Posts Tagged ‘radicalisation’

Murderers in the Making

Posted: August 9, 2019 in Literary Review
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More belated posting, this time another book review for Literary Review. It looks at Joan Smith’s thought-provoking Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists. Very pleased to be contributing regularly to this publication and look forward to doing more of it.

Murderers in the Making

Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists

By Joan Smith

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While the process by which a person becomes part of a terrorist group is different in every case, there are patterns and similarities in the ways people are radicalised. Identifying them is a big part of what our security services do nowadays, looking at individual behaviour to try to understand who may end up taking a path towards violence. Joan Smith’s new book, Home Grown, seeks to identify one set of indicators, focusing on misogyny and domestic violence. It is not based on data-driven research. Rather, it relies on anecdotal evidence, drawing on a somewhat random set of case studies from Western societies in recent years. But that does not stop it from being a very stimulating meditation on a topic on which gallons of ink have already been spilled. 

Understanding the ‘close link between private and public violence’, Smith suggests, can provide a ‘new way’ of identifying potential terrorists. Her main point is that if you dig into the backgrounds of those who commit terrorist acts, you will find life stories littered with abuse at home – angry men beating their wives and children – and a litany of misogynistic behaviours. She cites as an example the case of the Kouachi brothers, responsible for the January 2015 massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris. Their sister Aicha told the police after the massacre, ‘My father used to beat us, my mother neglected us.’ Both men were openly misogynistic too. While on trial a few years earlier for suspected terrorism-related offences, one of them refused to stand up in court because the judge was a woman. Smith also cites the case of Darren Osborne, who drove a truck into congregants outside the Finsbury Park mosque in 2017. Osborne was a repeated abuser of women and at the time of the attack was effectively homeless, having been thrown out of his house by his long-suffering partner. 

There is now an awareness in the security establishment of the importance of studying the inner lives of the people who become involved in terrorism. In the past few years there has been a growth in the number of psychologists and social scientists working on countering terrorism. MI5 has had a dedicated behavioural sciences unit for some time. The part played by broken homes and abusive fathers in radicalisation has certainly been noticed by the security services. What is more interesting and thought-provoking is the question of where misogyny and violence against women fit into the picture. This is the question that most animates Smith, who is a longtime campaigner for women’s rights and co-chair of the mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board. For her, the underlying problem of misogyny in societies contributes to an environment in which terrorism can germinate. She refers to Salman Abedi, the perpetrator of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, who belonged to a social group in which misogyny was commonplace. After the attack, one of his contemporaries at college told the authorities that ‘he would hang around with other lads who would smoke weed and harass girls. They’d say really inappropriate things, he just had no respect for women.’ In 2012 he assaulted a young woman at his college.

There is surely some truth to Smith’s claim of a connection between misogyny and terrorism – societies in which the victimisation and abuse of one half of the population is a daily occurrence are likely to create a range of problems for themselves. Violent Islamism and right-wing extremism, the two terrorist ideologies that most bother us today, are both fundamentally male-supremacist, and Smith reminds us that forced marriages, rape and sex slavery are widespread within ISIS. But the matter is complicated by the fact that some women are drawn towards such organisations. For them, joining an extremist group that advocates the subordination of women can, paradoxically, foster a feeling of agency over the future.

Even more complicated is the question of whether the phenomena Smith describes have long been present and under-observed or are new developments. Here Home Grown is frustrating, as the case studies Smith offers are all relatively recent – she draws particularly heavily on the explosion of violence in the West that began with ISIS’s proclamation of a caliphate in 2014. The other frustration with this book is that it is hard to know what practical conclusions to draw from it, aside from the need to pay more attention to people who come from abusive homes. The recommendations Smith offers at the end of the book are for the most part about improving the reporting of abuse of women in general. Only two out of twelve of them relate specifically to terrorism or radicalisation. And this in some ways captures the essence of Smith’s book. While it uses the topic of terrorism as a way of approaching these subjects, it is in fact more about misogyny and domestic abuse in society as a whole.

The Road to Radicalisation

Posted: July 13, 2019 in Pool Re
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Second up, a piece for Pool Reinsurance in-house publication Terrorism Frequency. Pool Re is an interesting institution which is specifically focused on the terrorism reinsurance market and was established in the wake of the 1990s IRA campaign in the United Kingdom. Their reports bring together expertise on a variety of topics, in this case their in-house experts on terrorism data, as well as the extreme right and extreme left, alongside myself and the excellent Andrew Silke.

Beyond these new pieces, spoke to the media including to the Telegraph about Ayman al Zawahiri’s latest comments about terrorism in Kashmir, to Public Radio International about radicalisation in France, the BBC about Turkestani’s in Syria, and an earlier interview with AFP about Xinjiang and Central Asia has now appeared in Portuguese.

