(24 Oct 2013) Somali immigrants in Norway fear that violent extremism is taking root in their community after reports of young Somali-Norwegians travelling abroad to join jihadist groups.
One of the gunmen in the Nairobi mall attack that killed 67 people last month has been identified in Kenya as 23-year-old Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow, a Norwegian citizen who was born in Somalia and returned there in 2010.
Norway's Somali community was still coming to terms with that news when they were struck by another startling development: Two teenage sisters - 16 and 19 - had left their family in Norway to join the civil war in Syria.
"We see a growing problem when it comes to people travelling to war zones" said the head of the domestic intelligence service (the Norwegian Police Security Service, or PST) Marie Benedicte Bjoernland on Wednesday.
"When they are radicalised and when they are determined to go, for instance to Syria or other conflict areas, we don't have many legal measures to stop them," she added.
The conflict in Syria has attracted hundreds of foreign fighters from European countries, many of whom have joined Islamic militant groups.
According to the PST an estimated 30 to 40 people have left Norway alone.
"Everyone is shocked. You can feel when you talk to the Somali diaspora in here, you can feel the kind of fear" said Mohamed Husein Gaas, a Somali-born East Africa expert at the Fafo research foundation in Oslo.
"Generalisation is very easy," said Bashe Musse, a Somali community leader and local politician in Oslo, who warned against drawing stereotypes.
He said he was worried that "if some Somali did something bad, then all Somalis will share the problem."
It's not clear how exactly the sisters from suburban Oslo, who have not been named, planned to participate in the Syrian war.
But they told their family they wanted to take part in jihad, said Musse.
Musse said he had been in contact with their father, who travelled to Turkey in hopes of finding the sisters in the Turkish-Syrian border area where the Norwegian police say they were last spotted.
He reached one of his daughters by phone, but she told him it was too late to stop them from joining the "jihadists," Musse said.
"It is really very sad," he said.
He added that the vast majority of Somalis in Norway don't support violent extremism. About 30,000 people in Norway were either born in Somalia or have Somali parents.
For Dhuhulow, whose family moved to Norway in 1999, that journey appears to have started in the years before he returned to Somalia in 2010.
Norwegian authorities have declined to confirm his identity because the investigation is ongoing, but Bjoernland told the AP on Wednesday that the Norwegian suspect was well known to her agency in 2010 and that it even tried to steer him away from a path toward militancy.
Like in other countries, jihadist groups are targeting young Muslims, and in some cases Norwegian converts, through a mix of online propaganda and physical recruitment.
Why Norwegian youth would give up a secure and comfortable life in one of the world's richest countries is something PST struggles to explain.

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