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Notes -
They aren't exactly a terrorist group like you're probably thinking, hidden with cells.
Somalia is in a civil war. Al-Shabaab is an Islamist faction in that war that commits terrorist attacks and is affiliated with al-Qaeda.
A lot of the Somalis in the west were refugees because they were supporters of Siad Barre before his government fell in 1990. Somali naming conventions are somewhat opaque to outsiders, so it was easy for colonels to just say they were teachers. The Barre government is hard to pin down ideologically, it was allied with the Soviet Bloc and also Islamist groups that opposed westernization.
So a lot of American-Somalis have family aligned with al-Shabaab due to tribal loyalties, support for Islam, local family strategies, etc.
Okay. I'm fairly intimately familiar with 'the men behind the wire' and whatnot.
You're essentially saying that they're sending remittances to Somali-residing family, who are then aligned with the terrorist groups and then possibly funded by those family members, but not direct transfer?
Yes. They probably couldn't do direct transfers even if they wanted to, it'd be too easy for the US Government to shut down. They probably do know that some of the money is ending up with al-Shabaab.
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