MINNEAPOLIS -- Over the long months that federal investigators delved into the baffling recruitment of young men who left Minneapolis to fight with Islamic militants in Somalia, the city's Somali community grappled with the fear they would all be branded terrorists.
But this week as the FBI netted its first grand jury indictments in the case, many hope the arrests of two Somali men will spell the beginning of the end of an investigation that has wracked their struggling community.
Minneapolis is home about 32,000 Somalis -the largest population of Somali immigrants in the U.S. - most of whom fled the Somalia in the 1990s to escape a brutal civil war that plunged the country into chaos.
But in the last 18 months as many as 20 young men are believed to have left Minnesota to join al-Qaida-linked militants who want to establish an Islamic state in the Horn of Africa country, which is plagued by an ineffective central government. Family members say at least three of the missing men are now dead.
"The image of this community has been hit very hard the in the last few months," said Farhan Hurre, executive director of the Abubakar As-Saddique mosque in Minneapolis. His mosque fell under suspicion as a recruiting site for some of the missing men.
After a monthslong FBI investigation, grand jury indictments against two men from Minnesota were unsealed Friday. The indictment accused Salah Osman Ahmed and Abdifatah Yusuf Isse of providing material support to terrorists and with conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim and injure. Ahmed is specifically accused of traveling to Somalia to fight with Islamic militants, according to the indictment.
It was not known if Isse also went to Somalia, though at least one community leader has described the two as "foot soldiers" not involved in planning or recruiting.
Attorneys for Ahmed, 26, and Isse, whose age is not known, didn't respond Tuesday to phone messages or e-mails seeking comment. Both men are in custody, with Ahmed scheduled for a detention hearing Thursday. Family members told a community advocate they believed Isse was cooperating with authorities; neither prosecutors nor the FBI are talking about the case.
Hurre said he didn't know either of the indicted men but couldn't say for sure if either spent time at his mosque. But he said the community is relieved that indictments might help ease the mistrust that had been brewing between neighbors.
"A lot of people are looking to go forward with their lives," he said Tuesday.
But others worry that the men still missing in Somalia could continue to tarnish their community that already faces racial discrimination and religious misunderstanding.
"A few individuals don't make up the reality of this community," said Hindia Ali, 23, a college student who knew one of the missing men.
Somalis flocked to Minnesota in large numbers starting in the early 1990s attracted by the state's generous social services and an active religious community with a history of reaching out to refugees from impoverished and unstable nations.
Many settled in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood directly east of downtown Minneapolis, an area now home to numerous mosques, Somali-owned shops and restaurants, and a series of aging high-rise apartment buildings occupied almost entirely by Somali families. The cities of St. Paul, Rochester and numerous Twin Cities suburbs are also home to sizable and growing Somali populations.
As with many new immigrant groups, Somalis have struggled for an economic and cultural foothold. The state demographer estimates a little more than half of Minnesota's Somalis live in poverty.
Minneapolis police officers and Somali community activists have reported increasing gang membership among young Somali males, and a series of seven slayings of young Somali men in 2008 has been attributed to gang warfare.
Hurre, the mosque director, said the disappearances have produced not just a negative image of Somalis but friction within the Somali community itself.
"There was some fingerpointing, some asking who could have allowed something like this to happen, an internal tug of war," he said.
But there is also hope among the families of those who have died or are missing in Somalia that the indictments will deter other young Somali men from making the same mistake.
"They are dying like flies," said Hussein Samatar, uncle of Burhan Hassan, whose family learned in June had been killed and buried in Mogadishu, the Somali capitol. "Anybody who has any sense would know what has happened to these young men would know that the same thing would be in store for the
