September 05, 2009

Fifth Minneapolis Somali Al-Shabaab jihadist killed in ambush in Somalia on Friday

An exclusive story from our friends at the Terror Free Somalia Foundation (HT: Rahm), a fifth jihadist from the Minneapolis Somali community, Mohamoud Hassan, was killed in an ambush on Friday as he and his friends were on their way to break their daily Ramadan fast:

A fifth Somali-American Jihadists from Minnesota was killed in his east African homeland today while fighting with the Somali extremist group al-Shabaab, according to a friend. Terrorist Mohamoud Hassan, 23, a student at the University of Minnesota, was apparently killed during heavy fighting between al-Shabaab and African peacekeepers Friday in Mogadishu.

A fellow fighter called at least one friend in Minnesota to report the news of Hassan's death, and some young Somali-Americans were quickly spreading the word Friday night through Facebook status updates.

According to one source who heard directly from the friend who received the phone call, Hassan and others were on their way to break their fast for Ramadan when they were attacked. The source, who knew Terrorist Hassan at the U, requested anonymity because he didn't feel comfortable speaking on behalf of Hassan's family.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Update: The Minneapolis Star Tribune is also now reporting that Hassan's family has heard he was killed yesterday.

Update2: The New York Times front page article on the missing Minneapolis Somalis back in July had this to say about Mohamoud Hassan (note they were listening to Anwar Awlaqi sermons):

If the first men who left for Somalia had struggled to find their place in America, the boys to follow were “our best kids,” in the words of one uncle.

Mohamoud Hassan outdid most of his peers at Roosevelt High School in 2006, becoming one of the few Somali boys to make it to college that year.

He stood out at the University of Minnesota. Answering to the nickname Snake, the tall, lanky freshman wore a black cotton beret and a pencil-thin moustache. Women found him clownishly charming, occasionally giving in to his pleas for their “digits.” The engineering major tried to cultivate a more serious image, writing poetry, debating politics and poring through “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” his friend Hindia Ali recalled.

Even his closest friends found Mr. Hassan an enigma. He had come to the United States without parents or siblings and looked after his ailing grandmother in a dim apartment in the Towers. He longed to return to his homeland, both to experience it for himself and to rebuild it. It was a common obsession among his friends. “It’s just this missing piece of us,” his friend Ruqia Mohamed said.

After the Ethiopian invasion, a circle of listeners sometimes gathered around Mr. Hassan at the Coffman student center. Mr. Hassan, then the vice president of the Minnesota Somali Student Union, defended the occupation, posting an essay on Facebook assailing the insurgents as “a handful of thugs.”

But over time, he began to see things differently.

Mr. Hassan’s interest in the Islamist movement dovetailed with his own religious transformation, friends said. In the fall of 2007 he began downloading sermons onto his iPod and soon was attending the Abubakar mosque.

By then, Mr. Hassan had become upset by the reports of rapes in Somalia and set out to learn more about the insurgency, one friend recalled. He began talking of joining the movement as early as February 2008, around the same time that a friend from the mosque — Mr. Maruf, the former gang member — left for Somalia.

“I wanted to go, so I got to know him,” Mr. Hassan said in a recent telephone conversation from Somalia with a Minneapolis friend.

That May, he was incensed by a United States military air strike that killed Aden Hashi Ayro, a leader of the Shabaab, along with at least 10 civilians. “How dare they?” Mr. Hassan demanded one afternoon at the student center. “Who is the terrorist?”

Mr. Hassan and another university student searched the Internet for jihadist videos and chat rooms, the friend said. They listened to “Constants on the Path to Jihad,” lectures by the Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is suspected of inciting Muslims in the West to violence.

While Somali nationalism had initially driven the men, a friend said, their cause eventually took on a religious cast. They became convinced that Somalia’s years of bloodshed were punishment from God for straying from Islam, the friend said. The answer was to restore the Caliphate, or Islamic rule.

“They saw it as their duty to go and fight,” the friend said. “If it was just nationalism, they could give money. But religion convinced them to sacrifice their whole life.”