The Road to Radicalisation – Ideological Trends and Processes

Amongst the reams of academic literature written on the topic, there is no single explanation or answer to how or why radicalisation happens. This process of radicalisation is a highly individualised one, driven by personal choices framed against a broader ideological backdrop.
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People seeking an identity or explanation for their role in the world are drawn to the relatively straightforward answer provided by an extremist ideology to join groups and conduct terrorist acts. Yet, the reason that they got themselves mentally into the space that meant they were seeking an alternative explanation for the world around them is highly personalised and driven by their own experience. Having said all of this, there are some broad trends that are observable in the process of radicalisation that seem to have evolved over time, and seem to vary across ideologies.

Islamist

For example, while violent Islamist radicalisation has long been perceived as being the domain predominantly of young men, more recently there has been an escalation in discussion around the role of women in extremist networks. Data shows us that women have long played a role in violent Islamist networks, but the impenetrability of most battlefields meant that in the past few would actually go and join groups abroad. Rather, they would stay behind and champion the cause through the dissemination of extremist material or through helping to inspire or instigate their partners to play a more active role. Women like Malika el Aroud, the twice widowed head of an online network sending people to Afghanistan, became significant radicalisers and recruiters, while only the occasional woman, like Muriel Degauque, would show up as suicide bombers.

This has now entirely transformed, with women seemingly playing this role from the frontlines, with growing numbers reportedly becoming involved not only in helping build and sustain networks, but also even in attack cells. While it is not clear the degree to which this changes our understanding of radicalisation, it has changed our understanding of how networks operate and the role of women within them.

Extreme Right-Wing

Looking at the extreme right-wing end of the scale, there has been a noticeable change in the profile of extremists who are becoming involved with the community moving increasingly towards a profile not dissimilar to those that are found on the violent Islamist end of the scale. Previously, the extreme right was largely characterised by older white men who tended to be isolated. This has changed more recently, with a growth in younger people and women becoming involved in communities that increasingly look closer to those found on the violent Islamist end of the scale. This has been most vividly captured in the UK through the emergence of the network National Action, a loud online and offline activist organisation that used to organise protests, and which has moved in the direction of planning covert terrorist activity. Unlike their predecessors on the extreme right, it has been a network bringing together younger activists all drawn by a common ideology and talking in terms not dissimilar to those that are traditionally found on the violent Islamist side of the coin. Using terms like white jihad and talking about launching stabbing attacks, the threat picture is one which apes that seen previously in cells inspired by ISIS, leading the UK Government to focus on the group as a particular terrorist threat.

In fact, this threat is not that new and is part of a growing continuum of threat from the extreme right that has been visible in Europe for some time. In continental Europe, an earlier expression of this threat can be found in the National Socialist Underground in Germany. And even in the UK, one of the precursors showing how this threat picture was connected up around Europe could be found in the outlier case of Pavlo Lapshyn, a young Ukrainian engineering student who won a scholarship to come to the UK and then launched a one-man terror campaign in 2013 against British Muslims in the West Midlands. Starting with the murder of Mohammed Saleem, Lapshyn then launched a series of bombs against Mosques in the West Midlands, with fortune largely sparing the communities he targeted before he was captured. His history in Ukraine before coming to the UK was of an angry young man with a history of making bombs and an active footprint online with extreme right forums. His appearance in the UK showed how the threat from Central and Eastern Europe was a mobile one which could threaten the UK.

There are other aspects of radicalisation which appear to be changing. While there was always some question about the degree to which mental health was an issue in radicalisation, in more recent years this has become more prominent. Cases like the attack on New Year’s Eve of revellers in Manchester was the latest expression of a threat which seemed to cross the divide between radicalisation and mental health, with the culprit examined through both lenses by authorities. The UK in particular has been very aware of this growing trend for some time – and while the research around whether this is a new phenomenon or merely a previously underexplored one is still unclear – the response has been to develop ‘vulnerability hubs’ in Birmingham, Manchester and London to respond to this side of the threat. These hubs are designed to bring together mental health practitioners, police officers and nurses to create a specially designed tool to manage this aspect of the threat picture.

A broad rationale

What is unclear is what is driving these changes. The broad rationale that can be found in most individual cases of terrorism remains a sense of personal grievance that is linked to a perceived injustice in society, which is mobilised by a terrorist ideology or network. The weighting of these varies from case to case, with some motivated more by personal issues than any ideology. But broadly speaking general anti-establishmentarianism remains a major driver of radicalisation, with extremist ideologies as the lens through which people can express themselves.

This is not something that is new to organised human society. Communities will always have a political spectrum, and on the edges of those spectra there will be individuals who feel like their messages are not being heard and need to express themselves through violence.

As we have seen in recent times, the growing radicalisation of the middle ground in politics has meant that the extreme edges (on the right in particular) have been brought further into the centre, giving adherents a sense of their ideology becoming more significant and relevant, spurring them into greater action.

Fringe ideologies

Going forwards this is going to be a growing problem, in particular as the growth in the online world has provided an environment in which more fringe ideologies can develop a sense of identity and community amongst themselves which previously they would have been unable to find. This creates a context in which radicalisation can become more diffuse, and micro-ideologies can assume greater power. Given the rise of the lone actor terrorist as a phenomenon across ideologies, and the lowered threshold of access to ever more dangerous technology, there is a menacing potential fusion on the horizon which thus far has expressed itself in one-off attacks. What we have still not understood entirely is how this changes our understanding of radicalisation and how it works.

