NY Times: A Call to Jihad From Somalia, Answered in the U.S.

[heyholetsgogrant]

MINNEAPOLIS — The Carlson School of Management rises from the asphalt like a monument to capitalist ambition. Stock prices race across an electronic ticker near a sleek entrance and the atrium soars skyward, as if lifting the aspirations of its students. The school’s plucky motto is “Nowhere but here.”

A screenshot of the Facebook profile of Mohamoud Hassan, one of a group of Minneapolis men who left for Somalia to join in a militant Islamic movement last November. Mr. Hassan went by another name, Bashir Maxamed Caydid, on his Facebook account.

For a group of students who often met at the school, on the University of Minnesota campus, those words seemed especially fitting. They had fled Somalia as small boys, escaping a catastrophic civil war. They came of age as refugees in Minneapolis, embracing basketball and the prom, hip-hop and the Mall of America. By the time they reached college, their dreams seemed within grasp: one planned to become a doctor; another, an entrepreneur.

But last year, in a study room on the first floor of Carlson, the men turned their energies to a different enterprise.

“Why are we sitting around in America, doing nothing for our people?” one of the men, Mohamoud Hassan, a skinny 23-year-old engineering major, pressed his friends.

In November, Mr. Hassan and two other students dropped out of college and left for Somalia, the homeland they barely knew. Word soon spread that they had joined the Shabaab, a militant Islamist group aligned with Al Qaeda that is fighting to overthrow the fragile Somali government.

Source: NY Times

Full Article Click Here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/12somalis.html

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The Article is 7 pages long, but a good read.

[GoSkins561]

There are many more like them in Minnesota.