As if to remind the United States —and the world— of the serious crisis still unfolding in the Horn of Africa, gunmen linked to the Islamist extremist al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab stormed a university in neighboring Kenya in early April, killing 147, after systematically determining which among the students were Christians.

It is the deadliest attack inside Kenya since the 1998 US embassy bombing carried out on the orders of Osama bin Laden, and one that has many analysts worrying about the power of Islamic extremists in this impoverished corner of the world.

Somalia has been considered a failed state since the early 1990s. Armed opposition to the rule of longtime Marxist strongman Mohamed Siad Barre eventually exploded into civil war in 1986; the situation was exacerbated by food and fuel shortages and famine, which killed hundreds of thousands. The presence of UN and African Union peacekeepers has been largely unable to quell the ongoing violence between various warlords and armed factions.

The failed nation has proved to be fertile ground for hardline Islamist groups like the Islamic Courts Union —which briefly controlled southern Somalia before being driven out by Ethiopian troops— and al-Shabaab (“The Youth”), a jihadist group founded by Soviet-Afghan War veteran Aden Hashi Farah in 2006.

Though Farah was killed by a US airstrike in 2008 —a fate shared by many of al-Shabaab’s “emirs”— the movement continues on. While no longer at the height of its power, the group continues to control wide swaths of the countryside in Somalia’s south. Recent operations —including the Westgate shopping center attack in Nairobi in 2013— indicate that even a weakened al-Shabaab is extremely dangerous.

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution’s Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, sees in al-Shabaab an increasingly dangerous and insidious threat.

“Compared to 2009, yes, Shabaab is weaker. But when I look at the issues in terms of security, it’s stagnating and at worst deteriorating,” she said.

Even though al-Shabaab no longer controls many major cities, Felbab-Brown said, the group’s influence is still widely felt. They control many small villages and roads and raise money by extorting travelers. Assassinations continue daily as al-Shabaab seeks to undermine confidence in the weak central government.

Asked about any potential links or similarities between a resurgent al-Shabaab and the more visible Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Felbab-Brown is quick to highlight their differences. While al-Shabaab and ISIS may share some superficial similarities, she says, the Somali group has more in common with the Taliban than the Islamic State. Afghanistan, like Somalia, is a deeply tribal society, and tribal affiliations give al-Shabaab the resources it needs to thrive. And like the Taliban, al-Shabaab practices a “politics of exclusion” meant to disempower certain clans and religious minorities, a practice that suggests a preoccupation with local politics, not global jihad.

While both al-Shabaab and ISIS operate like Islamic armies, their aims and ideologies are different. According to Felbab-Brown, al-Shabaab seems to limit its horizons to Somalia specifically. Unlike the Nigerian Boko Haram, the Southeast Asian Jemaah Islamiyah and the Filipino Abu Sayyaf, al-Shabaab has not pledged allegiance to ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and shows little enthusiasm for a unified caliphate in their propaganda videos.

“They are struggling with the relationship they have with ISIS and al-Qaeda,” Felbab-Brown said.

Though there is some fear that foreign fighters trained by al-Shabaab may launch attacks in the West, such instances are few and far between, with most international jihadis flocking to ISIS. The real danger of al-Shabaab, Felbab-Brown said, is the possibility that the group will extend its reach. From bases inside Somalia, the jihadi group has ready access to East African countries —many of them US allies— that have so far been spared from the scourge of Islamist violence. Western embassies might also find themselves targeted.

As al-Shabaab regroups, the international community seeking to rebuild Somalia faces new challenges. Beside Islamic extremists, the UN and AU must contend with widespread corruption, an unpopular leadership, militant separatist groups, Ethiopian and Kenyan proxy forces and an unstable economy. For its part, the US has limited its involvement in Somalia as of late. Though the United States occasionally conducts drone strikes against al-Shabaab, fear of upsetting the delicate peace process and killing civilians means that drones are used less liberally there than in Yemen and Pakistan.

Experts like Felbab-Brown are urging the international community to take a new approach: hold Somalia accountable for governmental failures, even if that means confronting allies. Such steps are needed, they say, if ordinary Somalis are to see the government as a legitimate alternative to al-Shabaab.

“They [al-Shabaab] are not good governors. But Somalis often choose between the lesser of two evils,” Felbab-Brown said.

And while all of this rhetoric plays well with non-interventionists and probably is the wisest policy route, that doesn’t mean that the decision to stand by is easy, especially when one considers the probable fate of one of the region’s oldest peoples, the Christians. Also known as Assyrians or, in some contexts, Chaldeans, many of them have been expelled from their homes in Mosul and northern Iraq.

Assyrians are a Semitic Christian people whose ancient homeland reaches from Turkey to Iran. Their mother tongue is Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth. Because their presence in the Near East predates the Arab settlement of the region, most Assyrians will, with irrepressible pride, tell you that they are the indigenous people of ancient Mesopotamia.

