What draws Aussie youth to jihadist cause?

As a young student at a private school on Australia's Gold Coast, Amira Ali spent her time much like her fellow teenagers in the coastal strip.

Described by friends as sweet and caring, she was a keen beachgoer and a frequent patron of nightclubs. She also had a coveted job at Sea World.

Her life was worlds away from the battlefields of Syria, but it was there that the 22-year-old died, alongside her young husband Yusuf Ali.

The couple were shot and killed by rival Islamist fighters in Aleppo in January, just days after arriving.

"She was beautiful," her father, Mr Mohammed Karroum, told ABC Television earlier this month.

"She came and saw me before she left… She hugged me, and she started to cry… I didn't know she was saying goodbye."

The young couple were part of the growing web of Australian jihadists who are not only travelling 13,000km to fight in Iraq and Syria, but also allegedly plotting attacks in their home country.

The Canberra authorities are closely monitoring this web, in particular the links that are being forged between a handful of senior Australian jihadist leaders, mostly based in the Middle East, and their supporters and acolytes back home.

Australia will also introduce new anti-terror laws this week to "modernise" existing legislation against extremist activity.

The biggest anti- terrorism raid in Australia last week illustrates how this network works.

The raids in Sydney and Brisbane saw the arrest of 15 people and exposed a plot to carry out a public beheading in Sydney.

This so-called "demonstration killing" was said to have been ordered by Mohammad Ali Baryalei, a 33-year-old former actor and nightclub bouncer from Sydney who is now based in Syria.

Baryalei, from a family of Afghan refugees in Australia, reportedly joined militant group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in April last year, having made his way to Syria from Turkey.

He is now the most senior Australian figure in ISIS and an active recruiter of vulnerable youth back home, according to officials here.

It was Baryalei who was accused in court last Thursday of conspiring with one of the men arrested during the Sydney terror raids, 22-year-old Omarjan Azari.

Their plot allegedly involved the "random selection of persons" for a public execution, and was uncovered following the interception of phone calls.

Australia has about 500,000 Muslims, with a small but growing fraction turning to extremist violence.

The country's spy agency estimates that 60 Australian jihadists are in Iraq and Syria, and 100 more are supporting them from Australia.

At least 11 Australians have died in Syria and Iraq since 2012, including several suspected suicide bombers. It is believed that one of them was Adam Dahman, an 18-year-old from Melbourne who was hailed by ISIS as a "knight" after he detonated a suicide vest outside a Shi'ite mosque in Baghdad in July.

The spy agency's concerns that these fighters may return to Australia to conduct terror attacks prompted the government to lift the official terror threat level from medium to high recently.

Aside from Baryalei, two other Australian jihadists - Khaled Sharrouf and Mohamed Elomar - have attracted attention.

Both are recruits of Baryalei, and have used social media to publicise their exploits.

Sharrouf gained notoriety last month when he proudly posted a photo on Twitter of his seven-year- old son holding a decapitated head in northern Syria.

An expert on Australia's Islamic extremists, Professor Greg Barton of Monash University, said most of the country's jihadists are young men from suburban pockets of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

As to what draws young people from an affluent society to war in the Middle East, he said many of the Australian recruits have a history of drug or crime problems, and are susceptible to messages of "redemption" from charismatic radicals.

"It is a hyper-masculine sub-culture of people who are unemployed and underemployed and perceive that their frustration is because of an injustice, and that they are victims of an unjust system," Prof Barton told The Sunday Times.

"They then go on to a global message that the injustice is global, and the answer is Islam and fighting for syariah.

"When someone comes along with a strong religious message and a sense of redemption, that is an attractive message."

This article was first published on September 21, 2014.
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