RadicalizationU.S. struggles to counter extremist Islamist narrative and its appeal

Since the George W. Bush administration, U.S. officials have understood that winning the war on terror would require changing the narrative used by terrorist groups to recruit new followers. In a 2006 report on America’s strategy for combating terrorism, the administration called the war on terror, “both a battle of arms and a battle of ideas.”

Today, U.S. officials still find it difficult to counter extremist narratives that have helped terror groups recruit many young Western Muslims to the Middle East. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris have brought further attention to efforts by these extremist Islamist groups to recruit Westerners to join the fight in Syria and Iraq. The Islamic State (ISIS) has recruited roughly 3,000 young people from cities including Detroit, Paris, and London, mostly by sharing on social media, videos, and articles that promote the group’s ideology.

“We don’t know how to fight this ideological battle,” said CBS News senior national security analyst Juan Zarate, a deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism during the Bush administration. “This is an ideology, like it or not, which is grounded in the principles and theology in one of the world’s great religions,” Zarate said. “It’s a narrative that grafts on tops of all of the grievances that are perceived — and real — in the Muslim world.”

Rabia Chaudry, an attorney and founder of the Safe Nation Collaborative, which works to improve cooperation between law enforcement and American Muslim communities, believes that the U.S. government has not done enough to promote credible moderate voices within Muslim communities. As a result, radical Islamist ideology appears to be winning the hearts and minds of many young Muslims. Zarate notes that while the success of extremist narratives can be easily identified by the number of new terror attacks, prevention and anti-radicalization efforts are hard to measure.

Chaudry points out that extremist ideology has only gone so far because “most Muslims recognize that Muslims themselves are the greatest victims of terror.” “The attack in Paris was horrific, but for the globally conscious person, there is an awareness that such attacks are taking place daily in Muslim-majority countries and in those places,” Chaudry told CBS. “Private citizens, law enforcement, military, civil society, media, all are trying to fight back. There is no wholesale acceptance by Muslims of extremist narratives — our hearts and minds have not been lost to these people.”

Next month’s White House summit on countering violent extremism will bring together religious and community leaders, along with law enforcement officers to discuss how to counter extremist narratives. Engaging Muslim communities can be a challenge for law enforcement, Chaudry noted. Previous attempts to build resourceful relationships are “consistently undermined” by the FBI’s use of informants to gather intelligence on Muslim communities, a policy which appears to paint entire communities as broadly suspicious. In some cases, the FBI’s tactics for catching lone wolf would-be terrorists have been seen as entrapment.

Many American Muslims who have flown to Syria to fight alongside ISIS have blamed U.S. Middle East foreign policy for their involvement in the Syrian civil war.

“What I consider terrorist attack is these Tomahawk bombs being shot from wherever they are being shot from, and killing innocent people. There’s no tears being shed for me if something happened in America,” an American fighter in Syria told CBS News correspondent Clarissa Ward.