Americans love to berate Europe and its failings. Youthful America looks to its European progenitor and sees post-colonial stagnation and sclerotic economies that are unwilling to face up to their problems. A bugbear of the past few years has been criticism of Europe’s approach to its resident Muslim population. Commentaries have focused on a problem that is seen by many as an incubator of anger that has expressed itself in the form of attacks by European, or European-based, terrorists against America – most notably on September 11, 2001.

But while Europe has in the past provided a depressingly productive Petri dish for Muslim rage with contradictory policies that have had an alienating effect on parts of the broader community, it is increasingly the case that America is simply following Europe in the same direction. Recent stories of New York’s police department using inflammatory videos about Islamist extremism in training come in the wake of stories of possibly CIA assisted intelligence operations against Muslim communities. Whatever the tactical utility of such operations, it is clear that from a hearts-and-minds perspective they can be seen to be a failure.

More absurdly, states have tried to pass laws preventing shariah law from being imposed on them – a highly unlikely outcome, but reflective of the high levels of paranoia and anti-Muslim feeling amongst the American public. Something also seen in stories of Muslim leaders being disembarked from domestic flights with little reason given, in some cases as they were on their way to conferences about “Islamophobia”.

At a political level the conversation has been just as poisonous as in Europe. Potential Republican candidate Newt Gingrich has spoken of “the mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it” posed by shariah. In Congress, Representative Peter King has held hearings accusing America’s Muslim community of failing to regulate itself and producing homegrown terrorists. And while a direct correlation with this polarizing narrative is of course impossible to draw, there has been an increase in young Americans drawn by the lure of jihad abroad or into becoming involved in what they believe are terror plots within the US in the past few years.

Europe has hardly covered itself in glory in integrating its Muslim communities. But neither has America, and the current approach is increasingly emulating many of Europe’s failed policies. It is all very good to shout about Europe’s failings, but the United States needs to increasingly look within before it allows its problems to get too out of hand.

America has a long tradition of being a national melting pot, able to absorb people of all cultures and creeds and accepting of diversity as a crucial element of its identity. For years, the belief was that America would be immune to the sort of problems that Europe faced with homegrown extremism. As time has shown, however, this is clearly not the case with numerous young men drawn to the flame of extremism. The United States should focus on learning positive lessons from Europe’s problematic experience and avoid emulating its failed policies.

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Towards the end of last year a story emerged that suggested that infamous al Qaida ideologue Mustafa Setmariam Nasr, aka Abu Musab al- Suri, had been released from the Syrian jail in which it was believed he had been languishing. Picked up in Quetta in October 2005, al-Suri was a longtime jihadist who during his career had served as a trainer in Afghanistan, married a Spanish woman, and worked as a propagandist from Londonistan. He is most well-known, however, as an author and ideologue and particularly for his massive tome, Global Islamic Resistance Call, a text that laid out his idea for al-Qaeda’s structure as “nizam, la tanzim” (system, not organization). Most recently, his writing had gotten increased traction as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) had very publicly taken up his ideas as part of their push in Inspire magazine to try to stir up Lone Wolf terrorism.

While the unconfirmed announcement of his release has not gotten much traction, the story was interesting given the importance al-Suri’s work is often given by researchers (and the fact that he was amongst the individuals whom Zawahiri asked for in exchange for kidnapped American Warren Weistein). Intrigued by the story, I reached out to Dr. Brynjar Lia of FFI in Norway, the world’s foremost expert of al-Suri, having written the excellent biography “Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Musab al Suri,” to see what he thought of the story and its potential consequences:

I think it is quite likely that al-Suri was transferred to Syria and has been held there, judging by the various reports pointing in that direction over the past few years. However, I am not sure whether Syrian authorities would have much to gain by releasing him. He is no friend of the Syrian regime to say the least, and he consistently denounced the Syrian regime both politically and religiously, labeling them "a Nusayri [another word for the Alawi, Bashar al Assad’s ethnic community] occupation". The only thing I could think of is that the regime is trying to send a signal to the West, and the U.S. in particular, that if they push the Assad regime too hard, they will lose a partner in "the war on terrorism", to use an outdated term. Al-Zawahiri mentioned al-Suri as one of several jihadis he wanted to see released in return for a U.S. citizen, reportedly held hostage by al-Qaida in Pakistan. However, in the current climate it is hard to imagine U.S.-Syrian cooperation on swapping al-Suri for the U.S. hostage.

 

“The impact of al-Suri's release, if true, will not necessarily be dramatic, although it depends on the circumstances of his release. I don't really see him in any operational role in the jihadi organisations in the region such as al-Qaida in Iraq, Ansar al-Islam, Fatah al-Islam or others. As for the Syrian opposition in exile, they will probably view him as a liability and they seem to believe that he might have been released as part of the Syrian regime's orchestrated efforts to portray the opposition as an al-Qaida supported insurgency. Furthermore, al-Suri has few friends among the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, whom he singled out for very harsh criticism in his early writings. He did not have a large crowd of dedicated disciples, but was mostly a theoretician and a writer and was admired for his writings and his seniority as a jihadist.

For my own two cents, it would be strange for the Syrians to take such an action for a man who was so clearly their enemy and unlikely to ever do them any favors – but then again, as the Shia Iranian experience with allowing Sunni al Qaida to stay in their territory has shown, the geopolitics of the war on terrorism are complex. But I also wonder whether it would necessarily be the case that his release would be some sort of a boon to the notion of Lone Wolf jihad as espoused by AQAP. Clearly Inspire magazine saw al-Suri as their ideological godfather and repeatedly held up his image and writing as key in their thinking, but I wonder if al-Suri would equally embrace the notions as they have advanced it.

To start with, it is unclear to me on the basis of his work that al Suri would be that impressed by the religious and ideological knowledge displayed by the army of young people who are taking up arms in response to AQAP’s call. In the early 1990s as he was first advancing his ideas in Peshawar, al Suri spoke of being unimpressed by the lack of “necessary doctrinal, programmatic, ideological and political guidance” amongst his fellow Arab-Afghans. Furthermore, in his magum opus, the Global Islamic Resistance Call, where he praises “the school of individual jihad and small cells” and a group of lone individuals who took up the cause of jihad, he highlights how while these attacks may be a military, security and agitation success, their political and educational impact is relatively low. It is hard to imagine that he would see greater ideological fervor or wider political success amongst the young people claiming his heritage.

Beyond this, it is unclear that he would necessarily approve of the sort of random targeting that is suggested by Inspire magazine’s ideas of taking down apartment blocs full of people by renting out one on a lower floor and letting the gas run freely or the idea to use a combine harvester to literally mow through crowds. While al-Suri’s writing does recognise the validity of targeting civilians, he does say that this needs to be done in a discriminating fashion. This is reflected in information to have emerged from Abbotabad where it is claimed that bin-Laden was “taken aback” by the Inspire proposal to use a harvester “he complains that this tactical proposal promotes indiscriminate slaughter. He says he rejects this and it is not something that reflects what al-Qaeda does.”

It is unclear whether al-Suri will be able to react in any sort of a public way to the children of the jihad who have claimed his legacy, not least because we have no idea at the moment of whether he has even been released (or if he has what limitations he may be under). But should he have been released and be able to become an active jihadi ideologue once again, it will undoubtedly prove a coup for al-Qaeda’s battered ideology and forces (as Jarret Brachmann has pointed out). What is less clear, however, is what kind of an impact it would have on the AQAP driven push towards indiscriminate, undirected Lone Wolf terrorism. It is uncertain to what degree the group is responsible for the growth in such events, and it is even less certain whether al-Suri would necessarily appreciate the interpretation of his work that they have been advancing.

Lone Wolf terrorism will no doubt continue to emerge whether al-Suri has been released or not. Al Suri’s potential addition to this mix will be to breathe new life into a group whose ideology and leadership has taken a sound beating, offering a leader whose ideas at the time were not paid much attention to, but since his arrest have increasingly become the vogue amongst terrorist tacticians.

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Islamist terrorism and extremism in China is a very difficult subject to research. A general sense of paranoia casts a shadow over the it and a great paucity in direct and accurate information means that people often have very little that is empirical or tangible to add.

None of this is to say that the problem does not exist. Recently a video emerged on the forums that by my count is the first to be released that is primarily in Chinese (Mandarin that is, the main Chinese language) – previous videos have been later translated into Chinese, but this is the first one to boast a speaker clearly using Chinese. Others have been released threatening China ahead of the Olympics, and a video from April 2008 showed three Chinese men being executed, most likely somewhere in Waziristan. There have also been a number of half-formed plots, including an attempt to bring down a plane going from Urumqi (a regional capital) to Guangzhou (a regional the capital) using a petrol bomb, a series of bus bombings for whom no satisfactory explanation has ever been provided and a seemingly suicidal attack against security forces in Aksu, Xinjiang in August last year.

In all of these cases, the Chinese authorities blamed what are called East Turkestan groups. East Turkestan refers to what China’s westernmost Xinjiang province is considered by those who call for independence of their province. These people tend to be Uighur, a Turkic minority mostly resident in China that used to be the most populous in that province: Han Chinese migration has completely changed the ethnic demographics of the province. This migration has been accompanied by what is seen locally as a slow erosion of Uighur culture and a general sense that Han China is taking advantage of the province’s considerable natural resources with little benefit to the locals. Uighur’s are a predominantly Muslim minority and some splinters of the al-Qaedaist narrative have managed to find a home amongst the disaffected communities. And these groups are either referred to as, or self-call themselves, East Turkestan Islamist Movement (ETIM) or Turkestan Islamist Party (TIP).

But whether these attacks are actually carried out by organised groups is very hard to confirm. Some individuals have in the past made connections with al Qaeda and affiliated networks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and broader Central Asia. According to Camille Tawil’s recent authoritative book Brothers in Arms, in Afghanistan prior to 9/11 ETIM “pledged allegiance to Mullah Omar and stopped all paramilitary activity against China (which the Taliban could ill-afford to upset), as requested.” And the existence of the connection is further confirmed by a quick review of the Chinese listed Wikileak’d Guantanamo detainee files that show a whole series of Uighur men who left China for reasons mostly to do with what they felt was Chinese oppression and ended up in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Whether they were all connected to terrorist groups is unclear, but certainly the path they took seems to have been a well-trodden one. There are regular reports that the Pakistani government trumpets of “Turkestan” fighters being killed in operations in Waziristan. And last May, interior minister Rehman Malik referred to the back having been “broken” of the “East Turkestan” groups. He was rewarded with substantial contracts and investment from China.

More recently, while the regional Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was undertaking one of its joint counter-terrorism exercises, Chinese minister Meng Hongwei declared that, “signs are the ‘East Turkestan’ terrorists are flowing back.” But while this declaration sounded like it was founded in some sort of direct threat intelligence, nothing has since materialized. This could of course be due to the fact that it is sensitive information and consequently suppressed, but at the same time, Chinese authorities like to trumpet success in counter-terrorism operations.

But now we have had what seems to be a genuine expression of violence in Xinjiang, with the news that a mob of “thugs” attacked a police station in Hotan, one of the few majority Uighur cities left in the province. While this attack does not seem on the scale of the grim July 2009 riots that led to around 200 deaths, reports indicate that at least a handful of people have been killed. So far blame has not been attributed to the East Turkestan groups, but the local information bureau has already referred to the event as “an organised terrorist attack.”

The East Turkestan groups and the threat from them are also often quoted as one of China’s driving motivations behind engagement with Central/South Asia. But what is interesting is that there is often little evidence of a successful terrorist attack being carried out in China. Consequently, there is a certain amount of skepticism about the size and nature of the threat. Curious, I recently asked a series of high profile researchers and officials what size they considered the threat to be and got broadly similar responses, though very different senses of how dangerous the ETIM/TIP groups are.

One told me that in the past year some 100 had been killed in Afghanistan/Pakistan and that he estimated there were some 1,000 more. Someone affiliated with a research institution linked to the state security ministry played the threat down, declaring that there were some 100/200 people and that the networks had been largely disrupted. The only reason he thought they would be able to make a turn-around was if things in Afghanistan got a lot worse providing the group with a new space to operate in. In a larger conference space I posed the same question to a University academic who had just given a very doom and gloom assessment of security in Central Asia and he guesstimated numbers were in the “hundreds” and that they were very active in the “border regions.” He expressed particular concern about Tajikistan and the porous borders that the nation had as a potential conduit for terrorist networks in the region.

Often, however, the bigger threat that is referred to are groups like Hizb ut- Tahrir, whom are present in Central Asia and apparently amongst the communities of cross-border traders that go back and forth between Xinjiang and the bordering states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. One high estimate that was given me was of some 50,000 HuT members in China spread out from Xinjiang all the way down to Sichuan province with people seeing the group as part of a dangerous Islamicization that is taking place in broader Central Asia and consequently in China too. More conservative estimates say there are some 20,000 HuT members in China.

It seems that there is some sort of a terrorist threat to China from violent Islamist networks. But what remains unclear is to what degree this threat is able to conduct any sorts of operations within China or to what degree al Qaeda and affiliate networks are able (or want) to manipulate it for their own ends. Currently, the jihad in China seems more aspirational than operational. At the same time, if events in Hotan are confirmed, it looks like the tinderbox of ethnic friction and disenfranchisement that might offer an outlet for such extremism to latch on to continues to exist.

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The new Independent Reviewer for Terrorism Legislation David Anderson QC has published his first review of counter-terrorism legislation, conducting a full inquiry into the case of six street cleaners working in London who were arrested on the eve of the Pope’s visit to London in September of last year. The report exonerates the police concluding, “I consider that the police acted responsibly and within the law in arresting the six men when they did.”

The report lays out in detail the evidential case behind the police decision to arrest the men. Apparently, at 4:30pm in the afternoon on September 16^th, the day before the Pope’s visit to the UK, police received a tip off from an unnamed source who told them that they had overheard five of the men “talking about a possible attack on the Pope’s vehicle on the following day.” The source’s information is summarized thus:

· The five men were looking at a picture in the Metro newspaper of the Pope’s motor vehicle.

· They discussed a recent incident where the Koran was burnt and stated that a Christian should be killed for every page that was damaged.

· The view was expressed that whilst the Pope’s vehicle was protected, it could be stopped and that even if he survived, those around him would die.

· Comments were made to the effect that it would be wonderful if the Pope was killed and that there were virgins waiting for them.

· The men could all be working on the day of the Pope’s visit to London.

· The depot had recently taken delivery of new uniforms, ten of which had been stolen.

Additionally, police were told that ‘a close associate of one of the men’ was arrested and released under terrorism legislation some 3-4 months previously. Somewhat more speculatively, one of the men was reported to have recently returned from Paris (one of the men, a 26 year-old, held dual Algerian and French nationality, though it is unclear if this is the man that is referred to), with his head shaven ‘and to have become radicalised.’ Background checks on the men revealed one of them shared a name with an individual who had been arrested and then released during the course of the investigation into the Madrid bombings. The five men under suspicion were aged between 26 and 44, all worked for Veolia Environment Services, and were all of Algerian descent except for one who was Sudanese. The Algerians were all either married to European’s or held European citizenships as well – one British, one Spanish and another French.

After the decision was made to arrest the men in the morning, a sixth man (Subject F) described ‘as being a friend of the suspects’ arrived to the company HQ later in the day and became agitated saying ‘I’m not working now. Does everyone think we’re fucking terrorists? They’re treating us like animals with our hands on our heads.’ He then stormed off. The same person who reported this statement also said that he recalled Subject F requesting to work on the Pope’s route during the visit. Investigation into the company’s files uncovered that a number of men had requested to work together on the Pope’s visit and that a couple had taken holiday time at the same time.

All of which would I suppose paint an incriminating picture to a suspicious mind. It is worth remembering that at the time, security in the UK and Europe was on high alert after the information came out of Afghanistan/Pakistan that cells of Europeans had been activated to carry out Mumbai-style terrorist operations. Cells were swept up in Germany, France and Denmark – in some cases turning up weapons. Plotters had not yet emerged in the UK, though a report from Waziristan pointed to an individual allegedly called Abdul Jabber who was tasked to establish an al Qaeda cell in the UK. He was apparently killed in a drone strike. Another element to emerge at around this time was that a Norwegian-Uighur who was allegedly plotting something in Oslo was found to have in his possession a photo of Ibrahim Adam, a brother to Anthony Garcia, aka Rahman Adam, one of the plotters linked to the Crevice cell. The passport-sized photos showed him in a variety of different haircuts and were taken as evidence that he was trying to obtain fake identification to get back into Europe to possibly carry out some sort of plot (possibly further darkening the picture, Adam was of Algerian descent, the family changed their names years before).

So within this context, it is easy to imagine why police would react as they did. It is a bit surprising that Mr. Anderson fails to mention all this, though he does highlight that the “requirement for reasonable suspicion” needs to “be kept firmly in mind by all forces during future operations….particularly in view of the security pressures that are likely to attend the forthcoming London Olympics.” This element seems to have been leapt upon by today’s Independent.

Nevertheless, it is worth taking a moment to cast a further skeptical eye over this case – the evidence for the plot appears to be single-sourced and not fitting with any other direct intelligence that the security services received. Mr. Anderson himself describes parts of it as “barely credible.” It may be understandable that the police reacted as they did given the context, but the operation will have done little to win them support amongst the Muslim community. As Subject F so eloquently put it, “does everyone think we’re fucking terrorists?” Doubtless, this experience has confirmed this to him and the others. For Subject E, a 27-year-old Sudanese man, the case concluded with it being discovered that he had had his application for asylum turned down and was currently operating using a false identity. According to the investigation “this has resulted in further action under the immigration laws.” One imagines this might include expulsion from the country, though I am uncertain of whether the UK can send people back to Sudan. None of which will endear HMG to him or his friends and family.

It remains unclear whether the chap who had returned from Paris “radicalized” with a shaved head was still a cause for concern, though I imagine he will remain on police radars. Unlike the previous Operation Pathway plot that has been linked to a series of plots in New York and Oslo and with key plotters back in Waziristan, this lot seems not to have had any serious links and their release back into society is likely going to do little to increase the terrorist threat. The fact that the Security Services (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ) did not feature in the investigation confirms that they were not involved and therefore did not have the intelligence.

Instead, it seems as though this was a case of a bad tip-off at a tense time, and hopefully lessons have been learned from this. It of course almost impossible to know to what degree this will have improved or worsened community relations – though doubtless it will be noted how loudly the arrests were reported and how quietly the report that declares “there is no reason to believe, with the benefit of hindsight, that any of the arrested men was involved in a plot to kill the Pope, or indeed that any such plot existed” was covered. But to blame the media is often a bit of a cheap shot, as ultimately, it only caters to the public’s desires and the discovery some people were innocent is less news grabbing than a dramatic arrest.

The purpose of this system of regulation with independent reviewers and inquests is intended to provide the citizenry with a way of watching the watchers. What might be perceived as being a problem, however, is that they continue to largely exonerate those they are overseeing. In the various investigations that have been carried out they continue to say the security services are doing a good job and that broadly speaking nothing is going wrong. Human mistakes are made and that is it. Now this may be the case, but in some cases one has to wonder about whether this might not be stoking further skepticism. Certainly with the Pathway lot, the absolute certainty with which everyone up to the Prime Minister claimed they were linked to al Qaeda was not supported by evidence that was subsequently released. I do not mean to doubt that the Pathway chaps were up to something (I have written a whole article detailing their supposed links to al Qaeda), but the problem of a presentational gap remains when no explosives or evidence of a bomb plot were actually found. In this case where six innocent men were swept up the cause seems to have been bad intelligence and a high level of background chatter.

Admittedly, it is unclear to what degree those who still doubt are a majority or whether it is merely conspiratorially minded obsessive’s or bereaved individuals for whom no comfort will be enough, but at the same time it is equally uncertain that the current structures the UK has set in place to watch the watchers are necessarily assuaging the concerns they set out to calm.

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I have in the past touched upon the case of the Tipton Taliban (or the Tipton Three), the three chaps from the West Midlands who were picked up in November 2001 by Northern Alliance forces and eventually transferred into US custody at Guantanamo Bay. They were amongst the first detainees to be repatriated from Gitmo in March 2004 and went on to produce, with award winning filmmaker Michael Winterbottom, a film of their experience in Afghanistan, The Road in Guantanamo.

The film painted the men’s experience in a very naïf way – as four young men who headed to Pakistan for a friend’s wedding and while there, wandered into Afghanistan out of curiosity to see what was going on. In a petition submitted to the US Supreme Court Shafiq Rasul claimed that he had travelled to Pakistan in the first place “to visit relatives, explore his culture, and continue his computer studies.” Asif Iqbal instead said that he was going with the intention of marrying “a woman from his father’s small village.”