Conclusion

The problem of radicalisation appears a perennial one, but how it expresses itself through different ideologies appears to broadly follow trends that go in similar directions; but as we move into a world where traditional groups hold an ever-more diffuse appeal and micro-ideologies start to emerge, how the threat picture expresses itself and who we need to pay attention to will become ever more confusing.

Explaining the Radicalization of Central Asian Migrants

Posted: February 10, 2018 in Diplomat
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Have some catch up posting to do, starting with a piece for the Diplomat magazine that draws on a bigger project we have been doing at my institutional home, RUSI, looking at radicalisation amongst Central Asian labour migrants in Russia. The project has been quite a complicated one, and many excellent colleagues have played a role, with Mo in particular playing an important driving role on the methodology and co-authoring this piece. This piece draws out that methodology in some greater detail and the longer report should be out soon. Given it is behind a paywall, I cannot just post it all here, but get in touch if you are interested, and I can see what I can do help.

Explaining the Radicalization of Central Asian Migrants

What factors contribute to the radicalization of a minority of Central Asian labor migrants in Russia?

By Mohammed Elshimi and Raffaello Pantucci
January 29, 2018
Explaining the Radicalization of Central Asian Migrants
Image Credit: Associated Press, Ivan Sekretarev

Radicalization in Central Asia has been a long-standing concern. Yet, historically, violence from the region has been relatively rare. While the immediate post-Soviet period was marked by internal conflict, including the civil war in Tajikistan, these conflicts largely remained local.

This appears to be changing. The past couple of years have been marked by a noticeable increase in instances of international terrorism linked to Central Asians. A further number have shown up as foreign terrorist fighters. The New York City truck attack, the attack on a nightclub in Istanbul, a vehicle attack in Stockholm, and the bombing of the St. Petersburg metro system were all linked to Central Asians. While the exact reasons for this pattern are still being uncovered by investigators, one feature that appears common among Central Asians who end up in Syria and Iraq, at least, is a history of working as labor migrants in Russia. This provokes the following question: why do a minority of labor migrants from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan leave Russia (a second country) to take part in somebody else’s violent conflict (a third country)?

In order to try to address this lacuna in understanding, the authors worked with a group of researchers from Central Asia and Russia to try to understand this phenomenon through a data-rich approach driven by interviews of Central Asians working in Russia.

Read the full story here, in The Diplomat

Twelve years on from the 7/7 atrocities, the terror threat has evolved. Have our defences?

Posted: July 18, 2017 in Telegraph
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Late to post this, as it was published over a week ago in the Telegraph on the anniversary of the July 7 bombings.

Twelve years on from the 7/7 atrocities, the terror threat has evolved. Have our defences?

We are always fighting the last war. As we reach the twelve year anniversary of the July 7, 2005 attacks it is worth taking stock of how much the threat picture from terrorism we face has changed, and ask whether our response has kept pace. From a terrorist threat that was directed by al-Qaeda using radicalised British nationals trained at camps in Pakistan, we are facing a threat of lone individuals launching confusing attacks with household weapons. It is not yet clear that our response has caught up.

Prior to 7/7 it was hard to conceptualize the fact that British nationals would commit suicide bombings at home. But once it happened, it became the norm, with security services spending much of the next decade countering similar plots. In doing so, they began to understand how the networks worked, what the processes and communications methods were, and how al-Qaeda saw British nationals as useful tools to strike against the West. Having understood the threat, they were able to develop measures to counter it, and find ways of getting into networks. What was once a source of strength, was steadily uncovered as a source of weakness, and security services adapted their practice to disrupt such networked plots.

But having closed one door, another opened. Still determined to launch attacks, terrorist groups have adapted and individuals now are instigated, inspired or directed remotely. The plots they are advancing are low tech and require little training. This shrinks the plotters footprint, making it much harder for security agencies to catch them in their nets. A link abroad still exists – and in some cases, like Salman Abedi in Manchester, a strong link – but the majority of cases appear to be more isolated with trace links abroad or to a broader radical milieu.

To counter this evolving menace a new posture needs to be taken. In the first instance, it is clear that more capacity is needed. This is something that has been clear for some time, and security agencies are growing – but this takes time to mature into useful capacity.

Second, we need to find a way of re-focusing and sharpening the way that residual or peripheral cases are managed. As we have seen in all three of the recent violent Islamist attacks in the UK, the individuals involved were people who had featured in previous investigations, but were never the main targets. Over time, the pool of individuals who fit into this category will only grow. While undoubtedly the Security Service will have to keep some attention on them, a new agency or cross-departmental team could be formed to instead focus on each case in a more intense fashion and to make sure they are getting off a path towards radicalisation. A methodical and refreshed look at them by a non-secret agency in light of the current threat picture might be useful and clear time for security agencies to focus on other priority cases.

