Somalia: Jihadist Recruitment in West Difficult to Stop

Abdi Mohamud Nur seemed like a pretty average American kid.

Part of Minneapolis' sizable community of Somali-Americans, Nur was obedient and good-natured, his sister, Ifrah, said. He loved basketball. He graduated from a Minneapolis high school last year and enrolled at a local college.

In March of this year, Ifrah said, things changed. Nur, 20, joined a local mosque in the Minnesotan city. He became "reserved and unsocial," Iftah told VOA.

On May 29, he left his relatives and flew to Istanbul. The following day he sent a text message to his sister, telling his family not to worry and saying he "wants to join the jihad in Syria in search of paradise."

That was the last his family heard of him.

Nur's case has caught the attention of the FBI, which this week announced it was investigating whether young Somalis in the United States were becoming radicalized, seeking to join jihadist groups in Syria and elsewhere.

The agency's Minneapolis office posted an announcement on its Web site on Tuesday asking people to contact law enforcement "[I]f you know anyone who is planning to and/or has traveled to a foreign country for armed combat or who is being recruited for such activities."

The issue of young men, Somalis or otherwise, being radicalized in the United States and recruited to fight in Syria or Somalia gained further attention in recent weeks with the case of Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, a Florida man who died in a suicide attack in Syria on May 25. It was believed to be the first time a U.S. citizen has been involved in an attack of this kind as part of the Syrian civil war.

Analysts in both the United States and Canada, which also has a sizable population of Somali refugees, said stopped recruitment is difficult for Western authorities.

Groups like the notorious Somali terror group al-Shabab find followers because the organization works "within [the] family network and family system," said Mubin Shaikh, a Canada-based Muslim scholar and former extremist who infiltrated some radical groups while working for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.