Sunday September 7, 2014
MINNEAPOLIS — It was a friendship that began in high school and ended in militant jihad.As Minnesota teenagers growing up in the 1990s, Troy Kastigar and Douglas McAuthur McCain shared almost everything. They played pickup basketball on neighborhood courts, wrote freewheeling raps in each other’s bedrooms, and posed together for snapshots, a skinny white young man with close-cropped hair locking his arm around his African-American friend with a shadow of a mustache.
They walked parallel paths to trouble, never graduating from high school and racking up arrests. They converted to Islam around the same time and exalted their new faith to family and friends, declaring that they had found truth and certainty. One after the other, both men abandoned their American lives for distant battlefields.
“This is the real Disneyland,” Kastigar said with a grin in a video shot after he joined Islamist militants in Somalia in late 2008. McCain wrote on Twitter in June 2014, after he left the United States to fight withIslamic State extremists. “I’m with the brothers now.”
Today, both are dead. While their lives ended five years and more than 2,000 miles apart, their intertwined journeys toward militancy offer a sharp example of how the allure of Islamist extremism has evolved, enticing similar pools of troubled, pliable young Americans to conflicts in different parts of the world.
The tools of online propaganda and shadowy networks of facilitators that once beckoned Kastigar and Somali men to the Horn of Africa are now drawing hundreds of Europeans and about a dozen known Americans to fight with the Islamic State, according to US law enforcement and counterterrorism officials.
“Troy and Doug fit together in some ways,” Kastigar’s mother, Julie Boada, said. “They’re both converted Muslims. They both have had struggles.” She added, “They’re connected through that.”
Investigators are looking into what led a handful of other people from Minnesota to follow the same path, said Kyle Loven, an FBI spokesman in Minneapolis.
Officials say McCain, 33, and a second American believed to have been killed while fighting for the Islamic State traveled in the same circles in Minneapolis and knew each other.
Officials have not publicly confirmed the identity of that man, but he has widely been reported to be a Somali immigrant in his late 20s who went by at least two names, calling himself Abdirahmaan Muhumed on Facebook. He spent much of his life around Minneapolis, worked at the airport during several years, and ended up in Syria this year, saying in a text to a friend, “With out jihad there is no islam.”
To law enforcement officials and community leaders here, the pathway for many recruits remains murky and difficult to uncover, but the latest wave of volunteers is a chilling replay of recent history.
Beginning in 2007, more than 20 men, mostly of Somali origin, left Minnesota to join Al Shabab militants who seized territory in Somalia and besieged the capital, Mogadishu.
The radicalization of the men prompted federal inquiries and brought scrutiny to the Somali population in Minneapolis, which is the largest in America, with about 30,000 people.
As Al Shabab forces withdrew from Mogadishu under pressure from African forces supported by the United States, people here held anti-Al Shabab rallies, and prosecutors eventually won convictions against eight men on charges stemming from the flow of money and recruits to the militants.
But now, Somali community leaders say they fear they are losing a battle to keep another round of young people from turning to another Internet-savvy and brutal group, the Islamic State.