Thursday, February 19, 2015
On Wednesday, President Obama is meeting with world leaders at the White House to discuss homegrown terrorists. The three-day summit, originally planned for last October, was revamped in the light of recent attacks in Europe carried out by radicalized Muslims. Among the topics will be how local communities can prevent disenfranchised youth from heading to Syria or committing violent acts closer to home in places like Los Angeles, Boston, or Minneapolis.
Those three cities are the focus of a pilot program intended to secure mental health counseling and community support for kids who've been groomed by extremists. The federal experiment was launched in response an exodus of at least 20 Twin Cities kids since 2007 to join al Shabaab—a jihadist group in Somalia that's affiliated with al Qaeda and probably best-known for its attack on a Kenyan mall in 2013. Since then, the Midwestern metropolis has been considered a hotbed of terror recruitment, and the Islamic State may have surpassed al Shabaab in local recruiting efforts.
People caught trying to join terror groups can face years in prison, so it makes sense that even though the family members of the al Shabaab recruits might have known something was up, they didn't go to the cops with their concerns. That's why they asked US Attorney Andrew Luger to give them the opportunity to deal with the problem themselves, without the risk of FBI involvement.
Abdi Bihi, a Somali community leader in the Twin Cities, is grateful for the pilot program, but thinks it doesn't address the systemic problems that allow for terror recruiters to do their dirty work in the first place. He says a lack of employment opportunities coupled with a paucity of after-school programs is to blame, and the government should work on correcting those inequities if they want to fix the problem.