Newsweek has a piece about the recent rash of Somali-American teenagers suddenly disappearing from their Minneapolis homes. The fear is that they are being recruited by radical Islamic groups to fight in their war-torn homeland. As many as 20 Somali-Americans between the ages of 17 and 27 have mysteriously vanished in the last 18 months. Most disturbing is the case of Shirwa Ahmed, a former University of Minnesota student who blew himself up alongside other suicide bombers in Somalia last October.

The Newsweek article doesn’t contain much that hasn’t been reported locally. (Abdi Aynte wrote an excellent piece on the topic for MnIndy last month.) But it does feature speculation from (anonymous) intelligence officials that al-Shabab, a radical Somali jihadist group linked with Al-Qaida, might be involved in the recruitment drive.  The relevant passage:

Since al-Shabab is on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, traveling to Somalia to train or fight with the group is illegal. But security officials involved in the investigation have a bigger concern—that a jihadist group able to enlist U.S. nationals to fight abroad might also be able to persuade Somali-Americans to act as sleeper agents here in the United States. Al-Shabab has no history of targeting the U.S. But the group has grown closer to Al Qaeda since the American-backed invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia in 2006. Al-Shabab has since been working with a number of non-Somali operatives wanted by the United States, including Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, an architect of the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, according to intelligence officials.

As if to underscore the danger, early last week the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warned in a bulletin for the first time that al-Shabab might try to carry out an attack in America—timed to disrupt the presidential inauguration. A government official, who asked for anonymity discussing sensitive intelligence, tells NEWSWEEK the information came from an informant who notified security officials that people affiliated with al-Shabab might already be here. The tip-off proved to be a false alarm. Still, security officials view the bulletin and the disappearances in Minnesota as a warning that Somalia’s brew of lawlessness and radicalism might rebound on the United States. “You have to ask yourself, ‘How long is it before one of these guys comes back here and blows himself up?’” says a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, who also wouldn’t be quoted on the record discussing intel.