Joining al-Qaeda

Jihadist Recruitment in Europe

Peter R. Neumann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135872670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In Britain alone, several thousand young Muslims are thought to be part of violent extremist networks. How did they become involved? What are the mechanisms and dynamics through which European Muslims join al-Qaeda and groups inspired by al-Qaeda?

This paper explains the processes whereby European Muslims are recruited into the Islamist militant movement. It reveals that although overt recruitment has been driven underground, prisons and other 'places of vulnerability' are increasingly important alternatives. It explores the recruitment roles of radical imams, gateway organisations and activists, and highlights the kinds of message that facilitate the recruitment process. It also shows how the Internet has come to play an increasingly significant role.

Neumann argues that there is little evidence of systematic, top-down jihadist recruitment in Europe. Rather, the activist leaders of cells increasingly drive the process. The paper explores possible options for European governments wishing to disrupt violent extremist networks, recognising that it will also be necessary to address some of the underlying risk factors that fuel jihadist recruitment. Ultimately, the major challenge for European states lies in constructing more inclusive societies in which the narratives of exclusion and grievance will not resonate to the benefit of recruiters to the extremist cause.

CHAPTER ONE

Dynamics and Structures

More than seven years after the 11 September 2001 attacks, much media reporting about al-Qaeda still presents the Islamist militant movement as a monolithic organisation, with similar structures and modes of conduct wherever it operates.¹ In consequence, it is often assumed that the pathways into Islamist militancy – the methods and means through which people radicalise and enter the movement – are uniform across the globe. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As will be shown in this chapter, there is considerable complexity in the process that underlies radicalisation and recruitment. Radicalisation and recruitment into the Islamist militant movement in Europe differ from similar processes in the Middle East or South Asia, and there are significant differences between Muslim communities within Europe. Moreover, the structures into which individuals are recruited are neither cohesive nor static, but – rather – reflect the amorphous nature of the movement as a whole. What emerges, therefore, is a highly dynamic picture, proving that an assessment of recruitment into the Islamist militant movement can never provide more than a snapshot that constantly needs to be updated and tested against reality.

Pathways into radicalisation

In recent years, it has become fashionable among analysts and commentators² to speak about ‘European Muslims’ as if they represent one unified group with similar ethnic, cultural and socio-economic characteristics. Yet the available demographic data on European Muslims reveals that they are divided among numerous communities. Estimates of the number of Muslims in Europe vary, given that some countries – including, most notably, France – do not record religious affiliation in their censuses. The figure of 20 million is widely accepted, though this includes at least seven million Muslims (some belonging to majority communities) in Eastern Europe and the Balkans who will not be considered here. The remaining 13m, who are spread across Western Europe, have little in common beyond adhering to the same faith (which, itself, is split into various sects) and the fact that they are minority, immigrant populations whose social and economic status is below national averages.³

If Muslim faith, minority status and economic disadvantage were sufficient explanations for al-Qaeda-inspired radicalisation and recruitment, one would expect the structures and dynamics of Islamist militancy to be uniform across Western Europe. They are not, of course: important variables have shaped and influenced the structures of the Islamist militant movement in Europe.

The first variable is the history of immigration. One of the most prominent explanations for radicalisation in Europe – put forward by the French political scientist Olivier Roy and others – is that the second- or third-generation descendants of Muslim immigrants are experiencing a powerful conflict of identity that makes them susceptible to Islamist militant ideology. Thus young Muslims are torn between the traditional culture of their parents and grandparents, which – in many respects – no longer makes any sense in the context of late modern, industrialised societies, and the cultures of Western societies, which – though superficially open and attractive – still regard them as foreigners and make it hard for them to integrate. As a consequence, many young Muslims have become open to the idea of joining a global, albeit virtual community of believers – the umma – which transcends national boundaries and is superior to identities derived from ethnicity or nationality. Indeed, as Roy points out, adopting this transnational frame allows them to rebel both against their parents and Western society at the same time.⁴

Evidence for this can be found in those Western European countries where the initial wave of Muslim immigration occurred during the post-war economic boom, with the first generation of predominantly male guest workers settling in the 1950s and 1960s and their wives and extended families following them in the 1970s. This is what happened in countries like Britain, France and Germany, where the second and (in some cases) third generation are now adults. However, the theory fails to make sense in countries such as Italy and Spain, which became destinations for immigration only later. The case of Spain is particularly striking: whereas before 1990, the entire Muslim population consisted of just 2,500 people, the number had increased to more than half a million by the early 2000s and continues to rise.⁵ In Italy as well, the majority of the Muslim population was born outside Europe, and the process of radicalisation consequently follows a different trajectory from that seen in Britain, France and Germany.

