Last week, six American residents of Bosnian origin were charged with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. This is not so shocking; with 70,000 refugees admitted to the United States every year, and over 10,000,000 legal permanent residents, it’s not inconceivable that one or two might choose old loyalties over new.
What’s more surprising is that they threw away their American dream to send al-Qaeda, its Syrian off-shoot the al-Nusra Front, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) what amounted to a few thousand dollars and some hardware that any red-blooded American survivalist might have in his garage.
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For this, the Bosnians are looking at up to 15 years in jail for each count in the indictment, plus fines up to $250,000 - two of them were also charged with conspiracy to commit murder, for which the maximum sentence is life. It is also unclear why, in a region awash with oil money and military equipment (some of it formerly American), anyone would need to source supplies in the American Midwest.
While some give material support to terrorist groups, others actually want to go and fight. The first American-citizen suicide bomber, in 2008, was of Somali origin, and in the last decade, at least 40 Somali-Americans have gone to fight with the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab in their ancestral homeland. Last week, Liban Haji Mohammed, a Somali-born man from the Northern Virginia, was added to the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ list and charged with being an al-Shabaab recruiter. He is thought to have left the U.S. to join them.
Recruits often seek out terrorists and not the other way round; since 2001 the Internet has made it much easier for the curious to get in touch, and media-savvy extremists have been working on their recruitment technique. On October 4, 2014, Mohammed Hamzan Khan, a 19-year old Pakistani-American, was caught attempting to leave Chicago with his younger sister and brother to go and join ISIS in Syria. On October 22, 2014, three American teenagers (Somali-American sisters and their Sudanese-American friend) from the Denver area were arrested in Germany while on their way to Syria to join ISIS.
One thing the Chicago and Denver cases had in common was that despite having little unsupervised time, the teens had been able to communicate over social media unbeknownst to their parents, who probably hadn’t even heard of the apps like AskFM, YiYak, Kik, or even Twitter through which ISIS was talking to their kids. According to a report by National Public Radio, ISIS had assigned an English-speaking recruiter to work with the Denver teens, in a sort of concierge service helping them with travel arrangements and telling them what to say to officials.
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The FBI Director has said that ISIS uses 23 languages in its online outreach. Last year, an estimated 15 young Americans were detained while trying to go to Syria and join ISIS. Some intended to fight; others, like the Somali girls, perhaps merely to live in the ‘Islamic State’ - though Boko Haram’s recent tactic of using young girls as suicide bombers in Nigeria makes you wonder how that plan might have actually worked out for them.
So far, only an estimated 130 Americans have actually gone to join ISIS in Syria. According to the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, Belgium has sent 450 and France more than 1200. Even if the numbers are relatively small, the worry is that some will come home and commit acts of jihadi-inspired violence. Thus, an important question is how best to reintegrate them so that they don’t. One approach has been to arrest and prosecute ‘foreign fighters’ on their return, as France, Belgium, and the Netherlands have done, or even block citizens from returning at all, as the British propose.
A mother in Britain was jailed for 5 years last December for encouraging others to go and fight jihad by disseminating messages on Facebook. An alternative approach is a community-based effort to reintegrate returnees; the Danish city of Aarhus has developed a program to match locals returning from Syria with mentors and provides counseling in an effort to channel their energies in a law-abiding direction.
The cheapest thing, of course, is to do nothing and hope returnees got it out of their system. It’s essentially the same policy conundrum as society faces in rehabilitating criminals in general: too lenient, and there is no deterrent to the others; too harsh, and you risk creating the very thing you avoid, by sending young people to prisons where their views will be hardened or they will be recruited into worse behavior.
Related: How ISIS Could Drag the U.S. Into a Ground War
French terrorist Amedy Coulibaly was held in a French prison notorious for harsh conditions and radicalization; he communicated and befriended the man in the cell below, Djamel, Beghal, in prison for plotting an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Paris and described by a French expert as one of al- Qaeda’s top European recruiters.
Scoring American recruits is a huge boost for ISIS or al-Shabaab. At the very least, it’s a public relations coup and a link to other recruits. At best, they gain members with fluent English, easy access to the U.S. and countries with visa-free travel for Americans, and specific knowledge of parts of America.
While stories of Americans leaving for Syria and Mogadishu make front-page news, more heartening stories like that of Abdullahi Ali Anshur don’t. Anshur left the chaos of Somalia in the early 1990s and made a success of himself in Minnesota, where many Somali immigrants live. An engineer, he recently decided to give up his job and move back to chaotic Mogadishu to help the struggling government with the mammoth task of repairing city infrastructure after a more than two decades of war and neglect. Having lost a generation of educated professionals, they certainly needed him. Last November, Anshur was shot and killed by al-Shabab militants, obscurantists who apparently see installing sewage systems as political conduct worthy of death.
We should be glad that in addition to successfully assimilating the vast majority of immigrants from all countries of origin, some with very traumatic backgrounds, America also produces men like Anshur. He had a skill to lend to a place that really needed it, and he did a brave thing. The youngsters who volunteer for ISIS and al-Shabaab can’t say the same.
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