Deadly journey: Minneapolis to Mogadishu
ICC Note
Over a dozen Somali-American have joined the Islamic extremist group in Somalia . The Somali Islamists are infamous of killing Christians and imposing Islamic laws on Somalis.
By Jonathan Beale
11/20/2009 Somalia (BBC News)- Minneapolis is very different from Mogadishu . Yet it is home to the largest group of Somali refugees in the country – more than 60,000 of them. It may seem like an odd place to settle if you are from the Horn of Africa.
But unlike Somalia , there is no civil war here, no children walking around with guns, no warlords and none of the grinding poverty.
So it seemed like a safe place for Zeinab Bihi to raise her son, Burhan, or so she thought.
On 4 November 2008, the 17-year-old went missing from their Minneapolis apartment.
“He was a young kid, he doesn’t know Somalia , he doesn’t speak Somali. He didn’t know anything that was going on over there!”
And the news didn’t get any better. Six months after leaving home, Burhan was dead.
His mother believes he was murdered by militants as he tried to escape from their clutches. The same Islamic extremists who she believes had recruited him and others in Minneapolis .
At the time they left, Islamist militants were trying to wrest control of the country from government forces backed by the Ethiopian army, which had invaded Somalia with the tacit support of the US .
And Burhan and Jamal were not alone. Over the past 18 months as many as 20 young Somali men have left the comfort of their new home in America to return to a war-torn Somalia .
FBI investigation
As a result, the FBI has now launched “one of its most significant terrorism investigations since 9/11”. But the investigation is not born out of a fear of what is happening in Somalia itself.
It is more to do with the fear that young Somali men with American passports will return to the US to commit acts of terrorism.
FBI agent EK Wilson admits “there’s no credible, specific threat that their intent is to return to the US to carry out a terrorist attack on US soil”, before adding “but we can’t rule it out”.
