The photos were laid out one after another, headshots of five young Somali-Canadian men who disappeared in mid-October.
The man from the East Africa desk of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service asked anguished parents the usual questions: Do you recognize any of the men in these pictures? Did you know them, or did your son? Did anything change in his life recently? Any indication of new friends or new interests?
The families often had no answers. Yes, some sons had recently chastised their parents for not showing sufficient religious devotion, friends say. Others had dropped out of college or lost interest in their studies. But most parents remain bewildered by their sons' disappearance.
The men left the country without a word of warning. They range in age from early 20s to early 30s and all worshipped at the Abu Huraira mosque in North York, community leaders say. Two or three have since called home to say they travelled to Kenya, but didn't say whether they ever plan to return to Toronto. The language they used in the phone calls is similar, an indication that they may have been told what to say.
Security officials believe the missing men have crossed Kenya's northern border with Somalia to join al-Shabab – literally “the youth” – an al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist movement that has swept across southern and central Somalia.
“Somalia's fragile coalition government appears helpless against a widespread Islamist insurgency that is gradually tightening its grip,” RCMP Commissioner William Elliott said in a speech last month. He added he was particularly concerned about the jihad spreading to “Somali-Canadians who travel to Somalia to fight and then return.”
On Thursday, a suicide bombing believed to be the work of the al-Shabab ripped through a graduation ceremony in Mogadishu, killing three Somali cabinet ministers, several journalists and more than a dozen students. Similar bombings have been perpetrated by Somalis raised in Europe and the United States.
In Somalia, and increasingly in Canada, community leaders view such attacks as war on their own futures. The refugee communities that fled the civil strife 20 years ago had hoped that generations raised in the West would break the cycle of bloodshed, poverty and anarchy. The cruel twist is that a handful of youth within the Somali diaspora are being pulled back to their homeland to perpetuate it.
Security officials say al-Shabab is to Somalia what the Taliban was to Afghanistan a decade ago: Violent Islamist warriors who promise law and order, but whose barbaric practices include cutting off the limbs of thieves and stoning teenage rape victims to death.
Somalia hasn't had a stable national government since 1991. The U.S., the UN, Ethiopia and the African Union have all tried unsuccessfully to bring a semblance of security to the country. The current leadership, known as the Transitional Federal Government, has limited reach even within the capital, Mogadishu. It's opposed by several rebel groups, most notably al-Shabab, as well as the pirates that hold sway in the northern province of Puntland.
Last month, U.S. prosecutors charged a group of American Somalis with recruiting at least 20 of their own kinsmen from the Minneapolis area to join the al-Shabab, including some who have become suicide bombers. Until recently, no one in Canada thought Toronto would be the next target.
“We used to argue with our American friends. We would say, ‘We will never have this extremism in Canada because we are a tolerant society.' … None of our mosques were known for spreading an extremist message,” said Abdurahman Jibril, head of the Somali Canadian National Council, a group that lobbies to improve social services for Somali immigrants.