Third, we need to get ahead of ideologies and methodologies. There are two parts to this: first, greater attention needs to be paid to the extreme right wing. It has a capacity to shock, cause misery and greater tensions that in turn exacerbate the violent Islamist threat. At the moment our focus is on violent Islamists, and yet we can see on the right wing a consistent pattern of threat and hints towards coordination and competence. Second, we need to explore new ways of mining and managing the data that is collected. The security agencies are clearly tracking new technologies that can support counter-terrorism analysis, but using AI may help throw up leads which are currently being missed among the mass of information. While this will never be completely accurate, given the disparate nature of the threat that is faced, and the manner in which it has recently kept popping out of the woodwork, it is worth considering whether something like this might help pick up some hidden leads.

Fourth, we need to have a more mature public conversation about the nature and reality of the threat that is faced and how safe we are from it. Statistically, there are innumerably more things that are threats to your health than terrorism. We are also not facing an existential threat. And we are unlikely to eradicate it in the near term future. All of these realities need to be discussed in a way that steers clear of the polemical side of the conversation that tends to crowd the public forum. Most organized human societies have faced terrorism in their histories – and in most cases they have survived. The few that have been changed have usually done so because of the overwhelming nature of the failures of governance by the power that was overthrown.

Finally, we need to make sure we do not make obvious missteps and exacerbate the very threat we are trying to counter. This means not cutting off (or threatening to) intelligence sharing with crucial allies in Europe. Not talking in the same clash of civilization terms that the extremists do. Not politicising counter-terrorism work in a way that means its effectiveness becomes stunted. And not standing idle while terrorist groups gather abroad. As we have repeatedly seen, they will come back and strike us in due course. None of these measures will likely eradicate terrorism in the medium term future, but they will set us on a course that will go in that direction and keep us even safer than we already are from terrorist attacks.

Raffaello Pantucci is the Director of International Security Studies at RUSI

The chilling effect of a brutally simple style of terror

Posted: June 5, 2017 in Financial Times
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Another short piece from this weekend in the wake of the atrocity in London Bridge this time for the Financial Times. Will catch up on other posting as soon as possible, though things at the moment are quite busy.

The Chilling Effect of a Brutally Simple Style

London attack comes as Isis is losing territory, making life harder for security forces
Raffaello Pantucci

Back in May 2013 two radicalised young Britons ran a car into an off-duty soldier outside his London barracks, leapt out and butchered Lee Rigby as he lay in the street. Brutal in its simplicity and effectiveness, this has become a style terrorist groups champion as they seek to bring horror to our streets. It was used in Saturday’s London attack, in which at least seven were murdered — and has made security agencies’ lives markedly harder.

As low-tech attacks have proliferated, the terror threat facing the UK has escalated. Since Khalid Masood staged his car and knife offensive on Westminster in late March, there have been two successful attacks and five failed ones.

The Manchester suicide bomb last month and the London attack appear to have been produced by conspiracy rather than lone individuals. This is a worrying development given that until recently the analysis of the threat picture suggested the latter were the greatest concern. The use of a sophisticated device in Manchester suggests Salman Abedi had contact with others before killing himself and 22 others at an Ariana Grande concert. The London atrocity involved at least three people — the suspected attackers killed by police.

Looking abroad, terrorist groups have been pushing people to launch attacks whenever and however they can — particularly in this holy month of Ramadan. Isis pumps out a stream of messages, exhorting the use of knives, cars or other tools to kill “crusaders”. In a recent post, the group told people to wear fake suicide vests to confuse authorities — just as the London attackers are reported to have done.

Two weeks ago Hamza bin Laden — the son of Osama bin Laden, who is trying to reinvent himself as the leader of al-Qaeda — issued his own advice for “martyrdom seekers” in the west. They need not use “a military tool. If you are able to pick a firearm, well and good; if not, the options are many”.

All this comes as Isis is losing territory and it is becoming harder for prospective jihadis to travel to such battlefields. This denies terrorist groups space to plan but also creates two new categories of concern: returnees who have fought on these battlefields and blocked travellers who retain the radical impulse. These categories are added to the long list of individuals already of concern to security agencies. In the UK there are 500 under investigation, according to Ben Wallace, security minister, and 3,000 of active interest. There are a further 20,000 in a wider ring including people on the fringes of investigations going back years. In other words, security agencies are managing a roster of dangerous extremists from which it is almost impossible ever to remove names. Individuals such as Masood, investigated a decade ago on the edge of plots, may return to strike years later so agencies must stay alert to them.

A successful attack is by definition a failure by security agencies. In the case of London and Manchester, it is not yet clear whether we are looking at a lack of analysis, intelligence or capacity — or whether the threat has suddenly grown more acute and overwhelming. Whatever the answer, the question will become central to political debate, particularly given the proximity of the attacks to the general election.

Prime Minister Theresa May has pointed to the need to deal with ideology and “safe space” — online and offline. There will also be ever-louder questions about whether the security agencies have the resources to manage an engorged threat — as well as how they manage sometimes fraught relations with allies in Washington and Europe.

