ALEXANDRIA: There was a book left in a Pakistani hotel room where several young men from Virginia suspected of trying to join Taliban forces stayed.

Called “The Pact,” that book tells the true story of three boys from a rough neighborhood and broken homes who bond and eventually help one another through medical and dental school.

“This is a story about the power of friendship. Of joining forces and beating the odds,” reads one snippet on the back of the book.

It is also a story with a happy ending. But the saga of five young men from Virginia – friends who grew up together and attended the same small neighborhood mosque – has been anything but that, quickly turning from one of promise to despair for many of the family members and friends they left behind.

There is sadness in their tight-knit Muslim community, and anger. These were young men who grew up with modest means, still living in small homes and apartments with their families, but who, in at least some cases, seemed as though they were on track to achieve good things.

Some of the young men, who range in age from late teens to early 20s, have been described by friends and neighbours as polite, quiet even kind.

They went to public schools. Some were athletes. Right up to the time they disappeared a few weeks ago, they regularly attended prayer services at the mosque. Then two or three of them would head to a nearby gym five days a week, “like clockwork,” a gym manager said.

At least two of them were in college. Umar Farooq – whose family ran a computer business and whose home has a small nameplate on it that says “geek” – was a business major at George Mason University. Another of the five, the soft-spoken but charismatic Ramy Zamzam, had just started dental school at Howard University.

This past week, he would’ve taken his first round of final exams. Instead, he and his friends were sitting in jail cells in Pakistan, not yet charged but suspected of trying to join militants who are fighting US troops in Afghanistan.

“We had such hope for them,” says Mustafa Abu Maryam, the volunteer youth coordinator at the Islamic Circle of North America mosque, a one-story brick house tucked in a residential street in Alexandria, a northern Virginia suburb of Washington, DC.

While the mosque is traditional, with a curtain dividing men and women during prayers, for instance, he and other leaders say they have always rejected extremism.

But that may not matter in an age when just about anyone on the Internet can connect with terrorists and where even young Muslims from moderate families can get caught up in what some call “Jihadi cool.”

These are “seemingly well-adjusted kids who are forming a subculture of their own – namely, the Muslim under siege,” says Saeed Khan, a specialist in Islam who teaches at Wayne State University in Michigan.

In this instance, Khan thinks the young men’s close proximity to the nation’s capital also could have influenced them.

“They feel a certain helplessness that, despite this proximity, they are disenfranchised from helping end the perceived violence against fellow Muslims thousands of miles away,” he said.

Very little is known, for instance, about Aman Hassan Yemer, a young man of Ethiopian descent who, at age 18, is the youngest of the five.

Meanwhile, for at least one other, Waqar Khan, signs of trouble making had begun to emerge. If the allegations from Pakistani authorities prove true, it will not be the first time that US Muslims from the Washington area traveled to Pakistan to receive militant training.

Members of this more recent group of five were much more low-key, and blended in more in their diverse neighborhood.

They also allegedly contacted their Taliban source through YouTube, an online video service that terrorists are using as a recruiting tool. (AP)