Mates 'til the death

Terrorist cells are like cults whose members form close bonds and attack their own communities

The Ausralian/February 19, 2007
By Sally Neighbour

"He seemed a really kind man. He taught the really bad kids and everyone seemed to like him." So said a former pupil of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the 30-year-old teaching aide who led a cell of bombers who blew up three trains and a bus in London in July 2005, killing 56 people."I know my son. He's honest, he's got a clean record, and he has never been in trouble." These are the words of the tearful father of one of 22 men arrested in Melbourne and Sydney and soon to face trial on charges of belonging to a terrorist group and preparing for a terrorist attack.

Testimonials like these are often repeated as families, friends and communities struggle to confront the new face of terrorism - the emergence of "home grown" terror cells around the world.

The first wave of the Islamist jihad, masterminded by bearded fanatics living in caves in Afghanistan, was shocking enough, but somehow simpler to comprehend.

Much harder to fathom is this second wave, a phenomenon the British authorities call neighbour terrorism - middle-class family men from the suburbs of London and Melbourne, Sydney and Toronto, willing to wreak death and destruction where they were born and grew up. This troubling trend has academics and counter-terrorism specialists around the worldwide redoubling their efforts to understand the causes of radicalisation - in short, what makes a terrorist.

"There is much about the nature of Islamist terrorism that is not fully understood, including in particular the fundamental question of the 'transmission belt' from religious belief to terrorism," Peter Varghese, head of Australia's Office of National Assessments, told a security conference in Canberra last year.

ONA has teams of analysts working full-time to apprehend a threat that Varghese describes as "growing and spreading to more countries", stemming from a large, diverse and fluid network, that is more often inspired by al-Qa'ida than directed by it.

As Varghese pointed out, no study has been able to explain why some people become terrorists. But a clear pattern is emerging. A key feature is what he calls "socio-psychological factors and questions of identity".

Terrorist cells have "striking parallels" to cults, Varghese explained. "One thing we frequently see in the trajectory of terrorists is a conversion experience that occurs within a small, tight-knit group. The dynamics of such groups tend to reinforce personal conviction, especially among individuals whose other social networks have frayed or can't match the intensity of bonds forged in what is for them an existential struggle."

This assessment is echoed by former CIA field officer turned psychiatrist, author and government adviser, Marc Sageman, in his book Understanding Terror Networks. Cutting through the jargon, Sageman uses a simpler term - he calls it the "bunch of guys" theory.

Sageman knows Islamic extremists better than most, having worked with the Afghan mujahidin in the late 1980s during the anti-Soviet war, the crucible for the present global jihad.

After studying the lives of 172 terrorists, Sageman found the most common factor driving them was the potent social bonds within their terrorist cell. Most started as friends, colleagues or relatives - just "a bunch of guys" drawn ever closer by bonds of friendship, loyalty, solidarity and trust, and rewarded by a powerful sense of belonging and collective identity.

Sageman cites a string of cases to demonstrate his theory - Mohammed Atta's Hamburg cell of 9/11 bombers; the three brothers at the core of the Bali bombing team - Muklas, Amrozi and Ali Imron; and the would-be millennium bombers who planned to attack Los Angeles airport in 2000.

These and other cells reveal a three-step process in becoming a terrorist. First comes social affiliation through friendship, kinship or discipleship (as in the followers of Abu Bakar Bashir). Next comes progressive intensification of beliefs and faith within the group. The final step is encountering a link to the jihad, and then joining it. This is usually a "bottom-up" process; most are "enthusiastic joiners" not brainwashed recruits.

Sageman's study shows, as others have, that the common stereotype of the terrorist as poor, desperate, naive or just plain "mad" is a myth. There is simply no psychological profile of a terrorist and no evidence that mental illness, personality disorder or childhood trauma feature among their ranks.

Three-quarters of the terrorists in Sageman's sample were upper or middle class. They were typically more educated than average, skilled, upwardly mobile and married with children. Many, especially the leaders, were educated in the West, multilingual and cosmopolitan. (The late Azhari Husin, the Australian-educated PhD professor who became Jemaah Islamiah's master bomb-maker and his colleague from the University of Technology in Malaysia, JI's current operational leader Noor Din Mohammed Top are two examples).

Another key finding of Sageman's work is that most of the terrorists went to secular schools. Only 23 per cent had exclusively Islamic education. (The exception is Indonesia, where the level of religious schooling was much higher.)

Furthermore, only about half were religious in childhood. The rest experienced a "shift in devotion" later - a crucial factor in their transformation, but not the cause. This concurs with Varghese's observation that most terrorists have little history of extremism, or even religious piety. Contrary to popular belief, religion is clearly not the driving force.

