Thursday August 27, 2015
The night a drunk, tired teenager met two boys on his way home from a failed night out, he was feeling angry and alone.
“I look around at all the faces on the bus,” recalled the young man, who identifies himself only as The Shadow. “They belong to a different world that isn’t mine.”
That was the moment his life changed forever.
As the bus rolled through Copenhagen, Mohammad and Abdi told him he was “living a bad life”. They said there was a better way for Muslims.Then they revealed that they were members of a militant Islamic movement that was recruiting Western teenagers: but not the one you might think. This was al-Shabab, the Somalian jihadist group that’s snowballing into something far bigger and more terrifying than IS.
Abdi Rahman died at 17. He travelled to Somalia to join the terrorist group and, posing as a journalist, blew up himself and 24 others at a doctor’s graduation ceremony in Mogadishu in 2009. He’s one of around 40 young Danes who have joined al-Shabab’s fight in Africa.
And the murderous organisation isn’t just taking hold in Denmark, but across Western Europe, in the US and Canada and in Australia. In the same year that Abdi blew up the graduation ceremony, Australian security agencies foiled an al-Shabab linked plot to attack Holsworthy Army Barracks in Sydney.
A Somali religious scholar told the ABC at the time that young Australians who had gone to Somalia to fight with the terrorists had returned and were living in Australia.
Five months ago, the al-Qaeda-linked militants masterminded the slaughter of almost150 people at a Kenyan university in April, in one of the country’s worst massacres. The masked gunmen hurled grenades and fired automatic rifles as students slept, freeing Muslims and holding Christians and Jews hostage before detonating suicide vests packed with explosives after a 16-hour siege.
Weeks later, the extremists killed seven people, including four UN workers, by setting off an IED, which ripped through a staff bus in the northeast of Somalia.
Al-Shabab has now been linked with numerous acts of terror. It was behind the killing of 76 people at a football stadium in Uganda in 2010 and claimed responsibility for the 2013 attack on Kenya’s Westgate Mall, where at least 67 were killed, including several westerners.
Mohammad is now an al-Shabab warrior in Somalia. His father Abukar fears he too will became a suicide bomber. “We were part of a group that was prepared to kill for al-Shabab,” agreed The Shadow. “Some of us went all the way”.
While he has left al-Shabab, he still looks back at his time in a Danish terror cell as the best in his life, when he felt a close bond with his jihadist friends, a group of Westerners aged between 17 and 30.
Now, this fresh wave of radicalisation is starting to raise alarm bells across the Western world.
“We’re exploring ways to fight this problems,” a spokesperson from the Somali Australian Council of Victoria (SACOV) told news.com.au. “We have a public forum coming up in October.
“We had some people who went to Syria, and one boy was killed. It’s been openly discussed since then, the community is very concerned.”
In Denmark, a society that considers itself progressive and welcoming, people are horrified to learn so many wannabe jihadists walk among them.
“It’s a story of estrangement,” Soren Jespersen, who interviewed young Western Somalians including The Shadow for Al Jazeera documentary Warriors of the North, told news.com.au. “These young people feel estranged from the society we feel so proud of. Integration has failed in Denmark. We’ve been so busy patting ourselves on the back we’ve failed to see the problem. For many years, we’ve turned a blind eye.”
Al-Shabab began life in 2006 as an offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union, a rebel group resisting the country’s Western-backed government and Ethiopian forces. It has since shifted its cause from a national fight to global jihad, with hte aim of imposing a strict form of Sharia law.
Osama bin Laden even expressed his support for the group’s fight against the West.
Now, Western teenagers are joining their hardcore jihadist training camps, getting a military and religious education in the battleground that is Somalia. “Many get a big shock when they enter the training camp,” said Soren. “It’s tough training with a lot of discipline, and there’s always the prospect of death.
“But their main experience is a sense of community, ‘we’re together in this fight’. They get inspired, they get the fire inside them. It’s a propaganda machine to make them really firm in their belief. They need to be to fight this war.”
The suicide bombers are never the soldiers born in Somalia, but those who grew up in the West. “It’s an act of desperation,” added Soren.
Al-Shabab is becoming increasingly skilled at communicating with young Westerners via social media and YouTube videos. Disillusioned youngsters now have more radical paths open to them than ever before.
“Unemployement is contributing,” said the SACOV spokesperson. “Particuarly with boys, young people aren’t getting jobs, there’s discrimination in the jobs market. It’s making hem very disappointed.
“Then they have a lot of idle time, and if someone feels they’re not welcome in their country and someone on social media says, you don’t belong in Australia, you belong in Somalia, that’s how it happens.”
These so-called warriors are comitting horrendous crimes, but we need to look at our society, and why ethnic and religious groups feel isolated and cut off from their community’s traditional values.
If they don’t have a voice, teenagers may be highly vulnerable to the twisted logic of the people approaching them to be part of something huge and terrible.