Terror group attracts Somali youths living abroad

Al-Shabaab, the Islamist terrorist group in Somalia that Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte were said to be hoping to join, is a relatively new organization that in 2006 grew out of the continuing fighting for control of that nation between warlords, traditional clans and religious followers of an extreme form of Islam, according to foreign policy experts.

Al-Shabaab, which means "the youth" in Arabic, has attracted Somali youths living abroad since 2006 when Christian Ethiopia invaded the mainly Muslim nation, forcing out the then-most powerful group in the country, the fundamentalist Islamic Courts Union. Al-Shabaab was originally the most militant wing of the courts union, according to an assessment of the organization on the Council of Foreign Relations' website.

The FBI has said that as many as two dozen young people are missing from the expatriate Somali community in Minneapolis who are believed to have gone to Somalia to fight for one of a number of Muslim factions there. One of the missing persons from the Somali community in Minneapolis was said to have become a suicide bomber in that country.

One of the key leaders of Al-Shabaab has been reported to be Omar Hammami, who grew up in Alabama, and now is known in Somalia as Abu Mansour Al-Amriki, "the American."

Located on the Horn of Africa, Somalia has not had a central government since 1991.

Most of those Americans who previously were familiar with the country probably know about it through the motion picture "Black Hawk Down," which was about the 1993 deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers who tried to arrest leaders of a warlord clan.

The soldiers were there as part of an international peacekeeping effort. But U.S. troops were withdrawn two years later.

Ironically, the rise of an Islamist threat linked to al-Qaida with a possible base in Somalia has had U.S. foreign policy giving tacit support to some of the country's factions formerly viewed as controlled by warlords.

The United States declared Al-Shabaab a terrorist organization in 2008 and U.S. drone strikes have been used to attack members of the group.