Like many other young Westerners, Mohamed Elmi Ibrahim was attending university, majoring in English. He maintained a blog where he posted pictures of pilgrimages to Mecca, unsurprising for a young Muslim publicly displaying his faith. Ibrahim’s blog also contained pictures of snow-filled landscapes featuring the northern lights, also unsurprising for a young Canadian.ii In 2009, however, he diverged from the usual path of a second- generation Somali living in Canada, and disappeared. He was not alone. That same year, five other young Canadians of Somali decent went missing.iii It was feared that Ibrahim –and the five others– were lured into joining al-Shabaab (Arabic for “The Youth”), a terrorist group that is not only engaged in a local fight against the Somali government, but that has also aligned itself with al Qaeda to fight to the global jihad.iv In March 2010, a video posted on the Internet not only confirmed that Ibrahim had indeed joined the ranks of al-Shabaab, but posted his eulogy: Ibrahim had died in combat.