Bartamaha (Nairobi)- Inside a dark, wood coffin lies the body of a young Somali man from Toronto, killed in Fort McMurray, Alta., last week, and prayed over by an Edmonton community where most didn’t know him.
To many in Alberta’s growing Somali community, the death of 19-year-old Abdinasir Abdulkadir Dirie — declared a homicide Monday, the same day as his funeral — is more than the loss of one young life to violence.
It is the 30th such loss.
Community leaders say 30 young men of Somali descent have been murdered in Alberta over the last five years, and all but a couple of cases have gone unsolved.
Two advocacy groups — the Alberta Somali Community Centre and the Ottawa-based Canadian Somali Congress — have reportedly combined forces to push for a task force to focus on the cases, looking for potential links and finding ways to prevent future deaths.
“We have more questions than answers,” said Mahamad Accord, of the Alberta Somali Community Centre. “Show us some leadership and show us some ownership.”
Some victims, including Dirie, had connections to drugs that may make their violent ends forgone conclusions to outsiders.
But Dirie’s father, Abdulkadir Tarambi, says his son was a good kid, a high-school graduate who called his mother every week. He was found dead Wednesday in a Fort McMurray apartment.
Tarambi said his son had taken a year off after high school to make money in what his family had heard was a lucrative job market. The money was supposed to help with the cost of tuition at York University, where Dirie planned to study computer science starting this fall.
He didn’t tell his parents he had been charged in a recent drug bust.
One of five young men arrested by Fort McMurray RCMP in the January bust, he was charged with possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking and possession of the proceeds of crime. His father said he only learned of his son’s charges after Monday’s funeral.
Dirie told his parents it was harder to make money than he expected, that he’d bought a ticket home and was supposed to fly out Monday.
Instead, his parents flew to Edmonton and said goodbye Monday in a mosque on the city’s north end, with a community sharing their grief.
Local Somali community leaders say they don’t understand why some of their young people are drawn to the criminal lifestyle; some are angry with police for not solving the cases.
“We are sick and tired,” said Mohamed Abdi, of the Somali-Canadian Cultural Society of Edmonton. “The community is really fed up with these killings.”
But the Mounties do not release statistics on the racial patterns of provincial homicides.
Fort McMurray RCMP say they actively communicate with police in Edmonton and Ontario, sharing information about cases and looking for potential links.
Beyond that, there’s the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams (ALERT), an integrated law-enforcement organization that pools provincial resources to dismantle organized crime operations.
Organized crime groups are less about cultural allegiances than they are about making money, said ALERT Insp. Bob Simmonds, who oversees the Fort McMurray team.
The idea of a task force was first pitched last month when Alberta’s justice minister met with representatives of the province’s Somali community.
Justice spokesman Jay O’Neill said young people being lured into high-risk lifestyles is not unique to one ethnic community.
“The minister’s point to them: task forces can take a long time. They can be costly.” O’Neill said. “Let’s just work with each other.”
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Source:-globaltoronto

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