By November 2001 they were in Afghanistan and were captured amongst the many former Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters fleeing the overwhelming US and Northern Alliance onslaught. In a long confessional they published with the Center for Constitutional Rights, they recounted the toughness of their detention, first at the hands of General Rashid Dostum’s forces, then in a Kandahar prison before they were handed over to U.S. forces that moved them to Guantanamo, This made them into poster-children for those angry at Guantanamo and the way the US was pursuing its war on terror until in June 2007 when they agreed to participate in a Channel 4 show in which Rhuhel Ahmed admitted to having visited an Islamist training camp and to having learned how to handle weapons like AK-47s. In January 2010 they confirmed this story during an interview about a BBC show which reunited two of them with one of their Guantanamo jailers, saying that “we all went to the Taliban training camp on many occasions to find out what was happening” and later “being in Afghanistan, we were at that age where….seeing a gun….you’d never seen a gun in the UK…you want to hold it.”

Now with the latest Wikileaks information release we have the version of their tale that they told their American interrogators and that was collated into a detainee assessment in late October 2003 (just under five months prior to their release). It must of course prefaced that some parts of their stories may have been obtained under duress, but nevertheless, the background stories that the Gitmo detainee assessments provide have the ring of truth to them – the consistencies between them, some of the very specific details about their pre-departure experiences in the UK, and especially in light of the men’s subsequent admissions (admittedly, it is mostly Rhuhel Ahmed who has done the on-air admissions since).

According to the newly published reports, in late 1999-2000 the men started to get interested in jihad. In Shafiq Rasul’s account, in 1999 they started to attend the Muslim community center in Tipton where “they were encouraged from the start, as Muslim youth, to fight jihad.” He reported that “a well-respected cleric named Sheikh Faisal visited the Tipton Mosque and encouraged the detainee and his friends to commit themselves to the armed struggle against the west.” In Rhuhel Ahmed’s telling, “he started thinking about jihad during the summer of 2000, after reading books on Afghanistan and the Taliban. He also listened to tapes and watched videos on the Chechnya Jihad,” all of which he obtained from the Maktabah al-Ansaar bookstore in Birmingham, UK (that was set up by Moazzam Begg a few years earlier). Asif Iqbal merely reports that “he was a member of the Tipton mosque” and “that he became interested in Jihad in 2000.

Inspired, in September 2000, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed both headed (a week apart) to, in Iqbal’s report “receive military training, to help him fulfill his desire to fight Jihad.” According to Ahmed, the two met in Karachi and stayed at a mosque in the city until they left for Quetta and then onto Kandahar where they “attended a forty-day training session sponsored by the Harakat al-Islami Bangladeshi.” Having completed their training, in November 2000 they headed to the frontlines staying “a few weeks between the front and Kabul.” Apparently this was not very exciting, as according to Ahmed, “their frontline tour mainly consisted of guard duty.” By late November they had had enough and on the 26^th they returned to the UK.

Until 9/11 when all three men (and a fourth man Munir Ali, also from Tipton who is believed to have died in Afghanistan) headed off to Afghanistan once again. Asif Iqbal is the most forthcoming on reasons behind this decision with his interrogators telling them that “he left on 27 September 2003 [I believe this is a typo which is meant to be 2001] to go and fight against the ‘crusades’…Bin Laden was being blamed for the attacks and that he wanted to ‘fight for Bin Laden.” He went on say that President Bush was responsible “for the conspiracy against the Taliban” and that “the Jews had been the ones who attacked America.” Clearly fired up with zeal, he grabbed a flight “first class, one way.” The others (Rhuhel Ahmed, Munir Ali, and Shafiq Rasul) joined him just over a week later, leaving the UK on October 5^th, 2001, and, according to Rhuhel, “basically took the same route from the previous trip.” Shafiq Rasul fills in more details saying that once in Karachi they met up with Abdul Rahman, “a known member of Harakat ul Jihad al Islami.” He organised their trip to Afghanistan, where the three of them met up again with Asif Iqbal.

At this point, their stories diverge a bit. According to Shafiq Rasul they were near the frontlines in Kabul for about ten days hiding in caves “with other Pakistanis, while coalition forces bombed the area.” Rhuhel Ahmed and Asif Iqbal instead say that following their meeting they went to a training camp near Kabul (an analyst speculates in Asif Iqbal’s statement that this might be the al Faruq camp), which Ahmed describes as “an old Russian military camp.” According to Iqbal, they stayed here for four weeks and were “bored.” So much so that they headed back into Pakistan for “sightseeing.” In his telling, after a couple of weeks drifting “they decided to return to Afghanistan, to rejoin the Jihad” – returning to Kabul they went to Bagram “to fight” for a couple of weeks. They then returned to Kabul and were instructed to head to the mountains where the frontline had been established. In Rhuhel Ahmed’s account, at the end of October they finished their training and went to Kandahar, then Kunduz before ending up in the mountains outside Kabul.

From this position in the mountains, the men appear to agree that they realised they were in a bad spot. According to Rhuhel Ahmed “they witnessed heavy US bombing raids” while Asif Iqbal recalls “one bomb landed approximately 50 meters away and ‘wiped out a whole mountain’.” They decided to try to get out to Pakistan, and as they were ended up getting caught with other Taliban aligned fighters by Uzbek General Rashid Dostum’s forces. Having been incarcerated and recognised as foreigners, the General’s forces sold them to the Americans for a reward and the men eventually ended up in Guantanamo.

It is highly likely that while in the custody of General Dostum’s forces, they underwent some nasty experiences, and no doubt Guantanamo was pretty harsh. But this new version of events goes a bit further in discrediting the rose-tinted version that they portrayed in their movie. Undoubtedly, US intelligence seems faulty and determined to conclude that they are more than they say. The American assessments for Ahmed and Iqbal lock onto the fact that they believe the men were at a rally in Afghanistan in winter 2000/2001 where Osama bin Laden spoke and “several of the 9/11 hijackers were present.” As it turns out, British intelligence was able to prove that all three were in the UK at the time; Rasul was in fact working at a Curry’s in the West Midlands. That he appears to have confessed to being in Afghanistan at the time is likely evidence of his mistreatment – all of which seems a bit excessive for an individual who while clearly misguided, was not an Al Qaeda kingpin.

No doubt this will not be the last that we hear from these men. They seem to enjoy the spotlight of publicity and their cause has been taken up by others as a way of shining a light on American misdeeds. Unfortunately, little digging has been done into their reasons for being in Afghanistan in the first place and it would be good to get a more candid version from them of their story at some point – especially in light of these new documents Contract article -

Lord Ashdown may have a good point when he accuses the west of suffering from “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” allowing Bosnia to “slide back towards the status of a failed state” while attention is so focused on Libya, but I wonder if there is not another comparison that can be made between the two: that of jihadi battlefields within easy reach of Europe.

It remains unclear how many jihadists linked to al-Qaeda are fighting alongside the rebels in Libya. NATO Supreme Allied Commander Admiral James Stavridis spoke of “flickers” of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah being present in the country and rebel commanders have been quoted saying how some of the men they initially recruited to go and fight in Iraq have returned to fight Gadaffi’s forces. There have also been reports of former Guantanamo detainees showing up in leadership roles, and one report claimed that the jihadist units that were making it to the front were amongst the most effective fighters. On the more alarmist end of the scale, leader of nearby Chad has claimed that al-Qaeda linked elements have plundered the Colonel’s weapons supplies and run away with surface-to-air missiles.

Amidst this all, there have been stories of British Libyans deciding to return home to fight to overthrow the leader. According to James Brandon and Noman Benotman’s authoritative account, “some” former Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) have returned to fight against Gadaffi, with at least one being killed and another captured. In the meantime, “Sam’s” story in the Telegraph seems to highlight that the fighting bug is catching amongst the younger generation. Others have told of how they are returning to take on roles as doctors of aid workers.

All of which is very understandable. Rather than watch their nation implode on their television screens, these expatriate Libyans are going back home to do something. And they are doing this all with the support of NATO bombing campaign from the air and western intelligence agents on the ground directing fire.

But what happens when the NATO campaign eventually stops and what if Gadaffi does not fall. What if the nation descends, like Bosnia did, into a protracted and grim civil war into which jihadist elements were able to move in and offer a live fire training ground for aspirant warriors from around the world? Last time this happened in Bosnia, an unknown number of young Europeans went to fight. As the story of Sayyad al Falastini shows, the battlefield was a coach ride away for young men in London, and Libya is not really that much farther away (not sure if it is a coach ride, but it is certainly easier than getting to Somalia or Waziristan).

This may all be an exaggerated concern. One friend pointed out that of greater concern was the fact that jails in a number of north African countries had emptied, turning god knows who on the street. While intelligence headquarters had all been pillaged, destroying a wealth of knowledge on Islamists from across the region. But as the situation in Libya continues to drift into something less than a conclusive solution with Colonel Gadaffi continuing to hold on, some consideration should be given for it as a potential risk as a jihadi battlefield next door. Given the fact that until recently the West was quite firmly on the wrong side of history in Libya, and we are still uncertain as to what the plan is to support the rebels while allied bombers are accidentally killing some of them, this is by no means necessarily a revolution which will completely go the West’s way. Looking back at footage or coverage of Islamists rallying troops to go to Bosnia, it is easy to see that even in the wake of action by the West they remained angry and the end result was a group of cells some of which ended up targeting the their home nations. Extremists in the UK are already talking about how this is just another western war in a Muslim land.

There are many good reasons for the fighting in Libya to be brought to some positive resolution quickly, not allowing a war with a potentially jihadist flavor to fester on Europe’s doorstep is clearly amongst them. Unfortunately, at the moment the end strategy seems uncertain leading to a potentially dangerous period of intractable conflict that could turn into a Bosnian-style jihadist battlefield. Lets hope some resolution can be effectively brought and enforced before such a situation arises.

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Given the shootings at Frankfurt airport by Arid Uka, and a series of arrests and convictions recently, it seems as though jihad in Germany is continuing to be a thorn in the side that is not going away. Last week I asked Ces to comment on events in Russia. This week, I have reached out to Dr. Guido Steinberg of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin, the most prominent expert on the topic of radicalisation in Germany, to give us some thoughts on the current state of jihad in Germany.

RP: Can you give us an overview of the current state of Islamism and Jihadi ideology in Germany at the moment? What sort of numbers are we talking about?

GS: The number of German jihadists has risen substantially since 2005/2006. Before then, Germany used to be more of a safe haven and logistics base for al-Qaeda and other organisations. Today, it has become a target and German citizens of different backgrounds have joined different organisations including al-Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Islamic Jihad Union.

Germany is under threat today because these organisations aim at perpetrating attacks on German soil in order to force the German government to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. At the same time, al-Qaeda and its allies now have the necessary recruits who have been trained in Pakistan and know Germany well.

According to official information, about 220 persons from Germany are on their way to, are currently in, or have recently been to jihadist training camps. Of these, 110 are back in Germany and 10 are in jail. In more concrete terms, there are currently more than 50 Germans in Pakistan. This is a substantial increase from previous years and the jihadist scene in Germany still seems to be growing.

RP: The recent case of Arid Uka and the shootings in Frankfurt is particularly disturbing- do you think this is the beginning of a trend?

GS: There has been a trend towards independent action in Germany just like in other European countries since 2005. At that time, most independent jihadists in Germany radicalised because of the Danish cartoon crisis. For instance, there have been the so-called suitcase bombers, two students from Lebanon who planted bombs in suitcases on two regional trains in Western Germany in July 2006. The bombs did not detonate because of a technical error. It might be that the trend towards independent action will gain traction as it has all over Europe and in the US in 2010. However, as of yet, there are no clear indications regarding this in Germany.

RP: What brought about the creation of the German Taliban Mujahedeen in Waziristan? Not many other European or Western communities have similar organisations out there.

GS: The German Taliban Mujahedeen has been more of a propaganda tool than an organisation. It seems as if it was founded by the IJU in 2009 after an increasing number of Germans arrived in its headquarters in Mir Ali, North Waziristan. Together with a Turkish-Azerbaijani group called Taifetul Mansura they formed a kind of jihadist international brigade. However, the organisation never consisted of more than a dozen fighters and after the death of its founding emir, Ahmet Manavbasi, the group disintegrated. Some were killed with him, some joined the IJU, and others returned to Germany. Its remnants today seem to consist of a small group of young men from Berlin.

RP: From the Hamburg Cell to the Sauerland Group and Arid Uka. Why has jihadism found such a rich soil to grow in Germany?

GS: The members of the Hamburg cell were in their majority Arab students who had only arrived in Germany during the 1990s and had not struck deep roots here. Therefore, I think that the history of a distinct German scene only began with the Sauerland group. It began when an increasing number of ethnic Turks and Kurds were radicalised. The Sauerland group was part of a wider network, which was predominantly Turkish. As it seems, it took the Turks longer than most Arabs to get attracted by jihadist thought. When that happened, Germany was affected because it is home to some 2 million ethnic Kurds and at least 500.000 ethnic Kurds from Turkey – the biggest Turkish diaspora community worldwide. Once the first Turks had joined, the German jihadist scene expanded rapidly. This to me seems to be the result of an internationalisation processes affecting the jihadist scene worldwide. However, the German example seems to be especially striking.

RP: Are there any particular trends in Germany that particularly worry you in the short to medium term?

GS: The most worrying trend is the growth of the salafist scene in Germany. Some years ago, there were only two or three prominent preachers. Today, there are dozens. Official estimates count some 4000-5000 salafists here. This is particularly worrying because all the German individuals who went to join al-Qaeda, IMU and IJU in Pakistan first attended salafist mosques. This is where they were radicalised and recruited. Visiting the al-Nur mosque in Berlin, the al-Quds mosque in Hamburg or the multicultural house in Neu-Ulm was the first step on their journey to jihad. The fact that the salafist scene is growing likely means that the number of sympathisers, potential supporters and active jihadists will grow as well. It is no coincidence that Germany-based salafist preachers also influenced Uka.

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The attack on Moscow’s Domodevo airport earlier this year was the latest in a long litany of terrorism in Russia emanating from the troubled Caucuses region. While it is a subject I follow, I do not follow it in nearly enough detail and have in the past turned to Ces Moore of Birmingham University for more detailed analysis. In the wake of the recent attacks I have been sharing emails with Ces on the subject, and he kindly accepted to answer a few questions on the subject for this site – for Ces’s complete bio, please see his site at Birmingham. My questions in italics:

1. Who do you think might be responsible, and why did it take them so long to claim it?

In the past, groups involved in launching suicide operations in Russia have claimed responsibility in statements, in the days and weeks following attacks. As such, it is not surprising that two statements were released in quick succession in February by the leader of the Caucasus Emirate – a loosely connected group of militants fighting in the North Caucasus (for more on the ‘third wave’ of attacks). In recent years Doku Umarov has vowed to launch attacks in Russian cities. The video statements suggested that the leader of the Emirate, Umarov, and his supporters played a role in the Domodedovo attack, although that must be read in the context of ongoing operations by the militant underground across the North Caucasus.

Obviously it is difficult to ascertain which faction from the North Caucasus, if indeed any, were responsible. Significantly, although Al Qaeda have offered endorsements for attacks, they don’t have a track record of launching operations targeting Russia, so, as the statements indicate; it likely that indigenous groups with the willingness and capability may have been involved in the attack. Given the target - a key transport hub and symbol of Russia - and the nature and form of the attack – a suicide operation – it is likely that Umarov and his supporters were involved in the airport bombing.

These groups often wait a few days before issuing statements, partly in order to ratchet up pressure on the Russian authorities and partly because their systems of communication, command and control are a being closely monitored by the Russian authorities, making it difficult for them to operate. For example, in the past, rebel websites have been subjected to cyber attacks. It may well be that this attack is only loosely linked to the core of the insurgency – many attacks in the past were launched almost as independent operations – under the framework of a loose network of affiliates. For instance, in the wave of terrorism between 2002 and 2004 called Operation Boomerang, groups approached rebel leaders for funding to launch attacks – almost as a franchise operation - while other attacks were launched independently, as acts of retaliation. The claim of responsibility will shed some light on the groups involved, and help unpack if there is a link to the North Caucasus.

2. This is not the first time this airport has been targeted: is this in part a message to the outside world? What is the message if it is? Should other countries be concerned about these groups going international?

This again, is a very interesting set of questions. The airport itself has not been attacked in the past, although its security was breached when two female bombers boarded domestic flights in August 2004. They detonated their explosives destroying two planes, killing scores of people. These attacks were part of the aforementioned campaign of terrorism called Operation Boomerang, by Shamil Basayev, and were followed shortly afterwards by the hostage-taking tragedy in the Ossetian town of Beslan. These attacks were all designed to demonstrate the weakness of Russian security measures, and occurred against the background of political normalisation and elections in Chechnya proper. In 2004 then, breaching security measures at Domodedovo not only caused embarrassment for the Putin administration, it also posed a security dilemma for the Russian authorities.

On this occasion, the explosion occurred in the part of the airport terminal itself. Given that the explosion caused mass casualties, and given that many of those who died or were injured had recently arrived on international flights, it is likely that the attack was designed to garner international news coverage. In short then, yes, in part the attack appears to have been designed to send a message to both the Russian authorities but also to the outside world – that is that the Russian authorities most secure transport hubs could be attacked; that mass casualty attacks have returned to Russia, and more particularly to Moscow and its environs; and that the continued statements about the elimination of rebel groups in North Caucasus has by no means been successful.

In 2010 the Russian authorities had a series of notable successes, killing and capturing key members in the militant underground. In the simplest terms, the attack appears to have been timed to coincide with a trip by the Russian President, Dimtri Medyedev to Davos, at which he was tasked with giving a keynote speech. Meanwhile the attack also occurred against the backdrop of increasing inter-ethnic tensions in Moscow between Caucasian gangs and Russia youth groups.

Whether the international community should read more into the attack then these more localised messages – and whether these groups could adopt a more international agenda – is something of a moot point. The Russian authorities repeatedly claim that rebels in the North Caucasus are intimately linked to Al Qaeda – although little if any evidence of these links has ever been provided. That is not to say that groups in the North Caucasus have not adopted increasingly radical agendas – or indeed, that Chechnya and the North Caucasus have not been viewed by radicals as one focal point in a broader Jihadi movement. Indeed, very small splinter groups and factions from the North Caucasus may well have become involved in a Turkic militant movement – known as the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) – which maintains links to Afghanistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and parts of Europe. But the aim of this group – and its outlook are international – while the aims of those fighting in the North Caucasus remain focused on a set of localised, indigenous issues. Indeed, the IJU is responsible for radicalisation in the Islamic community in Germany, and may have played a background role – radicalising Islamists and members of the Turkic community in Germany for example in the recent ‘lone wolf’ attack on American pilots near Frankfurt. Importantly though, like the militants in the North Caucasus, the IJU needs to contextualised, if attacks attributed to them are to be properly

3. How come these attacks continue in Russia? Is it a question of a lack of security or a determined force being deployed against them?

I would say it is a bit of both. These attacks have re-emerged in Russia as a new generation of volunteers have come to the fore in the North Caucasus – and while Russia, and the Russian-backed administrations in Ingushetia, Chechnya, Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria maintain a measure of control and security, rebel factions will use attacks against a broader range of targets across Russia. Targets – given Russia’s size – which will be difficult to secure, and which therefore creates a dilemma for the Medyedev administration. These attacks continue in Russia because of internal radicalisation within the movement in the North Caucasus; because a new generation of militants appear to be coming to the fore; because the groups behind the attacks have a willingness and capability; and because it is incredibly difficult to ensure security across such as vast area.

4. One hears more about Dagestan than Chechnya these days when thinking about insurgent extremist movements in Russia: what is behind this shift?

Dagestan is certainly one of two focal point of the insurgency at present (the other being Kabardino-Balkaria). Throughout 2010, a number of audacious attacks occurred in Chechnya, but the form, targets and relentless nature of attacks have wracked Dagestan. On the one hand this results from years of violent pacification and repression in Chechnya – including, of course, two brutal wars. This has done much to destroy any vestiges of the separatist cause which flared up in the early 1990s. On the other hand, poverty and the systematic abuse by the elites in neighbouring republics – in Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Dagestan have created the conditions in which a nascent underground movement could not only gain a foothold, but which could also undergo a process of internal radicalisation.

