by Sally Acharya, American Weekly, March 8, 2006
There’s a common image of a terrorist in the popular media and in the minds of millions, and it goes like this. He is a young Muslim man, perhaps steered onto his bloody path by a militant recruiter. His madrassa education gave him knowledge of almost nothing but the Koran, and he’s so sexually frustrated that he’s willing to blow himself up to get to a martyr’s heaven and enjoy his reward of 72 virgins.
Marc Sageman has studied the backgrounds of several hundred Islamist terrorists who attacked Western targets, including the 19 who killed thousands on Sept. 11. His conclusion? The stereotype is empirically wrong on virtually every point. The conventional wisdom, he said, is “nonsense.”
Sageman spoke last week on who terrorists really are, and how and why they join terror networks. Drawing on his background as an intelligence analyst and forensic psychologist, the author of Understanding Terror Networks examined biographical data, including thousands of pages of trial transcripts, and spoke of his conclusions at the Transnational Crime and Corrup-tion Center (TraCCC).
At the beginning, Sageman said, these men were like any idealistic young people who wanted to build a better world and fight injustice for an imaginary utopia. They were well educated in secular schools, and by the time they committed their attacks, they were about 26 years old and married, often with children.
But if they weren’t frustrated, madrassa-educated zealots, what did these terrorists have in common? Sageman’s basic answer: each other.
In his research on Islamist terrorists who chose to attack “the far enemy” of the West, he found that fully 84 percent belonged to the diaspora, living outside their homelands in an unfamiliar culture.
There is a traceable pattern among expatriate Muslim terrorists, he said. Like many expatriates, they get homesick and initially try to cope by clubbing and drinking. When that doesn’t work, they look for a sense of belonging by seeking out other Muslims. “Where do Muslims hang out? At the mosque,” he said. “So they gravitate there, not for religion, but friendship.” Strikingly, only 12 mosques worldwide generated 50 percent of the terrorists in his sample.
Like anyone abroad, these young men also call up old friends and relatives. Sixty-eight percent were friends before they became terrorists together; in fact, half of the terrorists in one French prison had grown up in three adjacent high-rises in Algeria. “That’s why they don’t have a problem with security. They know each other,” he said.
These friends share apartments, marry each others’ sisters, and get together over couscous or chicken tikka—defining themselves through culturally based social networks, just as other expatriates do. But what’s different is the content of the talk.
Perhaps influenced by an outspoken and influential individual in the group, their conversations begin to mix religion with frustration and hate for the out-group—in this case, for the West. “They just keep talking up the hate and increasing it,” he said. “They even believe other Muslims are really not Muslims; only their groups are Muslims.”
Most were highly educated in subjects like engineering, but had little religious background before what amounts to a joint conversion experience. “It’s an engineers’ problem,” Sageman said, only partly tongue-in-cheek, “because engineers are arrogant. They think they can read the Koran without any help.”
As what he calls “the script” becomes increasingly important, the emerging terrorists begin to view the in-group as special, and terrorism as a glorious proof of commitment and courage. “There’s no recruitment. It’s a group of friends . . . They simply acquire the beliefs of their friends. You have a total proselytizing environment. They all mutually recruit each other.”
When recruitment occurs not through, say, an Al-Qaeda operative planted at a mosque, but through the internal radicalization of friendship groups who then may seek out terrorist contacts by, say, traveling to a training camp, is it possible for military action to end terrorism?
“The military role has been sanctuary denial,” he said, shutting down the option of a group heading to Afghanistan for training. But terrorism has simply splintered into a “global, leaderless jihad”—and in many cases, moved online, so that friendship networks may even be virtual.
While the majority of terrorists attacking Western targets so far have not been criminals, Sageman did find a pattern of poor second-generation immigrants in Europe turning to extreme Islamist beliefs after an early life of petty crime. This group could lead to a crime-terror nexus that could become extremely dangerous, particularly if they begin to use the sophisticated organization of heroin smugglers.
Sageman noted that efforts to stop
terrorism can only succeed if the complexity of terrorism is recognized and
addressed. “Because they’re terrorists,” he said, “we
put our brain on hold,” and the stereotypes persist, in spite of the
lack of empirical evidence.
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Vol 1. Issue 3 |
March/April 2006 |
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