“It goes back a very long time. Assyrians were at the very center of the cradle of civilization,” said Peter Bityou, director of the Assyrian Aid Society of America.

Bityou was born in Iraq and left for the United States in 1982 to look for work as an engineer. Many of his relatives —including his brother— remain in Iraq to this day and have been displaced by ISIS’s ongoing campaign. Since early 2014, Bityou and the AASA have been instrumental in delivering food, water, kerosene, clothing, medicine, gas stoves, generators, mattresses, blankets and other essentials to the refugees struggling to rebuild their lives.

The AASA and other aid groups must help, Bityou said, because no one else will. Assyrians in Iraq have been abandoned by the central Iraqi government and, in general, are not treated well by the Kurdish Regional Government in the north, he said. While the Kurdish peshmerga, or military force, allows Assyrian refugees to cross into their territory, those fleeing violence are not provided with food or other essentials.

“No one is looking out for the Assyrians. That’s why we have to do for ourselves,” Bityou said.

Martin Youmaran, an executive director of the Assyrian American National Federation, sees ISIS’s persecution of Assyrians as part of a larger pattern of racist oppression and disenfranchisement that goes back many hundreds of years.

“In Iraq, the Assyrian people have faced continuous persecution,” Youmaran said.

Historical fact largely supports that narrative. While Assyrians have peacefully coexisted with their Muslim Arab neighbors for centuries, to say that they were treated well would be a conceptual stretch. Under the Seljuqs and the Ottomans, Assyrians were given three options: convert to Sunni Islam, pay a tax (known as jizia) or face expulsion and possible death. Ottoman discrimination against Christians became so severe that, during World War I, the nationalist government killed 1.5 million Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians —all Christian subjects of the empire.

The treatment of Assyrians during the 1960s and 1970s under the Iraqi Ba’ath Party varied widely. Ba’athist ideology stressed secularism and sought to brush aside religious differences in the service of national unity; Islamic extremism was largely kept at bay. Many Assyrians ascended to high levels of power within the Iraqi government, including Tariq Aziz, a former deputy prime minister who was also one of Saddam Hussein’s closest advisors.

Assyrian expressions of ethnic pride however, met with severe repression.

“People will say that under Saddam, Assyrians were not persecuted. But Saddam hanged three Assyrian nationalists,” said Bityou, referring to the executions of Youbert Shlimon, Youkhana Esho Jajo and Yousip Hermis, who were put to death without trials in 1985.

“What can you call that other than persecution?” Bityou asked.

Saddam’s relationship with Iraq’s many ethnic and religious minorities worsened in the late 1980s, when Kurdish peshmerga forces rebelled against the government. Faced with a secession campaign, the government used conventional weapons alongside unidentified chemical agents —most likely the nerve gas sarin mixed with mustard gas— to eradicate entire villages; according to Human Rights Watch, nearly 2,000 Assyrians perished from gas alone.

Iraqi Assyrians fared even worse after the 2003 American invasion. By 2004, Islamic terrorist groups like Ansar al-Islam and al-Qaeda in Iraq were blowing up Assyrian churches and enforcing hardline sharia law on Assyrian Christian communities. Many Assyrians sought refuge in Turkey, Europe, Syria and the United States.

“In 2003, there were 1.2 million Assyrians in Iraq. Today, less than 300,000,” Bityou said.

ISIS has continued the violence instigated by its predecessors, expelling and in some cases kidnapping Assyrians along the Iraqi-Syrian border.

Due to the escalating violence, Youmaran and the AANF are more insistent than ever. Among their most pressing concerns: military intervention against ISIS.

“We want intervention not only from the US but from the UN under Chapter Seven,” Youmaran said, referring to the section of the United Nations Charter that gives the UN Security Council the power to intervene to stop crimes against humanity.

Beyond a foreign offensive against ISIS, Assyrian groups have renewed calls for an autonomous Christian homeland in Iraq’s Nineveh Governorate, known as Nīnwē to the Assyrians.

“We need an internationally protected homeland,” Youmaran said. “We demand that the international community preserve it [the Assyrian homeland in Nineveh], because the Iraqi government cannot.”

WASHINGTON — The embattled Drug Enforcement Administration came under fire Tuesday as senators dug into the agency’s controlled substances quota program, questioning whether it contributes to shortages of certain medications.

A Government Accountability Office report stops short of explicitly linking DEA mismanagement to the shortages, but that caution has not stopped some on Capitol Hill from assigning blame.

The DEA, long criticized for internal dysfunction by the GAO and some lawmakers, is still reeling from a sex scandal involving several agents. A Justice Department report in March alleged that DEA officers in Colombia attended parties with prostitutes paid for with drug cartel money.

The charges have not improved the agency’s stock in Congress, where members of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control grilled the DEA’s Joseph Rannazzisi, a 28-year veteran of the agency who serves as deputy assistant administrator for drug diversion.