But it is clear that the current strategy — seeking to deal with the threats through a four-pillar approach of “prevent, pursue, protect and prepare” — is merely managing a problem that appears to be getting worse.

The writer is director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute and author of ‘We Love Death As You Love Life’

Cars and knives are easier to use, but bombs will always be central to terrorist thinking

Posted: May 23, 2017 in Telegraph
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A short response piece to the horrible incident that happened in Manchester for the Telegraph. The threat level has now been raised to Critical which means this incident is going to take a while to resolve. In the wake of the incident, spoke to CNBC, Guardian, and National Press Agency about bombs, and separately to Guardian, Washington Post, and The Australian about the bigger threat picture. Also did interview that was recorded on ABC’s Lateline.

Cars and knives are easier to use, but bombs will always be central to terrorist thinking

23 MAY 2017 • 5:32PM

Survivors of the attack sit on the pavement
The successful use of a bomb is unusual among recent terror attacks CREDIT: JOEL GOODMAN/LNP

 

Terrorism has a predictable brutality to it. And yet, the idea of a bombing is something that still surprises us when it happens. The attack in Manchester in some ways appears a flashback to a different time when the terrorists we worried about detonated bombs, rather than using vehicles as rams or stabbing people. The reality is that terrorism’s only constant is its desire to shock and kill. For any group or ideology, the fundamental point is to make yourself heard as dramatically as possible. Groups and individuals will use whatever tools they have to gain that attention.

Making bombs that you know will reliably work is not as easy as it might sound. History is littered with attempted bomb-makers whose devices detonated too early or failed to go off. Unless you have had some training or practice, it is difficult to know for certain that you are making something that will go off exactly when you want it to.

There have been examples of lone bomb makers in the past, but they are rare. Anders Breivik, who killed 77 in Oslo in 2010, and David Copeland and Pavlo Lapshyn, who respectively launched one-man extreme right wing bombing campaigns in London and Birmingham, are examples. But in all cases, lone bomb makers choose to leave their devices behind rather than die in the detonation. This separates them from the Manchester bomber, though the degree to which we can conclude this means he acted alone is unclear.

Isil’s claim of responsibility would seem to strengthen the idea that the bomber was linked to someone. But care has to be paid to understand exactly what their claim means. On the one hand, it could be the group is merely claiming something to which it has a very loose link. The use of a bomb can also add confusion to the picture, especially when we consider that the majority of the incidents we have seen in Europe linked to the group of late have been stabbings or using vehicles to run down crowds. Yet this narrative assumes that the group is not keen to launch explosives attacks. This is incorrect – from the group’s perspective, anything that fulfills their goals of gaining attention and sowing terror is desirable.

The shift towards knives and cars was something that the group had encouraged in part as it realised that making bombs is difficult and prone to failure. Telling your aspirant warriors to keep it simple seems a more effective way to ensure success. One need only look at issues of the group’s magazine Rumiyah to see how rudimentary some of the forms of attack being promoted by Isil are.

The smashed up car used during the 2017 Westminster terror attack
Vehicles have been used as weapons, as in the Westminster attack earlier this year, for their ease and simplicity CREDIT: GEOFF PUGH FOR THE TELEGRAPH

But the key point to remember is that these groups, and Isil in particular, are not very discerning in their methodologies for terrorist attacks. Their aim is to cause chaos, draw attention to themselves and kill as many as they can. This brings attention to their cause and shows their commitment to their ideology. It is intended to sow divisions in our societies and strengthen the narrative of anger that is central to breathing life into their beliefs.

So whether they use a bomb and murder children, massacre people at airports, gun them down in concert halls, or stab elderly priests in their churches, they are getting their job done. And if we shout in horror at the methodology they employ, they simply brush this away by pointing to atrocities that they see happening around the world, and which they see as setting a precedent for violence.

The key issue from the rest of society’s perspective is to realise this is their deadly intent, and to ensure to not rise to the bait and do the group’s job for them. Terrorism’s only constant remains its perpetrators desire to shock and murder: the manner in which they do so is only secondary.

Raffaello Pantucci is Director of International Security Studies at  RUSI and the author of We Love Death As You Love Life: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists

With Anjem Choudary in jail, will his al-Muhajiroun terror network collapse?

Posted: September 12, 2016 in Talk Radio
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A post on an old topic for a new outlet, a new British radio station called Talk Radio that asked for some speculation about what happens to al Muhajiroun now that Anjem Choudary has been jailed. Probably not a huge amount, but undoubtedly the loss of their star performer will have some knock on effect to their networks and influence.

With Anjem Choudary in jail, will his al-Muhajioun terror network collapse?

Choudary was the key figure in the al-Muhajiroun network

Anjem Choudary was jailed for five-and-a-half years on Tuesday

Thursday, September 8, 2016

The jailing of Anjem Choudary is not the end of al-Muhajiroun, the extremist group of which he was the fulcrum. Whilst a process of attrition has seen a number of the group’s more prominent members in jail or disappearing into the conflict in the Levant, a number still remain in the UK. The question is which of them will be able to fill Choudary’s role as prominent and public speaker for the organization.