While brutal, the security measures in Ingushetia and Dagestan were piecemeal in 2008 and 2009, compared to the counter-terrorist operations in Chechnya. Corruption, inter-ethnic and inter-clan rivalries, alongside the fact that Dagestan has always hosted a radical militant movement, has meant that it has once again become the centre of the regional insurgency. Freedom of movement has also facilitated this growth in the militant underground in Dagestan. Tellingly, groups in Dagestan and small factions in North Ossetia, Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria were relatively quick in pledging allegiance to Dokku Umarov as he sought to reo-organise the militant underground following the death of the Chechen leader Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev. Umarov integrated a host of different commanders into the hierarchy of his movement, shifting the focus of the militant underground away from separatism in Chechnya, to a more radical regional narrative of anti-Russian resistance. This included the adoption of a regional agenda, and gave Umarov a measure of influence over the groups in Dagestan. The slightly younger generation of commanders in Sharia Jamaat in Dagestan pledged allegiance to Umarov, while in Ingushetia the militant underground was led by Emir Magas (Ali Taziyev), a seasoned militant, and Emir Astemirov in Kabardino-Balkaria, a respected scholar and charismatic leader. In Chechnya, seasoned fighters – notably the jamaats led by the Gakaev Brothers – remained in control of the militant underground. Thus, while all pledged some allegiance to Umarov (known by the nom de guerre – Emir Abu Usman), his influence was at its most marked in Dagestan – the groups elsewhere operated in a loosely connected fashion largely orchestrating their own campaigns of resistance, drawing on their own jamaats. In fact, in 2010 a split of sorts also occurred when the jamaats in Chechnya sought to wrest control of the movement from Umarov, in what some experts have labelled a ‘palace coup.’ The relationship between Umarov and the small militant underground in Chechnya remains problematic.

The federal authorities captured Emir Magas and killed Emir Astemirov in 2010, making Dagestan an even more important front in the regional insurgency. In recent months there has also been a shift in tactics by groups in another republic in the North Caucasus – Kabardino-Balkaria. While the former leadership of the jamaats operating in KB advocated the creation of a clandestine support network, launching sporadic attacks, statements by the current leadership have called for a more systematic and violent campaign – which has been borne out by a real upsurge in attacks in the republic.

Dagestan continues to be a focal point of the insurgency at present – the two bombers who struck in Moscow in March 2010 came from Dagestan, and targeted suicide attacks have also continued in the republic, including twin attacks on the 14th of February. Sweep operations targeting militant strongholds continue in Dagestan, while the jamaats therein continue to pose a credible threat to the ruling elite, given that poverty and corruption is rife in the republic.

5. What kind of a role does Islam play in Caucasian groups thinking?

The question of religious influence in the movements in the Caucasus remains something of a moot point. By this I mean that different factions have variously deployed radical Islam – as a rallying cry; as an alternative to Sufi norms; as a way of countering the poverty and corruption in the region – but each group has been sensitive to local conditions. Emir Astemirov retained support because of his theological education, but also because he was a descendant of nobility in Kabardino-Balkaria; Emir Magas, sought to encourage support from the youth in Ingushetia, whether Sufi or if they had a radical agenda, in response to the harsh measures adopted by the Ingush authorities, the poverty and corruption; the jamaats in Chechnya, while radical, retain a focus on fighting in the republic; whereas in Dagestan, the radical strain of Islam has a deeper lineage. And so Islam plays a variety of roles unifying some factions of the resistance; it provides an overarching narrative which has been used to re-organise the insurgency, creating a regional social movement which had its genesis in the inter-war years in Chechnya.

6. Is there a role being played by outside actors in this violence, or is this purely an internal Russian question?

This is perhaps one of the questions which has received the most attention – along with readings (and in many cases mis-readings) of suicide attacks linked to the North Caucasus – but which are largely misunderstood by commentators. Outside actors have always played a role in the violence – although the vast majority have been linked to the broader Diaspora community. As aforementioned, Chechnya became a focal point for jihadis in the latter part of the 1990s, although many foreign jihadis were not accepted, nor became integrated into Chechen military formations. By 2000 many foreign volunteers had left Chechnya, although a staunch group of Arab fighters – numbering a few dozen – did remain in the region and did continue to operate in support of the insurgency. This included Jordanian, Saudi, Kuwati and Yemeni individuals, amongst others. The majority were linked to Ibn Khattab – and included a number of North African militants – although the ranks of the jihadi volunteer movement, including members of Khattab’s inner circle were decimated by 2000. As I have argued elsewhere, a fissure existed in the Salafi-Jiahdi movement in radical circles in the Middle East; in one sense groups in places like Saudi Arabia variously supported foreign fighters in Chechnya, placing Khattab as a traditional jiahdi volunteer fighting the ‘near enemy’ while others, such as the group linked to Bin Laden, targeted the near enemy (See Moore & Tumelty, 2008; Moore & Tumelty, 2009). Although the foreign fighter movement numbered around a few dozen by 2002 (Moore & Tumelty, 2008 & 2009), it has to be contextualised in the context of a broader Diaspora community, which included radical elements that overlapped with the Salafi-Jihadi movement and the indigenous militant movement.

Turkish volunteers also provided active manpower, in support of the then nascent military jamaats. The vast majority of volunteers did, however, come from the ethnic and sub-ethnic groups in the North Caucasus, although again, the number of volunteers remains unclear. The fact that the violence has continued, in varying degrees of intensity for nearly twenty years, indicates that the movements in the region have a social base – and are largely indigenous. Since 2007, the movement has adopted a more regional character – but can only exist through local support.

 

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It increasingly seems as though the young Kosovar who forced his way onto a bus of US servicemen yesterday at Frankfurt Airport may have had Islamist leanings. Investigators have apparently located his Facebook account and, according Der Spiegel, on it “the young man makes little attempt to conceal his Islamist beliefs.” The question now on security services minds is whether he is a Lone Wolf or a Lone Attacker.

The distinction is an important one to make. If he is a Lone Wolf, then he is likely going to be a one-off crazy who for reasons which will become the focus of much speculation in the near-future, decided to launch an attack on a bus load of US service people. If instead he proves to be a Lone Attacker, then he might be the beginning of a wave of attacks or plots which might finally be Al Qaeda or affiliated groups carrying out (or attempting to carry out) the long-awaited Mumbai-style attack that security forces have been dreading. And which he is will very much determine how security services respond.

Aftermath of the Attack at Frankfurt Airport (Courtesy of AP)

What does seem clear, however, is that the notion of the lone jihadist warrior has been normalized, in every sense of the word. Over Christmas, Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly tried to carry out an attack in Stockholm. There has been all sorts of speculation about his contacts with Al Qaeda in Iraq, but it remains unclear what role they played in his attempt. Last year we saw Roshonara Choudhry attempt to kill an MP seemingly with no outside instigation beyond what she found online, and then a week ago we saw federal agents in Texas grab Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, a Saudi student in Lubbock, Texas who was on his way to building a bomb. Again, there is at this stage no evidence he had any outside drivers.

And the list goes on. But the point is that it seems as though individual jihadists is increasingly the norm, be they ones sent and connected to organizations or ones who decide to move forwards of their own volition. This is not to say we have seen the end of larger-scale plots: soon after Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly blew himself up in Stockholm, police in the UK swooped and arrested a network of mostly British-Bangladeshi’s who it was claimed were plotting to attack a large site in London. And soon after that, Danish police disrupted another plot to attack Jyllands Posten with a team of people armed with firepower.

So the age of ambitious attacks and plots has by no means ended, but it seems as though increasingly the one-man terror team – either dispatched by a group or self-started – is becoming the norm. This presents a complicated threat for a number reasons, but how we address and then define this problem is increasingly going to be a focus of attention.

Later this month, ICSR will publish a paper by Raff offering a typology of Lone Wolves.

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In September last year, the Director General of the Security Service (MI5) made a speech in which he highlighted,

In Somalia, for example, there are a significant number of UK residents training in al-Shabaab camps to fight in the insurgency there. al-Shabaab, an Islamist militia in Somalia, is closely aligned with al-Qaeda and Somalia shows many of the characteristics that made Afghanistan so dangerous as a seedbed for terrorism in the period before the fall of the Taliban. There is no effective government, there is a strong extremist presence and there are training camps attracting would be jihadists from across the world.

This speech was the latest proof of high-level concern about the Islamist al-Shabaab (the youth) militia in Somalia, which has evolved quite rapidly from regional insurgency to aspirant regional al-Qaeda affiliate. The most recent evidence of its evolution was the revelation last week that the group both had a new logo and was launching its own television channel. As the official press release put it,

The “al-Kataib News Channel” came to teach.. to tell.. and to incite.. in honor of the martyrs who covered battlefields with their blood in various fronts; east and west, south and north. This came in defense of the victories of the Mujahideen who broke the pride of the infidel West, scattered its papers and made their senior commanders lose their minds. This in support of the Muwahideen’s patience and persistence in the land of pride.

This news comes in the wake of a continuing escalation in activity from the group. I have written in the past about the group in a number of different formats, each highlighting different aspects of the group’s morph from regional insurgent to global actor. It has gone from being one amongst many in the civil war in Somalia, to being an actor able to launch attacks first in semi-autonomous Puntland, to being able and willing to launch attacks in neighboring Uganda, to maybe even being connected to international attacks. There has been an almost constant digest of stories of al-Qaeda leaders hiding out amongst the group in East Africa, rhetorical video exchanges between al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab, and evidence of other al-Qaeda affiliates moving to set up shop in Somalia. On the ground, stories point to the group’s increasing extremism and imposition of Shariah law, now a television channel, and all the while it seems able to draw a wide community of foreigners to its ranks.

 

International Threat? Members of al-Shabaab in Training

The trajectory it seems to be headed is an attack on the international stage. As Evans put it, the group ‘shows many of the characteristics that made Afghanistan so dangerous as a seedbed for terrorism,’ and consequently it understandable that it is high on the list of threats that keeps him up at night. But at the same time, the question that should be asked is whether we are wishing ourselves towards a conclusion that in fact is not in the interests of the group?

Yes, it does seem as though the Shabaab’s trajectory is invariably taking it towards attacking the West, and at least one of its leaders has openly threatened America. As Omar Hammami, aka Abu Mansour, put it to the New York Times, “it’s quite obvious that I believe America is a target.”

But why would the group attack the West? On the one hand it would give it a greater profile and prestige, all which would invariably bring it a greater degree of support and contacts, but at the same time such an attack would bring the additional nuisance of foreign interference and attention. It already has a great deal, but compared to AQAP or AQ core in Waziristan it remains a secondary issue for western counter-terrorists. So much so that aspiring Western fighters wanting to go to jihad consider Somalia an easier place to go than the other jihadi battlefields. As far as Western security services are concerned, the greatest concern is from radicalised networks affiliated with the group that chose to move into action in their home states, rather than going to Somalia to fight. Examples of this would be in Denmark in the case of young Somali-Dane who tried to kill Kurt Westegaard, one of the cartoonists responsible for the infamous Mohammed cartoons, and the cell in Australia who were trying to get to Somalia, but failed and instead decided to try to do something at home. In addition, there is the mixed group in Demark who were apparently targeting Jyllands-Posten, and at least one of whom had tried to link up with Somali networks in the past.

But in all three cases, it is unclear to what degree al-Shabaab central command was involved. This does not mean that they are absolved of activity outside Somalia – certainly the Kampala attack seems to have had a high degree of Shabaab involvement – but it remains uncertain that the group wants to start attacks in the west. The risk it would seem is from radicalized networks who decide to do things at home of their own volition (like the Australian or Danish networks), or might be coopted by groups like Al Qaeda to carry out attacks in the west (maybe the mixed network of attackers in Denmark).

This nonetheless means the group is a threat, but it is different from the threat posed by groups whose leadership appears to have made a conscious decision to attack the west. At the moment its attacks outside Somali borders have focused on nations involved in the AMISOM force, rather than any “kaffir” state. The danger is that we wish ourselves into facing a threat from the group by focusing too much attention on it. While it seems clear that radicalized networks are a threat, it is not clear that the group itself is eager to launch attacks against the west. This is not to say that it might not happen (I am wary of making any concrete assumptions, aware of how these groups mutate and how easy it is for affiliate networks to be coopted by others), but it is unclear that we are there yet in terms of core command targeting cities in America or Europe.

The Director General of MI5 seems very aware of this, and chose his words carefully about the group. “I am concerned that it is only a matter of time before we see terrorism on our streets inspired by those who are today fighting alongside al-Shabaab,” is how he put it. But maybe this should be more delicately put saying “connected” rather than “inspired.” The point is not that the group is not dangerous or a threat, but that it is not quite at the stage of being an AQAP or AQ core threat. To think strategically it would seem as though we need to find a better way by which to assess which affiliates are direct and indirect threats and what are the signs they are moving in an increasingly dangerous direction. All of which might help identify what moves might be made to send them down a different path.

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This post needs to be prefaced with a note that it is based on court documents rather than any convictions. Unless specified, those mentioned are innocent until proven guilty. But this caveat also serves the purpose of providing a useful intro into this post that explores the complexities of pursuing individuals’ active supporting terrorism online.

The phenomenon of online jihadists is probably the most curious innovation to exist in the world of terrorism studies. The idea that individuals with no physical connection to their chosen group can be an integral part of a terrorist organization is something that seems anathema to a politico-terrorist movement. Traditionally terrorist networks were made up of individuals who knew each other and fought alongside each other. In the current conflict we can see people convicted at the same time for being in the same network with no clear evidence that they ever actually met in person (Younis Tsouli, aka Irhabi007, and pals for example).

But what actually is it that these individuals do online which is in support of terrorism? For Tsouli and his cell the evidence they faced overwhelmed them, and they pled guilty to inciting terrorism. In activities it seemed largely as though they helped Al Qaeda in Iraq upload videos onto the Internet and committed fraud to obtain the funds to manage to continue this activity. Tsouli may also have played a role in a cell in Bosnia and another group spanning from Bradford to Toronto, though how this worked operationally is unclear. A series of recent cases, however, seem to be pushing a bit beyond this in attempting to interdict individuals who were remotely linked to networks sending fighters and funds to battlefields in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Iraq.

Back in August last year, Spanish Guardia Civil forces in sunny Alicante raided the home of Faical Errai, a 26 year-old Moroccan resident in Spain who was allegedly one of the administrator’s and the creator of the Ansar al Mujahedeen website (www.ansaraljihad.net). Documents released at the time of his arrest highlighted Spanish police’s belief that Errai was one of the key players in the website and had helped raise funds, provide ideological sustenance and direct fighters to camps in (at least) Chechnya and Waziristan. He was recorded as having boasted on the site to other forum organizers that he had personally helped at least six Libyans get to Waziristan.

Then earlier this week, Canadian forces arrested on an American warrant, Faruq Khalil Muhammad ‘Isa, a 38 year-old Iraqi-Canadian who was allegedly involved in a network sending fighters and equipment to Iraq. According to the complaint released by the US Department of Justice, ‘Isa was in contact electronically with a network which sent at least four fighters from Tunisia to Iraq and which was trying to send a second team of four when it was disrupted by security forces from April 2009 onwards. Having watched these networks get closed down from Canada, it seems as though ‘Isa decided that he too wanted to join in the fighting and by early 2010 was asking to talk to the “boss” and vouching for his “not just 100% but 1,000,000%” commitment to the cause. The final paragraph in the complaint against ‘Isa highlights him telling his sister in Iraq on May 28, 2010 “go learn about weapons and go attack the police and Americans. Let it be that you die.”

Both cases are examples of individuals using the Internet to supposedly direct and conduct operations or the flow of fighters on the other side of the globe. To what degree they were the key players is unclear, but certainly in the case of Errai it seemed as though an important online player was taken out of action. Monitors noticed a substantial up-tick in online threats directed at Spain and calling for the “reconqista” in the wake of his arrest – something that was further read as evidence of his importance. For ‘Isa on the other hand, he claimed surprise at the charges at his first hearing. His role in the network is unclear from the complaint beyond having played some sort of a role in supporting ideologically, and maybe practically, a team get from Tunisia to Iraq – a team which was responsible for two separate suicide bombings, one of which killed five US service people on April 10, 2009 in Mosul. There was no immediate evidence of massive retaliation in the wake of ‘Isa’s arrest.

The cases against both men seem to focus on their capacity through the Internet to play a critical role in networks that were helping fighters get to the battlefield along with funds to support the groups hosting them. There is no suggestion that either man actually went to fight and while some of ‘Isa’s intercepts seem to hint that he may be thinking in that direction, he had not yet acted on this impulse at time of arrest.

This fact is likely to result in difficulties for prosecutors. For Errai, I believe he is still in jail in Spain waiting trial, while the U.S. and Canadian governments are settling in for a long-term extradition tangle. ‘Isa’s case could end up something like Babar Ahmad’s, the British-Pakistani sitting in prison in UK unconvicted as he fights extradition to the US on charges for the most part linked with his role in the www.azzam.com family of websites and helping send support to fighters in Afghanistan and Chechnya. The key difference being that the US wants ‘Isa in specific connection to an attack in Iraq that killed five Americans, giving them a clear set of victims to show a court of law.

Herein lies the nub of the problem: how is it possible to link in a legally satisfying way individuals who are supporting extremists and networks online without actually doing anything which contravenes the law in the way that a terrorist attack does. Using a computer can seem a very detached way of supporting a terrorist act for a jury. Laws can be adapted, as has happened in the UK, to adopt charges of “incitement” to terrorism, but this remains very hard to pursue in a court of law. So the question remains how can one actively and successfully chase and convict people online who are playing a seemingly important role in fostering networks on the other side of the globe. It remains to be seen how this game will play out.

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Whatever is discovered about Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly’s links to extremist groups, we are still left with the growing problem of lone attackers and the issues that security services have in interdicting them. While it seems as though, like an increasing amount of his earlier comrades, al-Abdaly has left something of an electronic footprint demonstrating his radicalization, from a security perspective this is an almost impossible element to latch onto given the sheer volume of similar jihobbyists around online who are simply bored teenagers showing off.

Or is this really the case? In the United States, a more proactive approach seems to have been taken with tracking and capturing such individuals. The two most recent cases are Mohamed Osman Mohamud in Oregon and Muhammad Hussain, aka Antonio Martinez, in Maryland. In both cases, it seems as though following an online alert (in Osman’s case he tried to contact extremists abroad, for Hussain he was apparently noted because of radical things on his Facebook page), FBI agents set up elaborate operations to capture the individuals as they were attempting to blow up in a public place what they thought were vehicle borne explosive devices. I have argued elsewhere about the conduct of these operations and their efficacy in stamping out the problem of radicalisation, but it is interesting that while the US arrests two of these chaps in quick succession, Taimour was able to almost carry out his operation in Europe.

But does this mean that the United States has cracked the code of capturing such attackers? I am unsure this is really the case. While on the one hand, it does seem as though they are able to capture more of these chaps, they have also had some very close calls, like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Faisal Shahzad in the past year alone. Admittedly in the former of these cases, he was not actually able to get to the US, but with Shahzad, it is clear that he was not on any radars and was in the US. Both men also left some semblance of an electronic trace that was found subsequently, though again, it would be hard to point to this as the element which should have alerted security agencies of the pending menace these men posed.

In Europe, there have been numerous cases similar to these. In the UK alone, Nicky Reilly in Exeter almost managed to blow himself and a restaurant full of people up in May 2008. Much of his radicalization appears to have taken place online, and afterwards his YouTube page was discovered to be filled with radical images and ideas. More recently, by her own admission, Roshonara Choudhry’s decision to try to kill Stephen Timms MP, was for the most part the product of ideas she got online.

If it emerges that al-Abdaly did have contact with extremist groups and training, then it would appear he joins Abdulmutallab and Shahzad, as individuals who can be termed lone attackers with links to extremist groups. This is rather than a Lone Wolf, in the sense of being an autodidact extremist who decides to do something of his own activation (like Choudhry or the earlier case of Isa Ibrahim). Both are dangerous, though in different ways.

The point is that it now seems as though there is a new need to actively pursue individuals who have expressed extreme ideas online, but at the same time to find ways of separating out who is dangerous and who is not. Certainly the American approach seems effective in catching people, but it is hard to know whether these are the correct ones to be catching, or whether there is a more dangerous body of individuals out there who are being missed. Is it really important to capture people like Osman or Hussain, while individuals like Shahzad and Nidal Hassan Malik slip past?

