FBI sees Seattle connection with violence in Somalia

The FBI believes "outside influences" are at work in Seattle's Somali community, trying to recruit and radicalize young men to carry out jihad in their homeland.

Those influences — whether they be radical Islamic Web sites or outside recruiters — are "a danger to the Somali community, and the Seattle community at large," Special Agent Fred Gutt of the FBI's Seattle field office said Thursday.

Just how much of a danger is what Sarah Farah, the director of the Somali Community Services of Seattle, hopes to find out at a community meeting where she's planning to talk about the recent report that a young Seattle man killed 21 peacekeepers and civilians last week when he set off a suicide truck-bomb at a checkpoint in Mogadishu. "We want to know, 'Is it happening here? Has anyone heard of it?' Sometimes you never know it's coming into your community until the last minute and it's already happened," said Farah, who has yet to set a date for the meeting.

She said it's hard to imagine why anybody would want to return to that war-weary nation.

"Nobody, especially teenagers, wants to go back to Somalia. People are dying there," she said.

Others who work with the thousands of Somali immigrants in Seattle say disaffected young people are vulnerable targets for recruiters.

"Our public school systems are simply ill-equipped to handle children who have spent most of their lives in refugee camps," Buddy Smith, 39, an after-school volunteer at the Somali Community Services Coalition office near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, wrote in an e-mail. The coalition is separate from Farah's group.

"Some kids arrive in this country having never gone to school. They don't speak the language, and they have to learn on the fly," he said.

In an interview, Smith said many Somalis get frustrated and drop out of school, making them turn to gangs or become targets for militants seeking to recruit them.

Smith said he has not personally come across young people who have been approached by recruiters because the kids he sees are those who go to extra effort to get help with school work.

"It's the ones I don't see that I worry about," he said.

In Minnesota, as many as 20 young Somali men are believed to have traveled to Somalia to fight, most for a group called al-Shabaab, a terrorist organization with links to al-Qaida. Three have died, including 27-year-old Shirwa Ahmed, who blew up himself and 29 others in a suicide bombing at a United Nations checkpoint last fall.

Now, the FBI and immigration agents are looking at a Seattle man in the bombing last week, for which al-Shabaab has claimed credit. The FBI did not release his name.

The man's parents live in the Seattle area, according to Omar Jamal, a Minnesota community activist who said he has spoken to other relatives. They have refused to be interviewed, he said.

The Seattle man would be the third from this area linked to the violence in Somalia or efforts to recruit Americans to fight there.

Gutt said agents and officials have met with several groups of Somalis in Seattle over the past months to discuss these and other issues. Gutt acknowledged there has been suspicion within the community, at least some of it stemming from post-9/11 investigations that targeted Somali money-changers and importers and users of the drug "khat."

Those raids were conducted by other federal law-enforcement agencies, he pointed out.

"These are hardworking people. They came here to make a better life for themselves. They don't want to go back" to their war-torn country, Gutt said. "So something is drawing these young people back. It's not their families. It's something from the outside."

Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com

Seattle Times staff reporters Steve Miletich and Christine Clarridge contributed to this report.