When the US decided to resist Moscow’s occupation of Afghanistan during the Cold War, it was not Afghanistan that the US had come to save. It was just another move in Washington’s anti-communist worldwide campaign, the ill-advised Soviet intervention providing a heavan-sent opportunity. The US supported jihadi insurgents as a weapon to defeat the Soviet Union and communism generally. With hindsight, the jihadi seeds planted in that war eventually grew into the hopelessly crooked trees of al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and other terrorist groups. This is exactly what has happened in Syria. Without learning any lessons from the Afghan conundrum, the US and its allies, both in the west and amongst Arab states, fed to the anti-Bashar al-Assad forces an uninterrupted flow of weapons. Al Qaeda affiliated groups were supported in Libya and Syria. This policy stoked a new wave of anti-American sentiments across the Muslim world and gave the Islamists another filip, thanks to the US and its allies. In a matter of a few years, the proxies fighting for the US broke up into various factions, each having its own agenda to pursue in the cauldron of the Syrian war. It then became difficult to either control them or know what to do about this simmering fundamentalist swamp. Now that it has been revealed that Muslims from Europe and the US were heading to Syria, Somalia to participate in jihad, the alarm bells have gone off. European Union (EU) officials are increasingly worried about the stream of Europeans joining the extremists in Syria, where they are trained and radicalized in special camps. Some officials fear these freshly trained Europeans will return home as ticking time bombs. According to EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom, the foreign fighters in Syria are “very dangerous people”. EU Counterterrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kechove said even a small number of determined jihadists “pose a high security threat”. To stem the flow of home-grown jihadists, the EU has agreed to prevent young fighters from leaving and to monitor returnees. Empires wage wars to expand their influence and strike terror in the hearts of weaker countries. They tend to operate on the wrong assumption that the sun can never set on them. The intoxication of power makes them do things that eventually become the reasons for their own downfall. The question is, will all this monitoring and laws prevent the west from receiving a taste of its own concocted medicine? *