The
Real Jihadist Threat No One Is Watching
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
July 17, 2017
|
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the
first of your friends to like this.
 Most people can tell
you who the potential jihadists are, especially the ones in Europe and the
USA. You can point them out in a group: they are immigrants, or more often,
the children of immigrants, who came from the Middle East or North Africa.
They often converse among one another in Arabic. Many want to join the
Islamic State and other terror groups in Syria, or have gone and since
returned. They are mostly men, usually around age 20 or less, and have
grown up feeling alienated from the societies in which they live.
Most of this is wrong.
In fact, the UK-based Henry Jackson Society has found
that "those who convert to Islam are four times more likely to become
terrorists than those who are born Muslims." And in 2015, the Washington
Post warned that converts have emerged "as some of the
most dangerous and fanatical adherents to radical Islam."
Now a recent study in the Netherlands shows that "the
share of converts to Islamist extremism tends to be significantly
higher" than those born into the faith. As many as 17 percent of Dutch
converts have joined the caliphate, the study's authors claim – seven times more than the percentage of converts to the
entire Dutch Muslim community. And most of those are women.
That study is supported by previous reports that show that as many as 25 percent
of the French Muslims who have made hijrah to Syria are converts
from other faiths. Figures are slightly lower – one in six, or about 17
percent– in Germany. In the UK, according to the Economist, though converts
comprise fewer than 4 percent of all Muslims, they account for 12 percent
of "home-grown jihadists." And in America, while one-fifth of
Muslims are converts, two-fifths, or 40 percent, of those arrested on
suspicion of ISIS ties in 2015 had converted.
A review of recent attacks confirms this. Converts were involved in the
attempted 2015 Garland, Texas attack on a contest to draw the prophet Mohammed; the killing of four people outside London's Houses of
Parliament; and the London July 7, 2005 bombings. Samantha Lewthwaite, the "white
widow" said to be responsible for the deaths of more than 400 people –
including those killed in the 7/7 attack, is a convert, as was the Belgian
Muriel Deguaque, who blew herself up in Iraq in 2005. And in America, Colleen La Rose, aka Jihad Jane, collaborated with
another convert, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, in a failed plot to murder Lars
Vilks, the Swedish cartoonist who had drawn cartoons of Islam's prophet
Mohammed.
The number of women among them is notable: according to the
BBC, unlike the men, the "vast majority" of women who join
ISIS from the West are converts. Similarly, according to the Dutch report,
of the Dutch converts who have joined the Islamic state, 61 percent were
women – a figure that seems consistent with other countries, as well. Among
the more well-known: Jaelyn Delshaun Young, a University of Mississippi
chemistry student, apprehended en route to the Islamic State in 2015; Fatima Az Zahra, neé Maria Giulia Sergio, an Italian
Roman Catholic convert whom the Italian media now calls "Lady
Jihad"; and British ex-punk-rocker Sally Jones,
whom counter-terrorists consider an active, effective, and therefore
dangerous recruiter.
To read more about social media and recruiting women, click here.
Also of note in the Dutch study is the age of the individuals who have
gone to Syria: they are on average 23 (though according to other analyses, the average German and American who
makes the trip is 26). The average ISIS-jihadist, in other words, is older
than many believe these young radicals to be.
None of this is accidental, according to Mubin Shaikh, a former Muslim
radical turned counterterrorism professional and the author of Undercover Jihadi: Inside the Toronto 18. In the
early days of the Islamic State, he said in a recent phone interview, ISIS
recruiters "would get a bonus if they brought women over. There were
units dedicated to recruiting Western women to use as propaganda,
specifically targeting converts."
All of which suggests that our current "profile" of your
average radicalized Muslim may need updating. And perhaps, too, we should
be tweaking elements of counter-terrorism approaches worldwide. Shaikh
believes the primary focus needs to be on "human intelligence"
and better monitoring within the (Muslim) community. "That's where the
best tips come from," he said. "But it's a sensitive topic. Do we
need to send more spies into the community? Then the community feels they
can't trust anyone anymore. But that's the price you pay. If a threat is
coming from a particular community, you need to convince them to come
forward."
That community includes converts' families, who often are too uninformed
about Islam, and rarely pay attention to what or who has influenced the new
convert's decision. And the problem, he said, is that many of these younger
converts "don't actually convert to Islam. They convert to
extremism." Hence families, especially parents, "need to be
vigilant. Identify what they are converting to. People need to know who
these groups are. Who are Salafis? Who are Sunnis? Sufis? You need to find
out what their ideology is."
But this alone is not enough. "I'm a big believer in sting
operations," Shaikh said, "because you often can't talk them out
of it. They continue to go down the route of extremism to the road of
terrorism." And even if the community goes to the authorities, he
pointed out, "how often do we hear 'he was known to the police'? Two
of the three London attackers were 'reported to the police.' But what does
that mean? So you need more human intelligence. You need spies."
