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SPEAKER 1: Minnesota has again found itself at the center of a global recruiting effort for a terrorist organization. Eight years ago, the group was Al-shabab based in Somalia. Now it's the Islamic State, or ISIS, operating in Syria and Iraq. For the past year, MPR News has been reporting on how ISIS has lured young recruits all the way from Minnesota. And today, we're going to tell you about three of them.

These three young men were suburban teenagers who embraced basketball and social media. They weren't overtly religious growing up, and at times they rebelled in the classroom. These young men are all former students of Burnsville High School, and they shocked their friends and family when authorities say they enlisted with the jihadist group. They're part of a global phenomenon that has seen thousands of fighters from Western countries go to Syria to take up arms with a ruthless group notorious for its videos of beheadings. Reporters Mukhtar Ibrahim and Laurie Yuen have the story of these three teens from the Southern Twin Cities suburbs.

LAURA YUEN: Let's start with Hanad Mohallim In May of 2013, he strutted to the playground across the street from the two story house in Apple valley, where his family lived. Mohalim was bored on this quiet block of single family homes, so he created a video selfie.

HANAD MOHALLIM: Just another day in the life of a gangster in the hood for me, Apple Valley. [MUTED] is bored out here, so, you know, decided to make a little quick ass, you know, video showing what life is like [MUTED] projects.

LAURA YUEN: His clips are on the video sharing app, Qik, were nothing unusual for a drifting suburban teen playing to a crowd on social media. But several months later, Mohallim found an answer to his boredom. Federal authorities say a year ago this month, the year 18-year-old took a plane from Minnesota to Turkey and made his way to the fighting in Syria. He's now believed dead.

The details of his death are not clear. Mohallim is one of at least five men who are assumed to have been killed ever since leaving the Twin Cities for ISIS. The FBI believes roughly 15 young people left Minnesota to join the group. So what set a young man from Apple Valley on a path to death with a terrorist organization in the mideast? His cousin, Abdihafid Ali, says Mohallim wanted to clean up his life. He had failed a few classes and struggled to catch up.

ABDIHAFID ALI: You know how the regular teenagers, the street problems, they might get into them. And he eventually got out of that slump and decided that it was time to get his life back together.

LAURA YUEN: Ali says his cousin started to take school seriously again. Hanad Mohallim transferred out of Burnsville High School and attended at least two additional schools. It's unclear if he ever graduated. A lot of what we know about Mohallim comes from a flurry of Twitter comments in the four months before he left for Syria. He tweeted about growing up without a father. He said the death of a cousin was a wake up call. He announced that it was time for him to start realizing his Muslim identity. He tweeted, anyone know how to make a beard grow faster?

Abdihafid Ali says his cousin was good hearted and wanted to help others. And after his failures in school, Mohallim was eager for renewal. Ali thinks someone must have taken advantage of his cousin's desire to forge a new identity.

ABDIHAFID ALI: They used his emotion and his devotion. They used his motivation to get better as a person in life to get him to do what they wanted him to do. When Mohallim left the country last march, ISIS wasn't yet a household name in America. The ghastly videos of beheadings didn't come until months later.

Court documents, which refer to Mohallim as H.M., say shortly after he left, he called home and confirmed he was in Syria. He told his family he was serving as a, quote, "border guard" and that he believed he would go to jail if he returned to the US. A woman who lived at McCallum's Apple Valley home declined to talk to us, saying she's still grieving. News of McCallum's death continues to reverberate in the circles he used to hang with.

On a recent evening, we meet Abdirahman Ahmed. He graduated in 2013 from Burnsville High School where Mohallim attended. My colleague, Mukhtar Ibrahim, wants to know if Ahmed remembers Hanad Mohallim.

MUKHTAR IBRAHIM: If I show you Hamad's picture, do you think you can recognize him?

