A dispatch from Nairobi, Kenya about an "infamous Islamist militant" for a "brutal Islamist group" reports that he "was raised in Daphne, Ala., where he was a gifted student and high school class president. He later embraced the ultraconservative form of Islam known as Salafism before ultimately moving to Somalia in 2006 to fight for the Shabab."
The Times has an unfortunate habit of referring to Islamist radicals (along with Zionists such as Sheldon Adelson) as "ultraconservative" rather than by using a less politically charged term such as "strict" or "rigid" or "fundamentalist" or extreme. The message conveyed is that if you take the conservatism of, say, Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley, Jr. to its logical conclusion, you wind up growing a beard and bombing government convoys in Somalia.