'Summer camp jihadists' pose challenge to West

A new type of recruit is volunteering to join terrorist groups. Not religious fanatics but young people brandishing iPads, who are bored with their lives in Western countries and go to the Middle East in their search for glory.

Chances are high that the English psychopath who beheaded American journalist James Foley and then posted the sickening video of his deed on the Internet will be identified.

Britain's intelligence services are putting all their resources into collecting every scrap of information about this outrage.

But apart from providing an instant feeling of gratification that justice would be done, the criminal's apprehension or, more likely, his death from a well-targeted missile fired by a drone, will do nothing to address Britain's and Europe's far bigger problem: the fact that thousands of Muslim extremists from Europe are not only volunteering to fight in the Middle East but also seem to relish the butchery that they unleash.

Dealing with this problem is, as British Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledges, a "generational struggle".

The real question is whether European governments know what they need to do to stem this pathway to death and destruction.

The US State Department estimates that about 12,000 foreigners from at least 50 countries have gone to join the conflict in Syria since it began three years ago, teaming up with radical groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The flow of European volunteers to the various terrorist organisations in Syria and Iraq is by now so established that most analysts tend to forget just how unusual the phenomenon is.

The overwhelming majority of Europe's Muslim immigrants did not come from the Middle East but from places farther afield, such as North Africa, the Indian sub-continent or Turkey.

Their sons and daughters who are currently volunteering to fight have never been to the Middle East, and most of them don't speak a word of Arabic.

Yet, they are prepared to swop relatively comfortable and predictable lives in the West for the dustbowls of the Middle East, to kill or be killed for a cause, which only a few years ago, was seldom heard of, to fight under the banner of an extreme version of Islam that is considered outlandish even in the Middle East, never mind Europe.

The default explanation, that Europe's volunteers are just "misguided" youngsters who have fallen prey to extremist religious preachers, is wobbly on closer scrutiny; there is no conclusive evidence that those currently travelling to the Middle East are especially religious.

As French anthropologist Scott Atran has pointed out, "what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Quran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends".

Another summer camp

In 2008, a classified briefing note on radicalisation, prepared by the behavioural science unit of MI5, Britain's internal security service, was leaked to local media.

It said: "Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could... be regarded as religious novices."

British scholar Mehdi Hassan, who has been following the phenomenon, concurred.

He has said that some of Britain's recent volunteers to "jihad" got their first brush with the faith not from some extremist preachers but rather, by purchasing Islam For Dummies, a basic textbook for people who have only a passing interest in the religion. Today's generation of European Muslims absorbs the faith in bite-sizes.

Equally problematic is another popular reason offered - that the youngsters who now volunteer to fight in the Middle East do so because they resent the discrimination Islam faces around the world.

If that was the case, it would be difficult to explain why the bulk of the volunteers still comes from Asian and African countries, where Islam is the state religion.

What really attracts young European Muslims to the wars of the Middle East is partly the traditional desire to rebel against their parents' authority, a sense of adventure, the temptation to belong to a "heroic" circle of friends, juvenile macho trends and, ultimately, also pure fashion. ISIS currently offers a "street cool" that other Muslim organisations simply lack.

There is plenty of evidence that many of these youngsters view their volunteering for the wars in the Middle East as just a more arduous version of a European summer holiday camp - many questions posted on jihadi websites contain requests for practical advice with the "move" to the Middle East, such as whether they need to bring toilet paper, or whether Iraqi electricity plugs are suitable for their iPad chargers.

It is doubtful if many volunteers have any understanding of the wholesale nature of the bloodshed they encounter, or the crimes they are expected to perpetrate for the organisations they join. But, once on the ground, they blend into the group, and commit crimes they would have never contemplated at home.

"It is common to describe these young British radicals as 'brainwashed'", says Mr Shiraz Maher, an expert at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation in King's College London, who rejects that term because it absolves people of personal responsibility for their actions.

No civic education

Yet, European governments also share some of the blame - through a series of fundamental errors sustained over decades, they have contributed to the present calamity.

The first mistake was the neglect in most European states to introduce any programme of civic education in the school system.

That meant that not only members of the Muslim minorities but also a large share of the broader population were left to search for their own identity and sense of belonging; multiculturalism was supposed to create "rainbow nations" but instead generated atomised societies.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, many young Muslims in Europe gravitated towards a pan-Islamic identity which, however distant or theoretical, was still more meaningful to them than the identity void which faced them at home. The road from that to volunteering for Middle Eastern wars was relatively short.

Social rather than purely religious or racial exclusion is another big contributing factor.

Tellingly, many of those who went to the Middle East to be "martyred" - usually by blowing themselves up in suicide attacks - left behind boring dead-end jobs. It's easy to understand why spending a few years with a Kalashnikov on one's back may be more appealing to a teenager tha working in a petrol station, or scanning barcodes in a supermarket.

And although European governments lavished money and attention on efforts to prevent the radicalisation of their Muslim populations, they did little to counter the narrative of victimhood and conspiracy theories used by the men of violence to attract new recruits.

One line that these recruiters use is that Western governments do not care about the well-being of Muslims.

But this clearly overlooks the inconvenient fact that during the 1990s, Europe and the US went to war in the Balkans precisely in order to ensure that the people of Bosnia and Kosovo, two Muslim nations, were protected. Without that intervention, they would have been massacred wholesale.

And it wasn't the West which started the civil war in Syria. Indeed, until recently, Western governments were being blamed for not doing enough to intervene in that conflict.

Mr James Foley, the journalist butchered by terrorists, did more than many others to highlight the plight of ordinary Syrians.

It's also not proven that if the US-led invasion did not take place, Iraq would have been a peaceful place today.

After all, nobody invaded Syria, yet the country still imploded.

Furthermore, up to 180,000 people perished in Syria over the past three years alone, not because of Western aggression but as a result of a fight between Muslims. Indeed, the Middle East is now torn apart by a broader confrontation between Sunni and Shi'ite, and between Arabs, Iranians, Kurds and Turks.

Western powers may periodically dabble in these conflicts but they have neither unleashed them, nor are they in a position to contain them.

Dispelling such myths is not an academic exercise; it should be seen as part and parcel of stemming the flow of volunteers to terrorism.

And it is something which should not be done by Western governments alone. It should be accomplished with the help of governments in Islamic states, which either turn a blind eye or even promote such manufactured myths of victimhood.

In the short term, there is no escape from using all powers at governments' disposal to deal with the scourge.

Western intelligence agencies are getting better at identifying volunteers through their peculiar patterns of behaviour, such as inexplicable disappearances from the workplace, or sudden binges of expenditure on credit cards, followed by sudden withdrawals of savings from bank accounts.

Law enforcement agencies are also getting better at tracking terrorist volunteers across frontiers.

And new legislation about to be introduced in Britain and France targets recruiters, and also gives governments the power to shut down offending recruitment websites.

But the long-term answer to this plague is for Western societies to assert more forcefully and with greater conviction the true achievements of Europe's open societies, and to make clear that Muslims and Islam continue to have a place and a bright future in the "old continent".

Jonathan.eyal@gmail.com

This article was published on Aug 25 in The Straits Times.

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