Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Dozens of Americans have been lured away from
comfortable homes to join Somalia's Shebab insurgents, the Islamist
group behind the bloody attack on a Kenyan mall.
While the FBI said Tuesday it has not yet been able to
confirm reports that two or three Americans were among the gunmen at
Nairobi's Westgate mall, the news has the nation's Somali community on
edge.
Especially since Kenyan Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed
said at least one of the young men hailed from Minnesota, which has the
largest Somali community in the United States.
More than 20 young men have been recruited by Shebab
from Minnesota, where the FBI has an ongoing investigation dubbed
"Operation Rhino."
"It is still an active investigation, as it has been for several years," FBI spokesman Kyle Loven told Agence France Presse.
At least two of those men became suicide bombers --
Shriwa Ahmed became the first known U.S. citizen to do so when he drove
an explosive-laden truck into an office of the Puntland Intelligence
Service in 2008 -- and several others have been killed in Somalia's
brutal civil war.
Three of the "martyrs" from Minnesota were featured in a
lengthy recruiting video posted online by the al-Qaida-linked group
earlier this year.
"This is the real Disneyland," Troy Kastigar -- the only
non-Somali among the recruits -- said in the video obtained by KMSP
news. "You need to come over here, join us and take pleasure in this
fun."
The 2006 invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian army was a
major factor in recruiting Somali-Americans to Shebab, said Peter
Bergen, director of the New American Foundation.
Young men were drawn to protect their homeland from a
"crusader army," Bergen wrote in a editorial posted on CNN.com, noting
that Ethiopia is predominantly Christian.
U.S. officials have been able to track down and
prosecute some of the people who've helped raise money for Shebab or
recruit others to the cause in recent years, including eight Minnesotans
who received lengthy sentences as a result of Operation Rhino.
Given how many U.S. citizens have been drawn to Shebab
and other militant groups, it's only a matter of time before one of them
attempts to strike in the United States, said William Banks, director
of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse
University.
"We've had a lot of intelligence and law enforcement
successes and we've been extremely lucky," Banks said in a telephone
interview.
"The chances of being lucky forever are not so good."
While it's clear that the capabilities of al-Qaida have
been "degraded" by U.S. strikes, Banks cautioned that the threat of
terrorism is more serious than it was a decade ago.
"It's more diffuse, it's harder to pinpoint, the
capabilities and ease of training are expanding because of internet
postings as well as the development of cyber capabilities that will
allow individuals or groups to attack from afar."
Somali religious leaders in Minnesota condemned the violence in Kenya and repeated their calls for youth to reject extremism.
"This outrageous act of violence has no place in Islam,"
Abdisalam Adam of the Islamic Civic Society of America said, at a press
conference Monday.
Yet Somali immigrants are not the only U.S. citizens who've joined Shebab.
A 2011 congressional investigation found that least 15
Americans had been killed fighting with Shebab and at least 21 others
"remain unaccounted for and pose a direct threat to the U.S. homeland."
The most high profile recruit was the Alabama-born
'rapping jihadi' Omar Hammami, who was killed earlier this month after
he fell out with top Shebab leader Ahmed Abdi Godane.
Born in 1984 to a southern Baptist mother with Irish
roots and a Muslim father with a Syrian background, Hammami moved to
Somalia in 2006.
He became one of the most prominent foreign fighters
with Shebab and recruited young trainees with English-language rap songs
and videos.
Jerky videos showed him enthusiastically promoting the Shebab's battle to overthrow Somalia's internationally backed government.