By Alexander Athos.
The mere presence of a Western Muslim fighter in prohibited zones like Syria/Iraq does not mean they are necessarily going to commit a terrorist act upon their return to the West. However, some will and this poses a threat to their home country’s security.
Many young Muslims want to help their brethren fight repression and persecution (for example assist Sunni Muslims against Assad in Syria). Still others want to be part of a heroic adventure where they can discard their old identity and take on a new one, that of ‘mujahid’/hero who with a band of brothers can participate in the struggle for the exultation of their group’s value systems (ISIS in Iraq).
In a major paper on the subject (‘Fearing the Western Muslim Foreign Fighter’), aDutch academic , de Roy van Zuijdew, has researched the typology of foreign fighters/ transnational insurgents in Muslim conflict zones such as Afghanistan and Bosnia and postulated that there has been a relatively low correlation between foreign jihadi involvement and subsequent terrorist acts in the West (the study is limited to Europe’s 28 EU member states plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland).
The stats (at least up until May 2013) seem to bear out the Thomas Hegghammer thesis that not all foreign fighters are terrorists in the making. Hegghammer’s research concluded that one in 9 (107 of 945) EU foreign fighters have been involved in terrorist plots since returning home. The author also points out that Hegghammer’s ‘radicalization rate’ may be too high given that it is estimated that over 4,000 British citizens have received training in overseas terrorist camps and that the ratio is more like 1 out of 17.
However, as the author, Jeanine de Roy van Zuijdewijn says: the study also pointed at some important exceptions and unfortunately, it only takes one foreign fighter expertly trained in combat and indoctrinated into extremism to launch a deadly terrorist attack on his home soil.
Van Zuijdewijn’s study was completed in January 2014 and really only covers attacks and plots up to May 2013. As events in Syria and Iraq have moved apace since the research was done, the paper needs to be urgently revised and updated to comprehend the ISIS phenomenon.
For example it does not analyse the deadly terrorist attacks in May 2014 at the Jewish Museum in Brussels Belgium by a jihadi fighter returning from Syria, Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French national of Algerian origin. Also further empirical research needs to be done on Salafi Muslims who travel abroad to non-conflict zones to receive terrorist training and indoctrination.
The London 7/7 bombers were not foreign fighters waging jihad offshore but Salafi zealots who went to Pakistan to receive their indoctrination and bomb making training before executing their ‘jihad’ against the UK by the London tube and bus bombings were carried out in 2005. The radicalization rates associated with Salafi indoctrination in Pakistan and other offshore jihad camps are 1 in 4 according to both Hegghammer and Van Zuijdewijn.
Nevertheless ‘Fearing the Western Muslim Foreign Fighter’ contains much useful data and analysis of and is worthy of your time to read as the aim of the thesis is to ‘historicise and contextualize the Western Muslim foreign fighter who is currently regarded as a possible threat’ to the West. Van Zuijdewijn’s concluding observations are worthy of further research that ‘the main danger of the current developments in Syria is not the actual danger posed by individuals but the resurgence of the global Salafi jihadi narrative’.
Hegghammer, Thomas (on behalf of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) ‘Should I Stay or Should I go? Explaining Variation in Western Jihadist’s Choice between Domestic and Foreign Fighting.’ American Political Science Review Feb 2013 http://hegghammer.com/_files/Hegghammer_-_Should_I_stay_or_should_I_go.pdf
de Roy van Zuijdewijn , Jeanine ‘Fearing the western muslim foreign fighter. The connection between fighting the defensive jihad and terrorist activity in the west.’ University of Utrecht
