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| Shaboob's Minnesota recruitment drive | |
| 2013-10-07 | |
| 'Betray the US and join "the real Disneyland" of African jihad' Teenage boys in America's biggest Somali community are being urged to betray the United States and join "the real Disneyland" of African jihad, in a recruitment drive by al-Shabaab. Kenyan officials said some of the two-dozen young men who left Minnesota to join the al-Qaeda affiliate in Africa may have taken part in the Nairobi massacre. The FBI is urgently investigating whether any gunmen came from areas such as "Little Mogadishu", the centre of the Midwestern state's 32,000-strong Somali-American population. "It is our number one priority here in Minnesota," Special Agent Kyle Loven told The Daily Telegraph. "We consider it to be a very serious threat." Recruiters from al-Shabaab are targeting disaffected young men in the "Twin Cities" of Minneapolis and St Paul, which are blighted by gangs and high youth unemployment. A 40-minute video released online earlier this year, titled Minnesota's Martyrs: The Path to Paradise, promised would-be recruits a glamorous new life. It followed three young Minnesotans – Dahir Gure, Muhammad Al Amriki and Mohamud Hassan – from their ordinary lives to Somali training camps. "If you guys only knew how much fun we have over here," Gure told viewers at one stage. "This is the real Disneyland". Friends say Hassan was previously an unremarkable engineering student who spent much of his time caring for his 90-year-old grandmother. "They are being radicalised, and that's something we are attempting to thwart with the support of the greater Somali community, who are absolutely appalled," said Mr Loven. Abdirizak Bihi, a director of the Somali Education and Social Advocacy Centre, has worked to assist these efforts since losing his nephew, Burhan Hassan, to the recruiters. "We would never have guessed that our kids had been brainwashed and recruited," he said. Eight Minnesota men have been jailed in recent years as part of Operation Rhino, the FBI's inquiry into the so-called "jihadist pipeline" to Somalia. Earlier this year Omer Abdi Mohamed, a 28-year-old teacher from Minneapolis, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for recruiting local men for al-Shabaab. Two of his recruits were sentenced to three years, after escaping from the Somali training camp after only a week and claiming they did not know what they had signed up for. Most older Somali residents of Minnesota received asylum after fleeing their war-torn country in the Nineties. "The tragic irony here is some of their children and grandchildren … have left the relative safety of the US to engage in the very thing their grandparents and parents were able to escape," said Mr Loven.
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| Posted by:Steve White |
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| Posted by: Barbara 2013-10-07 19:06 |
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| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2013-10-07 18:54 |
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