Somalis hope arrests lift suspicion

MINNEAPOLIS — Over the long months that federal investigators delved into the baffling recruitment of young men who left Minneapolis to fight with Islamic militants in Somalia, the city's Somali community grappled with the fear they would all be branded terrorists.

But this week as the FBI netted its first grand jury indictments in the case, many hope the arrests of two Somali men will spell the beginning of the end of an investigation that has wracked their community.

Minneapolis is home to about 32,000 Somalis — the largest population of Somali immigrants in the U.S. — most of whom fled Somalia in the 1990s to escape a brutal civil war that plunged the country into chaos.

But in the last 18 months as many as 20 young men are believed to have left Minnesota to join al-Qaida-linked militants who want to establish an Islamic state in the Horn of Africa country, which is plagued by an ineffective central government. Family members say at least four of the missing men are now dead.

"The image of this community has been hit very hard in the last few months," said Farhan Hurre, executive director of the Abubakar As-Saddique mosque in Minneapolis. His mosque fell under suspicion as a recruiting site for some of the missing men.

After months of FBI investigation, grand jury indictments accused Salah Osman Ahmed and Abdifatah Yusuf Isse of providing material support to terrorists and with conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim and injure.

Hurre said he didn't know either of the indicted men but couldn't say for sure if either spent time at his mosque. But he said the community is relieved and that indictments might help ease the mistrust that had been brewing among neighbors.

But others worry that the men still missing in Somalia could continue to tarnish their community, which already faces racial discrimination and religious misunderstanding.

"A few individuals don't make up the reality of this community," said Hindia Ali, 23, a college student who knew one of the missing men.

Somalis flocked to Minnesota, attracted by the state's generous social services and an active religious community with a history of reaching out to refugees from impoverished and unstable nations.

Many settled in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood directly east of downtown Minneapolis, an area now home to numerous mosques, Somali-owned shops and restaurants, and Somali families living in aging high-rise apartment buildings.