A Bit More Detail

CBC's Jeff Green describes the grief and confusion felt by the people who knew Mohamud Mohamed Mohamud, a Somali-Canadian from Hamilton who was a student at York University before he left to become a jihadist for the Islamic State in Syria and died there in recent airstrikes. No one seems to know what set him off.

Roughly one year ago, Mohamud Mohamed Mohamud, then 19 years old and a biology student at Toronto's York University, met a group of friends at a hip-hop dance audition, and later partied and grew close with them. But he eventually cut them off — through the spring and summer of 2014.

By July, while those friends thought they lost touch with an athletic, outgoing man, who at times seemed unsure of himself and his identity, his family in Hamilton was frantically trying to warn the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and RCMP that their eldest son may have taken up arms with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria militants.

Earlier this week, CSIS, albeit unofficially, told the family there were reports he was killed by the anti-ISIS military campaign, apparently dying during attacks from Kurdish forces in northern Syria last week.

His extended family has gone into seclusion to deal with their loss, said Hamilton lawyer Hussein Hamdani, who tried to help the family once they realized he was "crossing over."

What happened that led to the change remains a mystery, he said.

"That is an important question that we must look at and try to find the answer to."

Jennifer Pagliaro's Toronto Star article about a controversial raid by Toronto police in a substantially Somali-Canadian neighbourhood touches upon a few Toronto issues: crime, race, poverty, scandal.

Saeda Sidin Hersi woke to what sounded like gunshots.

When police arrived at the Dixon Rd. complex where she lives early morning on June 13, the woman told a news conference she was startled awake.

“It was like a loud, repetitive thunder. It reminded me of gunshots,” the 65-year-old woman said, her story told through a written translation. “I was pinned against a wall, rubber handcuffs holding my hands behind my back and I was pushed onto the floor by what looked like a soldier.”

[. . .]

Later, the woman tells her story inside the apartment where she says police officers in tactical gear broke down her door, threw in a flash bang and tried to handcuff both her and her 96-year-old mother while they arrested her son as part of the sweep — a year-long operation that culminated with the raids last week targeting guns, drugs and alleged gang members.

Her apartment at 340 Dixon Rd. is part of a complex of six buildings known as Dixon City that was the focus of the raid and where police say the alleged gang members of the Dixon City Bloods are based.

But the complex in Little Mogadishu has also been the subject of much controversy after it was linked to a video that appears to show Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine.

Sources have told the Star police became aware of the existence of the video during surveillance for Project Traveller.

And after reports of the video shown to two Star reporters were published, sources said that during a meeting with staff, the mayor blurted out two units at Dixon Rd. where the video could be located.

Another address on Windsor Rd., which was also subject to a search warrant, was the setting of a now infamous photo taken of Ford and three men — one who was shot and killed in March, and two others who were arrested as part of the sweep.

That's the question that this grim article from the Globe and Mail, by Joe Friesen and Colin Freeze, asks.

The men left the country without a word of warning. They range in age from early 20s to early 30s and all worshiped at the Abu Huraira mosque in North York, community leaders say. Two or three have since called home to say they travelled to Kenya, but didn't say whether they ever plan to return to Toronto. The language they used in the phone calls is similar, an indication that they may have been told what to say.

Security officials believe the missing men have crossed Kenya's northern border with Somalia to join al-Shabab – literally “the youth” – an al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist movement that has swept across southern and central Somalia.

“Somalia's fragile coalition government appears helpless against a widespread Islamist insurgency that is gradually tightening its grip,” RCMP Commissioner William Elliott said in a speech last month. He added he was particularly concerned about the jihad spreading to “Somali-Canadians who travel to Somalia to fight and then return.”

On Thursday, a suicide bombing believed to be the work of the al-Shabab ripped through a graduation ceremony in Mogadishu, killing three Somali cabinet ministers, several journalists and more than a dozen students. Similar bombings have been perpetrated by Somalis raised in Europe and the United States.

In Somalia, and increasingly in Canada, community leaders view such attacks as war on their own futures. The refugee communities that fled the civil strife 20 years ago had hoped that generations raised in the West would break the cycle of bloodshed, poverty and anarchy. The cruel twist is that a handful of youth within the Somali diaspora are being pulled back to their homeland to perpetuate it.

[. . .]

Last month, U.S. prosecutors charged a group of American Somalis with recruiting at least 20 of their own kinsmen from the Minneapolis area to join the al-Shabab, including some who have become suicide bombers. Until recently, no one in Canada thought Toronto would be the next target.

“We used to argue with our American friends. We would say, ‘We will never have this extremism in Canada because we are a tolerant society.' … None of our mosques were known for spreading an extremist message,” said Abdurahman Jibril, head of the Somali Canadian National Council, a group that lobbies to improve social services for Somali immigrants.

Of note is the fact of the young men's new invented community, related not to the region of their origins or to their clan allegiances or to Canada (in whatever degree), but to al-Shahab's particular blend of religious extremism and pan-Somali nationalism.

What's most troubling for Somali-Canadian leaders is that these are not young men who struggled to adjust to life in the West. At least two were born in Canada. The others were educated here from primary school onwards. They are the children of respected families who have found work and integrated into the broader community, leaders say. They attended either college or university. Most of the missing men can't even speak Somali, the community leaders add.

[. . .]

A further contradiction is that they may have joined a movement based primarily in Somalia's south, in the city of Kismayo, even though four of the five men are descended from families from the relatively stable northern province of Somaliland.

Somaliland was overseen by the British during the colonial era, while the south was run by the Italians. Somalis generalize by describing northerners as more reserved, and southerners as more outgoing. Northerners live primarily in the Scarborough area, while southerners dominate the area known as Little Mogadishu, around Kipling Avenue and Dixon Road. The bulk of Toronto's 50,000 Somalis live in the apartment towers and public-housing projects that dot that corner of Etobicoke.

Omar Kireh, administrator of the Abu Huraira mosque, where the men prayed, said it's strange that northerners would join a southern insurgency. But nothing is predictable with the younger generation, he added, who know little of the country's fractious tribal politics.

The classic sort of diaspora extremism is evidenced here, I think.