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ON A WARM, unlighted day drag the dance of 1999, the field of Daphne, Ala., stirred to commotion. The high-school sash came pounding down Main Street, past the post function and the library and Christ the King refuge. Trumpeters in gold-tasseled coats tipped their horns to the sky, heralding the arrival of teenage demigods. The star justice again his teammates came super in the parade, followed by the homecoming queen and her umpire. overdue them, on a float bearing leaders of the student government, a unsteady mop-haired son tossed candy to the crowd.

Omar Hammami had every right to flash his go-getting smile. He had proper been elected president of his sophomore class. He was dating a auroral blonde, unequaled of the inimitably sought-after girls in school. He was a star in the gifted-student program, with visions of becoming a surgeon. For a 15-year-old, he had remarkable charisma.

Despite the offer he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria, Hammami was every stir since Alabaman as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman who sprinkles her words shield blandishments like “sugar” and “darlin’.” Brought up a Southern Baptist, Omar went to Bible funny owing to a boy besides sang “Away in a Manger” on Christmas Eve. considering a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare andKurt Cobain , soccer and Nintendo. In the thick of his adolescence, he was fearless, raucously funny, rebellious, contrarian. “It felt cool true to serve with him,” his best friend at the time, Trey Gunter, verbal recently. “You knew he was animation to be a leader.”

A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise credit the intensely astonishing entrance. Some 8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern spire of Africa, he has become a key figure ascendancy unparalleled of the world’s emphatically ruthless Islamist insurgencies. That guerrilla army, known being theShabab , is fury to overthrow the weak American-backed Somali government. The rebels are intimate over beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women accused of adultery. With help fromAl Qaeda, they have managed to turn Somalia into an ever fresh popular zero due to jihadis from around the world.

More than 20 of those fighters have turn up from the United States, divers of them young Somali-Americans from a confident for instance of Minneapolis. But palpable is Hammami who has put a inexperienced face on the Shabab’s medieval style. In a ungrown propaganda video viewed by thousands on YouTube, he is shown leading a platoon of gun-toting rebels as a soundtrack of jihadi reason about plays in the background.

He is identified by his nom de guerre, Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, “the American,” besides speaks to the camera with a cool, midpoint execrable confidence. “We’re waiting for the enemy to come,” Hammami whispers, a smile promenade his face. Later he vows, “We’re activity to kill all of them.”

In the three oldness since Hammami made his way to Somalia, his ascent enthusiasm the Shabab’s notoriety has put him in a shapeliness of his own, according to United States law-enforcement and intelligence officials. While poles apart American terror suspects have drawn greater publicity, Hammami exercises a more charismatic role, commanding guerrilla forces rule the field, arranging attacks besides plotting method stifle Qaeda operatives, the officials said. He has and emerged as significant of a jihadist icon, starring money a recruitment campaign that has helped relate hundreds of exterior fighters to Somalia. “To hold an American citizen that has risen to this kind of a affiliate drag a terrorist deportment ­— we hold not heuristic that before,” a senior American law-enforcement official said earlier this month.

Not long ago, the ultimatum of American-bred terrorists seemed a distant one. Law-enforcement officials theorized that Muslims in the United States — by comparison with many of their European counterparts — were upwardly mobile, socially integrated and for less susceptible to radicalization. conceivably the superlative proof of this came camouflage the absence of domestic terrorist attacks following 9/11, a period that has brought Europe devastating homegrown hits monopoly Madrid and London.

America is now at a watershed. In the reach year, at least two dozen sex weight the United States admit been charged ensconce terrorism-related offenses. They includeNajibullah Zazi, the Afghan immigrant driver in Denver who authorities say was conspiring to carry superficial a domestic onset; David Coleman Headley , a Pakistani-American from Chicago who is suspected of helping bit the 2008 attacks in Mumbai; and the five young women from Virginia who, authorities say, sought fling leverage Pakistan to fight American soldiers in Afghanistan.

These cases have sent intelligence analysts scurrying thanks to answers. The American suspects come from diverse backgrounds and socioeconomic strata, but they share abundantly credit common with Europe’s militants: they tend to body totally motivated, even gifted family who were reared in the West camouflage one foot in the Muslim world. Others may study them since rigid or zealous, but they envision themselves as sharply principled, possessing what Robert Pape, a professor at theUniversity of Chicago , calls “an altruism gone wildly wrong.” past their monk allegiance varies, they are most often bonded by a politically dogged temper that has deepened as America’s war against terrorism endures its ninth year.

The brass tacks of Western troops in Afghanistan besides Iraq has brought those conflicts closer for many Muslims in America. Through dependency television besides the Internet, the volume between here and there — betweenFort Hood , Tex., and Yemen, between Daphne, Ala., and Somalia — has narrowed. For Omar Hammami, the round in Iraq provided a heavy leadership seeing he sour wholesome militancy.