It is worth pointing out that it is in the first instance that membership of al-Muhajiroun is almost impossible to pin down. Given the absence of formal membership cards, all that can possibly be done is point out that a constellation of individuals persistently show up at each other’s events, and advocate the same message and are involved in similar activity. This in many ways constitutes a group, but it is difficult to talk about it in absolute terms with the organization staying largely amorphous and fluid, reflecting a regulatory environment that quite aggressively tries to clamp down on them.

Of those that are left, therefore, who might be identified as future spokesmen for the group’s message?

“The others lack Choudary’s links and attention-grabbing power”

In an interview after Choudary’s jailing, Ricardo Macfarlane, also known as Abdul Hakeem, a man who was jailed for participating in ‘sharia patrols’ around East London, pointed out that Choudary’s incarceration ‘leaves big boots to fill.’ Macfarlane may have some history, but lacks the preaching charisma of others. Some, like Abu Haleema or Abu Waleed have some history with the community and have been advancing the message publicly for some time through various videos and online speeches.

But the reality is that one of the criteria for participation in the community is propagation and advocacy, which in many ways makes them all preachers. Some may be more articulate than others, but all of them are driven by spreading their violent message as much as possible. Consequently, they will all be filling his boots in different ways.

image: http://talkradio.co.uk/sites/talkradio.co.uk/files/styles/large/public/gettyimages-51349249_1.jpg?itok=phgtAgD5

A policeman stands in front of devotees shouting ‘Allah u Akhbar’ during a 2002 ‘Rally for Islam’ in Trafalgar Square, which was attended by around 400 Al-Muhajiroun devotees (Getty)

The reason that Choudary was able to elevate himself so far above the others was longevity and profile, along with an ability to deliver pithy messages to attendant audiences and manipulate any discussion to focus on the message he was seeking to deliver. Able to remain tone deaf to any counter arguments, and the fact he had been alongside Omar Bakri Mohammed since his early days of establishing al-Muhajiroun meant he was an excellent promoter of the group’s message. As his acolyte and now aspirant ‘jihadi john’ Siddhartha Dhar told him via text message after the announcement of the Caliphate by Isis, once Choudary gave his ‘Islamic verdict’ on the announcement, his ‘words would be gold on Twitter.’

In his absence, the group will not go away, but it may lose some of its public profile. This will reduce some of its magnetic power, as others lack his links and attention-grabbing power. The media will focus less on the others given their different personalities and loquaciousness. But the remaining figures will likely remain persistent features of investigations.

A survey of the eight different terrorist plots disrupted in the United Kingdom since the murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich in May 2013 that have shown up in courts show that at least five have clear links to the group, two with tenuous links, and a final one that may also be linked but the detail has yet to emerge. All of which suggests that security and intelligence agencies will continue to look at the community as one of the beating hearts of the terrorist threat that the United Kingdom faces, and has continued to face since the late 1990s.

Raffaello Pantucci is Director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute and the author of We Love Death As You Love Life: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists

What does a modern terrorist look like and what motivates them?

Posted: July 24, 2016 in Telegraph
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Last catch up for something that was published today in the Sunday Telegraph, this time in the wake of the Munich attack specifically but looking more broadly at the rather odd spate of semi-terror attacks that have taken place.

The piece was re-published in the Gulf News, and separately an interview with one of the newswires was picked up by the Express, spoke to the LA Times, the newswires (picked up in the Mirror) and Middle East Eye in the wake of the Nice attack, spoke to the Wall Street Journal about the current terror threat that Europe is facing, spoke to PBS about Lone Actors, spoke to CNN about the recent terror arrests in Brazil, to AFP about the recent incidents in Kazakhstan, whilst an old piece about Breivik was cited in the New York Times.

What Does a Modern Terrorist Look Like and What Motivates Them?

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There is no perfect profile of a terrorist. This is one of the main findings in the growing body of literature around terrorism. Terrorists and those who are radicalised towards extremist ideologies come in all shapes and sizes. Yet, one of the key features that appeared to distinguish terrorists from mass murderers was the fact that they were motivated more clearly by an ideology than by personal motivations. Increasingly, this line is becoming harder to draw. The last two cases to afflict Europe – the massacres in Nice and  more recently in Munich – highlight this difficulty with both cases appearing to have elements of both within them.

It is still unfortunately too early to categorically know what was going on in Nice and Munich. Whilst the early coverage around both focused on the fact that the Nice murderer was operating alone, and the speculation around the Munich shooter that he may have been motivated by some violent Islamist ideology, we are now instead seeing confusing indicators in other directions. French authorities have now arrested five others in conjunction with the Nice attack, whilst it now appears that the Munich shooter was someone who may have had a fixation with mass shootings and was possibly more inspired by Anders Behring Breivik (who exactly five years earlier murdered 77 people in Oslo in anger at the government’s immigration policies) rather than Isil.

