This story WAS odd from the beginning. Never bought the altruistic youth thing either...
Yeah the whole thing was a stretch.
My guess is that it went like this, Farris gets his head filled with tales of jihad at the local mosque, most of them are bad in FLA, he goes to Iraq and kinda steps out of a dream, "oh man these guys really are bad! what the hell did I do?"
So he gets on the phone to daddy and says "hep me, I really screwed up"
And so the father concocts the cover story goes over there to make sure sunny is ok and they benefit from the whole thing publicity wise.
You are welcome, such sentiment makes these projects worthwhile.