This is not to absolve either Osman or Hussain of their responsibility. In both cases, I do not doubt that the court cases against them will show them calculating how to kill innocent people in a callous and cold-hearted manner. But it does seem necessary to ask whether either was going to continue on to become like Nicky Reilly or whether they were instead going to continue to be online aspirants who would grow out of this fad. The distinction between these chaps and the ones who actually almost carry out attacks is very hard to draw, but is clearly at the heart of understanding what exactly it is that the new radical profile looks like.

In the New Year, ICSR will publich Raffaello's latest paper, which offers a framework for formulating a typology for lone-wolf terrorists

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This weekend I sat through the full-whack three-part version of the film “Carlos,” the story of Carlos the Jackal, the infamous Venezuelan who turned from a beret sporting revolutionary into international gun for hire. An enjoyable experience, it reminded me once again of the many parallels that seem to exist between the ideas and motivation that drive Islamist extremists and the left-wing extremists who turned to violence in the 1960s and 1970s.

To give a brief history, Carlos, whose real name was Illich Ramirez Sanchez, was born in Venezuela in 1949 to a father so dedicated to the Leninist cause that he named his children, Vladimir, Illich and Lenin (after the great man). Having decided from a young age he was set on becoming a revolutionary, Illich joined and trained with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) for whom he struck repeatedly around the globe. From there he graduated into international celebrity, achieving his greatest notoriety for leading the raid in which he and a team kidnapped the OPEC ministers while in conference at Vienna. Having reached his apex, much of the rest of his career was spent living off the laurels of this infamy, though he led a terror campaign across Europe and against French interests in the 1980s. The collapse of the Berlin wall and disappearance of the communist bloc meant he lost one of major benefactors, leaving him stranded and reliant on the mercy of friendly Arab states who were trying to ascertain their position vis-à-vis the West in the post-Communist world.

The film is useful in highlighting a couple of key lessons that leaders learned after their experiences with terrorism in the 1970s.  First of all, that negotiation and capitulation to terrorists’ demands at the end of a gun is something which is really only going to bring you more trouble. Secondly, that state actors tend to play an important role. Carlos and his group are repeatedly reliant on funding from states and the use of their diplomatic cover to move weapons and to travel around. For the supporting states, Carlos and his team provide asymmetric depth to their ideological conflict with the western powers.

More interesting when comparing the problems then to the problems now is the incredibly diverse set of people that Carlos calls upon in his operations. From German members of the Revolutionary Cells, to ETA members, to Palestinians, and other Arab nations, the front that Carlos is seen leading is an international one which is motivated (at least initially) by a deep desire to free the world from what they characterize as “imperialism.” Parallels are easy to draw between this and the idealism behind the individuals who are drawn from an international community to the cause of Islamist extremism. The recent scare to emerge from Waziristan seemed to focus around a possible plot which included British-Pakistani’s, Franco-Algerians, and an assortment of German born or raised young men. In both cases, young people from around the world are drawn by a common ideology to fight against the system.

But equally concerning is the parallel that one might draw when one considers the ideological flexibility these groups and networks can deploy once established. In the film we see Carlos shift from being a revolutionary idealist to a gun for hire – deploying his international network at the disposal of states that are willing to fund his operations. Similarly, these days it is possible to see how networks established to support causes abroad can be turned to support ones at home: Lashkar e Toiba’s European network appears to have provided some support for Richard Reid’s attempting shoe bombing and the structure from which Operation Crevice emerged. There are many such examples, the point being that once created, these networks can easily switch from merely funneling abroad to bringing trouble home.

The film itself is very well made, if a bit long, but I did choose to watch the longer version that I can see in parts could have been trimmed. The lead actor, Edgar Ramirez, is very impressive both in his acting and his capacity to leap quite fluently between languages. However, it is difficult to shake the sense that the film is an attempt to glorify the Jackal; as this reviewer put it, presenting his as “the terrorist as pin up.” Something that might exacerbate the problems this film is talking about. But if that is part of a terrorist’s appeal, then maybe it is unavoidable – films will always be glamorous and it remains unclear whether it is always their fault or their responsibility if people are inspired by media to carry out similar actions.

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That al-Qaeda as a concept cannot be defeated is not in itself a very revealing comment. As General Richards correctly pointed out, “I don’t think you can probably defeat an idea, it’s something we need to battle back against.” But in many ways it is not the al-Qaeda ideology that should concern us, but rather what the shape of future terrorism is increasingly looking like.

Historically the problem of terrorism is something that has been a constant problem in one form or another. To just track it through the last century, we start with Anarchists, through to left and right wing extremists who then towards the second half of the century started to transform into Middle Eastern extremists before evolving into jihadist nihilists. And all along the way, different groups of separatists have used violence to advance their causes.

Extremists using violence in pursuit of ideas is not new. It has been a constant for much of the past century and is likely to be with us for a while yet in one form or another. Jihadist nihilism is likely to eventually fade into the background while some other form of politically motivated violence will take to the fore. Society will always have its malcontents.

What should in fact be of greater concern is the fact that it has now become so much easier to wreak havoc with ever more commonly available devices. Nowadays a lone lunatic in a basement can persuade themselves to act using any of a number of widely available online ideologies and construct devices of increasingly alarming yield.

In some cases it is possible to see groups trying to hijack these lone lunatics into their ideological frame to guide them towards carrying out their actions under their name. The concept of individual jihad is one repeatedly advocated by new al-Qaeda bogeyman Anwar al-Awlaki and his ideas appear to have persuaded individuals in the West to act without seeming leadership. Roshonara Chaudhry apportioned some level of blame to her frenzied attack on Stephen Timms, MP to Awlaki’s ideas and similarly, Nidal Hassan Malik appears to have had some level of inspiration from the preacher before he launched on his shooting spree at a US military base. It is only a matter of time before some other loner attempts something more dramatic based on Awlaki’s teachings or their interpretations of them.

But beyond Awlaki, it is possible to imagine how ever-smaller groups of individuals will develop ever more extreme ideas and find the capacity to turn them into ever increasing levels of violence.

None of this is to shout wolf and cause mass alarm about a threat that cannot be eradicated, but it is important to recognize that terrorism as a problem is unlikely to go away permanently, and the focus should be on increasing our resilience when the problem strikes us in whatever form it should take. The potential overreaction to an attack by a loner from any faith who kills hundreds of people in a major city is going to be same no matter what his religious orientation.

The real point that General Richards should be advancing is not that we should resign ourselves to the fact that we are not going to be able to defeat al-Qaeda, but rather that terrorism is not something that can be defeated globally with some military deployment. A conclusion that will become increasingly accurate as we face an ever more disaggregated threat.

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All of Europe is at an elevated terrorism alert level. Aside from ongoing separatist threats from traditional ETA and IRA groups, Greek left-wingers and various other small-time dissident groups, the biggest threat has been a spike in threats emanating from al-Qaeda or affiliated networks. Most European governments have chosen to respond to this threat with something of a moderated tone – the British government continues to quietly counter terrorism, while the Germans have admitted the problem is serious, but nonetheless have maintained a moderated tone. The exception to this would be the French, whose Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux (whose name appropriately enough contains the word “fires”) has repeatedly taken to the airwaves to shout about the imminent threat to the French mainland.

There is no doubt that the French Minister has good reason to be concerned: Osama bin Laden picked France out for particular vitriol in his last cassette; AQIM has been actively kidnapping Frenchmen wandering around North Africa; and friendly intelligence services like the Saudis and the Algerians have been passing on alarming bits of intelligence pointing to direct threats to the country.

The French have responded to this with an active clamp down on networks in their country. In September, flares went up when Algerian intelligence told them a female suicide bomber was heading their way leading to a substantial beefing up of security at major tourist attractions. In October, they asked the Italians to pick up Riad Hannouni, a returnee from the Afghan conflict who was found in Naples with bomb making information on him. Tracking phone numbers and information on his laptop, a group of 12 were arrested in Avignon, Bordeaux and Marseille. It was not clear if they all were linked to Hannouni, but among their belongings were found a pump action shotgun, an AK-47 and ammunition.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week a new group of five was picked up in central Paris and at Roissy airport. Two men were arriving from Egypt had apparently come directly from the Afghan-Pakistan region. According to a press conference given by the Interior Minister, at least one of the men (apparently a woman was also amongst those picked up) was involved in a plot to kill the head of the Paris main mosque, Dalil Boubakeur. One of them was also prepared to die in the conduct of his action.

In a hint as to why the French are quite so alarmed by this, Mr. Hortefeux said, the plot to kill the Imam was “taken all the more seriously because the wave of attacks that hit our country in 1995 began with the killing of imam Saraoui from the mosque on the rue Myrrha.”

This statement is particularly worth noting as it shows the level of concern in France remains elevated. It also suggests that their previously overconfident attitude regarding the effectiveness of their counter-terror strategy was perhaps premature.

France was known for watching networks and threatening them quietly if they stepped over the line. They would try some “Prevent” type measures, but broadly they saw that a more robust approach was the more effective answer. I recall a friend telling me about a high level French participant to a conference on Prevent sneering at the whole experience, saying something along the lines of: “Prevent is for p****s.”

The French approach has been oddly progressive and draconian in similar measure: on the one hand Sarkozy pushes affirmative action, while on the other he bans the veil. When it comes to countering terrorism, they warn people off if they think they are veering down the wrong path, presumably to save them the trouble of having to chase them later, while on the other hand they come down hard on Adelene Hicheur, the Algerian-French scientist who a year later has yet to be charged. The evidence against Hicheur was always a bit odd – he appears to have been in contact with AQIM online and may have been passing them money, but at the same time he did not seem to have actually done any terrorist planning. A year later he is still in jail under French legislation that allows judges to hold people without charges for some time, while colleagues on the outside continue to plead his innocence.

But having said all this, the French have had a very successful counter-terror experience more broadly. It has been since 1996 with the GIA campaign that they have managed to keep Islamist terrorism away from the homeland. Maybe shouting and clamping down does work.

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The weekend news was filled with stories of the failed attempt to deliver a series of bombs from Yemen to the United States using the international postal service (including a good early summary here by Shiraz Maher). Apparently, the plot was disrupted thanks to an intelligence tip off of from Saudi Arabia, and the blame has been almost universally ascribed to the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). But the most curious thing is the fact that it has taken these groups so long to get to the point of trying to use this delivery vehicle for their explosives.

As James B pointed out to me on Friday in an alarmingly foresighted manner, back in 1997 a wave of letter bombs were apparently sent out of Egypt seemingly targeting the offices of the Al Hayat newspaper in London, New York and Washington, and Leavenworth prison in Kansas. Initial suspicions fell on Libya (ruled by our then-enemy Muhammar Ghaddaffi) and Egyptian extremists, in particular ones who it was believed were avenging the incarceration of “Blind Sheikh” Omar Rahman – Leavenworth held one of the men convicted alongside him for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. He contacted Al Hayat through his lawyers denying he knew anything about it and blaming it instead on the FBI and Mossad.

Two security guards were maimed when the bombs blew up in London, and New Scotland Yard dispatched a team to Egypt to investigate. The United States similarly launched an investigation trying to track down the return addresses. But both failed and I believe that a $5 million bounty still awaits collection for whoever solves that crime.

Then in 2001 in the chaotic wake of the 9/11 attack, letters started showing up at a variety of locations in the United States containing anthrax and badly spelt messages hinting they were from someone linked to the attacks on New York and Washington. Five people died. After a protracted investigation, the FBI believes they solved the case, but no-one was actually ever convicted of the crime.

The point is that the criminals/terrorists behind them mostly got away with it. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski got away with sending bombs in the post for 17 years. Of course, others have actually been caught for doing such things, but in the larger scope of ways of delivering bombs it seems a pretty effective and danger free way of doing it. What is really quite surprising about this wave of bombs supposedly out of Yemen is that it has taken AQAP (or in fact any of the AQ affiliates) so long to cotton on to the notion of trying to use the international parcel delivery service as a way to send explosives around the world.

Two other remaining loose ends intrigue me about this plot: first, why the synagogues in Chicago? It seems a rather precise and unambitious target, even if the intention was, as David Cameron has said, to actually bring the planes down rather that deliver the packages. And second, was this the same warning that the French Interior Minister said that his nation had received from Saudi last week? Any thoughts or pointers on either are welcome.

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While European security services continue to monitor the networks connected to the recent up-tick in threat warnings from across the spectrum of terrorist groups. Federal agents in the Washington, DC area arrested 34 year-old Pakistani-American Farooque Ahmed on charges of conspiring to carry out multiple terrorist attacks on the Washington Metrorail stations. According to court documents, Ahmed was the target of a six-month sting operation and believed that he was working with individuals connected to al-Qaeda.

According to an affidavit submitted to the courts, Ahmed first came to the FBI’s attention in January 2010 when he was “inquiring about making contact with a terrorist organization in order to participate in jihad by travelling overseas with an unnamed associate” It then took agents until April 2010 to establish some sort of cover story by which to lure Ahmed into meeting someone whom he believed was “a representative of a terrorist organization.” This was the first of a number of meetings in which Ahmed met with individuals whom he believed were members of Al Qaeda and with whom he apparently believed he was conspiring to conduct a multiple bombing on the Washington, DC subway system.

In the process of the investigation, Ahmed is reported to have declared a desire to strike a subway station frequented by U.S. military personnel, to have suggested that they use trolley bags as more effective purveyors of explosive than rucksacks, and to have expressed a desire to go and fight in Afghanistan in January 2011 after going on Hajj to Saudi Arabia. When he was finally arrested on October 25, Ahmed was accused of “attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization; collecting information to assist in planning a terrorist attack on a transit facility; and attempting to provide material support to terrorists.”

While the court documents make for pretty damning reading, it is worth remembering that they remain unproven in a court of law. It also seems as though Ahmed was the only actual plotter in a network of up to four or so people – the others were either not as involved as him or were undercover agents. Which does raise some questions about how much Ahmed was seeking to be a terrorist or how much he was spurred on and entrapped by the team of undercover agents who had deployed against him.

On the one hand, it is hard to know whether this is relevant or not – Ahmed seems to have been caught bang to rights and was apparently seeking to go and fight abroad even before the FBI became involved. But at the same time, would he necessarily have attempted to carry out a terrorist attack if he had not encountered the undercover agents masquerading as Al Qaeda operatives?

This is not the first time that the FBI has seemingly caught such hapless plotters. In other instances, the plotters proceeded much further than Ahmed apparently did – but the fact they are caught in these ways diminishes the sense of threat from them. From an observer’s perspective it seems hard to understand how individuals would be so gullible as to believe that some random person they have encountered is genuinely a terrorist plotter and that they are willing to trust them so completely. One can only assume that the federal agents are very good at their jobs.

It remains to be seen whether Ahmed is guilty or not. In court, he was reported as sporting “a full beard” and “shook his head and let out a deep sigh in apparent disbelief as the charges against him were read. ‘Yes, yes,’ Ahmed said, as the judge told him the charges were serious.” For British observers there is a connection in press reports that indicate that his wife was from Birmingham and a neighbour who recalled that Ahmed might have been brought up in London before he moved to the US at 17 years old.

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I recently returned from a trip out to China’s Western province (hence the prolonged silence), Xinjiang. Bordering Central Asia, the name literally translates as New Frontier and it accounts for a sixth of China’s landmass while less than two percent of the total population. It is covered with vast tracts of empty land, much of which produces energy helping fuel China’s exponential growth: open coal mines dot the countryside and the roads are littered with pieces of coal that have fallen off trucks, giant fields of windmills stretch as far as the eye can see, and for an hour and a half we crossed a flat piece of country covered with methodically bobbing oil derricks.

But of greatest interest to readers of this blog is that the region is also the source of many of China’s terrorism concerns. The province is home to the majority of China’s Uighur population – an officially recognised minority who share more with the Turkic people’s of Central Asia than with their Han Chinese brethren who make up the majority of what people traditionally think of as Chinese people. In the past the community has even managed to rule itself (though usually with outside support), with parts claiming themselves the Republic of East Turkestan in 1933-1934 and again in 1944-1949. Since 1949, the province has firmly been ruled by Beijing, and these days dreams of independence live on in the minds of some Uighurs and in the actions of a select few who comprise one of China’s main domestic terrorism concerns.

Ethnic tensions in the province remain and last July the capital erupted into international attention when ethnic Han and Uighurs clashed on the streets of Urumqi the capital resulting in some 200 deaths. When we visited, the most visible sign of tension was the heavy police presence, and in the main Uighur part of the city groups of People’s Armed Police paraded menacingly. Locals we spoke to in Urumqi talked of the separate lives the different communities led and spoke with suspicion of the “others”. In Kashgar, the main southern city which is currently undergoing an overhaul to become a “special economic zone,” Uighur and Han Chinese locals told us of local anger at the growing outsiders presence in the province and ominously that “Han are all the same.” All around the vast empty countryside are large signs displaying propaganda messages - one particularly memorable one near Kashgar announced something along the lines of "People from outside the province are a boon to the state."

 

Avoiding Shirk: Face Removed from Advertising

Travelling along the Karakoram highway to the Pakistani border the most interesting thing to see is the wide array of different communities that live out West. We passed Tajik, Kyrgyz, and Uighur villages, all clearly displaying very different traditions and of clearly different ethnicities: at the Tajik city of Tashkorgan just before the border it felt as though we were in Eastern Europe. At other points up north we met communities of Russian origin who had migrated to China decades before and were now Chinese. Everywhere there were small road blocks checking to see who was travelling around.

 

Uighur Mosque

During a later discussion in Shanghai, an academic working on counter-terrorism issues told me that the root of the problems was that Uighurs, unlike other Muslim minorities in China, felt apart from the Chinese mainstream. They feel alienated and retreat into a blend of ethno-religious ideology to provide perspective. While it is certainly impossible to take my brief trip as a scientifically complete investigation, anecdotal conversations certainly supported this analysis.

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I have recently indulged in watching a couple of films which in different ways handle contemporary terrorism. One is serious and one is less so, but both did inspire me to think about issues around some of the questions they raise. While my aim is not to provide a substantive critique on the films themselves, undoubtedly some opinion will slip in.

First up (in alphabetical order) is Four Lions, British satirist Chris Morris’s take on Islamist terrorism in the UK. In true Morris style it is a mordant comedy which pulls no punches in highlighting the sheer stupidity and inadequacy of the majority of young men who become involved in jihadist terrorism in the UK. The men are religiously illiterate and lead meaningless lives which are focused around whatever banal things fill the average middle Englander’s day.

 

Clueless: Three of the Four Lions

Morris claims much of the material he has used came from amongst the reams of research into court documents and interviews he has done with people who have become involved in Islamist terrorism in the UK. I have no doubt that this is true – I have spoken to a number of security professionals who have at various points in my endless questioning about various plots and plotters highlighted to me what morons these chaps actually are. And in some cases, you really have to wonder. Omar Khyam, the leader of the Crevice plot, was busted after he forgot the bomb-making recipe he had learned and emailed his friend in Pakistan a rather blatant note inquiring about the specific volumes. Eventual “super-grass” Mohammed Junaid Babar was so discrete that he thought it would be a good idea to go straight to the hotel where all the foreign journalists were staying in Lahore and announce that he had radical ideas and was willing to do interviews about it. This landed him a prime-time slot on international TV and arrest as soon as he stepped back onto U.S. soil. Rangzieb Ahmed, the first man to be jailed in the UK for being an “Al Qaeda director,” was unclear what exactly a bidet was and thought it might be a bath for small people. And the list goes on. One case which Morris highlighted in interviews is of a plotter who snorted some TATP thinking it was cocaine – I have been unable to pin down exactly who this was and would appreciate any pointers.

But for me, the fact that they are idiots is not all that relevant. Some of them may not be all that smart, but they are nonetheless playing with dangerous toys which can lead to innocent deaths. That they have no idea what they are doing, are religiously illiterate and are buffoons is somewhat tangential if they are able to actually follow through on what they are attempting to do, albeit in their half-baked way. Morris hints at this towards the end, but it is an important point to remember when considering these people as idiots. People treated Abu Hamza like a clown who had been delivered by central casting to act as a real-life Captain Hook until it became clear exactly what he was facilitating. This is not to exaggerate the menace, but neither is it a good idea to completely dismiss it – the real point is that hopefully such satire will help demystify these groups a bit.

The second film, which is probably less well-known outside a specialist audience, is called “La Prima Linea” (translation: the first line – it was the name of the group). It is an Italian film which looks at a terrorist group that existed in Italy during the Anni di Piombo (years of lead) during which left and right wing terror groups shot and blasted their way around the country. The group was second only to the more notorious Brigate Rosse (red brigades) in number of activities and members. Based on the memoirs of one of the group’s commanders, the film does for the group much the same as “The Baader Meinhof Complex” did for the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction).

