without saying another word.

She says she was upset that her child went to the anarchic country and took up a gun to fight.

"The only thing I am expecting now is for him to die," she says tearfully.

Abdi blames the U.S. federal police for her young boy's disappearance - according to her, it is because of lack of good safeguards at airports.

"How can a very young boy be allowed to fly on a plane? The police are irresponsible," she says.

Asked about who encouraged her son to take off to Somalia, she says she knows but can't publicly accuse anyone, adding she has heard that several other young children have left for Somalia in a similar way.

Abdirizaq, another Somali living in Minneapolis, says his 17-year-old nephew and two other young boys went to Somalia one day, and that others have gone in the past.

"We don't know how those children will return home," he tells The Media Line (TML).

Some Somalis believe their disappeared children have died in Somalia, and that others have been wounded.

The strongest indication that American children have died in Somalia is the belief that they were used to carry out a string of coordinated suicide attacks in Somaliland and Puntland, in the north of the country.

The arrival of these children coincided with the invasion of the country by thousands of Ethiopian troops, who defeated a group called the Islamic Courts Union, which ruled the country for six months.

Abdinur Hussein, a Somali national who lives in Minnesota, the state with the largest Somali community in the U.S., believes that more than 500 youths might have gone to Somalia to fight alongside Islamist rebels.

However, some Somali parents in the US consider reports of children leaving for Somalia to fight a jihad are exaggerated.

Fos 'Ali is a mother of eight, who says she does not believe these reports are accurate, as she hears them only from some American Somalis.

When children disappear, the parents call the mosques in American cities asking where their children have gone, but they are mostly told, "We don't know," say Fos.

One of the Somali mosque leaders, Imam Hassan Mohamud, says the reports of missing children have placed a cloud over holding important religious feasts, and he had to postpone a large feast because he was busy answering calls and talking to other imams about the issue.

The mosques' leaders regularly receive calls accusing them of pushing the disappeared children into joining Islamist fighters in Somalia. Most of the accusations have been directed at the Abubakar Alsiddiq mosque in Minneapolis.

Speaking at a news conference at the mosque, imam Sheikh Abdirahman Ahmed told thousands of Somalis and their American neighbors that the accusations were baseless and it was shameful to accuse the imams of recruiting children to fight in Somalia.

"We teach people religion in our mosque, but it has nothing to do with what these people are framing us for doing," Ahmed said.

A Somali community member in the US, who declined to give his name, told TML that serious efforts were being made by the authorities to track down children attempting to fly from US airports to Somalia.

Many children have been prevented from boarding planes, as community members and US intelligence officials fear they are joining jihadist groups in Somalia.

"There is a lot of attention from the FBI to stop the children from leaving for Jihad," he says, referring to extensive investigations and interrogations undertaken by the FBI and CIA in recent months since the issue of the disappearing children emerged.

While it is not known who pays the children's travel costs, some US Somalis believe the Islamists in Somalia have recruitment representatives in the US since the children could not join the jihad in Somalia without outside investment and support.

Somali males who have vanished in the US have differing education levels and job prospects, says Dr. Abdullahi Abdi, a US-based Somali educator.

Some are reportedly linked to Somali gangs, while others have been described as intelligent and studious. Some attended college and appeared to have good job prospects.

Some children have thought about joining gangs in the US or leaving for Somalia to fight alongside the Islamists because they are susceptible to "brainwashing," according to Abdi.

There are also concerns in Europe and other continents that children are leaving for jihad in Somalia.

Nearly all the Somali communities believe that the vanishing children join the Alshabab group in Somalia as some video recordings and interviews have been seen with foreigners, including Americans, in its ranks in training camps in Somalia.

Alshabab has previously confirmed it has foreigners in its number.

"We have foreign (brothers) fighting in our jihad and we will show them," said Sheikh Moqtar Robow Abumansur, the spokesman for Al-Shabaab, which is on the US's designated list of terrorist groups.

The group opposed the presence in Somalia of Ethiopian troops. The Ethiopians left the country last month as part of the terms of a peace deal brokered between an Islamist opposition group and the Somali transitional government.
At the same time as Somalis in the United States are mystified by the synchronized disappearances of some of their children, some analysts in the region believe that the recruitment of children for jihad will only increase following the departure of the Ethiopian troops.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304803715&pagename=JPost%2FJPArt icle%2FPrinter

[darrels joy]

Why Somalia must rise up UK agenda

Last Modified: 17 Feb 2009

I've just come up for air after several weeks investigating claims that dozens of Islamic extremists have returned to Britain from training camps in Somalia.

The security services believe that they may end up using the skills they have learned in Somalia to commit acts of terror here in the UK.

Nobody knows just how many have been there and come back.