European Muslim communities also differ in terms of their countries or regions of origin. While Turks settled in Germany, North Africans went to France, and later Italy and Spain. South Asian Muslims went largely to Britain. The Netherlands is unique in having received Muslim immigrants from all these backgrounds. Scandinavian countries, in addition to being a destination for immigrants from Turkey and South Asia, have seen significant inflows from the Middle East and East Africa. It would be wrong, therefore, to think of ‘European Muslims’ as being rooted in a particular culture or having a distinct ethnic profile.⁶

These differences matter, because Islamist militant radicalisation and recruitment have, at times, been related to particular regional conflicts outside Europe. The most obvious example is the Algerian civil war in the 1990s, which led to terrorist attacks in France but had no immediate consequences for most other European countries. Another instance of regional ‘spillover’ is the conflict in Kashmir, which became a focal point for the Muslim community in Britain, but was of lesser importance to Muslim communities in continental Europe.⁷ Indeed, according to British security sources, the reason why Britain continues to be the ‘centre of gravity’ for the Islamist militant movement in Europe is precisely because of the historical links between the British Muslim community and Pakistan, with the result that recent instability there has been imported into Europe via the United Kingdom.⁸

More generally, diverse ethnic and national backgrounds have resulted in Muslim communities with vastly different attitudes towards a range of cultural and social issues. In opinion polls, for example, Muslim support for the introduction of sharia law is highly uneven across European countries, ranging from a significant minority among British Muslims to negligible among German Muslims.⁹ These differences cannot be explained by Muslims’ experience in Europe alone, but must be seen in the context of the cultures in which they were brought up. Most German Muslims’ families originated in Turkey, where the separation between state and religious law was settled more than 80 years ago; nearly half of all British Muslims have roots in Pakistan,¹⁰ where the sharia continues to be a strong source of legislation as well as national identity.

Another significant variable involves the diverse languages spoken by European Muslim communities. This difference cuts across generations and countries. For example, in contrast to their co-religionists in Britain and Germany, Muslims in France, Italy and Spain can use Arabic language writings and media, because most of their communities are rooted in Arabic-speaking North Africa. Second- and third-generation European Muslims, wherever they live, prefer European languages as their primary means of communication.

This may not seem hugely relevant at first, but it has profound consequences for the ways in which European Muslims are radicalised and recruited into the Islamist militant movement. For example, the success of a radical preacher like Abu Hamza in appealing to young Muslims of Pakistani descent can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that he was able to communicate with his (second- and third-generation) audience in English at a time when most of the services and prayers at mosques in Britain were still held in Urdu. Being Egyptian, he also spoke fluent Arabic, with the result that his followers regarded him as an authority on the Koran, even though he had had no theological training.

Another variable arises from the fact that Western European Muslims live in different countries, and that each national community experiences different national policies on immigration, integration, accommodation of faith practices, and foreign affairs. The connection between government policies and radicalisation can be straightforward. There can be no question, for example, that the invasion of Iraq contributed significantly to domestic radicalisation and recruitment in countries like Britain, which actively participated in the war. A leaked British Foreign and Commonwealth Office memorandum in 2004 said that that the situation in Iraq had played ‘a significant role in creating a feeling of anger and impotence among especially the younger generation of British Muslims’, and that this had been ‘a key driver behind recruitment by extremist organisations’.¹¹

However, the link between government policies and radicalisation may be counterintuitive. The European country that has been the most accommodating in relation to Muslim faith practices – Britain – is also the one with the largest extremist population. French Muslims, on the other hand, who are banned from wearing religious symbols (most prominently, of course, the headscarf) in many public spaces and often encounter open hostility when wanting to build houses of worship, seem to be far less susceptible to the ideology of the Islamist militant movement. In fact, the Pew Global Attitudes Survey in 2006 showed that – despite the many difficulties they are confronted with in being practicing Muslims in a strongly secular state – the percentage of French Muslims who consider themselves French first and Muslim only second (42%) is far higher than the percentage of British Muslims who view themselves as British first and Muslim only second (7%).¹² It is far from clear, therefore, whether ‘being nice’ to Muslims always produces the desired result of reducing the appeal of extremist ideologies.

The four variables assessed here are essential to understanding the different trajectories of radicalisation and recruitment among European Muslim communities. It is equally important, however, to make sense of the Islamic militant movement itself and explain how it operates in Europe.

The Islamist militant movement

Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, many attempts have been made to explain what the Islamist militant movement, often popularly but inaccurately referred to as ‘al-Qaeda’, represents. Historically, it emerged from the group of foreign fighters who had supported the mujahadeen in their successful campaign against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The term ‘al-Qaeda’, which emerged in 1988 and translates as ‘the base’, initially referred to some of the so-called Afghan Arabs who had gone through certain training camps in Afghanistan and agreed to form part of an Islamic ‘rapid reaction force’ – ready to support local forces wherever Muslim lands were threatened by foreign invasion or occupation. At the time, little was known about the group, nor is it entirely clear whether all those who had been included in al-Qaeda were conscious that they had become members of a new organisation.¹³

In fact, to this day, government analysts disagree as to which events should be regarded as the first al-Qaeda attacks. The British government, for example, begins its al-Qaeda chronology with the first World Trade Center attacks in February 1993 followed by an incident in the Philippines in 1994¹⁴ and the four-month bombing campaign carried out by Algerian Islamists in France in 1995.¹⁵ The US State Department's Global Patterns of Terrorism report, on the other hand, starts with three bombings carried out in Yemen in December 1992 and the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident in Somalia in 1993 and lists no further al-Qaeda attacks until the US Embassy bombings in East Africa in August 1998.¹⁶

The differing accounts of the group's origins reflect a deeper disagreement – apparently even between the two closest allies in the ‘war on terror’ – about what kind of structure al-Qaeda represents. In the period immediately following the 11 September 2001 attacks, al-Qaeda was portrayed as a hierarchical organisation with a clear chain of command and control: it resembled a spider web, with Osama bin Laden at the centre and sleeper cells around the world, prepared to strike at We...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One Dynamics and Structures
• Chapter Two Recruitment Grounds
• Chapter Three The Recruiters
• Chapter Four The Message
• Chapter Five The Internet
• Conclusion
• Notes
• About the Author