Unlike Four Lions, this film takes its subject matter very seriously, and is told from the perspective of one of the leading members who relates his story from prison. It shows how the group evolved from small-time protesters, to murder and beyond. In many ways it is a story telling a piece of Italian history – but in the same way as something can be learned from examining old groups which is applicable today, the group dynamics highlighted in the film offer some lessons which seem relevant to our time

In the film we see how the group launches a massive assault on a prison to release their comrades. A rather foolhardy act in many ways, but nonetheless it does provide evidence of how strong the bonds are between the members of the group – a dynamic which is part of Marc Sageman’s “bunch of guys” theory. Much is made of the emotional bond between the individuals in the group (in true Italian style, two fall in love), and the fact that over time, the political content of what they are doing starts to lose its power and not wanting to let down your comrades takes over as a driving motivation. Early on we also see how, though they don’t think that they are necessarily going to achieve their goals, they are certain that something should be done and a vanguard needs to lead the way with action.

In an earlier post looking at the RAF, I (in a highly caveated fashion) pointed out some of the similarities between these leftist groups and current Islamist groups. This film adds some depth to this discussion in showing how the dynamics of the relationships in such groups might work – though it is unclear that current groups are necessarily structured in as hierarchical a fashion.

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Last Friday Danes were inconvenienced once again by the specter of incompetent terrorism. Following a “small explosion” in the bathroom of the low-cost Hotel Joergensen near to Copenhagen’s busiest train station, police chased a suspect to a nearby park where they cut off his belt using a set of remote controlled pliers.

At this point the story gets confusing. The man, slightly injured by the blast, is now in custody, but has yet to be officially identified. Charged with attempting to detonate a bomb and firearms possession, his age has been placed at either 20s or 40s and he has been described as being of either European or North African extraction. He has been refusing to cooperate with investigators though he apparently speaks “excellent English,” German and used a French interpreter in court.

According to investigator Svend Foldager, the man “has done everything to hide his identity” and when arrested was found to be in possession of three different ID’s (in the names Raoul Foltz, David Francois de Vicq de Cumptich and Hans Veller) from Luxembourg and two “Central European countries.” One report in the Belgian press claimed one of these was Belgian, a detail which was supposedly supported by the fact that he had purchased a bus ticket to Brussels a few days prior to his bombing. But none of this is corroborated or clear and he had no credit cards, mobile phones or other identifying objects in his possession at arrest. He has further apparently scratched off the serial number on a prosthetic leg he uses and while in custody has asked for a Bible and a Koran and declared himself a vegetarian. All part, no doubt, of an effort to further baffle investigators.

This being Copenhagen, early speculation around the incident suggested he might be attempting a bombing at the offices of Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper which famously published the Muhammad cartoons a few years ago. Tabloid Ekstra Bladet claimed that a source close to the investigation had said that the man was captured in possession of a map of Copenhagen with the Jyllands-Posten address highlighted. Police responded cryptically that “The information Ekstra Bladet has put forward is not correct. We base our work on the thesis that Jyllands-Posten may be a target, but those are two different things.”

All of which merely highlights how little Danish police seem to know about this entire case. They have now published pictures or him, his fake leg and a tool set he bought recently in the hope that someone might be able to help them figure out who he is. One report hinted he might be a “lone wolf” though as we have seen from earlier in the year, “lone wolf” Islamists with connections have been drawn to attempt to avenge the cartoons. Similarly, Colleen LaRose, aka ‘Jihad Jane,’ was planning on going to neighboring Sweden to kill a cartoonist who had offended the prophet.

Whether there are any sort of links is of course speculation at this point. But the fact he has so many fake ID’s and has managed so thoroughly to eradicate his identity seems to suggest that he is not without some capabilities. At the same time, you would have thought that if this was some politically motivated attempt, he might have spoken about it more loudly or some further evidence of his motivations might have been found. Instead he sits mum in his cell in Copenhagen leaving harried local forces with a riddle to puzzle over.

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The chaps over at the Center for Social Cohesion were kind enough to share with me a copy of their recent comprehensive text Islamist Terrorism: The British Connections. It got quite a bit of media attention at the time of publication, as it was basically the only substantial text to be published in time for the five year anniversary of the 2005 bombings on the London underground (this is not to forget the special edition of International Affairs that also came out at around the same time featuring a number of heavy hitters in the world of terrorism studies).

The report meticulously goes through all of the “Islamist related offences” committed in the UK between 1999-2009, though it looks as far back as 1993 for plots which have British links: some early fighters in Bosnia drawn from Azzam publications tapes, and Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center plot, who was no doubt radicalized by his time in Oxford and Swansea.

In an attempt to bring some statistical analysis to bear on the information, they have culled background and biographical data to create pie charts and tables. Problematically, the dataset itself is not actually that big (they have included “120 Islamism-inspired terrorist convictions and attacks in the UK”), meaning that the figures are a little less than conclusive and rapidly impacted by subsequent prosecutions.

Nevertheless, one detail that does seem clear is that South Asian’s, and specifically Pakistani’s, are the largest single group to be drawn towards terrorism in the UK. This may seem unsurprising given the fact that they are the largest single community of Muslims in the UK, but the detailed figures are actually quite interesting. Even if one includes all of the individuals classified as of uncertain South Asian origin into the Pakistani total, the figure that is reached is 36.21%. This compares to 46.69% of Muslims drawing their identity from Pakistan in the general population (according to the 2001 census figures). Meaning that Pakistani’s are, proportionally speaking, substantially under-represented in the terrorist roster in the UK as drawn up by CSC.

But frankly, the most useful thing about the report is the fact that they have collected in one place a great deal of the information about the many individuals who have been convicted for Islamist terrorism related offences in the UK. For those who follow these things (and for those only interested in the topic in passing), this will become a very useful reference tool.

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Yemeni-American preacher Anwar al Awlaki has becoming something of an international boogeyman, with traces and connections to him being found amongst an ever expanding array of terrorist plots around the world. According to the U.S., he has gone beyond being a nuisance preacher to being actively involved in terrorist plotting – his connections to underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab have earned him a place on the U.S. Predator hit-list.

But in many ways, more interesting than his apparently growing role as a preacher moving up the ladder to training individuals, is his ability to reach out through cyberspace to an ever-expanding and diverse community of people. Two recent cases highlight this in particular: Paul “Bilal” Rockwood and his wife Nadia in Alaska, and on the other side of the world in Singapore, Muhammad Fadil Abdul Hamid.

Awlaki is the common thread between the two. According to court documents, Rockwood was a long-term follower, having converted in “late 2001 or early 2002” while he was living in Virginia. He rapidly became a “strict adherent to the violent Jihad-promoting ideology of cleric Anwar al-Awlaki….This included a personal conviction that it was his (Rockwood’s) religious responsibility to exact revenge by death on anyone who desecrated Islam.” While his timings appear to correlate with when Awlaki was also in Virginia it is unclear from information in the public domain whether they actually met.

Having been radicalized, over the next eight years Rockwood, who when he was arrested was a 35 year-old weatherman in the charmingly named King Salmon, Alaska, identified a list of possible targets through “visiting websites on the internet that professed to identify individuals, including American servicemen, who were alleged by the websites to have committed crimes of violence against Muslim civilians.” He further researched how to execute them “including discussing the use of mail bombs and the possibility of killing targets by gunshot to the head.” He narrowed his list down to 15 possible targets and planned on sharing this list, through his knowing wife, with a third person whom he believed shared his beliefs. From here it got to the Feds, certainly suggesting that this third party was not all that he or she seemed.

On the other hand, it seems highly unlikely that Muhammad Fadil Abdul Hamid ever had opportunity to meet the preacher. A 20-year old national serviceman in Singapore, he self-radicalized online and attempted to make contact with Awlaki through the net claiming to want to fight alongside him in Yemen. He was also in contact with a suspected Al Qaeda recruiter who urged him to go fight in Afghanistan and he produced at least one “self-made video glorifying martyrdom and justifying suicide bombing.” According to information released after his detainment under the Internal Security Act, his main influences appear to have been Anwar al-Awlaki and Australian-Lebanese former boxer Feiz Muhammed.

At around the same time as they detained Hamid, Singaporean police also placed Muhammad Anwar Jailani, 44, and Muhammad Thahir Shaik Dawood, 27 on two-year “restriction orders.” Jailani was apparently distributing Awlaki material, while Dawood went so far as to try to join the preacher in Yemen, though he was unable to connect with him and was instead rather disillusioned by what he did find there.

While not delving into the detail of the plots (which are not quite on the scale of 9/11), the running theme is Anwar al-Awlaki and his ability to provide some sort of indirect ideological guidance to people through the internet. While he may have had some contact with Rockwood early on, it still took Rockwood about five years before he started his research, and another three years before he moved into action. For the Singaporean’s, no contact appears to have taken place, but (like many others) the men appear to have sought out Awlaki as a guide to carrying out contemporary jihad. It would seem in many ways as though Awlaki, rather than Osama or even Abu Musab al Suri, is actually proving to be the globalized voice of jihad. His cry for personalized jihad in English appears to resonate amongst the global community of disenfranchised individuals across racial, national, and generational lines (I have not seen any evidence of gender yet, but women in jihad remains a marginal feature).

What is not clear if this is anything particularly new, or whether he is simply the latest in a long line of radical clerics whose charisma is able to draw people to him and it his ability to use the internet that has given him a global reach. Whatever the case, it is clear that his online presence is also what will guarantee him longevity beyond if the Predator’s do ever catch him.

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It has become something of an article of faith to say that poverty and economic misfortune are not drivers of terrorism. This seems a sensible conclusion to reach when one considers the volume of poverty and misery in the world and the relatively small volume of terrorists that emerge from it. Were poverty truly a determinant of a predilection for terrorist radicalization then theoretically speaking there would be far more terrorists in this world than there are.

But at the same time, it seems clear that there is some sort of correlation between social deprivation and radicalization – even if only from the perspective that it often appears as a constant in communities where radicalization seems able to take root (though of course this is not always the case). This is a difficult correlation to understand as it is not one that appears to exist on a steady or universal gradient, but it is clearly plays some sort of a role in the radicalization picture.

Understanding this question, however becomes increasingly salient as we enter ever tighter economic times, as theoretically speaking we are increasing one of the possible drivers. The core point is: are we are going to see an increase in radicalization amongst communities as they feel the economic squeeze?

One possible vision of the consequent trends can be seen in the recent annual Europol report on terrorism trends in the EU (which I wrote about for the Jamestown Foundation). Amongst other things, it highlighted a growing level of concern about left-wing and anarchist radicalization: “In 2009, the total number of left-wing and anarchist terrorist attacks in the EU increased by 43% compared to 2008 and more than doubled since 2007.”

These trends are discernable at a wider level too: the emergence in the UK of far-right groups like the English Defence League appears to at least in part be the product of social disaffection stirred up by disenfranchisement. Rioting in Greece has taken an increasingly violent turn and there has also been a more general increase in anarchist violence and extremist activity. And German officials have expressed concern about the discovery of an 80-page pamphlet entitled “Prisma” which offers ideas for bomb-making, avoiding detection by police and other tips for urban guerrillas. They have also marked a 53% jump in left-wing attacks in 2009 which has included some large scale acts of vandalism and violence.

All of which would point to an increase in radicalization amongst communities that do not appear to be so directly influenced by the Al Qaeda narrative. So does this mean that the poor economic climate is directly contributing to radicalization in general: youths are becoming angry at the system and fighting against it, is the free time they are left with due to their economic disenfranchisement giving them the time to indulge in such activity? Well, possibly, but it seems as though it would be best not to leap to any conclusions about this quite yet or any draconian reactions. Anyway, what exactly would be the abrupt security reaction be: pour security funding into economic stimulus packages?

At the end of the day what we might assess as the underlying causes of some of the increase in right/left/anarchist violence may indeed be the economic crisis, but care must be paid to not exaggerate our response to this particular cause over others. As previous experience has shown, an exaggerated response leads to mistakes the impact of which is impossible to measure.

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Counter-terrorism sage Bruce Hoffman has an article in the latest issue of the National Interest which I would recommend as a sanguine assessment of the threat that the U.S. faces from domestic Islamist terrorists.

The article opens with a cold-eyed assessment based on insider conversations of the intelligence disaster that took place around Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to bring down an airliner in December 2009. Highlighting a number of missed connections that were likely in part for Admiral Denny Blair’s resignation recently, the main point appears to be that the dots were simply not put together in time to stop Abdulmutallab getting on the plane in Amsterdam. Apparently, preparations had been built around the assumption that AQAP was about to launch an attack on a U.S. target abroad, not that an attack was about to be launched on the homeland.

The broader point of the article, however, is the lack of imagination which has led the U.S. to treat a tactic as a strategy (Predator strikes) and a mistaken belief that America was somehow immune to the sort of domestic radicalization which has become the primary preoccupation of many European planners. A list of events, plots, and groups is provided showing how short-sighted this analysis has been, showing how links to various AQ affiliates can be found in a long list of plots, as well as a larger pool of low-level attempts all carried out by American citizens. A lack of imagination which is also found in the inability to recognize that AQ is a multifaceted organization with many different locations and iterations, rather than a monolith which can be focused on in an organized fashion in one location at a time, “we rivet our attention on only one trouble spot at a time, forgetting that Al Qaeda has always been a networked transnational movement.”

This is coupled with an ongoing failure to admit that the Predator strategy which is regularly trumpeted as crippling Al Qaeda’s ability to carry out attacks has done nothing to stem the flow of foreigners going to train in the camps in Pakistan (he cites a figure of about 100 who have graduated from the camps and now returned home). Something that is only a tactic appears to have become the only show in town when it comes to strategic planning in addressing the threat from Al Qaeda in Pakistan. As has been repeatedly said by numerous experts, it is unlikely that you will be able to kill your way of this problem. As Hoffman puts it: “until we dissemble the demand side….we will never be able to staunch the supply side.”

So simply hammering AQ or its affiliates in local insurgencies abroad is not going to get rid of the problem, especially as the ideology continues to appear to have deep resonance amongst a community of individuals living in the West. Management is key, and making sure that we are able to contain the problem from exploding as it did in the case of Abdulmutallab or some of the other plots that have managed to come to fruition in the U.S., is likely the best we can do in terms of stopping AQ or the ideology it inspires. This is not going to eradicate the problem in the immediate term, but neither is the current approach. But admitting to this will hopefully open doors which maybe lead in a better direction.

There was one point in the article which bothered me, which was when he refers to Abdulmutallab’s profile as defying “conventional wisdom about the stereotypical suicide terrorist being poor, uneducated and provincial.” My question would be: whose conventional wisdom is this still? Given the laundry list of well-educated and assimilated terrorists, who out there still sees simpletons from the provinces as the main incubator of radicalization in the West? I do not actually disagree with what Professor Hoffman says, but it bothers me that there might still be those out there looking for such a profile.

One final point which struck me as interesting is the assertion that Lone Wolves might be part of a strategy by AQ to “flood already-stressed intelligence systems with ‘noise’.” The suggestion, if I am reading it correctly, is that low-tech attacks by “lone wolves and other jihadi hangers-on,” are more coordinated than one might think and are in fact an effort to keep security planners busy and distracted from focusing on serious directed plots from abroad.

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My first substantive post to this blog was on the topic of terrorism in Italy and the attempt by Mohammed Game to blow himself up at a barracks in Milan. Fortunately, no-one was killed in Game’s attempt and he remains in custody along with two alleged accomplices – the three are going on trial (in two separate cases) May 12 and June 26.

While undoubtedly more information will come out during the trials, it would appear from what is already in the public domain as though Game and his contacts were a relatively free-standing “Lone Wolf” terror cell. A phenomenon which appears to be increasingly common in Italy, where details have just been revealed about the reasons behind the expulsion of a couple of Moroccan students from Perugia University towards the end of April. The two students, now apparently living freely in Rabat, were thrown out of Italy following an assessment that they were a threat to public safety.

It has now been revealed that Mohammed Hlal, 27, was overheard saying that he wanted to kill the Pope in order to guarantee himself a place in paradise, part of a regular digest of anger apparently directed at the Catholic Church. It is unclear what role his accomplice 22-year old Ahmed Errahmouni had in the plot, though a wide array of images of famous Italian locations were found in their possession, alongside numerous maps, and an instruction manual on how to build bombs. No actual weapons or explosives were located, though apparently confiscated computers had encryption programs installed.

Italian services had been alerted to the two in October of last year, following unspecified leads about concerns being expressed of radical views heard amongst some Moroccan students in Perugia. An investigation was launched, and in late April a series of arrests were made, allegedly because the group was becoming more isolated and radical and there were concerns that some action might be on the horizon. In the initial sweep another four Moroccans, a Tunisian and a Palestinian with an Israeli passport were also picked up: the group apparently used to attend the same mosque in Perugia.

Reporting to have emerged from the cell appears to point to the fact that it was a largely self-contained group who self-radicalized – much like the narrative being painted around Mohammed Game and his cell. This is a phenomenon which Italian investigators are seeing an increasing amount, including in the case further north  of Abdelkader Ghafir, 44, and Rachid Ilhami, 31, two Moroccan laborers accused by security head Bruno Megale of being in a cell like Game’s atlthough in an earlier phase (two others stand charged of immigration offences alongside them). Those men’s trial is currently ongoing. And Game’s cell has been repeatedly referred to in the context of the Perugia cell that threatened the Pope.

In all cases, the groups appear to be self-contained and have (according to reporting) no connections to Al Qaeda core or a regional affiliate. The individuals involved appear to be mostly of North African extraction (like most Muslim migrants in Italy) and male, but aside from this they tend to defy uniform classification. Their radicalization appears for the most part to be self-generated, though they appear to also operate on the fringes of known networks. In the case with the Game group who were also linked to the radical Viale Jenner mosque in Milan, a former Imam of which was incarcerated last month, while Ghafir and Ilhami were also apparently helping run a local Islamic center. According to the press, the other students involved in the Perugia sweep are being looked into for connections.

In my earlier post on Game I described the group as a Lone Wolf Pack – something I have been exploring in greater detail in a longer paper that I am currently working on. The phenomenon is not in fact isolated to Italy, both the Fort Dix group in the United States from 2007 and Jihad Hamad and Youssef el Hajdib, who in July 2006 left a set of suitcase bombs on a Cologne train, have elements similar to the Italian groups. What is interesting, however, is the apparent high instance of these sorts of groups in Italy – I have yet to see any analysis as to exactly why this is (of course, it has to be said that all of these Italian groups are being tried or are on trial (or have not been tried and simply ejected from the country) – so they are in fact still innocent until proven guilty. Only Game would appear to be conclusively guilty of something).

What is not clear is to me yet is whether these sorts of groups coming together is something which needs to be analyzed within the context of Al Qaeda plots or if it should be analyzed within the context of trying to understand the impact of the internet as an accelerant of the ideology. Or maybe it is something which is a social phenomenon which needs to be understood using the sort of social network analysis that Marc Sageman deploys. Whichever is the case, it would not surprise me if this sort of phenomenon in one way or another becomes an increasingly important element of counter-terrorism in the West that will require deeper understanding and research.

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Inspired by a post over at Kings of War which looked at the three big party’s defense proposals in their manifestos, I decided to perform a similar operation of the big three counter-terrorism proposals. As it turned out this was a pretty easy endeavor, given the almost complete absence of major shifts or proposals in any of them. To look at their respective proposals in alphabetical order:

Conservative
- ban Hizb-ut-Tahrir and “close down organizations which attempt to fund terrorism from the UK”
- create a new National Resilience Team for Homeland Security
- (I have to confess that I could not find this in their manifesto, but the BBC seem to think it is) review “the controversial control orders system”

Labour
- “we will develop our PREVENT strategy to combat extremism.”

Liberal Democrats
- scrap control orders
- reduce pre-charge detention to 14 days
- allow intercepts in court, make greater use of post-charge questioning.

All three seem to suggest that the police should take the lead in counter-terrorism, and all condemn torture (the Libdems want to launch a “full judicial inquiry into allegations of British complicity in torture and state kidnapping”). Afghanistan features in all three as linking a foreign threat to a domestic threat, while Pakistan is of greatest apparent concern to Labour – though all are concerned with unstable states as a threat to domestic security. Al Qaeda is only mentioned specifically by Labour. Aside from Labour, none of the parties discuss the allegedly all-important Preventing Violent Extremism strategy (and even Labour merely refers to it as listed above, without giving any more detail). In the debates, the topic has come up even less, with it merely being referred to within the context of Afghanistan.

