Local banks recently shutdown money-wiring services for local Somalis.

​The war on terrorism is making life difficult for local Somalis.

Last month, owners of Somali money-lending businesses, called hawalas, were notified by St. Paul-based Sunrise Community Banks that they would no longer be able to wire money back home. Sunrise was the last bank in Minnesota to offer that service.

The news posed a huge problem for the area's 32,000 Somalis, many of whom have family in East Africa that rely on money transfers for basic needs.

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Bob Fletcher in his former post as Ramsey County sheriff.

​After he lost the election for Ramsey County sheriff, Bob Fletcher declared a new passion: educating law enforcement about Somali culture and history. He dubbed the new venture the Center for Somalia History Studies, and its first event -- an educational seminar called "Understanding the People of Somalia" -- takes place on Thursday.

However, in a letter sent out to several law enforcement agencies as well as the press, members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Minnesota called the seminar "anti-Muslim and anti-Somali," and called on those agencies to withdraw from the event.

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Somalia's civil war claims another Minnesotan.

​A suicide bomber who blew himself up in Mogadishu yesterday in an attack that killed 10 had traveled to Somalia from Minneapolis in 2008.

Abdisalan Ali had emigrated to Minnesota with his family when he was 2 years old, but was among 20 local youths who returned to the war-torn land to fight in its civil war back in 2008. He is the fourth American to kill himself in a suicide attack in Somalia.

In a clip posted by an Al-Qaida-linked militant group on Somalimemo.net today, the man alleged to be Ali urges fellow Muslims to conduct attacks in Western countries.

"My brothers and sisters, do Jihad in America, do Jihad in Canada, do Jihad in England, anywhere in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in China, in Australia," the suicide bomber urges.

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Former Sheriff Bob Fletcher is back with an unexpected new project.

​Former Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher has kept a pretty low profile since he lost the election back last November. He returned to his post as a watch commander with the St. Paul police, surfacing only occasionally to field criticism of how he ran the department as his successor settled in.

Now he's back in the news with the launch of a surprising project.

"When I lost the election, I really had a couple projects I'd wanted to do," he says. "This was one of them."

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Farah Mohamed Beledi fled the Twin Cities in 2009

​The FBI is confirming that 27-year-old Farah Mohamed Beledi of St. Paul was one of two men who died in a Mogadishu suicide attack last week. He fled Minnesota in 2009 to join the al-Shabaab terrorist group.

Beledi was one of 13 Twin Cities men indicted on terrorism charges in July 2010, as part of the ongoing probe into how young Somali men from the cities are being recruited to fight for al-Shabaab.

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Wikipedia

Al-Shabaab has been linked to Minnesota before.

​Al-Shabaab, the Islamic terrorist group allied with al-Qaeda, is reporting on its website that a Somali American from Minnesota, 25-year-old Abdullahi Ahmed, blew himself up during a car bombing in the Somali capital of Mogadishu.

GlobalPost reports that Ahmed was known as Al-Amriki, and that he traveled to Somalia two years ago to join Al-Shabaab. He tried but failed to drive an explosives-laden car through a security barrier on Monday, but still killed a number of African Union soldiers.

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Hussein Abdi Hassan has pleaded not guilty.

​Riding the train all the way from Minneapolis to Seattle can get a little dull. Last month, Hussein Abdi Hassan found himself on that trip, and decided to make things interesting -- by dropping a bomb threat.

Well, the 24-year-old Somali from Burnsville is probably regretting that unwise fake-out right about now. He never made it to Seattle--since February, he's been awaiting his court date.

Yesterday, Hassan was arraigned in federal court in Great Falls, Montana, where he pleaded not guilty to federal charges of false information and hoaxes.

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Ahmednur Ali was shot and killed at the Brian Coyle Center in Sept. 2008

​A drive-by shooting outside Brian Coyle Community Center last night left two Somali men wounded and rekindled fears about gang violence.

Neither the victims nor the suspects have been named by police. One of the injured men suffered a life-threatening gut shot, but had stomach surgery overnight at Hennepin County Medical Center and is expected to survive. The other man got away with an injury to the leg.

"We don't think this was a random shooting," says Tony Wagner, president of Pillsbury United Communities, the organization that runs Brian Coyle.

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Image by Jenny Cestnik on Flickr

Bomb Target: the Christmas Tree at Pioneer Square in Portland

​There's plenty of hot air online right now about this weekend's arrest of Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the 19-year-old kid who got caught trying to detonate what he thought was a bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon.

Mohamud, an American citizen who was born in Somalia, has local connections: His stepmother reportedly hails from Minnesota. There have been plenty of news stories about the foiled bomb plan now. And those have quickly been followed by hand-wringing over whether the FBI was right to supply this kid with a fake bomb.

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Somalis are waging war on themselves with money sent from here

​Three more Somalis have been charged with funneling money to the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab. One of the men was arrested Monday in Minneapolis.

Abdi Mahdi Hussein, who works for a remittance company, is accused of conspiring with Mohamud Abdi Yusuf, of St. Louis, to hide the paper trail for money sent from the U.S. to Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

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