Somali 'Travelers': The Holiest Gang, Part III

How young Somali immigrants searched for belonging, and found jihad. Last of a three-part series. Part I can be found here. Part II can be found here.

Somali-American terror recruits have common roots in an impoverished, neglected and sometime oppressed immigrant community. Their feelings of impotence and isolation -- and their desperate searches for structure -- are not new. But for the most part, any violent impulses simmered under the surface until late 2006, when the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia gave American Somalis -- and their kinsmen all over the world -- a cause on which to hang their dissatisfaction. ...