The New York Times has an article on a kid raised as a Southern Baptist in small town Alabama who grew up to become an Al Qaeda-aided Jihadist leader in Somalia:
As a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo.. “It felt cool just to be with him,” his best friend at the time, Trey Gunter, said recently. “You knew he was going to be a leader.”
A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise in the most unimaginable way. Some 8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern edge of Africa, he has become a key figure in one of the world’s most ruthless Islamist insurgencies. The rebels are known for beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women accused of adultery.
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