LAURA YUEN: Mukhtar pulls up a picture on his smartphone. It's of Mohallim with a half smile as he poses in front of a beige apartment complex in the suburb of Savage. Abdirahman Ahmed leans in. He knows men from the Twin Cities have died fighting for ISIS. But until this moment, he has no idea that one man killed was his own friend.

ABDIRAHMAN AHMED: Whoa, I'm so sorry to hear that. What?

MUKHTAR IBRAHIM: Wow, yeah.

ABDIRAHMAN AHMED: I mean, I knew a Hanad had passed away. I didn't think it was exactly that Hanad. It was a buddy of mine, I can say that for sure. And we played sports together.

LAURA YUEN: Ahmed says guys like Mohallim were just like him in high school. They shot baskets. They met at the library and the Y. He says there was never a whiff of radical tendencies.

ABDIRAHMAN AHMED: The most baffling part is that we were all the same, and a lot of these guys had bright futures.

LAURA YUEN: Now let's move on to a second traveler, Hamza Ahmed. Unlike Mohallim, Ahmed didn't make it to Syria. He was stopped at the airport. But he faces charges of supporting ISIS. Abdirahman Ahmed, who we just talked to about Mohallim, also knew Hamza Ahmed and remembers the first time they met. It was the start of senior year at Burnsville High School. Abdirahman Ahmed assumed the lanky boy with hipster glasses was Somali, just like him.

ABDIRAHMAN AHMED: I said, hi, how are you doing, all the stuff in Somalia, speaking to him in Somali for a few minutes. And he would let me finish and then he looked at me and started smiling. And I asked him, why are you smiling. And then he said, well, because I didn't understand a word you said.

LAURA YUEN: He quickly learned Hamza Ahmed wasn't Somali, he was an ethnic Oromo. The two hit it off from there. Still, they had their disagreements. After they got into a fistfight at school, he says Hamza Ahmed was the first to apologize. A police report shows Hamza Ahmed got into more brawls, including one that drew 500 student spectators.

On Twitter, Ahmed displayed both swagger and a world of hurt. He spoke achingly about missing his older brother, who he said left for the Middle East, although it's unclear why. He also became more concerned about the bloodshed in Syria, and specifically the atrocities of President Bashar Al-assad.

Ahmed's tweets turned religious, and he became consumed with a desire to help fight for the Muslims in Syria. He tweeted, staying here just seems to kill part of me every day. The call of my dying family keeps ringing in my heart. And he talked about wanting to become a martyr. Federal authorities say last November, Ahmed acted on that yearning. A criminal complaint says he took a bus with three other young men from Minneapolis to New York. He boarded a plane that would help him get to Syria, but authorities pulled him off the plane. Again, his friend, Abdirahman Ahmed.

ABDIRAHMAN AHMED: I can't get over the shock still. I mean, I don't know if you guys can tell in my voice, but it's heartbreaking. I feel like him going really didn't make a difference, and he was better off staying here, you know, making a name for himself, supporting his family.

LAURA YUEN: Hamza Ahmed is in federal custody, awaiting trial. And finally, there was a third young man who attended Burnsville Schools and attempted to leave.

DEB ALWIN: Oh, wow, Abdullahi Yusuf, yeah, man, he's grown up--

LAURA YUEN: Retired school guidance counselor Deb Alwin is reacting to Yusuf's mugshot. He's 18 now with a wispy mustache. Alwin used to work at Nicolet Junior High in Burnsville. She remembers Yusuf as a troubled kid who frequently came through the guidance office and the principal's office.

DEB ALWIN: And most of it was for disrespectful behavior, not following directions, saying things that were inappropriate, and then being argumentative.

LAURA YUEN: But to his family, Yusuf was kind and polite. His relative, Kamal Hassan, says despite problems Yusuf had in school, nothing suggested he would one day try to join a brutal band of extremists. Hassan also notes that Yusuf was unemployed when he paid for his plane ticket to Turkey. It cost $1,500. Hassan thinks someone must have helped arrange and finance Yusuf's travels. The question, he says, is who.

