3 Somali-Americans guilty of conspiring to help IS

A jury in Minnesota has found three Somali-Americans guilty on all charges of conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State militant group. U.S. federal prosecutors had accused Mohamed Farah, Guled Omar and Abdirahman Daud, all in their early 20s, of planning to travel to Syria to fight for IS. The men were also […]

A jury in Minnesota has found three Somali-Americans guilty on all charges of conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State militant group.
U.S. federal prosecutors had accused Mohamed Farah, Guled Omar and Abdirahman Daud, all in their early 20s, of planning to travel to Syria to fight for IS.
The men were also found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder overseas, a charge that carries the possibility of life in prison. The defendants, who will be sentenced at a later date, showed little emotion when listening to the verdict.
The case captured the attention of Minnesota’s Somali-American community, which has seen about a dozen of its members join Islamic State, a few years after losing about 20 young men to Somalia-based al-Shabab.
Farah, Omar and Daud are among a group of Somali-American men the FBI tracked for a period of months starting in March 2014. That month, a member of the group aroused suspicion when he applied for an expedited passport to travel to Turkey, but was unable to answer basic questions about his planned trip.