The New York Times magazine is publishing a big profile of Omar Hammami aka Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, the Somali al Shabaab militant commander, an American who grew up in Daphne, Alabama.

It’s a magazine article so there is lots of this:

Daphne sits along Alabama’s serene Mobile Bay, just north of the Gulf of Mexico. The town seems stopped in time. Colonial-style cottages and gazebos dot the bluffs. The wide, blacktopped streets are shaded by pecan trees and Southern maples. At dusk, the tide slaps the docks as fishermen loll, casting silhouettes against a golden sky.

But Hammami strikes his most dramatic pose silhouetted against the rubble of Somalia:

When Hammami engages in combat, he makes an impression on other militants, said a former Shabab commander, Sheikh Mohamed Sheikh Abdullahi Sheikh Mohamed. “He doesn’t blink in the face of the enemy,” said Mohamed, who recalled four battles in 2008 and 2009 in which he and Hammami took part. In combat, Hammami used a sharpshooter’s rifle, firing calmly and with precision, said Mohamed…

The author suggests with this quote from a poem that Hammami wrote when he was 12 that he is a glory-seeker:

“My reality is a bore. I wish, I want, I need the wall to fall and the monster to let me pass, the leash to snap, the chains to break.
….

“I’ve got a taste of glory, the ticket, but where is my train?”