Bump
The Face of the New Global Jihad
In one of the first comprehensive non-governmental studies of its kind, Dr. Sageman collected data on 400 terrorists, focusing on those targeting the West as opposed to their own governments. He divided them into four large clusters: the old leadership of Al Qaeda; the Magreb Arabs (people from North Africa, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria), including the second generation who grew up in Western Europe and whose parents come from those regions; the “core” Arabs (Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, Yemenis and Kuwatis); and Southeast Asians (Indonesians). The results, he says were surprising.
“It turns out that the terrorists are very much like us,” he says. “They’re not really all that different.” In a 2004 speech, Sageman explained, “Most people think that terrorism comes from poverty, broken families, ignorance, immaturity, lack of family or occupational responsibilities, weak minds susceptible to brainwashing — the sociopath, the criminals, the religious fanatic, or, in this country, some believe they’re just plain evil.”
But Sageman found that three quarters of his sample came from the upper or middle class. The vast majority — 90 percent — came from caring, intact families. 63 percent had gone to college, as compared with the five to six percent typical in the third world. “These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways,” he says.
The terrorists he studied were not, for example, “the Palestinian 14-year-olds we see on the news,” but they joined the jihad at an average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi-professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, his right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri is a physician, and the 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta was an architect.
+ Absence of a “Profile”
Whatever commonalities there might appear to be, Sageman says, there is no psychological common denominator among the terrorists he studied, aside from their link to the jihad. “There’s really no profile, just similar trajectories to joining the jihad and that most of these men were upwardly and geographically mobile,” he says. “Because they were the best and brightest, they were sent abroad to study. They came from moderately religious, caring, middle-class families. They’re skilled in computer technology. They spoke three, four, five, six languages including three predominant Western languages: German, French and English.”
But according to Sageman, despite their intellectual acuity, his subjects were ultimately ill-prepared for life in the West. He traced their transition to radicalism back to a universal human motivation — loneliness. “When they became homesick, they did what anyone would and tried to congregate with people like themselves, whom they would find at mosques,” he explains. “They drifted towards the mosque, not because they were religious, but because they were seeking friends.”
These cliques often formed in the vicinity of mosques that had a militant script advocating violence to overthrow the corrupt regimes, thereby transforming these alienated young Muslims into terrorists.
“It’s all really group dynamics,” he told an audience last year. “You cannot understand the 9/11 type of terrorism from individual characteristics.” Sageman points to the Madrid bombers, who blew themselves up when the police surrounded their apartment, as a perfect example: “Seven terrorists sharing an apartment and one saying, ‘Tonight we’re all going to go, guys.’ You can’t betray your friends, and so you go along. Individually, they probably would not have done it.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/front/etc/today.html