In the United States,
two Chechen immigrants are accused of the Boston Marathon bombings. In Canada,
a doctoral student at a Montreal university is one of two non-citizens accused
this week of plotting to derail a passenger train
The headlines in North
America in the past week echo an issue that authorities have been grappling
with for more than a decade: why do a tiny minority of men in immigrant
communities in the West appear to be drawn to Islamist violence.
In many cases, the
motives need to be sought as much in psychology or sociology as in politics or
religion, said Raffaello Pantucci, a counter-terrorism specialist at London's
Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) security think tank.
"It's a
complicated mix of reasons, usually as much personal as they are transnational
or global," he said.
Young men could become
vulnerable if they felt they were not advancing in society, or wanted to do
something for their community and found a misguided means of doing so.
"The broad
conclusions are that they tend to be under a certain age [40s] and are Muslim
males, though none of these are hard and fast rules - we have seen women
involved and very recent converts. There is usually some kind of outside
contact that pushes them along in the process," Pantucci said.
Some may have come into
contact with radical Islamists on trips abroad, a possibility investigators are
exploring in the case of the elder of the two Chechen brothers - 26-year-old
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed in a firefight with police.
Some fit the
description given to his younger brother, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,
well-liked and hard for those who knew him to imagine turning to violence.
Take Omar Sheikh, for
example, one of the earlier British men drawn into global jihad. As a schoolboy
in north London, he loved to arm-wrestle in smoky pubs - drinking only milk -
or play chess with friends. The son of a clothes' merchant who had spent part
of his school years in Pakistan, he was obsessed with academic success and
dreamed of going to Harvard.
"Omar was very
likeable in lots of ways. When he was younger, he had this very roguish charm
and was full of adventure," said Daniel Flynn who was in his class at
school.
"He wouldn't often
fight but when he did, he would fight to stick up for other people. If any of
the younger boys were being bullied, he would stand up for them," said
Flynn, now a Reuters journalist.
Many years later, Omar
Sheikh, now in jail in Pakistan, became infamous after he was convicted of
involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent
Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002.
Then there was
23-year-old French-Algerian Mohammed Merah, who shot dead seven people in
France last year before being killed by police. He came from a broken home in
the poor suburbs and a background of petty crime, and preferred to visit
nightclubs than going to the mosque.
He was initially
described as a "lone wolf," but French police later said he had
travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and had been interviewed by intelligence
officials after a 2010 complaint for showing a young boy a video of beheadings.
"We don't have the
capability to watch all of them," France's top anti-terrorist judge Marc
Trevidic told Reuters earlier this year. "We accept that there are 4,000
deaths on the road every year, that there are serial killers... It's really the
only form of criminality where 100 percent success, 100 percent prevention, is
demanded."
More recently, three
men from the English city of Birmingham were convicted in February of plotting
attacks which prosecutors said would have been the biggest since the July 7,
2007 London transport bombings which killed 52 people.
Young British
Pakistanis, they had been influenced by the American-Yemeni preacher Anwar
al-Awlaki, killed by a U.S. drone attack in Yemen in 2011, and by the magazine
he created, Inspire. The men were recorded discussing some of the plots
mentioned in the magazine, including the idea of driving a harvester machine
re-fitted with swords or blades into a crowd.
Like some of the London
transport bombers, they had travelled to Pakistan for training. But unlike the
four suicide bombers in London, they had little support once they returned home
- al-Qaeda, according to Western intelligence officials, has lost its capacity
to provide direction from a distance.
And then there are
those who seem to have no direction at all, like 25-year-old ethnic Chechen
Lors Doukaev, a Belgian citizen, who accidentally blew himself up in a toilet
in Copenhagen while preparing a bomb. He was convicted by a Danish court in
2011 of plotting an attack on the daily Jyllands-Posten whose caricatures of
the Prophet Mohammed sparked violent protests in the Middle East, Africa and
Asia in 2006.
From ethnic
conflict to gobal jihad
U.S. and European
security agencies have been worrying for years about their citizens from immigrant
communities travelling overseas, possibly coming into contact with frontline
militant Islamist groups in their ancestral homelands.
Some from the large
British Pakistani community were drawn initially to Pakistan-based groups
focused on the Kashmir dispute with India, before crossing over into the orbit
of al Qaeda with its more global anti-western ideology. To those studying it,
the route became known as "the Kashmir escalator."
A flagship U.K. program
to counter radicalisation failed to achieve its objectives, so much so that in
2010 British lawmakers said the policy had alienated those it was supposed to
be winning over.
The Tsarnaev brothers
would have been brought up in the shadow of the two wars their Chechen people
fought against Russia in the 1990s, and were exposed to the spread of hard-line
Islam in southern Russia since then.
"Early indications
suggest a young member of a diaspora, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, disaffected, unable to
fit in and unhappy with his life, who sought comfort and an explanation for his
perceived troubles in an extreme and extremely over-simplistic ideology,"
said Stephen Tankel, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment in the South Asia
Program and author of a book on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.
"That ideology
explained not only his unhappiness and perceived failures here in America in a
way that gave him someone else to blame, but also connected him to those
suffering in what for him was a, probably mythologised, homeland as well as to
a wider community. If so we've seen that before."
If Western countries
have gained experience in disrupting plots - through intelligence cooperation
and domestic surveillance and policing - they have got little better at
challenging the narrative which leads young men into jihad.
Big, complicated
attacks may be more difficult for militant groups to organise, but al-Qaeda is
encouraging like-minded people to conceive their own smaller-scale plots.
"There is no doubt
the big sophisticated 9/11 type plot, 7/7 type plots, are much harder to
organise," Stuart Osborne, Britain's Senior National Coordinator for
Counter Terrorism, said last month. But he added that, "it would be fair
to say that some of the al Qaeda leadership have sort of said: 'That's good if
you can do it, but if not, any attack, whatever you can, at whatever size is
useful.'"
A new generation is
growing up, disconnected at home by urbanisation and in the diaspora by
immigration, from its familial, ethnic, tribal or linguistic identity, but
unable to identify with a westernised, irreligious elite, said Huma Yusuf, a
Pakistani columnist for Dawn newspaper who has studied in the United States and
lives in London.
"This generation
has conservative values, and a deep experience of inequality and lack of
identity that has not found political expression except through the narratives
of extremist groups," she said.
"Instead of seeing
the emergence of a new urban, middle-class political movement that
simultaneously acknowledges 'Islamic values' and embraces modernity,
globalization, and emphasizes middle-class aspirations, we're seeing new
political actors echo the 'clash of civilizations’ narratives and isolationist
posturing of extremist groups."
The wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq may also have accelerated an already existing problem, said Pantucci.
"The post-9/11
wars maybe made it easier to persuade people that the narrative really was not
only that the West didn't care about Muslims, but was actively going around the
world trying to kill them."
That assessment was
borne out talking to activists in city of Birmingham. While they believed
al-Qaeda was no longer relevant after U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden in
Pakistan in 2011, and stressed they themselves had no interest in violence,
they also saw a need to stand up to a decadent and corrupt West.
"Al-Qaeda has been
destroyed," said one young man, talking in a café in the inner-city suburb
of Alum Rock. "This is not an Islamic struggle," he said. "It is
a global struggle against corruption, imperialism and Zionism.
Sources :
http://www.voanews.com/content/anaylsis-alienation-draws-some-vulnerable-immigrants-to-jihad/1647237.html
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