The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the disappearances of Somalis across the U.S. — including many who have acquired American citizenship — because some of the missing later reappeared in the Islamic African nation where a jihad is taking place.
“A number of young Somali men have traveled from throughout the United States to include Minneapolis to Somalia, potentially to fight,” FBI special Agent E.K. Wilson told CNN.
The report said the Somalis have been disappearing over the last six months. They have been reported missing from Boston, Portland, Maine; and Columbus, Ohio, as well as Minnesota.
WND reported earlier when young men were disappearing from the Miinneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, which has a large Somali population.
 (Illustration: Minneapolis’ Fox 9) |
The suspicion reportedly was that the men were being recruited to join the holy war in Somalia.
KMSP-TV in Minneapolis reported at the time that more than 20 men between the ages of 17 and 22 had vanished from the Twin Cities area’s Somali population of about 60,000 in the previous few months.
Those who left simply disappeared, sometimes without even letting parents and friends know.
“It looks like people are being recruited to join the jihad in Somalia, but who’s doing it?” Omar Jamal of the Somali Justice Center told the station at the time. “We don’t know.”
Mahir Sherif, an attorney for the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center told CNN the organization was uninvolved in the disappearances.
The mosque, he said, “has not and will not recruit for any political cause,” according to CNN.
One of the missing was 17-year-old Burhan Hassan, according to CNN’s new report. He told his family he was catching a ride to school with a friend and just vanished.
Now his mother told CNN he called her.
“Mom, I’m in Somalia! Don’t worry about me; I’m OK,” the mother quoted her son as saying, according to the report.
Authorities say they are highly concerned after reports Shirwa Ahmed, 27, allegedly blew himself up in an apparent suicide bombing in northern Somalia in October.
Hassan’s mother, identified only as Amina, told CNN her son has called several times and that she can hear voices in the background as he speaks to her.
“It’s like a kidnapped person,” she said.
The Chicago Tribune reported the CIA has recruited gangs of Somalis to find, capture and allegedly detain Islamic militants on warships. Early last year, the U.S. helped install a pro-Western transitional government there, crushing the “Taliban-like movement.”
But now the Islamists are regrouping, and violence is everywhere.
More than 700,000 residents of Mogadishu have been driven out of the city, fleeing combat between extremists and the interim government.