These themes are explored further by Harvard Law School professor and long-time terrorism specialist, Louise Richardson, in her book What Terrorists Want. Richardson has studied dozens of terrorist groups, from the Palestinian zealots of antiquity and the assassins of medieval times to the IRA in her native Northern Ireland where she grew up a child of the troubles. Richardson's starting point is that terrorism is neither a new strategy nor the work of a bunch of mad fanatics, but rather "an age-old political phenomenon that can be understood in rational terms".

Richardson writes: "Group, organisational and social psychology are more helpful than individual psychology in explaining terrorist behaviour."

Drawing on interviews with dozens of terrorists, she says many speak of an "intense feeling of camaraderie within the group" and "an overarching sense of the collective", which consumes the individual. Richardson identifies a "lethal cocktail" of three key ingredients that make a terrorist: a "disaffected individual", an "enabling community" and a "legitimising ideology".

The idea of the "disaffected individual" resonates strongly in Australia. Think of the troubled Sydneysider Mamdouh Habib, who spent nearly three years in Guantanamo Bay; the alcoholic divorcee Jack Roche, currently serving nine years for conspiring to bomb the Israeli embassy in Canberra; or the Adelaide cowboy turned Taliban fighter, David Hicks.

Converts such as Roche and Hicks are drawn to Islam by its empowering ethic of egalitarianism, brotherhood and social justice. For a young man in search of meaning, Sageman says fundamentalist Islam offers "elegance and simplicity" and "a single solution devoid of ambiguity". As interpreted by the extremists, it also offers a justification for acts of violence.

As for the cause of the average recruit's "disaffection", alienation is a powerful recurring theme. Out of Sageman's group of 172 terrorists, 115 (70 per cent) joined the jihad movement while in a country other than their homeland, as students, refugees, workers or fighters living abroad, while cut off from their family, friends and culture. Another 14 were second-generation immigrants.

These figures add up to a total of 78 per cent who were "socially alienated, or temporarily disembedded, from their societies of origin". Sageman concludes that "this absence of connection is a necessary condition" for joining the global jihad.

After joining, the cell becomes the new recruit's world. As the bonds within it grow ever stronger, his ties to all other groups grow weaker. This "in-group love" is strengthened by what Sageman calls a "common bond of victimhood based on Islam". And it is paralleled by growing "out-group hate", which in turn is sharpened by the identification of a common enemy - such as the US and its allies.

The internet plays a pivotal role in strengthening the sense of belonging and collective identity enjoyed by those who join, and enhancing their disconnection from the outside world. In cyberspace they become part of a much larger virtual community, without the constraints of earthly society. As Sageman writes, this "ideal virtual community" has strong appeal for alienated youths living in immigrant communities in the West.

This process of disconnection helps explain how a young man takes the final step to carrying out a terrorist act. "They become embedded in a socially disembedded network, which, precisely because of its lack of any anchor to any society, is free to follow abstract and apocalyptic notions of a global war between good and evil."

Much the same conclusions can be found in the Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on July 7 2005, which describes how the kind and dedicated teaching aide known as Sid organised the London cell with his friend Shehzad Tanweer, a "friendly, mature and modest" university graduate, who worked in the family fish and chip shop, drove a red Mercedes Benz bought for him by his father and played for a local cricket team.

The report finds that the process of indoctrination for the London bombers was principally through "personal contact and group bonding". While sometimes attendance at a radical mosque or contact with an extreme spiritual leader can be influential, a more critical factor is the role of personal mentors and then bonding within a group, in which members "begin feeding off each other's radicalisation".

The report notes, "There is little evidence of overt compulsion. The extremists appear rather to rely on development of individual commitment, group bonding and solidarity".

The notion of cultural and social alienation also applies to the London cell. Clive Walker, a terrorism specialist of the University of Leeds, home town of the bombers, has expanded on this theme. He sees the London cell as "a group of young men caught between the conservative and unreplicable culture of their parents and the apparently unappealing culture of the West".

Walker writes: "The problem may not lie in mosques at all, but in the problems of a second generation ethnic minority". A minority whose members feel alienated from the social and cultural values of the larger community around them. This certainly rings true in Australia, where most of the men charged with terrorism have been second and third generation Australians, brought up in the displaced cultures of their parents.

While religion is clearly not the main driver, it does play a crucial role for the terrorists who embrace it. In Richardson's words, "it provides a unifying, all-encompassing philosophy or belief system that legitimates and elevates their actions".

Richardson cites Osama bin Laden, whose oft-repeated demands are clearly political - the removal of foreign forces from Saudi Arabia, an end to hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan - but who utilises religion to legitimise his actions and persuade followers that their struggle is sanctioned by God.

It is this conviction that makes the terrorist who claims to be inspired by his religion the most terrifying of all.

"Islamic fundamentalists tend to see the world in terms of an enduring and cosmic struggle between good and evil," Richardson writes. They are therefore less prone to compromise, "more fanatical, more willing to inflict mass casualties more absolutist, more transnational and more dangerous".