This is a bizarre story, told through some incred­i­ble jour­nal­ism, of a young Amer­i­can man’s jour­ney from the Sun­day School rooms of an Alabama Bap­tist church to the bow­els of a Jihadist oper­a­tion in Somalia.

Here’s an excerpt. It really is worth read­ing the whole thing.

Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immi­grant from Syria, Ham­mami was every bit as Alaba­man as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman who sprin­kles her con­ver­sa­tion with blan­d­ish­ments like “sugar” and “dar­lin’.” Brought up a South­ern Bap­tist, Omar went to Bible camp as a boy and sang “Away in a Manger” on Christ­mas Eve. As a teenager, his pas­sions veered between Shake­speare and Kurt Cobain, soc­cer and Nin­tendo. In the thick of his ado­les­cence, he was fear­less, rau­cously funny, rebel­lious, con­trar­ian. “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. That guer­rilla army, known as the Shabab, is fight­ing to over­throw the frag­ile American-backed Somali gov­ern­ment. The rebels are known for behead­ing polit­i­cal ene­mies, chop­ping off the hands of thieves and ston­ing women accused of adul­tery. With help from Al Qaeda, they have man­aged to turn Soma­lia into an ever more pop­u­lar des­ti­na­tion for jihadis from around the world.

Read the whole thing — and then read this per­spec­tive on the story from another guy who grew up in aSoutherb Bap­tist church — Rus­sell Moore — who pro­vides a handy foil to the gun-toting Amer­i­can red­neck type response that would tra­di­tion­ally see this guy as death deserv­ing trai­tor­ous scum…

“You and I heard the gospel because of another jihadist’s trip to Dam­as­cus. Saul of Tar­sus was filled with indig­nant zeal and, armed to the teeth, he thought he could ter­ror­ize the name of Christ off the face of the earth. What stopped him wasn’t a set of argu­ments. What stopped him was Christ. And the gospel he found on that sandy road was later pro­pelled, through him, across the world right down to wher­ever you, and Omar, first heard it.”

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

Read Nathan's 3665 articles.