Clouded in mystery (Image: ABACA/Press Association Images)

IT’S a question being asked around the world. How can you stem the flow of foreign jihadis making their way to Syria and Iraq? As New Scientist went to press, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic were finalising their game plans to tackle the rise of Sunni jihadist group Islamic State, but the issue of homegrown fighters won’t be far from their minds.

The answers will be based partly on research that a handful of counter-terrorism scientists have carried out since 9/11. But piecing together the mindset of a jihadi hasn’t been easy because of a scarcity of field data, which means that much foreign policy, and media coverage, is underpinned by speculation rather than hard data. In recent months, several researchers have called on the US government to allow academics access to intelligence data, such as intercepted communications and transcripts of interviews, to help them understand how fighters become radicalised.

Despite the shortage of first-hand material, some things seem clear. For instance, the idea that hundreds of British and other European Muslims fighting for IS were brainwashed or coerced by jihadist recruiters into joining is almost certainly wrong.


Those who study terrorist behaviour claim that the vast majority of fighters originating in the West are radicalised at home, influenced largely by their own circle of friends. “The brainwashing theory is baloney,” says Scott Atran of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. This is more about “young people hooking up with their friends and going on a glorious mission”.

The brainwashing theory is baloney. This is about young people going on a glorious mission

Evidence collected by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College London supports this view. The ICSR has been following about 450 foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, communicating with dozens of them through social media tools such as Facebook and WhatsApp and conducting interviews on the Syrian border. It estimates that 80-85 per cent of them mobilised with their peer group.

“The vast majority go as part of clusters,” says the ICSR’s director Peter Neumann. This explains why a disproportionate number of recent British jihadis have come from the same places, such as Portsmouth and Cardiff. “A couple of them might go first, they stay in touch with each other, and one by one they pull their friends out there.” None of the jihadis interviewed by his group were recruited in the sense of someone reaching out proactively to manipulate them, he says. “That doesn’t happen. No one has been indoctrinated.”

This path to radicalisation is in line with what many studies on terrorist behaviour in the past decade have suggested, and is a long way from the often peddled idea of indoctrination.

So why do such myths persist? Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and consultant to various US government agencies, thinks they allow politicians and commentators to ignore wider causes of radicalisation, such as political injustice, which may be unpalatable to Western governments. “You get politicians saying that IS is a bunch of psychopaths, which is not helpful.”

You get politicians saying that Islamic State is a bunch of psychopaths, which is not helpful

Of course, it makes little sense to study how terrorists are radicalised without looking at the political context. “It won’t do just to look at the militants and assume that, if we know enough about them, we’re going to understand this,” says Clark McCauley, a psychologist at the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. “We’re not. We need databases on how governments respond to terrorism as much as we need databases on what terrorists do.”

Sageman agrees: “This is political violence, and the number one assumption should be that it’s about politics.” That means broadening the focus of terrorism research to political science, economics, sociology, social psychology and anthropology.

The need for a broader appreciation of the factors driving Islamist extremism is underlined by an as-yet-unpublished study conducted by McCauley’s team. This shows widespread sympathy among Muslims in the US for Syria’s repressed Sunni Muslims. About half those questioned said either that they wouldn’t condemn anyone who joined the fight against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, or that doing so was morally justified. McCauley expects results would be similar in the UK. The poll was conducted in July, so it isn’t known how the beheadings conducted by IS since then have affected the level of support.

Only a tiny minority of those who sympathise with the jihadi cause choose to fight for it. For those who do, there are many paths by which they can become radicalised. “There is no one storyline,” says McCauley. But most researchers agree that, aside from the influence of peers, the following factors are important: a personal grievance, such as a crisis of identity, that opens them up to a new religious or political ideology; a sense that their cultural in-group is being persecuted; moral outrage at injustice (discrimination against a relative, for example); and access to a politically active network. While there is evidence that some have been influenced by hard-line clerics, this is rarely the principal driver.

Knowing this, is it possible to steer those on the path to radicalisation away from it? The UK government’s Channel programme aims to identify vulnerable people and introduce them to a suitable role model, for example, or help them with their career or relationships. This approach is unlikely to turn hardened militants, says Neumann, but the Home Office says Channel has helped several hundred of the 2000 people referred to it since 2012.

It should be easier to develop similar programmes that could de-radicalise returning fighters if intelligence data gets released, exposing the motivations and experiences of front-line jihadis. “The difficulty is not lack of ideas but lack of field knowledge,” says Atran. “Nobody really knows what’s going on with IS.”

Leader: “Not so easily led“

This article appeared in print under the headline “Lifting the black mask”