In the wake of September 11, the US authorities targeted informal financial networks serving people in the Islamic world for particularly severe treatment. One of these was called Barakkat, a cash-transmission network that linked expatriate Somalis living in the US with their impoverished home country. Barakkat was closed down less than a month after the outrage, causing enormous stress to the large expatriate Somali community in the US and their families in Somalia.
The US alleged at the time that Barakkat was a "quartermaster of terror" and closely linked to al-Qaeda. It later claimed it was part of the "mosaic of a terror network". But the US offered no evidence for its allegations, and no-one associated with Barakkat was accused of terrorist financing.
The Barakkat network consisted of a group of grocery shops around the US whose Somali owners accepted deposits in cash or cheques from their customers. These deposits were rarely more than $200. The individual grocers despatched the money by bank, charging a small fee to their customers, to a central bank account in Minnesota. This acted as a depository.
The funds were then despatched to Abu Dhabi where they were converted from dollars to Somali shillings.