But what both cases do appear to have in common is disturbed young men who are angry at the world around them. In both cases, stories have now emerged of potentially confused sexuality, confused religious identity, anger management issues and family disputes. Rather than being ideologically committed terrorists, they may simply using be the method of a terrorist attack – under whatever ideology – to excise personal demons.

This appears to be an increasingly common phenomenon. It is difficult to know exactly why this is happening. Certainly, the methodological approach of “lone wolf” terrorists is on the increase and groups like Isil and al Qaeda have advocated for their adherents to undertake it for some time. But in many of these cases it is not clear that the “lone wolves” in question are totally bought into the ideology they claim to be fighting for. Man Haron Monis, the Australian-Iranian who held up a coffee shop in downtown Sydney in 2014, was an only recent convert to Sunni Islam and brought the wrong flag with him to his allegedly Isil-inspired attack. Omar Mateen, the shooter who killed 50 in Orlando, apparently claimed some allegiance to al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Isil – competing Islamist organisations.

But it is possible that the amount of noise surrounding groups like Isil is drawing lost souls towards it. It is almost impossible to turn on the television or open a newspaper without hearing about Isil, terrorism or political violence. If you are a socially awkward individual with violent tendencies who is seeking some sort of meaning in your life, then the methodology of a “lone wolf” spree under the banner of such a group may be appealing. It will provide you with a way to punish the world around you whilst also giving meaning to your act. And given the manner in which Isil and other groups push out their omnidirectional message of violence and offer a very low bar for entry to the group, it is very easy to latch on to the ideology as you may loosely understand it and use it as an excuse to express your anger.

There is also an element of “copy catting” within such attacks. It increasingly seems as though Munich shooter Ali Sonboly may have drawn some inspiration for his attack from Anders Behring Breivik. This emulation is not new to such incidents – the murder of Lee Rigby in 2013 by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale is an attack that has generated numerous copies. The day after the attack Alexandre Dhaussy, a recent convert to Islam and known to authorities more for his petty criminal activity that than his violent Islamist links, stabbed soldier Cedric Cordier in the La Defense part of Paris. In August 2014, Brutschom Ziamani, a young man who had fallen into the orbit of violent extremists after he had been thrown out of his family home, was arrested on his way to carry out an attack emulating the Woolwich murder. In January 2015, Zack Davies started hacking at a South Asian man he saw in Tesco’s  shouting “white power” and that he was undertaking the attack in revenge for Lee Rigby. Later investigation showed he was an isolated and paranoid young man who was obsessed with the far Right and claimed to have drawn inspiration from the Jihadi John videos.

The profile of what we consider a terrorist attack is becoming increasingly hard to define. In the same way that the specifics of what our terrorists look like is becoming ever harder to grasp. Fundamentally, a terrorist is someone who is motivated by a political ideology rather than personal anger – but increasingly this line is becoming blurred. The profile of your average terrorist is increasingly becoming melted into the profile of a mass killer presenting authorities with an almost impossible mountain to climb to prevent them all.

France must learn from its intelligence failures

Posted: July 24, 2016 in Times
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Another catch up post, this time a piece for The Times in the wake of the horrible attack in Nice. Not sure the article totally corresponds with the piece, but the fundamental point about France facing a very acute problem definitely holds unfortunately.

France must learn from its intelligence failures

France_Times_July 2016

From the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January last year, the attack on Paris last November and Thursday’s outrage in Nice, it is clear that France is the western focus for Islamist terrorists.

The reasons lie in a unique combination of practical and historical factors. Back in the 1990s, the nascent terrorist threat to Europe came from north Africa, where France had been the big colonial power and a focus for hatred.

Algerian groups launched a series of attacks in France, and put in place networks that were nurtured on the jihadist battlefields of the Balkans war. These networks developed links with London, through preachers and terrorists who would enter the UK, and even with north America in the shape of, for example, Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested trying to cross the border from Canada into the US to bomb Los Angeles airport on New Year’s Eve 1999.

However, during the 2000s the focus shifted, with the UK bearing the brunt of attacks directed by al-Qaeda against the West, with the US often proving too difficult for terrorist networks to penetrate.

Today, France is once again at the centre of the threat. It has always been regarded by Islamists as one of the old imperial powers at the heart of the western alliance against them. But what’s changed is that the terror threat comes increasingly from the Arab Levant, a part of the world encompassing the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa that France has stronger links with than any other European power.

Previously, the heart of global jihadism was in south Asia, a region that Britain had a greater connection to. Nowadays, both France and Britain have jihadists going to fight in Syria and Iraq.

France does, however, have noticeably more.

There are practical issues that have exposed France to a greater threat. Its open borders with fellow EU nations, through the Schengen free movement area, give it the benefits of free trade, but make it harder to secure against terrorism.

With an almost uncontrolled flow of people and weapons, French authorities are dealing with a threat that is much more heavily armed than anything in the UK. In an echo of the British experience after the 7/7 attacks, French MPs recently lambasted the performance of their intelligence agencies and the institutional rivalries that prevent them from collaborating effectively.

