(Reuters) – A Chicago man pleaded guilty yesterday to planning to join an al Qaeda-linked group in Somalia, the latest US prosecution in a crackdown that has made it harder for Somali-Americans to send money to the war-torn country.
Shaker Masri, 28, was arrested in August 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States and agreed to serve nearly 10 years in prison, the US Justice Department said.
The prosecutions of Masri and others since the Sept 11, 2001, attacks are designed to stop support to al Shabaab, a militant group the United States says has ties to al-Qaeda.
The campaign against al Shabaab has had a chilling impact on legitimate money transfers from the Somali-American community to relatives in one of the world’s poorest countries, Somali-Americans said. For more than two decades, Somalia has been ravaged by a civil war that has left the country with no functioning central banking system and an income per person only a little over $200 a year, according to the World Bank. Somali-Americans in Minnesota and other states rely on small money services businesses to funnel money to their relatives in Somalia.
But many US banks stopped hosting accounts for those businesses because US laws, starting with the Patriot Act, made them potentially liable if money ended up in the hands of al Shabaab. The US State Department designated al Shabaab a foreign terrorist organization in 2008. Wells Fargo, US Bank and TCF Bank stopped providing account services in recent years.
Sunrise Community Banks stopped at the end of 2011, and others have dropped out since, adding to the concerns of Somali-Americans in Minnesota, home to the largest Somali population in the United States at about 34,500, according to census data.
