Abdirizak Warsame may have an exotic name, but by all accounts, he was an American teenager. He lived with his mom in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, where he played basketball and wrote poetry in high school.
How, then, did he become a leader of an ISIS cell?
On 60 Minutes this week, Scott Pelley talks with Warsame, who is awaiting sentencing and faces up to 15 years in prison. In reporting how young Americans like Warsame have joined, or tried to join terrorists overseas, Pelley and his team found a recurring theme in Minnesota: a generation of youth who are confused about where they belong. They are, as Pelley explains, “too foreign for many Americans, and too American for their parents.”
“I feel like I grew up like any other kid in America.” Abdirizak Warsame
In Cedar-Riverside, where 20,000 refugees from Somalia began to settle in the 1990s, Warsame grew up in two worlds: a first-generation American caught between his Somali heritage and daily life in Minneapolis.
“Growing up in Minnesota, it’s different than most people, because you have all these different identities,” he tells Pelley in the clip above. “You know, you’re a Somali. You’re Muslim. You’re America. And so it’s kind of confusing for some youth growing up in that kind of environment.”
Because Warsame moved to the United States as an infant, his experience in America was very different from his parents’, who came to this country to flee a civil war.
“I really didn’t feel fortunate,” Warsame says, “because I never knew what it was like to not have school. I never knew what it was like to, you know, be exiled out of your own country and war everywhere. I didn’t know what feeling was like. So I feel like I grew up like any other kid in America.”