Now on the one hand, it is worth remembering that for the two parties not in power, they do not have access to all of the intel that the government does and thus are potentially preparing blind. But at the same time, it is surprising that in essence all of the main parties have failed to present in their party manifesto’s anything substantial to address the threat of terrorism.

There are, in my mind, two answers to this: they either think that it is not a problem (or agree with the current strategy approach aside from the small tweaks they offer) and have thus omitted it consciously, or they have no idea what to do. Either option, however, offers the conclusion that they have no fresh ideas about what can be done to address a problem that senior police officers, politicians and security agents believe will remain with us “for a generation” and for which the budget has trebled since Labour have been in power (according to their own figures cited in the manifesto).

Of course, there is the possible conclusion that it is my personal fixation on the topic which is exaggerating the importance of its absence. Maybe in fact this is all a conscious effort to tone down the centrality or importance of counter-terrorism within the government’s duties, and thus maybe defuse some of the mythology around it. Still, if this is the really the case, then you would expect some greater acknowledgement of the choice given the fact that the government has been moving in the opposite direction, spreading counter-terrorism across an ever expanding number of agencies and departments.

To look at the specific proposals, the Liberal Democrat proposals seem most progressive, but at the same time, I wonder if they will not find themselves of a different view when they are in power and can see what I imagine is the intelligence that is bringing around the control order regime. Still, there is some substantial logic behind the premise that the government should prosecute or lift control orders and that the ongoing situation is not sustainable in the extended long term. If they are able to force the discussion about how to conclude this situation, then this is excellent news. In contrast, I remain unsure about the proposal to proscribe Hizb ut Tahrir. If it is implemented, I have a feeling it will merely increase the power and mystique of the organization with little substantial counter-terror benefit.

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I have been re-reading Stefan Aust’s excellent book The Baader Meinhof Complex and have just finished trudging through the part which looks at the Stammheim trials period when four of the main Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction, RAF) members, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Mienhof, and Jan-Carl Raspe were held in the high security Stammheim Prison while they were on trial for a series of RAF attacks.

What is interesting about the Baader-Meinhof story is that in many ways there are parallels to be drawn with the current wave of extreme Islamist terrorism in the West. A small group of individuals, mostly young, educated and from middle class families, become persuaded that the system that they were born into and live in is fatally broken and the only way to fix it is through the use of purgative violence. Of course, it is equally easy to pull holes in the comparison, but that is not the focus of my train of thought here.

The Stammheim part highlights the differences to me. For the RAF group the trial was an opportunity to grandstand for the media and an attendant audience. They disrupted the trial to the point that they were not even present to hear the conclusion. This has manifestly not been the case with the ever increasing roster of Islamist terrorist cases in the West, where instead the defendants have chosen, for the most part, to use the trials as an opportunity to plead innocence while they remain silent about any connections to other terrorists.

Olivier Roy, in his paper, “Al Qaeda in the West as a Youth Movement: The Power of a Narrative,” describes the phenomenon thus:

“most of AQ suspects keep silent or deny any involvement during their trial, a very unusual attitude for political militants, who traditionally transform their trial into a political tribune.”

This is one of the fascinating elements of the movement which has found appeal amongst a specific community of young Muslims in the West. These individuals appear committed enough to go and train in camps in dangerous corners of the world and then come back home to plot, but they do not appear willing to try to stand up for their convictions in court or to publish voluminous texts to support their activities. At the same time they are also remarkably resilient in terms of caving to pressure and giving each other or their superiors up. To paraphrase what I recall hearing a former senior copper saying, the halls of Paddington Green police station (where most terror suspects are taken in the UK), are not “ringing” with the sounds of confessions.

On the one hand, this could be explained away by the fact that they genuinely are innocent and are merely sticking to their guns. But in counter to this, in cases where there is a pretty heavy burden of evidence against them (for example, Bilal Abdulla who was literally caught sitting on his bomb outside Glasgow airport), we have still had them denying culpability and offering pretty thin political statements to defend their actions. Nowhere have there been the sort of detailed political writing and haranguing that we find during the RAF trials: the RAF prisoners used to send letters between each other arguing about their political beliefs and published books and statements about their cause. The closest I have seen to this is the odd letter that leaks out from the prison system which is claimed to be written by incarcerated extremists, but these mostly complain about their treatment inside rather than going into the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence.

But the question remains as to whether this is a sign of a lack of seriousness and thus weakness of the central motivating ideology, or whether it is a sign of strength. Weakness since they do not appear to be able to back their convictions with stirring rhetoric, or strength since they are willing to take their punishment and silently sit it out to prepare to return to the fight when they are released. Given the control order regime which can continue to hinder activity once released, there is a benefit to staying quiet and acting calm. After all, hatred is patient.

For the RAF the Stammheim trials marked the end of the first generation of fighters. Ulrike Meinhof killed herself long before the trial ended, while the other three killed themselves a few months after the verdicts were handed down (a fourth member, Irmgard Moller, also attempted suicide, but survived the attempt and claimed it was all a government plot). The group continued on until it officially disbanded in 1998 – giving it a total lifespan of 28 years. I am unsure how far we are along in the current lifespan.

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Cognizant of my own limited knowledge on the topic of Russia and terrorism, I asked Dr Cerwyn Moore of the University of Birmingham, one of the top scholars on the topic in the UK, for his thoughts. He has kindly agreed to share them with us all:

“Since 2000, there have been three waves of suicide attacks linked to the insurgency in the North Caucasus. I won’t detail the three waves here, but will note that the recent attacks in Moscow on Monday (29th March), and the most recent suicide attack directed against security personnel in Dagestan (Kizlyar, 31st March), form part of a wave of attackers which began in 2008, when a lone bomber detonated explosives near military officials in the highland Chechen town of Vedeno. Thereafter, a suicide attacker attempted to assassinate Musa Medov, an Ingush official, again in 2008. Although overshadowed by the war in South Ossetia, another suicide attack occurred in 2008, in November, when a female attacker detonated explosives in a taxi cab in the North Ossetian capital, Vladikavkaz. Few statements were released related to these attacks, but all served symbolic, tactical and strategic purposes, in support of the case of the North Caucasus insurgency led by Dokku Umarov. Throughout 2009, suicide attacks became commonplace in Chechnya, Ingushetia and latterly in Dagestan, as the third wave gained momentum. For the most part, the attacks revolve around five points:

1)    They have served a broader strategic goal, garnering international news attention, while allowing the insurgents to draw federal forces into an evermore internecine cycle of violence, thereby demonstrating the weakness of federal and local security measures. 
2)    They have served a tactical goal, targeting key officials such as the Ingush President, federal forces including key police compounds in Nazran (17th August, 2009) and in Dagestan (6th Jan 2010) and more general interior ministry and political officials.
3)    Thirdly, they have been used symbolically, on the one hand, to unnerve local political officials, and on of the other hand, to bring the war to the heart of Russia. Given widespread human rights abuses by local law enforcement agencies, although condemned by the wider population, the attacks are viewed as a legitimate retaliatory tool by the military units of the insurgency.
4)    Politically and strategically, the leader of the insurgency, Doku Umarov has successfully integrated different ethnic groups, including a younger generation of disillusioned men and women into the insurgency. In 2008, Umarov re-instated the Riyad us-Saliheyn, a franchise organisation which links different jamaats and facilitates the use of suicide terrorism. The Riyad us-Saliheyn, essentially a group of martyrs, was founded by Shamil Basayev as part of the second war, and was used to deadly effect in the second wave of suicide attacks, named ‘Operation Boomerang’. Following the Beslan school siege and a series of decrees and military reforms by the leader of the resistance between late 2005 and 2006, the unit was disbanded.
5)    Finally, the recent attacks raise the broader issue of the relationship between insurgencies and terrorist networks. How do the former host the latter? How do these relationships evolve and change over time? The insurgency in the North Caucasus is, and indeed always has been multi-ethnic, with Chechen fighters at the forefront. The transformation from a separatist movement to a North Caucasus movement has its roots in the early 1990s, but became more marked in the inter-war year. This shift has also acted as a catalyst as a result of widespread poverty, years of conflict and latterly, the influence of religious radicalism and internal radicalisation.

Together these points have given insurgents from the North Caucasus, and Umarov, a willingness and capability to mount a campaign of suicide terrorism across the North Caucasus and in the heartland of Russia, as part of a broader anti-Russian or anti-federal campaign.  
The return of suicide attacks to Russia, as well as the steady escalation in the usage of this tactic is partly due to the pressure exerted by federal forces since April 2009, and partly due to internal radicalisation in the North Caucasus insurgency. Commentators, reporters and even some academics often mistakenly focus on the sensational aspects of the attacks; the use of female attackers (depending on how attacks are assessed, there have been nearly as many male attacks over the last ten years) or so-called ‘black widows’, highlighting trauma, the influence of foreign groups or Wahhabi religion, contagion or Al Qaeda, as a motivational causes, instead of recognising the tactical, retaliatory and strategic and symbolic nature of the attacks, or the local cultural narratives of resistance and blood revenge, and dynamics in the insurgency. Moreover, commentaries often conflate attacks with suicidal intent (such as the Moscow Theatre or Beslan School siege) with suicide attacks. All of which blurs, rather than effectively highlights the decision to employ, halt and resume the use of suicide attacks as part campaign of terrorism within a broader multi-ethnic insurgency.

Although notable exceptions exist, a tendency also exists to view attacks through the lens of Russian studies, clouding analysis of the organizational dynamics in the insurgency. At the forefront of the recent wave of attacks, as I have argued, are two key jamaats – the first, the Ingush group headed by a long serving insurgent who operates under the nom de guerre Magas, hosted the young Islamic convert and radical ideologist, widely considered to be one of the advocates who re-instigated the use of suicide attacks – Said Buratsky. Said Buratsky was killed, along with around eight other people in a two day shoot-out in Ingushetia at the start of March. A few weeks earlier, a long-serving member of the Arab mujahideen, and key leader involved in the organisation of the insurgency, Seif Islam, was also killed by federal forces, who have had other notable successes in recent months targeting the jamaats which operate in Dagestan. Moreover, in the last few weeks Abu Khaled, another foreign fighter, and a key aid of the leader of the insurgency, Doku Umarov, was also killed in federal operations. These setbacks, along with the severe restrictions, widespread human rights abuses appear to have forced the insurgents to escalate their campaign – targeting the metro stations near the FSB headquarters, the Lubyanka, and the Park Kultury station, near the interior ministry in Moscow, as part of the broader wave of suicide attacks. Both the FSB and Interior Ministry were said to be behind the recent military successes which have targeted the leadership of the insurgency.    
The recent attacks in Moscow clearly result from recent federal successes in the low-intensity conflict which has beset the region since 2007. Whilst federal authorities have repeatedly claimed major successes, indicating that the insurgency was all but defeated, wide-scale poverty in the region, corruption and hard-line policies by Kremlin – repeated in recent days in statements by Vladimir Putin (which are, incidentally, eerily reminiscent of statements he made prior to the outbreak of the second Russo-Chechen War) - appointed strongmen, and apparatchiks have helped to radicalise a generation of new fighters willing to undertake ‘smertniki’ operations or suicide attacks.” 

Cerwyn has covered this topic extensively elsewhere (see his webpage for a complete list), including two recent pieces for the Jamestown Foundation on the recent wave of attacks (here, and here). He also has a forthcoming book “Post-Modern War in Kosovo and Chechnya” from Manchester University Press. He can be contacted directly at: c.moore.1@bham.ac.uk

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Up North at Manchester Crown Court, brothers Abbas and Ilyas Iqbal have been found guilty this week of charges relating to their the dissemination of material useful to terrorists and preparation of acts of terrorism. A third man, a white Muslim convert, was cleared of charges against him.

The men became dubbed the "Blackburn Resistance" after a video was uncovered on a mobile SIM card in Abbas Iqbal’s luggage as he tried to board a plane at Manchester airport. The clip showed the men running around a park in Blackburn in camouflage and seemingly imitating command training with As Sahab-type music in the background. At the beginning of the video the words the "Blackburn Resistance" featured prominently, and a voice intoned "They are fighting against oppression, they are The Blackburn Resistance."

Alongside this footage and a wide array of other photos of the men brandishing or trying weapons out, a variety of knives, BB guns, an air rifle and pistol, crossbows and live ammunition were found with the men. Two documents entitled “attack planning” and “urban combat” were also found bearing the brothers fingerprints.

But while some of the pictures of the group are quite dramatic looking, the reality is that it is very hard to imagine this group as a cell of hardened terrorists. Cognizant of this, the prosecution was very careful to not paint the men in too heavy a light, recognizing that "some aspects of the material may at first blush seem almost comical in [their] amateurishness." Nonetheless, they saw the group as "intoxicated by the evil of terrorism," and actively preparing to disseminate recruiting material abroad.

The men ultimately received relatively light sentences, Abbas Iqbal, 24, was sentenced to two years in prison for the dissemination of terrorist publications, while his younger brother Ilyas, 23, was incarcerated for 18 months for possessing a document likely to be useful to a terrorist. Given he has spent almost that amount of time already on remand, Ilyas was released, while his older brother will still serve another three to four months. Their co-defendant was cleared on all charges having spent 387 days in custody. A fourth man picked up with them at the airport is still on trial in a separate case.

But it is hard to judge exactly how much of a victory this really is for counter-terrorists. This is not a cell of global travelers with contacts to Al Qaeda core, but rather a group of young men who through the internet and home computers were able to create an imitation set of videos and pictures of themselves dressing up as terrorists. That they may have later gone on to do something is of course perfectly possible, but as the prosecutor pointed out: "at the stage when they were stopped by police, they had not got very far."

It is easy to see how this could play badly in the court of public opinion, where what even the prosecution described as "larking around in a park in Blackburn," was painted as potential terrorist training. The fact they seem not to have been receiving much coverage in the press is a good thing, and probably the product of the fact that very few editors would have taken the group very seriously.

A final point I would add about these chaps, however, is how lucky they are to have been caught doing these acts in the UK – had they been nabbed for similar things in the U.S., they would probably be looking at very long stints inside.

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The UK is often seen at both the forefront of the violent Islamist threat and also the legislation that is being crafted in the West to counter it. Consequently, it was very interesting to see the Home Office publish a paper by DSTL (which I always thought was a more tech-based lab) that provides an overview and analysis of the current research that has been undertaken in the UK looking at counter-terrorism legislation and its impact on public opinion and opinion forming.

The conclusions are pretty bleak for those actually seeking to obtain useful information from the sea of research that has been produced on the topic (as someone in HMG put it to me late last year, much of what has been pumped out under the aegis of research on countering terrorism is "dross."), but I suppose are quite positive for those who are in fact planning to produce more of this research: the report concludes highlighting "the need for further research".

This would I suppose discount reams of speculative articles essentially re-treading what are believed to be public perceptions based on reading the press or Comment is Free (one can only hope that previous pieces I have done do not fall into this category, apologies if they do).

Here are a few quick points I took away from the DSTL paper:

Perceptions are at the heart of what this paper is trying to probe and government is clearly trying to understand: the very title "What perceptions do the UK public have concerning the impact of counter-terrorism legislation implemented since 2000?" shows this, but at the same time, the report highlights how this is something that has not been analyzed or measured effectively at all. In part this is a problem since more generally the report concludes this is a topic that is hard to measure.

But with regards terrorism legislation, it is an even harder thing to measure practically when we consider the low number of actual terrorist attacks (though this is a good problem to have), and thus measuring reactions to legislation which can appear to be targeting individuals who, in practical point of fact, have failed yet to carry out their murderous plans.

A big tangible take-away is that people don't like stop and search and think that it is targeting groups unfairly, etc. In fact, according to the paper stop and search is the only demonstrable policy which can conclusively said to be unpopular in implementation (conclusions about reactions to other policies are mostly anecdotal). Hardly a surprising conclusion to reach, and one that increasingly makes me feel as though I need to see some conclusive evidence that it actually helps or does anything if we are to continue it – under certain circumstances maybe it is necessary, but blanket stop and search for terrorism issues cannot have stopped or disrupted many terrorist plots.

In a way connected to this, it seems as though the public has absolutely no faith in the government on terrorist matters, though this likely is exacerbated by my earlier point about perceptions. While apparently if something has a judicial stamp on it, it is seen in a more positive light, I have a feeling people are in fact equally skeptical about that if pushed.

I recall giving a presentation in which I highlighted that in fact police had to present a suspect before a judge every 7 days while he was being held in a pre-charge state on terrorism charges to present their case for keeping him longer, I was met with a wave of skeptical hems and haws about the fairness of this.

Two statistical details highlighted which I rather enjoyed: it turns out we really don’t like the government getting their hands on our DNA unless we have done something very naughty. An understandably high degree of paranoia I would have thought, but good to see in numbers. Secondly, and less amusing, apparently 45% of people think that denying people a trial for terrorism charges is a "price worth paying." Admittedly the date the poll was taken is relatively soon after 7/7, but it seems to me that this is a fundamental thing that we need to hold on to if we are planning on marking long-term success in this conflict.

We will only do this if we fight it on terms that we have laid out before we step on to the battlefield, not making it up as we go along. We may have to build some flexibility into this in the long-term, but nonetheless there are certain key elements we have to establish agreement on before we proceed too far.

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Over at the Inner London Crown Court the case is being heard against Cossor Ali, the wife of Abdullah Ahmed Ali, one of the leaders of the UK end of the plot disrupted in August 2006, alternatively known by its police codename "Overt" or as the "liquid plot" after the main bomb ingredient (and the reason for the subsequent restrictions on liquids on airplanes). Cossor Ali stands accused of being complicit in the plot by knowing about it prior to its occurrence and failing to alert the authorities.

The outcome of the case is unclear at this point, and at the moment one of the newer pieces of information to emerge is that Abdullah Ali was something of an absent and abusive husband – or at the very least domineering. Cossor Ali has claimed she felt her personality was being erased when she was absorbed into her husband's family and that he was away for the birth of their child.

The evidence for the prosecution appears to hinge around statements recorded in Cossor Ali's diary about extremist literature she read and the fact that she appeared to support the activities her husband was undertaking. She hoped he might become a "shahada" (a "martyr", though the defence contends this means "the highest form of spirituality"). Her fingerprints were also found on some radical material at their home.

She is not the first wife in the UK to be brought up on charges of either knowing or being complicit in their husband's activities. Mehreen Haji, wife of convicted Al Qaeda member Habib Ahmed, was cleared of arranging terrorist funding.

Tahira Tabassum, wife of attempted Tel Aviv bomber Omar Khan Sharif, was cleared of knowing what her husband was plotting. Bouchra el-Hor was tried and cleared, while her husband Yassin Nassari, was convicted on charges of possessing extremist material.

Mohammed Siddique Khan's wife was picked up in a wave of arrests that followed the long investigation into the July 7, 2005 bombings, but was later released without facing any charges. On the other side of the coin, Yeshiembert Girma, the wife of Hussain Osman one of the failed July 21 bombers, was convicted of helping orchestrate Osman's escape and of knowing about the plot prior to the event.

Fellow failed bomber Yassin Omar's 17-year old recent fiancée Fardosa Abdullahi pled guilty to charges of facilitating his escape. Beyond British shores, there is of course the story of Muriel Degauque, the Belgian convert who blew herself up in Iraq soon after her husband had attempted a similar attack.

In other instances, there are stories of couples that meet while involved in radical groups (or join them together), a phenomenon that is maybe less surprising when one considers the time commitment and passion that is required when one joins such groups.

The underlying question, however, is the role, if any, of wives in terrorist plots? In Saudi Arabia, wives (or future spouses) are an integral part of the de-radicalization process, supposedly acting as stabilizers to men who have strayed.

While in Belgium Malika el Aroud, the wife of one of Ahmed Shah Masood’s assassins who later remarried a different plotter, is alleged to be a key figure in a radicalizing network. The point is that it would appear as though wives can play both a positive and negative role – and this is not to pry into the broader role of women in radicalizing networks more generally.

A recent story in the Telegraph suggested that security services believe a team of women had been dispatched by Al Qaeda to attack the West, while the BBC highlighted the phenomenon of female recruitment into extremist groups.

What remains somewhat unexplored (to my knowledge – any pointers to interesting reports greatly appreciated) is the role that women have played in terrorist plots – are they accelerators in their husbands radicalization (or possible plotters)? Or are they innocent naïf's who either get caught up in their husband's plotting or are firmly kept out of the loop by domineering males?

