FORT MORGAN, Colo. (AP) — For the last decade, Somali refugees have flocked to this conservative farm town on Colorado's eastern plains. They've started a small halal mini-market and a restaurant, sent their children to the schools and worked at a meat processing plant.
As much as Fort Morgan's small town feel reminds many of their rural villages back home, some say they will feel like outsiders until they get what has so far eluded them: a permanent mosque. They are renting two small rooms for a makeshift version, for now.
They say they've tried to buy property to build a mosque but believe no one wants to sell to them.
"If we can own a mosque here, we will be more a part of the community," said Abdinasser Ahmed, a local Somali leader and public schools teacher who fled war-torn Mogadishu, Somalia, in 2003, arrived in Fort Morgan in 2009 to work at the plant and is now a U.S. citizen.
Some longtime residents say they don't want one in their city of 12,000, a step too far especially at a time when fears of terrorism have grown following the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California. ...
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