TerrorismU.S. launches campaign to combat recruitment of young Americans by militant groups
The White House, Justice Department (DOJ), DHS, and the National Counterterrorism Center have formed an alliance to combat the recruitment of young Americans to join militant groups like the Islamic State (IS) and Somali-based al-Shabaab.Officials have not released details on the network of community partnerships but local law enforcement officials, religious leaders, teachers, mental health professionals, and parents are expected to help monitor at-risk youths.
Abousamra, jihadi recruiter of Americans // Source: fbi.gov
The White House, Justice Department (DOJ), DHS, and the National Counterterrorism Center have formed an alliance to combat the recruitment of young Americans to join militant groups like the Islamic State (IS) and Somali-based al-Shabaab. “We have established processes for detecting American extremists who attempt to join terror groups abroad,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a video statement announcing the initiative. “And we have engaged in extensive outreach to communities here in the U.S.— so we can work with them to identify threats before they emerge, to disrupt homegrown terrorists, and to apprehend would-be violent extremists. But we can — and we must — do even more.”
Officials have not released details on the network of community partnerships but local law enforcement officials, religious leaders, teachers, mental health professionals, and parents are expected to help monitor at-risk youths.
Local officials in Minnesota have deployed a similar initiative to discourage Muslim youths from joining al-Shabaab and ISIS. About twenty men and four women are reported to have joined ISIS in Syria in recent months, but al-Shabaab has been recruiting young men from the Minneapolis-St.Paul area for years, as the region is home to America’s largest Somali community. Authorities believe that ISIS’s sophisticated social media campaigns may appeal to a wide audience regardless of religious affiliation or nationality. The Homeland Security News Wire reported on the case of Shannon Conley, a nineteen-year-old woman from Colorado who was arrested in April as she boarded a plane to visit a Syria-based ISIS fighter she met online.
Vice News reports that the new “countering violent extremism” (CVE) initiative led by the White House will rely on local communities to be the first line of defense against recruitment. “This program goes well beyond the threat posed by any one individual movement. It also acknowledges that the kinds of challenges faced by communities in one city may be quite different to those faced in another area of the country,” said John Horgan, an expert on the psychology of terrorism, who worked with the government to develop the CVE initiative. “That’s why local context, local knowledge and local resources are at the heart of any effort to protect communities from predatory recruitment efforts.”
Some critics question whether the program is necessary since there has been a relatively low number of Americans fighting alongside militants in Syria. “I don’t want to overhype this threat, I think it’s a real threat, but the reality is, we had hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan for a dozen years and the fear that this would happen never materialized in any significant way or at least close to the degree that we feared it would,” said Tom Sanderson, co-director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That’s something for policymakers and U.S. citizens and others to keep in mind as we watch this program unfold.”
Some European countries have launched similar counterterrorism recruitment initiatives. The French government offers a telephone hotline to allow parents to inform authorities of possible terrorist recruitment activities or their children’s plans to travel to Syria. The British government has launched social media campaigns to discourage vulnerable youths, and it has even threatened to revoke some would-be terrorists of their passports.
The U.S. State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications currently operates the “Think Again Turn Away” campaign in languages including Arabic, Urdu, and Somali to discourage at-risk youths from joining terror groups, but the CVE initiative is expected to be more elaborate. “Current countering violent extremist efforts are largely focused on engagement between public safety and community leaders,” a DOJ spokesman told Vice. “This new effort will compliment and supplement existing efforts by engaging the resources and expertise available from a wide range of social service providers including education administrators, mental health professionals, and religious leaders to provide more robust support and help facilitate community-led interventions.”
