More on Somali Youth Disappearing

Previously, I blogged about Somali youth disappearing from Minneapolis, NPR has a follow up story:

The Somali communities in Boston, Cleveland, San Diego and Seattle are also missing young Somalis. But nowhere have the numbers been as high as they have been in the Twin Cities — where up to 27 young men have vanished. And that, of course, raises the question: Why here?

The FBI has looked for some answers at a local school: Theodore Roosevelt High School. It's a two-story brick building in the suburbs of Minneapolis nestled in a neighborhood of bungalows on a narrow strip of road.

Inside, the hallways echo with foreign languages, some smatterings of Spanish and French and Somali.

At one point in the late 1990s, Roosevelt had the largest concentration of Somali students in America. One of them was a skinny 15-year-old named Shirwa Ahmed. He left Minneapolis for Somalia in 2007. He blew himself up in a suicide bombing last year. His remains are in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of town.

New Somalis are arriving in Minneapolis all the time, and many begin their high school careers in what is essentially a Somali phonics class. A lot of the new Somali students are illiterate. So they basically sound out Somali words on the board — as first-graders might do in this country. As a result, in many ways, they have become isolated even in their own high school.

And in Minneapolis, that small percentage was convinced to go to Somalia and join the fight there. Parents in the Somali community, for their part, are soul-searching. They wish they had kept a better eye on their kids and, instead of trying to get them to forget about Somalia, warned them about how dangerous it is there. Most of all, they are anxious for the FBI to tell them who is taking their children.