KAMAL HASSAN: That is the big, you know, mystery. We know this guy was not working, was not making money. Somebody gave him that money. And it's not his family. It's not us.

LAURA YUEN: At the Al-farooq mosque in Bloomington, friends knew Yusuf as a "hooper," One of the guys who played basketball all day in the gym. He was so tall, he could even dunk, says his friend Zak. MPR News has agreed to withhold Zak's full identity because of the ongoing terrorism investigation. But within a year, Zak says, Yusuf started turning down invitations to go to the movies or play pickup.

ZAK: Towards the end of our friendship, he was a bit of a loner. He would take a step back from basketball. You could actually tell the transition from being a guy that was outgoing to a guy that was saying that he was becoming more mature, you know, acting like a man.

LAURA YUEN: Last may, soon after turning 18, Yusuf tried to board a plane from Minneapolis St. Paul to Istanbul, but the FBI, tipped off by a passport official's suspicions, was waiting for him. He pleaded guilty to a terror conspiracy charge and is waiting to be sentenced.

The charge against Yusuf is part of a broader federal investigation into how these young people, some of them barely old enough to vote, could have plotted their trips to Syria to join a terrorist group. So far, prosecutors have not charged anyone with recruiting people for ISIS, and authorities haven't said who paid for their airfares or provided the men with connections to ISIS.

At the Bloomington mosque, Al-Farouk, where several recruits attended, leaders have banned one man after learning he was expressing what they considered radical views. A police report says the mosque officials were concerned about Amir Meshal, a 32-year-old citizen from New Jersey who had been interacting with the youth. Kamal Hassan, the relative of 18-year-old Abdullahi Yusuf, says he believes Meshal had ample opportunity to influence the young men.

KAMAL HASSAN: He created a study group of about 25 boys that he used to take to his home every Monday, provide him with pizza dinner, teach them whatever he wants-- What was he teaching them, then?

LAURA YUEN: Through his lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, Amir Meshal has denied any involvement with the young men's departures. Radical groups like ISIS have capitalized on the recruitment that began eight years ago in Minnesota. That's when a mix of religion and politics drove about two dozen men to enlist with the terror group Al-shabab in their native Somalia.

But the Syrian conflict is even more perplexing to community members given that the recruits from Minnesota had no ethnic ties to the region. That could suggest extreme religion might be more at play with the ISIS enlistees. It's important to remember the roughly 15 ISIS recruits from Minnesota represent a tiny fraction of the thousands of Muslim youth who call the state home.

OMAR ALI: [ARABIC SPEECH].

LAURA YUEN: On a recent Friday at the University of Minnesota, scores of students bow in prayer. Omar Ali delivering a sermon about the Islamic concept of striving for perfection.

OMAR ALI: You have to do it in the most excellent way that's possible.

LAURA YUEN: Ali has a unique perspective on the youth. He teaches Islamic studies to high school students in Fridley, and he used to direct a mosque in Minneapolis at the same time, al-shabab started recruiting worshippers from Ali's mosque. Those young men met secretly to hatch their plans to enlist with Al-shabab unbeknown to Ali and the other mosque leaders. Although there's not one tidy profile of who might turn to violent ideology, Ali says he's definitely seen a theme, young men with unfulfilled promise.

OMAR ALI: When the person loses hope in life here, and they don't have anybody to guide them, you know, once they're in that state, they're very vulnerable and they can be susceptible to anybody who tells them that there is another opportunity somewhere else.

LAURA YUEN: The question is how to detect when a loved one is slipping away. Elders, mosques, and family, Ali says, are often the last to know. With reporting from Mukhtar Ibrahim and Sasha Aslanian, I'm Laura Yuen, Minnesota Public Radio News.

SPEAKER 1: For photos and biographies of the travelers from Minnesota, go to our website, mprnews.org. There's a lot more there.