Since the intelligence failures of 7/7, Britain has invested huge sums in personnel and technology. France needs to learn the same lesson to ensure that its squabbling agencies focus on the job in hand. We should be careful not to blame the attacks in France on the country’s large Muslim population. It’s clear that Muslims in France feel alienated, but so do Muslims in many other countries in Europe that are much less tolerant of religious and ethnic minorities. Before some French politicians seek to blame the attacks on their fellow citizens, they should realise that fomenting civil strife is what these atrocities are designed to do.

France may be in the crosshairs of Islamist terrorism, but once it develops a response, the scourge will seek new countries in which to carry out attacks.

Raffaello Pantucci is director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute

Ignored by the authorities, emboldened by Brexit, Europe’s far right is surging

Posted: June 30, 2016 in Guardian
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And a second post-Brexit article, this time for the Guardian, covering some of the same points but this time focused singularly on the far right and the implications for them for the Brexit vote. This has some depressing portents in the future for it, and lets hope that politicians and others can find ways to move us forwards.

Ignored by the authorities, emboldened by Brexit, Europe’s far right is surging

Rightwing extremists are a grave danger in themselves, let alone when you factor in their influence on mainstream politics, and on terrorism
Poles against migrants protest

The result of Britain’s referendum on EU membership has strengthened far-right activism across Europe. In the UK there have been reports of public racist abuse, while far-right-leaning parties across the continent have taken advantage of the situation to call for their own referendums. There is a danger that an already polarised political environment will become even more broken with some individuals choosing a path to violence in response.

Extreme rightwing terrorism has been a growing problem in Europe for some time. A recent study by a consortium led by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) highlighted that when looking at the phenomenon of “lone actor” terrorism in particular (terrorist acts conducted by individuals without any clear direction from an outside group), the extreme right wing was responsible for as many as Islamist extremists. And not all were random one-off killers – Anders Breivik was able to butcher 77 people in a murderous rampage in Norway. What was particularly worrying was the fact that these individuals sat at the far end of a spectrum of extremists that included elements closer to the mainstream.

In the runup to conducting his act of terrorism, Breivik claimed to have attended protests organised by the English Defence League (EDL), a group he admired for its stand against what he perceived as invading Muslim hordes in Europe. Founded in the UK in response to a perceived refusal by authorities to clamp down on the noisy extremist group al-Muhajiroun, the EDL became a grab bag of far-right, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant protesters who would take to the streets. It spawned imitators in continental Europe.

The emergence of the EDL, however, came at a moment when more established European nationalist groups such as Front National in France, the British National party (BNP) or the Austrian Freedom party, all became prominent in the public conversation. Far-right nationalist xenophobic sentiment has always been a part of the European conversation, but the strengthening of these groups highlighted how much the ideas they represented had started to slip into the political mainstream, largely off the back of anger with the usual parties of power. But while the far right tried to move itself into the mainstream, its violent edge remained, and as the European debate on immigration and Muslims has become more pronounced, there has been a growth in incidents of extreme rightwing violence.

The response from security forces has been mixed. While we have seen an apparent increase in extreme rightwing violence, there has been less attention paid to it by authorities. In the RUSI-led research, a particularly striking finding was that in about 40% of cases of far-right extremists, they were uncovered by chance – the individual managed to blow himself up or was discovered while authorities conducted another investigation. By contrast, around 80% of violent Islamist lone actors were discovered in intelligence-led operations – in other words, the authorities were looking for them.

But it is easy to understand why the extreme right wing gets overlooked. Most examples are fairly shambolic lonesome individuals whose efforts to launch terrorist plots seem amateurish at best. But they are still attempting to kill fellow citizens to advance a political ideology. And in the case of lone actors, they are at least as lethal as their violent Islamist counterparts – in our dataset of 120 cases, even when one removed Breivik as an outlier, the extreme right wing was as lethal as violent Islamists.

The concern from this phenomenon must now be twofold. On the one hand, the increasing mainstreaming of a xenophobic anti-immigrant narrative will feed the very “clash of civilisations” narrative that groups such as al-Qaida and Isis seek to foster – suggesting that there is a conflict between Islam and the west which they are at the heart of. It will only strengthen this sense and draw people towards them.

But there is also the danger of frustrated expectations. The reality is that notwithstanding a rise in anti-immigrant feeling in Europe, the migrants will still come. Attracted by the opportunity and prosperity they see in Europe (which is often a huge improvement on the environment they came from), they will come to seek low-paying jobs – jobs that western economies will still need to fill and are not taken by locals, which offer better prospects than where they came from. This economic dynamic means that people will not necessarily notice a dramatic change in their material environment. Foreigners will continue to come and will continue to be a presence around them – providing a community to blame when individual economic situations do not change or feel like they are getting worse.

Here lies one of the more dangerous sides of this new European political environment. A polarised society which does not appear to materially change – frustrating those who feel like they have expressed their political will only to find it unanswered. The result, unless handled properly by the mainstream political community, is a potential for violence that has already reared its head brutally on the European continent, and unless carefully checked will do so again.

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