Mohammed Warsame - Life

Life

Warsame emigrated to Canada from Somalia in 1989. In 1995 he married American Fartun Farah in an arranged marriage. While she lived in Minneapolis, Warsame continued to live and work in Toronto; twice travelling to the United States for a three-month period to stay with his wife. In 1998, a daughter named Maryam was born to the couple.

From 2000-2001, Warsame said he was intrigued by the "utopian" society he had heard existed in Afghanistan, and travelled to the country where he attended two Afghan training camps using the kunya name Abu Maryam. He is accused of having sent $2000 to a militant he met at one of the camps and teaching English in the camps and at a nearby medical clinic. He is additionally said to have fought Northern Alliance troops twice to stabilise Taliban control of the country, and to have eaten meals with Osama bin Laden.

In early 2001, Warsame asked a militant leader if the organisation would pay to bring his wife and child over from the United States, but he was informed that he was being asked to leave, and they would pay his April airfare to return to Canada. He reported that he "grew disillusioned" with the militants, and returned home.

The following year he moved to the United States permanently with his wife and daughter, and enrolled at the Minneapolis Community and Technical College, where he also tutored computer science students.

Read more about this topic:  Mohammed Warsame

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    Judgments, value judgments concerning life, whether for or against it, can in the end never be true: their only value is as symptoms, they only come into consideration as symptoms—in themselves such judgments are stupidities. We must reach out and attempt to put our finger on this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be assessed.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    Two such as you with such a master speed
    Cannot be parted nor be swept away
    From one another once you are agreed
    That life is only life forevermore
    Together wing to wing and oar to oar.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.
    Richard Louv (20th century)