Many people found themselves disconcerted when the news broke that Somali youth are going to Syria to join a Jihadist group to fight against the regime there. It is an experience of deja vu.

More than 20 Somali youth have already gone to Somali to join Al Shabaab, an extremist group, affiliated with Al Qaida. One of the Somali boys, Ahmed Shirwac, was the first U.S. citizen to carry out a suicide bombing in the northeastern region of Somalia known as Puntland. Many of these youth were killed in combat; some who survived managed to come back. They were prosecuted, convicted and sent to federal prison.

The Somali community has since been tenacious and resolute not to have such a thing happen again. And so when the news broke that young Somali were going to Syria to join a jihadist group, most of the community were dumbfounded that their youth still continued to slip out of Minneapolis to join terror groups across the globe. The FBI has focused on this pipeline for recruitment for the last few years and launched an operation dubbed “Operation Rhino.” But the program has been a colossal failure, and this failure calls for an immediate revision along with genuine collaboration of the community.

It is clear that the FBI has been caught unprepared.

The number of Somali youth gone to Syria is now indeterminate, but the fact is that there is an active recruitment of Somali youth to Syria just like the one that seemed organized by Al Shabaab.

Why Syria? Syria, as a result of the mass eruption of anti-government protests that swept through Middle Eastern countries known as Arab Spring, experienced its own share of public protest. However, in Syria this outbreak of violent protest turned into a long brutal civil war. Recall that for Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, regime change occurred as a result of the protest.

Behind all this Arab mass protest, prowled angry, well-organized, wide-spread extremist groups, each lurking in the corner to grab power at an instant of civilian unrest. The jihadist movement now active from Africa to Yemen to Southern Asia and the Middle East, alongside the scramble in Europe among the victors of Second World War, is definitely a nightmare to elite in the Western countries. The West is now unable to impose an assertive action against this wave of jihadist might threatening global U.S. influence. Furthermore, just as the U.S. armed Mujahideen to kick the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Russia and China may decide to back up some of these jihadists to reduce U.S. global dominance.

Some said in the past that the Somali youth from the Twin Cities who went to join Al Shabaab did so because of nationalistic sentiment resulting from the incursion by Ethiopia, a Christian neighbor country, into Somalia — that they left to defend their homeland.

As I see it, however, nationalism was not the motivating force then, nor is it now.

The only thing that binds these groups together is a deeply rooted conviction in extremism, and it is about time that the FBI gets the broader picture and revisits their strategy to make it more effective next time.

Omar Jamal has long been active on issues of interest to the Somali community in the Twin Cities.