ISIS message thrives online after defeat on the battlefield

▶ Experts dissect motivation for terrorist recruits and offer solutions

Terrorist groups such as ISIS are reaching bigger audiences online after their defeats on the battlefield, and their skill in exploiting young people’s anger and in recruiting makes them a difficult enemy to fight.

“They send their messages, they decide on the platform and we’re always on the defence, trying to catch up with what they’re trying to do and how they recruit,” said Maqsoud Kruse, executive director of Hedayah, the Abu Dhabi anti-extremism centre.

Mr Kruse told the Globsec forum in Bratislava, Slovakia, yesterday that terrorists had been remarkably successful online “in cyber crime, their ability to connect and reconnect and establish different associations”.

He told an audience of security officials and government ministers that there was a need to create an alternative for people susceptible to radicalisation.

“When they join these groups they actually tap into a world of excitement, action, endangerment, but most important they feel they’re having a noble cause, they’re making a difference in the world, they’re part of a group,” Mr Kruse said.

“If you take all of this away from them, the question remains: what is the alternative?”

Among the other UAE speakers was Dr Anwar Gargash, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, who on Friday called for an end to Iranian and Turkish interference in the region.

Nicholas Rasmussen, former director of the National Counter-terrorism Centre in the US, said the ability of ISIS to bring foreign fighters to a conflict zone “had as much to do with adventure, had as much to do with violence and had as much to do with excitement, changing your life” as it did any religious element.

“It may just be about personal fulfilment in a way. Unfortunately, that meant that the pool of potential recruits was much, much wider than anything we’d seen during the Al Qaeda years,” Mr Rasmussen said.

“I hesitate to think of the Al Qaeda years as the good old days of dealing with counter-terrorism but it was a small pool of potential actors.”

The debate focused on how extremists often have a background in low-level crime, how recruiters tap into disaffection with targets’ lives, and how organised crime in Europe has funded terrorist networks on the continent and in the Middle East.

Magnus Ranstorp, research director of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College, said terrorist groups had long been linked to organised crime, from the IRA smuggling fuel and demanding extortion money to ISIS smuggling refugees.

“If you look at the microfinancing of foreign terrorist fighters, one thing they’re not lacking is money,” Mr Ranstorp said.

“And the money is generated from a whole array of activities, from welfare benefit fraud to VAT fraud.”

He gave the example of a group of shell companies run by extremists in Denmark that imported cheese and meat from Germany and the Netherlands.

Mr Ranstorp said they were connected to an ISIS sleeper cell in Spain, and gave the extremists access to the group accounts so they could fund people going from Melilla to Syria. The cell was exposed last year by Spanish police.

“I came yesterday from Copenhagen, where a huge ring of criminals and extremists were arrested,” he said.

“What they were doing was actually smuggling people into Europe – these were Syrians – and of course the money they got from that was then smuggled back into Syria, to fund Al Nusra Front.”

All three experts said local communities had a greater role to play in identifying those at risk of radicalisation.

“We need to also remind ourselves that only relying on security, policing, intelligence and military approaches is no longer enough or efficient,” Mr Kruse said. “If we are truly sincere in countering this phenomenon, we are all part of the solution.”

Mr Rasmussen said: “In easily 80 per cent of the cases we’ve looked at over the last decade in the US, somebody in the aftermath of that case lifted their hand and said, ‘I actually saw something and I didn’t really act on it’ in a timely way.

“That person may have been a teacher or a relative or a peer or a coach or a colleague, and those are the individuals that are most likely to spot the signs of radicalisation.

“As director [James] Comey of the FBI used to say: ‘If I’m involved, if the FBI is involved, it’s usually way too late already’.”

I hesitate to think of the Al Qaeda years as the good old days but it was a small pool of potential actors NICHOLAS RASMUSSEN Former director, NCCl