“DEA refused to comply with GAO’s requests for information from a particular DEA database for over a year,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the caucus’s chairman as well as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I had to get personally involved in the process to make sure GAO had the information it needed,” Grassley said.

Some caucus members worried that DEA delays in processing supplier applications and setting quotas have contributed to the problem.

Between January 2001 and June 2013, 168 drug shortages —instances where needed drugs were unavailable to patients— were reported, according to the GAO, an investigative arm of Congress. Many were controlled prescription medications, including pain relievers, anxiolytics and stimulants.

Rannazzisi and Capt. Valerie Jensen, associate director of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug shortages program, insisted that drug manufacturers bear most of the responsibility.

“Shortages are usually preceded by a production disruption,” Jensen said, referring to the quality control issues that sometimes force drug companies to recall certain medications.

GAO Health Care Team Director Marcia Crosse however, painted a different picture. According to Crosse, the GAO’s ultimate inability to establish a relationship between shortages and quotas stems from inaccurate and incomplete data provided by the DEA.

“[DEA] did not have performance measures related to setting quotas or insuring an adequate and uninterrupted supply of controlled substances,” Crosse said.

The shortages issue has come to light at a time when the DEA is facing criticism on multiple fronts. Liberal activists have faulted the agency for holding fast to marijuana scheduling regulations that they say are outdated. Attempted collaborations with and investigations by other government agencies, like the FDA and GAO, routinely expose an agency where dysfunction and secrecy are the norm, some lawmakers say.

One of the most damning indictments however, has come from the DEA’s detention of UC San Diego student Daniel Chung.

In 2012, Chung was arrested by DEA agents after going over a friend’s house to smoke marijuana. Despite promises that he would be processed and released, Chung was left in a holding cell for five days without food or water with his hands cuffed behind his back. When he was discovered, Chung was suffering from dehydration and kidney failure. He was later paid a $4.1 million settlement.

Sen. Grassley, asked Rannazzisi why Grassley had not received an answer from the DEA after sending a letter asking about Chung’s ordeal.

“It’s been eight months and I still don’t have a response,” said Grassley. “There’s no ongoing investigation to hide behind now.”

Rannazzisi said that he could not guarantee a response before the end of the month.

Referring specifically to the Chung case, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said that the reputation of the DEA has taken a huge blow.

“I hope this is not the DEA of today, because if it is, you won’t have any support up here,” Feinstein said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said he had reached the point “where it’s starting to look to me like DEA is an agency that cannot manage administrative and regulatory responsibilities, and maybe they should be moved elsewhere and it should just purely become an investigative agency with no more administrative responsibilities.”

WASHINGTON — The Philadelphia branch of the Department of Veterans Affairs has already fixed some of the problems noted by federal inspectors who said the office altered quality reviews, violated claim policies and had stacks of unopened mail, a top VA official said Monday.

Last week’s report by the VA inspector general’s office is the latest blow to an organization routinely accused of chronic mismanagement, cooked books and retaliation against whistleblowers. The investigation began in June when the inspector general’s hotline received numerous complaints about the Philadelphia VA regional office. According to the report, many of those callers were VA staff concerned with reprisals against employees who raised problematic issues with management.

VA Under Secretary of Benefits Allison Hickey told reporters in a conference call that while she agrees with the findings in the VA inspector general’s report, recent restructuring has already solved most of the regional office’s problems.

“The report that was released by the IG, from my perspective, reflects conditions as they were over a year ago, and we knew that,” Hickey said.

The VA inspector general’s report was released last Wednesday. It documents numerous problems in the way the office operates. They include confirmed cases in which the Philadelphia VA violated claim processing protocol and, in at least one instance, concealed bins of unprocessed mail. The report also expressed concern for employees at a VA call center, who routinely complained about a lack of bathrooms, leaking roofs and insect and vermin infestations.

Hickey claims that the report does not reflect changes made last summer, including improved claim dating procedures, new call center facilities and mass retraining of VA staff. She also noted that the VA encourages employees to report problems without fearing reprisal.

“We are inviting our employees to tell us when they see something that causes them concern,” said Hickey when asked what will happen to those employees who reported the Philadelphia and National Call Center problems.

“The majority of [problems raised by the report] have already been fixed,” she said.

Hickey is overseeing a parallel internal investigation of the Philadelphia VA that will be completed at the end of June.

Many veterans’ groups were unimpressed with Hickey’s assurances.

Joe Davis, director of public affairs for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, viewed the Philadelphia VA’s story with skepticism.

“When the VA says they’ve fixed everything, you better make sure somebody goes in there and does fix everything. And that’s a trust problem that the VA has,” Davis said.

Davis also pointed to the culture of the VA, which he believes is out of sync with the military it serves.

“The problem with the VA is they forgot who they work for,” said Davis. “They don’t work for the next line supervisor, director, hospital manager or regional office director. They work for the veterans.”