Two high school buddies from the Minneapolis suburb of New Hope have been killed while fighting for terrorist groups in the Middle East, reports the Associated Press. It wasn’t immediately clear how Douglas McAuthur McCain and Troy Kastigar were drawn into radicalism after their initial conversion to the Muslim faith or whether they might have influenced one another along the way. But the two best friends went down similar paths and met the same end.
They attended high school in New Hope at the same time in the late 1990s. A classmate described them as “goofy,” “funny guys” and “just nice.” U.S. officials confirmed that McCain, 33, was killed recently in Syria while fighting with the Islamic State group ISIS. Officials said Kastigar was killed in Somalia in September 2009 while fighting with the terror group al-Shabab. U.S. officials were looking into reports that a second American fighting with ISIS had been killed in Syria.