ASSESSING THE TERRORIST THREAT: A REPORT OF THE BIPARTISAN POLICY CENTER’S NATIONAL SECURITY PREPAREDNESS GROUP

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The new threat

“Mom, I’m in Somalia! Don’t worry about me; I’m okay,” was how 17-year-old Burhan Hassan’s worried mother discovered where her son had gone weeks after he and six other Somali-American youths disappeared from their homes in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area shortly after Election Day 2008. Almost without exception, the youths who slipped away were described as good boys1 who were “good students *who+ had no problems with the law.”2 But what especially troubled their relatives and others in the tight-knit émigré community was that no one could explain how the impoverished young men were able to pay for the $2,000 airline tickets they used to travel to Somalia.3 “My nephew, he doesn’t have money for a ticket,” the uncle of one lamented. “None of these kids do.”4 According to Abdisalem Adam, a teacher and head of the local Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, “Up to now, no one knows who recruited them. But they obviously did not wake up one morning and decide to go *to Somalia+.”5

The youths were radicalized and recruited in the U.S. and trained in Somalia by al-Shabab (“the Youth”), 6 an al-Qaeda ally that deliberately emulates its mentor organization -- down to its reliance on training camps, a safe haven, the use of the Internet for propaganda purposes, and suicide attacks. Indeed, it is believed that their trainer in Somalia was Saleh Ali Nabhan, the longtime al-Qaeda commander implicated in both the 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi and the 2002 attack on Israeli tourists at a hotel in Mombasa, who was killed last year. Two of these youths have become the first known Americans to have carried out suicide terrorist attacks.7