MINNEAPOLIS — Tall and lean, with a wispy mustache and shy smile, 17-year-old Burhan Hassan chalked up A's last fall as a senior at Roosevelt High School, vowing to become a doctor or lawyer.
After school and on weekends, he studied Islam at the nearby Abubakar As-Saddique mosque. He joined its youth group.
"He wanted to go to Harvard," said his uncle Osman Ahmed. "That was his dream."
Instead Hassan has gone to Somalia, the anarchic East African nation that his family fled when he was a toddler. On election day, Hassan and five other youths slipped away from their homes here, and anguished family members now say they may have joined a Taliban-style Islamic militia that U.S. authorities call a terrorist organization.
The youths, who have U.S. passports, followed a well-trod trail from Minneapolis to Mogadishu. Another group took off in August. The FBI believes that over the last two years, 12 to 20 Minnesotans have gone to Somalia.
As a result, a joint terrorism task force led by the FBI is scrambling to determine if extremist Islamic groups are seeking recruits here in the nation's largest Somali community -- as well as in San Diego, Seattle, Boston and other cities.
"We're aware that these guys have traveled from Minneapolis and other parts of the country," said E.K. Wilson, the FBI spokesman here. "Our concern obviously is they've been recruited somehow to fight or to train as terrorists."
Topping their concern is the case of Shirwa Ahmed, a 27-year-old former Minneapolis resident who went to Somalia in 2007 -- and who may be what Wilson called "the first occasion of a U.S. citizen suicide bomber."
Officials believe the naturalized American was on a terrorist team that detonated five car bombs in two northern Somali cities on Oct. 29, killing at least 30 people, including U.N. aid workers.
Ahmed phoned his sister in Minneapolis a day before the bombings to say he would not see her again, according to a family friend. "She thought he was sick," the friend said. The next day, someone else called from Somalia to say he had "gone to paradise" as a martyr for Islam.
The FBI brought back bone fragments and other remains found in Bosaso, one of the blast sites, Wilson said. DNA tests established Ahmed's identity.
He was buried in a Muslim funeral in Burnsville, south of Minneapolis, on Dec. 3.