Or is none of this the case, and in fact they could play a positive role in shifting the husband’s attention from his extreme ideas? All of which would be useful knowledge when attempting to craft a counter- or de-radicalization strategy.

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In response to Amm Samm's last post, "visitor" raised a number of interesting points, one of which I wanted to use the opportunity to quickly highlight.

Amm Samm: "there are no clear metrics for measuring success"
Visitor: "what do you offer?"

This is something that I have to admit that I have also been guilty of, complaining about the absence of metrics of PREVENT without necessarily offering any solutions. Consequently, I will use this opportunity to sketch out some thoughts I have been recently having on the topic (Amm has some coming up too I believe).

On the one hand, it should be quite easy to measure success: no terrorism attacks means the strategy is "preventing" terrorism. But how do we know whether what we are spending public money is actually having an impact and it is not other factors? This is important if we do not simply want to be throwing money away.

One solution that has been offered is to calculate the amount of good that groups receiving Prevent funding are able to do in their community: are they helping kids, providing useful local social functions, etc.

A police view that I have instead heard is that success in Prevent is measured by the amount the community trusts and engages with them – are communities coming forwards to offer information on people unsolicited? Are traditionally more sceptical communities using local social services, and thus "trusting" the system and becoming more engaged and less alienated?

But while both of these sound like reasonable areas to use as a basis to measure success, it remains hard to know exactly how many terrorists have been "prevented" in each case for each pound spent. Also, it seems awfully unclear to me that either of these metrics is somehow evidence that the government's strategy is in fact shielding us from the few individuals within society who choose to get involved in terrorism.

Without wanting to sound like I am throwing the baby out with the bathwater, maybe the root of the problem is that the scope we have defined for PREVENT is simply too large, and thus this is why we cannot find suitable metrics: maybe if we pared PREVENT down to simply being activity which pre-empts terrorist activity before it reaches the PURSUE stage then we might be able to measure success it in better.

As I have said before, this does not mean stopping work being done under PREVENT, simply de-tagging it from security. Instead, let us have PREVENT be more intelligence based activity or strengthened (and targeted) social work, alongside efforts to actively counter the spread of radical ideas and breaking up groups actively recruiting people to go abroad to fight. While it will remain hard to calculate success (we are still after all talking about measuring something by its absence), it will theoretically be more tangible than the slightly abstract societal measures that are currently offered by NI 35.

I look forward to hopefully having a conversation with people on this either in the comments or via email if you would prefer.

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The decision to proscribe Al Muhajiroun, Islam4UK, and a cluster of their successor groups is not entirely surprising. The combination of a successful prosecution in Luton of five members (or individuals linked to Al Muhajiroun or one of its off-shoots) after their performance at a homecoming parade for troops from Iraq in March 2009 and the fact that the Prime Minister got dragged into the public debate over whether the group was going to make some sort of ceremonial march through Wootton Bassett, all pointed to things coming to some sort of a head. The question really is whether this time it might mean something final for the group?

The short answer is: no. It would seem highly unlikely that this is the last we shall hear of Omar Bakri Mohammed’s acolytes. Last time the Home Office went forwards with a decision to proscribe some of them in July 2006 (that time it was Al Ghurabaa (the strangers) and the Saved Sect), the decision was made in the months after a group of them had been picked up and charged by police for comments they made at a protest outside the Danish Embassy in which they crossed the line and "solicited murder." In that instance four group members were given custodial sentences, while in April and May of 2007 another six group members were arrested on charges of "inciting terrorism overseas" and "terrorist fundraising." 

This clamp-down of sorts appeared to work for about a year, though the group did not go away and simply adopted a lower profile. Then the website http://www.islam4uk.com popped up and things started to take off again, culminating with ever more confrontational and loud statements, an attack on Conservative Muslim peer Baroness Warsi and the protests for which the aforementioned Luton group were just convicted. And while I have seen nothing linking Christmas Day underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to the group, the renewed attention he drew to today's Londonistan meant some reaction was likely.

If history is anything to go, this should mean that we will see some further arrests in the near future – recent comments by some prominent members appear to tread close to the lines laid out in recent terrorism legislation of incitement or glorification of terrorism. But this will undoubtedly not stop them from reappearing once again, as such groups thrive on the oxygen of publicity (Anjem Chaudhury was quite open in his admission that the main reason for their raising the idea of the march in Wootton Bassett was to attract publicity), and given the relatively light sentences that will be imposed, these individuals will be in and out of jail (some of those from the previous swathe of arrests are already back out). These boys believe they are about God's work and a short stint inside is unlikely to deter them.

The more interesting question is what is their relationship to terrorism? The fact they have been proscribed under anti terrorism legislation means that the British government says there is a link – according to the BBC the impetus for the ban was a JTAC report that was commissioned after Al Muhajiroun reappeared last year – but it is hard to imagine that serious terrorists would associate with people who go around drawing the sorts of attention to themselves that the Al Muhajiroun chaps seem to thrive on. Instead, it is more likely that individuals who are involved in terrorism operate on the fringes of such groups – keeping an eye out for possible recruits amongst the zealous youngsters who are drawn in by to these groups. By shutting them down in this way, the government is at least creating a further hurdle to making them quite so easily accessible – though it is likely that they will in the long-term simply reappear under a new guise. For a period at least, they will have to tread carefully.

Conveniently I suppose, this decision to ban the group comes just ahead of an upcoming article that I have in March's Studies in Conflict and Terrorism journal entitled "The Tottenham Ayatollah and the Hook Handed Cleric: An examination of all their jihadi children," which catalogues the links to terrorism from Al Muhajiroun and Supporters of Shariah (Bakri and Hamza's groups respectively). More on that later!


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The revelations that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab may have been in part radicalized in the United Kingdom are not entirely surprising. He was in the UK while he was a student, traditionally a young person's most fecund period of political activism. Furthermore, there is the unfortunate reality that while the more overt forms of extremism and training offered by individuals like Abu Hamza al-Masri, Abdullah el-Faisal or Abu Qatada may have died down (or gone beneath the radar), many elements of what has been termed "Londonistan" do remain active. Put simply, London remains a place where extreme elements and ideas are easy to find for anyone seeking them.

But nonetheless, we need to be wary of sparking off some sort of overreaction to this. That Abdulmutallab, like a number (according to the Times count, a further three) of previously convicted terrorists in the UK, may have been the President of the University Islamic Society and organized conferences on subjects related to Islam and the war on terror cannot in itself be read as some sort of marker of his later terrorist action. How many have been through these roles and gone on to nothing remotely related to terrorism? To watch all of these individuals would doubtless be tough for already stretched services, and to ban all such groups and conferences would merely drive them underground and raise all sorts of fearsome debates about freedom of speech.

Unlike some friends, I would also contend the argument that the University of London is somehow the connective tissue – while a number of convicted British terrorists have passed through these hallowed halls (about 10 if I recall a count over drinks the other night) – innumerable others have passed through harmlessly (including most contributors to this blog). Compared to other Universities, it may seem like a high concentration (though I have not seen an absolute count yet anywhere making this an unsubstantiated assertion), but then again, consider how many students have passed through University of London: according its own count, there are currently 120,000 enrolled. The most likely explanation for these similarities is that extremist recruiters seeking warriors for Al Qaeda’s cause are probably hidden amongst London's diverse community, and they are fishing in the pools nearest to them.

Maybe a more disturbing link should be drawn through the Yemen-UK connection. Back in late 1998, seven British Muslims (two of whom were related to Abu Hamza) were picked up and incarcerated for their part in plotting a bombing campaign and kidnapping alongside a local Islamist group. In 2000, following the death of a young Briton in a incident involving a firearm at a madrassah north of the capital Sanaa, the British Ambassador went to investigate and was shocked to discover 30 British students at the school. Since then I have heard stories of journalists coming across young Britons, amongst other foreigners, seeking jihadi camps in Yemen. Furthermore, the presence of fabled extremist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, means that these youngsters can find a teacher there who speaks a language they understand.

What really stands out, however, is the familiarity of all of these connections. The fact they are not that novel highlights the fact that the ideological battle is nowhere near won. Here we are almost a decade since 9/11 and we are still seeing suicide attackers on airplanes, having passed down a path that is not unknown. This is both a break-down in security, but also a sad indictment that the stream of young men seeking martyrdom has not diminished.

Here are a few links if you want to dig deeper:

News from Nigeria
Britain turned him away
Organized "terror conf"
AQ "groomed" him in London
His time at UCL
Unis "complicit" in his radicalization
Con Coughlin "when will we wake up"
NYT long piece on London links
NYT piece news on his contacts and family background
CNN with interviews with London friends, and that he became more radical in London
Farouk "not radicalized" at UCL
THES article by UCL head

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Another week passes and more stories of young Westerners showing up on Somalia's battlefields. Two distinct tales jump out this time – first, the recent bombing in Mogadishu was the work of a Danish-Somali suicide bomber; and second, an 18 year old Italian-Somali handed himself over to government forces claiming that he was sent over to fight by his father.

The first case appears to be what can increasingly be described to be the traditional model of recruitment for al-Shabaab. Drawn by a combination of religious zeal and nationalism, 25 year old Abdulrahman Ahmed Haji moved back to Somalia from his adopted home just outside Copenhagen about 18 months ago, taking a pregnant wife with him. Friends report that he was a gregarious young man who used to party and play football, but that recently he had started to withdraw into himself. A local leader in Copenhagen claimed that the young man had increasingly turned to religion.

The young man’s father claims that Abdulrahman has apparently been made a scapegoat as he was the only person who was not recognized amongst the dead in the hall – he claims he was invited to the graduation ceremony that was bombed by a friend who was also killed in the blast. As is typical of Shabaab, they denied responsibility for the attack which killed 24 including 3 government ministers. The bomber allegedly masqueraded as a veiled woman, and since the attack took place during a graduation ceremony at the local medical university there was further chaos afterwards at local hospitals.

The second story is stranger, and was initiated when a young man started waving a white flag on the battlefield in Mogadishu, surrendering to local government forces. Under interrogation, the 18 year old revealed his Italian roots and claimed "I have no intention of being a suicide bomber. My father sent me into this hell. He wanted me to fight jihad, holy war. But none of this interests me." Born in Mogadishu, Asad Shami Sharif Abdallah joined his father in Padova, Italy when he was four, where he went to school and obtained an Italian passport. According to his father, he was awkward in Italy and wouldn’t always go to school, wandering instead around the city.

The father's account has been called into question – according to the son, it was the father who at 16 filled his head with stories of jihad, told him about his religious duty as a holy warrior and took him as far as Dubai on the path to fight. Once in Dubai his father put him a separate plane which took him to Mogadishu where he was met by three men who took him to Chismaio for training. The father denies this, however, claiming that he did indeed send the boy back to Somalia, but because his mother had called for him. The Italian press has focused on the fact that the father would choose to send his son from il bel paese to war-torn Mogadishu, but it is also worth pointing out that it took the boy almost three years to hand himself in.

Whichever the specifics of these two cases, they do point most clearly to the continuing strength of connection between diaspora Somali's and the conflict that ravages their home country. While the west has not seen any tangible backlash yet (the specifics of the Melbourne case remain unclear), and the numbers remain relatively small, there have been numerous cases in the past that demonstrate that returning jihadis can produce problems.

I have written a bit about this topic, including this paper for the ASPI and a shorter piece on the Minneapolis group. Grazie to Lorenzo for his thoughts and tips on this topic.

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The conclusion of the trial against Adam Khatib, 22; Nabeel Hussain, 25; and Mohammed Shamim Udin, 39 marks further confirmation of the apparently very real plot that was being hatched back in the summer of 2006. The three, described by the prosecution as the "backroom team" were all linked to Abdulla Ahmed Ali, the man who appears to be at the centre of the UK end of the plotting. Ali was convicted in September of this year along with co-conspirators Tanweer Hussain and Assad Sarwar – all were given life sentences (Ali 40 years; Hussain 36 years; and Sarwar 32 years). Three other men who appeared in court with them are facing a third re-trial, sometime next year.

These three appear to be part of the network of East London natives that Abdullah Ali recruited to help in various aspects of the plot. It is not clear that any of them knew that airlines were the target, but in at least Khatib's case, he was deeply involved in the plot. By his own account a rebellious teenager, Khatib dabbled in drugs and wrote an essay at school for French class about "going to Afghanistan, finding a wife and joining Al Qaeda," signing it "Adam Osama bin Laden." After graduating, he met Abulla Ali through one of Ali's brothers and the older man appears to have taken him under his wing.

Significantly, in 2005 Khatib went with Ali on a six month trip to Pakistan – at the same time as already convicted co-conspirator and plot "quartermaster" Assad Sarwar. Sarwar admitted on the stand to learning how to make bombs in Pakistan, and in emails and information released during this trial, it would appear as though Khatib too – as when they returned from their trip in Pakistan, he started undertaking in-depth research into bomb making materials. He also shared notes on his findings with other plotters, giving advice on how to construct devices and was apparently in direct contact with their contacts in Pakistan.

The other two appear to have played a more supportive role – Nabeel Hussain met with Ali a number of times, had written a will, was in contact with him on a particular number that Ali only used for him and Sarwar, and had applied for a £25,000 loan. The jury obviously did not find anything suspicious in the fact that Uddin had allowed Ali to use his computer to do research on bomb making material, but did find him guilty of possessing information useful to terrorists. According to a police statement, "the three men made no comment during police interviews."

While two allegedly key players in this plot remain at large – one on a control order and the other living freely in London (Bruce Hoffman's recent article in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism goes into some detail about them) – this set of arrests highlights again the importance of Abdulla Ali in this cell. He may not have been the absolute emir of the plot, but it certainly appears as though it was his ability to draw his East London friends into his conspiracy that turned a plan being developed in the badlands of Pakistan into a conspiracy involving up to 8 British Muslim suicide bombers.

Yahya Birt has argued that this plot will mark the "end of an era" in Al Qaeda plotting against the UK – in that the model of using British Muslims who appear loosely connected to networks on the periphery of the radical preachers appears to have been repeatedly compromised and is probably now beyond practical use for Al Qaeda. This may be a premature, though it has been almost three years since these chaps were arrested and while a number of other individuals connected to this network have been arrested, none have been involved in what Jonathan Evans described as "late stage planning." This is unlikely, however, to mark the end of Al Qaeda's plotting against the UK.

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I've just had the pleasure of finishing reading Heartland by Anthony Cartwright. It is what I have been allowing myself by way of a break as I continue to plough through mountains of information about extremism and radicalization in the UK.

The book is a work of fiction (hence the break I referred to above), that explores in a wonderfully nuanced and sensitive way the issues around the BNP's rise in the British Midlands against a backdrop of inter-racial tensions in the immediate post-9/11 period. Set in the fictional ward of Cinderheath – which is in the real city of Dudley in the heart of the Black Country – the book follows Rob, a young man who briefly touched minor celebrity as a footballer, but who is settling into life as a school P.E. teacher/assistant. His uncle is the local Labour councilor who is fighting a seemingly losing battle against a slick BNP candidate and his army of football thugs, as the local Muslim community builds a large mosque and people worry about the precedent set by the revelation that three local lads are in Guantanamo Bay (the very real "Tipton Taliban"). In the front of everyone's minds, however, is football – with England battling their way through the 2002 World Cup (to no avail), while the country's press are fixated on a local league game which is pitting a local Muslim side against a non-Muslim side.

Written in a way that seamlessly blends dialogue and prose, with a fine ear for the local brogue, the book does get a little confusing in parts. There are no chapters (it is divided into four sections: first half; half-time; second-half; and final score), and it can be hard to know exactly what is being said sometimes. But it really feels like it captures the underlying tensions that lie at the heart of the BNP's rise. There is less exploration of the motivations that might persuade young men from these areas to throw their lot in with the Taliban, but we get a sense of what it might be like for the locals with the references to a ghostlike "Adnan the mujahedeen" peppered throughout the book. Overall, well worth the read if you have a moment.

This also gives me an opportunity to highlight the case of the Tipton Taliban – who after being freed worked with Michael Winterbottom to produce the impressively one-sided The Road to Guantanamo (which can actually be found on YouTube in its entirety), which while rightly highlighting the excesses of Guantanamo, probably should have done a little more background research before charging ahead. I say this, as on largely un-watched and un-reported Channel 4 show called "Lie Lab," one of the chaps admitted that he had in fact been to a training camp and fired weapons while in Afghanistan (another refused to take the polygraph-type device that was at the heart of the show). Not quite the babes in the wood that they are portrayed as in the film.

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Much of the media attention into the publication of Lord Carlile's review of the dramatic arrests back on April 8th of this year in Liverpool and Manchester has focused on the criticisms he levelled at the police, security services and government in their conduct of the case, known as Operation Pathway. However, there has not been much analysis of the details of the alleged terrorist plot that the report uncovered, something that has been made even more interesting by the later revelations that the thread for the unravelling of the alleged plot around Najibullah Zazi came from a British source, "after an email address that was being monitored as part of the abortive Operation Pathway was suddenly reactivated." Zazi, you may recall, was the young Afghan arrested in the U.S. in September of this year who admitted to having trained at an Al Qaeda camp and who was building some sort of hydrogen peroxide device.

The report by Lord Carlile highlights MI5's belief that the central figure in the Pathway plot was one Abid Naseer – a Pakistani national registered as being a student at John Moores University in Liverpool where he was doing a BSc in Computer Sciences. It is unclear where Naseer is now, but a report from earlier this month in the Pakistani press seems to suggest he is still in British custody. Aside from assertions that he was connected to Al Qaeda overseas, the report indicates that Naseer was the author of a suspicious email which was at the centre of police concerns about how advanced the plot was (the email was found in his possession on a USB drive). The email, which can be found in full in the report with under the nickname "the 'hi buddy' email", seems to indicate that Naseer has chosen a wife, has met the family, and has now chosen a date for their "Nikkah" (wedding). This final element was what pushed security services into action, as it seemed to indicate that an attempted attack was imminent.

Under interrogation (over 7 days, using 33 tapes), Naseer provided no explanation or comment on any of this. No-one else appears able to corroborate his story that he may have been about to marry a girl called Nadia, and there was little evidence he was preparing to get married. It is likely that the same could be said for the many other women referenced during the earlier email intercepts that were partially leaked in the Telegraph. The report highlights, "throughout the period of police etc interest in the group, no women had been seen, and there had been absolutely no signs of wedding preparations."

In addition, it has now been revealed that a second man who was lived in the same house as Naseer in Cheetham Hill Manchester, a UK national named Hamza Khan Shenwari, was apparently working at a hair products company and had registered a hair care company at Companies House. Presumably the suspicion is that they intended to use this as a way of obtaining hydrogen peroxide – a common base for explosives. Under interview (over 6 days, on 21 tapes), he apparently also stayed mute, answering only one question "about the contents of a bag." Possibly of greater significance, "he became very agitated when shown the 'hi buddy' email."

None of this is of course conclusive in any way, but it, and the intelligence information he has seen, does appear to provide Lord Carlile with enough to assert "if the above [intelligence community information] was correct, the potential threat posed to national security was grave." He certainly seems to agree that some of the men may have been up to something, but the links to some of the others appear tenuous.

Further speculation in the press has hinted that this plot may have been linked to the broader network around the ever elusive (and possibly dead) Rashid Rauf, but as with most things connected to the man, it appears hard to pin anything down. The initial information into the group is believed to have possibly come from interrogations of a young American Bryant Neal Vinas, who is currently facing charges of plotting to attack the Long Island Rail Road after having trained at an Al Qaeda camp. What remains clear is that the Security Services are convinced something nefarious was afoot (according to Greater Manchester Police, the case remains "live"), but it will likely be a while before anything definitive comes out.

Finally, somewhat off this central point of this post, I note in paragraph 114 of the report that Lord Carlile highlights that "it would be useful too if a government Minister were to have added to his/her responsibilities the coordination of the community consequences of any major counter-terrorism operation." I am surprised that this does not already take place, as I would have assumed it might be a DCLG responsibility – can anyone out there cast a light on this?

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Two stories surfaced over last weekend which I have only now gotten around to processing properly – first is the case of Jan Schneider, the latest convert linked to the infamous Sauerland group that has the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) on high alert, and second is the case of Khalid Kelly, former head of Al Muhajiroun in Ireland (or at least one of its more prominent activists) who has now surfaced in the Swat valley.

