Mohamed Muse, a Minneapolis cab driver, used to be able to wire money back to his wife and two small children in Mogadishu. Photo: David Joles, Star Tribune

Every day, Mohamed Muse grows more fearful for his family.

The Minneapolis cab driver hasn’t been able to send the $200 to $300 his wife and two children in Somalia have come to rely on each month to pay for rent, food, electricity and other basic supplies since the Somali-owned money transfer businesses in Minnesota shut down recently.

“There is no way I can get them their monthly bill that I give them,” Muse, 25, said last week. “They’re really scared.”

Anxiety and frustration are mounting in Minnesota’s Somali community, the nation’s largest, as people struggle to cope with the Dec. 30 shutdown of the local money service businesses called hawalas. They have been the lifeline between Somalis here and relatives in their war-ravaged homeland, a country without banks or a functional central government.

That lifeline was severed, at least temporarily, when Sunrise Community Banks decided to close the accounts of the money-transfer companies for fear they might come under suspicion of funding terrorism. The decision came just weeks after a jury found two Minnesota women guilty in federal court of conspiring to support known terrorists in Somalia.

Muse and other Somalis here now must figure out whether to try to use hawalas still open in other states, such as Georgia and Virginia, or find more creative ways to send money back home. Many are in disbelief, said Hassan Warsame, a Virginia-based consultant working with the Somali American Money Service Association, a coalition of money-transfer operators.

“Some blame the banks. Others are blaming the U.S. government and the regulations that have led to this,” he said, referring to tougher federal banking rules enacted in recent years to cut off funding for terrorist groups.

(You can read the rest of the article at the StarTribune website — http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/136912723.html)