US-born Somalis go missing, feared recruited for jihad

debkafile‘s sources in the US Minneapolis-St. Paul report that the disappearance of dozens of young US-born Somali men in this area since last fall is under investigation by anti-terror authorities concerned they have been recruited to fight with al Qaeda-linked Islamist al Shabaab militia to topple the transitional federal government in Mogadishu. Some may even return home trained to form America’s first homegrown Islamist terrorist cell. The probe, triggered by a group of concerned ex-US military officers, has spread to Somali communities in other parts of America and, according to our sources, Canada too.
Last December a local newspaper reported suspicions that these young men may have returned to Somalia for jihad after Shirwa Ahmed, a naturalized US citizen, died in a suicide bombing in northern Somalia. Ahmed, 27, was a 1999 graduate of Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School.
The London Telegraph added: US law enforcement agencies are concerned the young jihadists could return to the US to plot terror attacks following a similar path to the British Pakistanis behind the London bombings in July 2005 who made many visits to radical mosques in Pakistan. Since then, British Muslim extremists were suspected of involvement in the Mumbai terrorist outrage last November.
The FBI has issued grand jury subpoenas for the teachers at the Minneapolis and St. Paul mosques to find out who the missing men’s teachers were, what they were taught, how recruited them and funded their travel.