Both stories are amusing in their own way thanks to their predictability. Jan Schneider is merely the latest in a list of sons of Germany linked to the Sauerland group who have gotten Germany's security services into a high state of tension. An earlier scare with Eric Brenniger turned embarrassing when he released a video of himself running around an Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) training camp, ridiculing BKA concerns. And just before the elections, Bekkay Harrach, a young German-Moroccan, released a series of threatening videos which seemed to suggest that AQ or the IJU had a terror attack planned in the weeks after the recent elections. Nothing, however, surfaced which might mean nothing, or might mean everything (there was an earlier discussion about this on Free Rad!cals). This time concerns are focused that Schneider may do something in Afghanistan, maybe follow in the footsteps of Cuneyt Ciftici, another member of the broader Sauerland group network nicknamed the 'Bavarian Taliban' who has the dubious honour of being Germany's first known suicide bomber.

The Khalid Kelly case is instead amusing for the bluntness of his "coming out" interview in the Sunday Times. In it he states "I'm already on the path to jihad….next week, inshallah, I could be in Afghanistan fighting a British soldier," and if he is unable to locate a British one, he will "settle" for an American. Charming as they may be, such comments are not entirely new for a chap who once said "Osama bin Laden is a good man," and who wishes that he had "been on those tube trains" on July 7, 2005. One imagines not in a passenger role.

Kelly is a known quantity and has been active in Al Muhajiroun circles since he came back from Saudi Arabia a changed man in 2002. Initially migrating to Saudi as a nurse, he was incarcerated for bootlegging and while inside converted to Islam. Upon returning to the UK, he started attending Omar Bakri Mohammed's lectures and became an activist with his group. Schneider appears to be a brighter sort of chap: German authorities claim he is one of the intellectual figures on the Islamist scene with others seeking him out for advice, making him a possible leader. A German born in Kazakhstan (during the war Stalin brutally relocated Germans living in the Soviet Union to Kazakhstan as a pre-emptive measure), he uses the name "Hamza" (powerful), has a young family and apparently studied in Saudi Arabia for a while.

Tactically both cases are interesting in that they suggest two known European support networks feeding fighters to Afghanistan remain active. The converts angle is also interesting, however, as it highlights the high proportion of converts who appear in radical groups. Most major plots in the UK have counted a convert amongst their ranks – something that was explained to me as the product of the fact that often a convert can have a catalytic radicalizing effect on a group. Any individual who chooses to convert is clearly already very zealous – and if they are attracted towards an extreme path, it stands to reason that this zeal will follow them down this road. This in turn might drive those around them to greater lengths to prove their piousness.

It is unclear how useful Kelly will prove to be in Swat – by his own admission he is out of shape, 42 years old and seems a little under-prepared with only five hours training on an M-16. Schneider may seem scarier, but at the same time, the German government's regular shouting of wolf about individuals in this network appears not to have been answered with any attacks, something one suspects is probably beginning to dull public belief in them.

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, the other major theme that appears to be on everyone's minds in Britain's Muslim communities is focused around the belief that the UK's "Prevent" counter-terrorism strategy is in fact a vehicle for spying on Britain's Muslim communities. This is not an entirely new concern – one can see earlier expressions of it amongst the almost complete lack of trust in the British government that can be found, in particular when considering the counter-terrorism strategy, amongst communities in the UK.

The recent spate of worries have been set off by a report released by the Institute for Race Relations (IRR), which looked in detail at the Prevent program (Prevent being the forward looking aspect of the 4 P's of Britain's counter-terrorism strategy which seeks to prevent people from choosing a path to terrorism). In particular, press attention was grabbed by the salacious details of how the government was using programs funded under Prevent to gather intelligence on communities. The scandal around this was spurred on when Ed Husain made some comments that proved a gift for the Guardian's Vikram Dodd, giving him the eye-catching headline: "Spying morally right, says thinktank."

Reports have long been bouncing about of the intelligence community pushing community workers in a variety of ways (one report from the Independent showed how Somali youth workers were being harassed into helping the Security Service), and I have heard first hand reports of tales of community workers being asked for intelligence information. Similarly, an official report by the Audit Commission & Her Majesty's Inspectorate of the Constabulary (HMIC), entitled Preventing Violent Extremism: Learning and Development Exercise, done for the Home Office and Department for Communities and Local Government in October 2008, highlighted that "partnerships need to collect and process information from staff so that vulnerable individuals and communities can be identified."

And more generally, have we all forgotten about the infamous "Operation Rich Picture" by which the security services sought to map out Britain's Muslim communities and thereby understand them better? The point here is that I am surprised by how much of a splash this has made, though admittedly some of the more egregious cases should be highlighted and frowned upon. None of this is of course to excuse it, but I think the furor is masking a bigger picture issue.

As Prevent has expanded out to becoming Preventing Violent Extremism and from being one of four strands to being the central focus of counter-terrorism, it has started to grow beyond what one might usefully describe as its practical parameters. One of the deleterious side-effects of this is that it has slowly turned everyone into counter-terrorists, as it evolved from being program to counter terrorism to being something which was seeking to remodel a substantial portion of our society. Not only does this mean that a wide community of individuals beyond traditional security services need get involved, but also that an ever expanding pool of money was guided towards a specific community in an ever-broader fashion (a recent Newsnight report put it at £140 million).

On the one hand, a case can be made that years of underinvestment needed to be redressed, but at the same time, this focus appears to have also had the impact of exacerbating the community cohesion problems that the money was in part meant to fix. But within this also lies at the core of the problem: work which should be defined as social work is being re-defined as counter-terrorism.

The problem with Prevent is that it would appear as though we have long lost our way in understanding exactly what Preventing terrorism is about any more. In the quest to understand and fix this, the solution has been to push the program out to an ever expanding circle of individuals as we move further and further back up the radicalization chain (though I hate linear descriptions of radicalization). This has had the added problem of confusing what everyone’s roles within this are.

Police need community intelligence to be able to do their jobs; but this should be obtained through confidence building, rather than bluntly milked from community workers. It is unlikely to be helpful to the cause of countering terrorism, or policing more generally if the current trend continues. Programs seeking to redirect youngsters from a radical path should stay firmly within a local community and civilian remit – putting them in a police direction has implications which will naturally make community workers less comfortable with using them.

More generally, however, Prevent needs to be re-focused. A tighter remit needs to be drawn up which separates out the social work being done under a Prevent banner – to work that should once again be done under its proper heading. Instead, Prevent work should remain firmly focused on countering-terrorism, as in de-radicalizing prisoners, stopping young men making contact with extremists, and lessening the appeal of jihad. Making people more integrated into British society, helping them get jobs or training, giving them a more positive outlook, and making sure they are accepting of other religions are all important things, but not things that should be tagged as counter-terrorism work.
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While I recognize that I still owe a piece on Prevent in the UK, the events in Fort Hood have sparked off a different line of thought which I thought I would quickly scribble down – this is the aspect of Major Nidal Malik Hasan as a Lone Wolf.

Let me quickly emphasize two things, one I do not have some sort of morbid fascination with the concept of Lone Wolves, and two, I am not by any means prejudging what might later come out about Hasan Malik.

The reason that this aspect has struck me, is the parallel story in the America that we are coming up to execution day for John Allen Mohammed, the infamous DC sniper who in October 2002, with the assistance of brainwashed teenager Lee Boyd Malvo, brought fear and terror to Washigton's streets. For as-of-yet not completely explained reasons, Mohammed (a Muslim convert who served in the U.S. Army during the Gulf War) decided to cruise around Washington, Virginia and Maryland and take pot shots from the back of their car at people going about their daily business.

Ten people were killed and three injured at random (Malvo further claimed they had killed another four people, though nothing more is known of this), and the city was practically brought to a stand-still. Having gotten to Washington myself about six months later, I can testify that people were still shaken by the experience then.

The men's plan was apparently to extort some $10 million from the government which they were going to use to train an army of homeless children in Canada to carry out similar acts across the country, the Washington shootings were merely the first phase. This plan is nothing like what we have currently understood Malik's to be (which are at best unclear at the moment, though speculation appears to focus around the fact he apparently did not want to be deployed in Afghanistan), but the terror and impact that has been caused is on a par.

While I may be proved wrong, it would be surprising if Hasan Malik's attack turns out to be some plot orchestrated by Osama and friends in a cave in Afghanistan/Pakistan. More likely he will be listed under the category of Lone Wolf, or individual who for his own reasons chooses to launch a random terror attack. Whether this is classified as Islamist terrorism, thanks to the links to Al Awlaki, the fact he was shouting "Allahu Ackbar," or details that are yet to emerge we shall see, but what remains clear is that a single man armed with weapons has essentially taken over global headlines. Back in 2002, John Allen Mohammed (admittedly more of a Lone Wolf Pack, by which I mean a group of individuals operating without any tangible connections, and it seems clear that it was Mohammed who was driving the agenda), brought America's capital to a standstill for a few weeks.

The point here is that Lone Wolves (or Lone Wolf Packs) are surprisingly effective terror tools when they are actually able to carry out their action. Think what would have happened had young Isa Ibrahim managed his plot to attack a mall in Bristol or if Nicky Reilly's manipulation pushed him to successfully blow up a restaurant rather than just himself (a friend also told me of a case in 2005 in the US of a chap who blew himself up, however, I cannot find more information – if anyone else knows please let me know...).

The troublesome thing is, however, that these individuals are equally hard to legislate or police against – all sorts of warning signs can be seen posthumously, but it is with the 20/20 given by hindsight. It is understandably hard to figure out how you are going to legislate against the insane or those who are simply driven to insanity by the hothouse of modern life.

But none of this detracts from the fact that they can be grimly effective, and that in many ways one can see an attempt to harness their potential in the writings of someone like Abu Musab al-Suri whose ideal of "a global insurgency" is constructed around individuals independently choosing the same path, with no tangible and thus compromisable connections, but driven by a similar ideology and towards a similar goal.

In a way, this is maybe the real face of the "leaderless jihad" that Sageman has spoken about. Fortunately, it remains clear that as appealing as the Al Qaeda narrative may have appeared at times, it has not managed to make this leap yet.

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I have been traveling around the UK the last few weeks. Two things appear to be atop everyone's concerns, the "rise of the right" and the fact that the British government may be using the "Prevent" counter-radicalization and counter-terrorism program to spy on Muslim communities. I plan on dealing with each in separate posts, but first on the "rise of the right".

For those who have missed it, the United Kingdom is finding it has an increasingly belligerent and noisy right-wing which is not only managing to make unpleasant speeches and protests, but are also able to win votes in elections. The far right British National Party has won a growing number of seats in first local elections, and most stunningly in the 2009 European Parliament elections it was able to secure two seats and a total of just under 1 million votes nationally.

This seeming acceptance of an openly xenophobic party into the mainstream of British politics received its crowning moment recently when BNP leader (and holocaust denier) Nick Griffin made an appearance on the BBC's flagship politics program Question Time.

In parallel to this seeming legitimization of racists by the ballot box, the UK has also recently seen the emergence of the English Defence League (EDL), a group claiming to be "demonstrating against the spread of radical Islam" for whom the infamous Luton protests against returning British soldiers in March of this year were the "final straw".

Their response was to stage a series parades up and down England in which overwhelmingly caucasian crowds of well-lubricated shaven-headed chaps protest against extreme Islamists (a full list of their demos shows a fixation with the latest incarnation of Omar Bakri Mohammed’s extremist group Al Muhajiroun). At core a blend of skin-heads and football hooligans (something most clearly borne out during the violence in Birmingham), the group is nevertheless able to rally a few hundred protesters at a go under the banner of "taking back England" from "jihadists".

Disturbingly, there has also been an increase in armed far-right terrorists, including one group who apparently had some 300 weapons, 80 bombs and links around the world, the two right-wing extremists who were convicted for "inciting racial hatred", and separate "lone wolves" Martyn Gilleard and Neil Lewington (who was picked up with incendiary devices in his bag after he got pissed on a train and took a leak in public while on his way to a date. Lucky girl).

Responding to this growing threat, one police commander said, "I fear that they will have a spectacular", suggesting that extremists might attempt some major action in order to stir up inter-ethnic hatred.

This last group can be addressed as a clear counter-terrorism issue, but what of the others and their impact which might be said to provide the ideological backdrop for the violent extremists?

The BNP may have managed to secure the veneer of respectability, but they have not found many friends in the European Parliament (something no doubt helped by Mr. Griffin’s charming comments about sinking boat-loads of migrants) – this is significant as it dilutes their power.

Furthermore, while they may have mustered just under a million votes, this should be seen against a backdrop of falling support nationally for the main parties, who cannot shake pay scandals and a bad economy. The BNP specialize in going into economically depressed parts of the country, where they capitalize on local grievances and a sense of abandonment from Westminster with a localized narrative which dresses up anger in anti-immigrant and "national identity" language.

This is enough to rally a core group of voters who actually show up on Election Day and give the BNP its success (it is worth highlighting that it was with a less-than-impressive 9.8% and 8% of the vote that they won in each EP seat).

Similarly, while the EDL appear able to get crowds after football matches, they are almost always matched by a larger counter-protest uniting a wide array of factions. BBC's Newsnight (part 1, part 2) called them a "drinking club with a website," estimating their numbers at some 300-500 members nationally.

One concern they have voiced, about the focus of current counter-extremism funding towards Muslim communities appears to also have some parallels amongst other communities, but they do not seem to have much of a plan of action beyond running around the streets and ejecting people like Anjem Choudhary from the country. This may win them some more drinking buddies, but is hardly the basis of an election manifesto.

For Muslims in the UK, it is the terrorist group that is most bothersome – if there is this growing menace of potential right-wing terrorism, then why isn’t there the same fixation on them that one sees with terrorists who instead choose an Islamist garb?

The answer is relatively simple (the right-wingers tend to be local nutters bereft of serious external connections, and their inability to carry out effective attacks reduces their news value) – but the bigger problem does exist of how these far-right groups (violent and non-) might be impacting cohesion between communities in the UK.

More radicalization amongst Britain’s right means more protests on the streets, and likely more violence. Maybe even to the level of the famous 2001 Northern City riots, in which localized social problems provided kindling which was set alight by a growing far-right presence. None of this is to exaggerate the threat (the numbers are still quite small in contrast to continental Europe which appears to have institutionalized racist parties long ago), but it would be dangerous to simply ignore the groups all together.

What does seem clear, however, is that there is a growing well-spring of disaffection amongst Britain's communities which is finding solace in extreme rhetoric – what is positive is that we are seeing a substantial grass-roots reaction against it, and the main political parties appear willing to stand up against it.

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A couple of weeks have passed since 35-year old Libyan Mohamed Game attempted, in an alleged  revenge for Italian involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, to carry out a suicide attack on the Santa Barbara army barracks in Milan, where forces going to Afghanistan are based.

Using a fertilizer-based explosive concealed in a tool box, Game detonated his bomb in the morning of October 12, apparently as a reference to 12 November 2003 when a suicide bomber blew up an Italian military police base in Iraq killing 19 Italians. The bomb failed to completely explode, mutilating Game (his hand was amputated, he was blinded by shrapnel and remains on life support), while only injuring one guard at the base.

The attack raised speculation about possible connections with other extremists in Italy. Game had apparently been a congregant at the infamous Viale Jenner Mosque in Milan and the barracks he targeted where on the list of possible targets of a cell arrested in Milan last December. However, the President of the Milan Islamic Institute in Viale Jenner, Abdel Hamid Shaari (also of Libyan extraction), said he had only seen Game a couple of times at the Mosque and police rapidly dismissed these connections saying Game had not been on their radar before.

The next day, however the police arrested two men in connection with the attack: 52 year-old Egyptian engineer Abdel Haziz Mahmoud Kol and 33-year old Libyan electrician, Mohammed Imbaeya Israfel. The day before his arrest Israfel had been interviewed about Game, and had said that Game had been "talking about jihad generally in the last month," that "it was likely suicide" was his intention, and "he probably wanted to end his life and go to paradise" (rough translation of mine).

None of the men had appeared in any serious way on police radars before ( even though Israfel's home had been searched in July) and Italian security services continue to call the group an independent cell with no connections to a wider terror network or to Italian radical milieu's.

And this is most alarming: all three men are apparently below any radar. All three had their papers in order, two were employed (Game had lost his business a couple of years ago), and Kol and Game were both married with children. According to the security services, the three men self-radicalized and formed a cell, they set up a bomb factory (in a flat rented by Kol, went to nearby Corvetta to buy 120kgs of fertilizer and other reagents then used a recipe taken off the internet to mix the explosive. Kol apparently drove Game to the scene of the attack.

It seems to me that other details should be investigated: in the flat, 40 more kilos of fertilizer were found; there was a fridge full of food which could indicate that more than just three men were present and a mysterious "list of important people's families" was found. It also seems unclear where their money came from given all three were living in rather tough circumstances (some reports suggest that Kol and Game were squatters). Game and his wife were even interviewed in August by a local news show to show the plight of poor families in Milan.

It is perfectly likely that this group will turn out to be a cell of lone wolves who, aggrieved at their downtrodden situation in Italy and stirred up by the nation's involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, concluded that a path of violence was their only option left.

This is not the first time such incidents have occurred in Italy – on September 11th, 2003, Jordanian Mohammed Al Khatib tried to blow himself up outside a synagogue in Modena, while on March 29th, 2004, Moroccan Moustafà Chaouki attempted a similar action outside a McDonald's in Brescia. In both instances, the wannabe-suicide bombers and their cars were the only victims, though they both left letters behind explaining what they were doing, something Game has not done. The only hint of a rationale behind his action is the disputed allegation that he shouted something about Italian involvement in Afghanistan before blowing himself up.

All of which suggests that the combination of dissatisfaction and Al Qaeda's single narrative is one that appeals to a growing constituency in Italy. It is still too early to dismiss possible connections between the cell and others but the seeming surprise with which the police were caught and the relatively amateurish nature of the attempt all suggest that none may be uncovered.

Italian investigators should be alarmed as this could suggest that the problem of radicalization in Italy has moved beyond the traditional networks of North Africans providing support for fighters going to Afghanistan or Iraq (which in some cases stems from previous networks sending support to Bosnia), to a domestic problem which is refusing to go away and is a source of violent anger amongst the community of Muslims in Italy.

The call by Interior Minister (and Lega Nord member) Roberto Maroni who called for a profiling of Muslim communities based on the radicalization model of Game to identify possible threats in the future and the hawkish statements aimed at the Viale Jenner mosque by Defence Minister Ignazio la Russa suggest that the social aspect of the problem will most likely not be addressed.

What is worrying is how many more cells alike may be operating beneath the radar and how long it will be before one of them gets their explosive blend right.

 

UPDATE:

Since publishing this, a friend has pointed out to me that the Viale Jenner link may be stronger than Shaari indicated in his telling. Stories in the respected Corriere della Sera and more right-leaning Il Giornale, show photographic evidence that he was involved in a Ramadan event being held near (and organized by) the Mosque in September of this year. The Giornale report goes so far as to say he served as security at the event, suggesting a possible closer link.
 

 

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This is a short introduction to my corner of FreeRad!cals which will look at radicalization, terrorism and extremism – with a particular focus on what is happening in Europe and Asia. An ambitious remit which I share with a number of co-contributors to FreeRad!cals, but I look forward to adding my two cents to the debate on this growing site.

My work over the last few years has increasingly focused in on what is happening in radicalization in Europe, and specifically the United Kingdom. I am in the process of working on a large writing project trying to understand where Britain’s jihadist culture has come from and this is likely to be a major focus of my contributing on this site. However, recent work has also looked at "Understanding the Shabaab Networks," and I write regularly for the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor on a wide range of terrorism-related topics. Further, I am currently spending most of my time in Asia on a European Community grant – so I hope to be able to bring some more information and analysis on that to the table too.

To give you some background about where I am coming from, I have been a researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) since 2006, and before that I worked in Washington at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). I write for a wide array of other outlets, and my literary canon can be found here.

I plan on using this blog to add my thoughts on the increasing fragmentation of the Al Qaeda threat – which has evolved from its earlier franchise-based structure (as laid out by Jason Burke) into a wide array of different threats, encompassing traditional structured Al Qaeda threats, lone wolves, self-radicalizing seekers, and fellow traveler or affiliate groups like the Islamic Jihad Union or AQIM. And against this backdrop we continue to see the radicalizing impact of wars abroad amongst certain sections of Muslim diaspora communities.

I look forward to hearing your collective thoughts and reactions (positive and negative) to my contributions and hope to bring something useful in the ongoing debate of radicalization and where Al Qaeda and global jihadism is going.

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