Archives » Tuesday, November 24, 2009
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Michael Isikoff
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Nov 24, 2009 11:43 AM
As Declassified noted last weekend,
a recent FBI affidavit in a big Chicago terror case offered an
unusually revealing glimpse of life behind “enemy lines” in Waziristan
in northwest Pakistan.
ON Monday, the FBI provided an equally eye-opening look at the scene
inside another jihadi stronghold, this one in the war-ravaged nation of
Somalia (which U.S. officials increasingly fear is becoming a haven for
Al Qaeda). In the process, the bureau shed new light on how one Somali
American from Minneapolis ended up losing his life in Somalia—as a
suicide bomber.
Earlier this year NEWSWEEK reported
on the FBI’s concern about the strange case of young Somali Americans
who were disappearing from their communities in Minneapolis and
elsewhere in the United States only to reemerge fighting in Somalia on
behalf of Al-Shabab, a militant terror group closely aligned with Al
Qaeda. As part of its charges unveiled this week against eight
defendants accused of providing material support to Al- Shabab, the
Justice Department unsealed an FBI affidavit
recounting the experiences of one such man—an unnamed confidential
informant from the Minneapolis area who has pled guilty and is now
assisting the FBI. The informant described how he was among a group of
four men who flew from Minneapolis in late 2007 and wound up at an Al-Shabab training camp. The training camp was attended by “dozens” of
other young Somalis from Africa, Europe, and the United States, the
affidavit states. Somali, Arab, and “Western” instructors were there to
train the students in “small arms, machine guns, rocket-propelled
grenades, and military style tactics.” The instructors also
“indoctrinated” the students with “anti-Ethiopian, anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-Western beliefs,” the affidavit states.
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