Radicalized Americans in Yemen and Somalia May Pose Threat to United States
January 23rd, 2010Oh sure.
Via: Security Management:
Approximately 72 American citizens, some ex-convicts, have disappeared into the ungoverned spaces of Somalia and Yemen and may pose a jihadist threat to the United States, according to a report released yesterday by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Chairman Sen. John F. Kerry warns in the report that Al Qaeda and affiliated movements seek “to recruit American citizens to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States. These Americans are not necessarily of Arab or South Asian descent; they include individuals who converted to Islam in prison or elsewhere and were radicalized.”
The committee produced the report after interviewing American counterterrorism officials in Yemen and surrounding countries, even before the botched Christmas Day attack directed attention to the terrorist threat emanating from Yemen. The report focuses on three separate groups of American citizens that have traveled to Yemen and Somalia.
Counterterrorism officials told the committee that possibly three dozen American ex-convicts moved to Yemen, ostensibly to study Arabic, and have intermittently “dropped off the radar.” The officials fear these individuals may have traveled to terrorist training camps.
Another group of about 10 American citizens traveled to Yemen, converted, radicalized, and married Yemeni woman to remain in the country. The report describes them as the perfect jihadist recruit: blond-haired, blue-eyed, and American. They are what terrorism expert Peter Bergen calls “clean skins”—”without previous criminal records or known terrorist associations and intimately familiar with the West.”
They are hardly ideal ‘clean skins’ if known to be among 72 missing, or 10 settled & married etc. If we know about them, how can they have no known associations etc? If I am John Smith, US citizen, and I head out to Yemen and radicalise, when I return I either do so as myself and get grilled by the authorities, or I return in disguise. If in disguise, what difference does it make if my real identity is known to the authorities or not, seeing as I am travelling as a fake identity etc.?