But no doubt it is a tiny minority of British Somalis giving the security services something of a headache, as well as stigmatising an entire Somali community struggling to settle here.

If you cross a dirt road from Kenya into Somalia and disappear, then nobody is keeping numbers. Though I gather there has been a marked increase in police questioning of Somalis re-entering the UK at Heathrow.


Watch Jonathan Rugman's Somalia report


Few Somalis I have spoken to will admit there is a problem. A study of immigrants by the Institute for Public Policy Research in 2005 included data which suggested Somalis have the highest unemployment and lowest earnings of any ethnic group here.

Somalis are already associated with gang and knife crime. So being labelled as terrorists is the last thing they need.

Turn on a camera, and even a Somali who does admit privately that there is a problem with radicalism may well say quite the opposite.

One man's terrorist is of course another man's freedom fighter. Somalia was invaded by Ethiopia in 2006, so flying in from Ealing or Tower Hamlets to push the invaders out might have seemed like a noble cause.


Our journalist let himself be blindfolded and driven for 16 hours to meet Sheikh Hassan al-Turki, leader of the Raskamboni militia and something of a godfather to the Islamists.

The problem is, what do you then do with the bomb-making skills you've acquired? Let them gather dust, or use the kudos from fighting in the motherland to recruit jihadists to help you set off bombs here in the UK?

We could of course ask the returned jihadists themselves, but how do we set about interviewing them to find out what their opinion is of the UK, if Britain's anti-terror laws mean we will be obliged to hand over all our material to the police?

The authorities here are concerned by the extreme radical views of those groups who may be training British jihadists; what once may have seemed like a noble cause for the liberation of Somalia has fragmented into Islamists of various hues, vying for power.

Al-Shabaab or "The Youth" began as the armed wing of the deposed Islamic Courts administration. Now it is something else; as per my last piece on the subject, it is battle-hardened, steeped in blood and apparently determined to oust the moderate new president, Sheikh Sharif, elected under UN auspices.

The Atlantic Monthly reported that last November al-Shabaab stoned a 13-year-old girl to death for the crime of being raped. Suspected spies are beheaded with knives. As Rageh Omaar put it on Channel 4 News last night, Ethiopia's invasion has created Frankenstein's monster.

I couldn't go to Somalia myself. Too many of my colleagues, including Martin Adler and Kate Peyton, have been killed there.

But an incredibly brave and talented Somali journalist was prepared to take risks on our behalf.

Extraordinarily, he let himself be blindfolded and driven for 16 hours to meet Sheikh Hassan al-Turki, leader of the Raskamboni militia and something of a godfather to the Islamists occupying swathes of southern Somalia.

Turki is wanted for his alleged involvement in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

A senior counter-terrorist source told me he is "one of the most senior Islamist militants in East Africa".

"The camps are mobile and not fixed targets" my source continued. Our journalist wasn't allowed to film al-Turki's tents, but footage of the crater left by a US missile - which failed to kill al-Turki in the town of Dhobley last March - was deemed okay.

Al-Turki denies harbouring al-Qaida. The CIA thinks otherwise.


The fear, as my source puts it, is that 'Ethiopia's withdrawal will create more space for terrorism training camps'.

"Unarguably, there are training camps....to prepare them for the kind of combat that al-Qaida and its affiliates want to impose on us," was how outgoing CIA Director General Michael Hayden put it last month.

"The Ethiopian move into Somalia a year or two ago has catalysed Somalis and it has affected the Somali expatriate community around the world".

Which is ironic, given that the Americans supported the Ethiopians in the Bush "war against terror" and still do.

The Americans have their own problem with Somalis disappearing - in their case from Minnesota, apparently to join the jihad. (See Jamestown.org terrorism monitor, 9 January, 2009.)

And the al-Qaida figure in East Africa the Americans want dead or alive is Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, alleged pal of al-Turki and mastermind of the Kenyan and Tanzanian attacks.

The fear, as my source puts it, is that "Ethiopia's withdrawal will create more space for terrorism training camps".

But I'm not sure this is right. The place was pretty lawless - "ungoverned space" as the intelligence community calls it - before the Ethiopians came along.

After all, this has been one of the world's worst failed states for years.

Though if al-Shabaab take over the country - and even if they don't - who knows how many wannabe jihadists will join them.

Though from what I can gather, the Somali warlords think many expatriate Somalis and foreigners are something of a joke, who can't cope with the weather and the terrain, don't understand the clan system and are pretty useless in battle.

What is clear is that engaging with Somalia needs to rise far higher up the UK agenda. Key to that may be supporting Sheikh Sharif, if that helps create a government in a country which has gone without one for the best or worst part of 20 years.

http://www.channel4.com/news/article...0agenda/295840