At the same time, Bart Schuurman, an assistant professor at Leiden
University's Institute of Security and Global Affairs and co-author of
"Converts and Islamist Terrorism," a policy brief
produced by the International Center for Counter Terrorism in The Hague,
cautioned in a recent interview, "We don't want all converts to be
seen as a terror threat. The vast majority do not get involved in terrorism
whatsoever." Hence, despite the "overrepresentation of
converts" among terrorists and extremists, he said, "conversion
itself should not be seen as a risk factor for violence."
Yet the number of violent, radicalized converts to Islam also shows that
many current counterterrorism initiatives may be misplaced. Both Schuurman
and Shaikh point to popular proposals for Muslim bans in the United States
and several European countries. Those bans are especially ineffective,
noted Shaikh, if they only involve specific Muslim regions of the Middle
East and North Africa. "It's too quickly expanding," he said,
referring to radical Islam. "And ultimately it doesn't work anyway,
because the majority threat is coming from the inside." Similarly,
Schuurman observed, "If you want to prevent people from doing harm to
your society, it helps to understand what makes them do harm in the first
place; and if you have a 'Muslim travel ban,' if you feed into the
narrative that the West is at war with Islam, it doesn't help security in
Amsterdam or Chicago."
What does help, said Shaikh, who practices Sufism – a mystic, spiritual
movement within Islam – and whose wife converted to Islam from Catholicism,
is to create a different narrative, both for those born Muslim and for
converts "I don't think we can stop the conversion. But there is a
pro-Western argument to be made that the Muslims who are flourishing in the
world are doing so in non-Muslim countries, expressly because of their
interfaith, secular cultures. Where in the world has radical Islam brought
wealth, or success, or dignity? Name me one place, and I'll sell up and go
live there. Because it doesn't exist."
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands. Follow her at @radicalstates
Related Topics: Recruitment
| Abigail
R. Esman, converts
and radicalization, ISIS,
Henry
Jackson Society, Garland
Texas attack, Samantha
Lewthwaite, Jihad
Jane, Colleen
La Rose, Jamie
Paulin-Ramirez, Muriel
Deguaque, Jaelyn
Delshaun Young, Fatima
Az-Zahra, Mubin
Shaikh, Bart
Schuurman, Recruitment
Converts
and Jihad
by Abigail R.
Esman
Special to IPT News
July 17, 2017
|
|
|
|
Share:
|
Be the first of your friends to like this.
 Muslim converts have
long been especially valued by recruiters for Islamist terror groups.
"Their ability to operate freely in Europe, Asia, and North America
without arousing the suspicion of security authorities," a 2006
study said, making them especially useful in executing plots. In
addition, the study claims, "They are among the most aggressive of
Islamist activists."
More than a decade later, ISIS recruiters
continue to seek out new converts. Most of this activity takes place
online, according to former radical turned counterterrorism professional
Mubin Shaikh, who particularly blames social media. "The volume and
speed of information communication – I think what that does is overwhelm
young people," he says. "They exist in a paradigm where kids who
get bullied online go and kill themselves. Or it will be the crazy antics
they do in videos where they do something extremely dangerous and often it
gets them killed. I put this kind of ISIS recruitment in that category of
youth being overwhelmed."
Compound that with the allure of a
counterculture identity that, as he notes, has always been cool. "For
them, it's a completely exotic thing."
Women are especially vulnerable, Shaikh
says. "ISIS opened the door to women. Al Qaeda gave them no role. But
ISIS said, 'you can be part of this great project called the
Caliphate.'"
He describes one particularly powerful video made by such a young woman, the
Belgian Laura Passoni, after she had gone to the Islamic State and managed
to return. "This white girl, she's in love with this guy, she breaks
up with him, she's on the rebound. She hooks up with this one guy and they
go on a cruise and they end up in ISIS territory. This is what they
do."
Recruiters also monitor chat rooms.
"They see who makes these comments, then they go on and talk to them.
It's the same as child sex predators," he says. "Exactly the
same."
And because women suffering a broken
heart or looking for romance are especially vulnerable, male recruiters
often infiltrate dating sites, luring women with promises of the exquisite
jewelry they will receive from the handsome husbands they will meet when
they arrive at the Caliphate. Passoni's seducer, for instance, tempted her
with visions of a life in a luxurious villa and the horses she would own.
"He sold me a dream I would have everything I wanted in Syria,"
she recalls in the video.
But it isn't just women, of course. A
young non-Muslim man might marry a Muslim girl and be recruited through the
community, as was the case with Omar Shafik Hammami, an American born to an
Irish-American mother and Muslim father and was raised Southern Baptist. He
converted in college, moved to Canada and married a Somali immigrant before
traveling to Somalia to join in the jihad there.
"I actually saw him in a Somali
mosque [in Toronto]," Shaikh recalls. "I thought, 'who is that
white guy?' He had married into the community and then got dragged into Al
Shabaab. That's how it works. They get into the network and the network
drags them into something else. So it's not just Twitter," he adds,
referring to the frequently-cited concern about Twitter, Facebook, and
other social media sites where recruiting takes place. "It could be
wherever."
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most
recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in
New York and the Netherlands. Follow her at @radicalstates
|
Print
Send
RSS
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment