Irregular Warfare Podcast - On the Road to Jihad: The Role of Foreign Fighters in Irregular Warfare

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

Foreign fighters play an influential role in Islamic extremist groups. They tend to be more violent, more committed, and more resistant to reconciliation than their indigenous counterparts. Perhaps most significantly, they act as vectors of extremism, moving between zones of conflict, and sometimes returning to their countries of origin to instigate acts of terrorism. Our guests on this episode, Jasmine El-Gamal and Nate Rosenblatt, have researched the problem extensively for almost two decades. They predict that the next wave of extremism fueled by this phenomenon is gathering momentum even now and could pose an even greater threat to global security than its predecessors. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

I think that as Western countries, we really have forgotten what it means to pick up arms to defend a principle. There were so many reasons. For example, why people picked up arms to go fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. For example, why people picked up arms to go fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Fast forward decades later, people are picking up arms to go fight in Syria. There were many, many complicated reasons why people picked up arms to go to Syria. The reason why so many transnational jihadist fighters migrate from conflict to conflict, and in fact what sets them apart from other foreign fighter mobilizations like for international socialism or others,

is that governments around the world are consistently unwilling to repatriate, prosecute, and reintegrate citizens all over the world. And so you end up having these quasi stateless pseudo militias migrating from conflict to conflict and simply peaking when there's opportunity. Welcome to episode 37 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm Andy Milburn, and I'll be your host today, along with Abigail Gage. Foreign fighters play an exponentially influential role in Islamic extremist groups. They tend to be more violent, more committed, and more resistant to reconciliation than their indigenous counterparts. In today's episode, we discuss this phenomenon, which has fueled global extremist groups, from the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80s, to the thousands of young men and women who flocked to join the Islamic State.

Our guests discuss what political, social, and economic circumstances create the conditions that enable the mass recruitment and radicalization of foreign fighters. Their research on this topic represents a startling departure from conventional wisdom and in doing so offers opportunities to preempt this destructive process before it begins. Jasmine Okumar is the Senior Manager for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, where she is responsible for overseeing all the research into violent extremism in those areas.

Previously, Jasmine served as a Special Assistant to three consecutive Undersecretaries of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, where she advised on national security issues. During this period, she also served as a translator and cultural advisor in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Nate Rosenblatt is finishing his doctorate in sociology as a Newfield College fellow at the University of Oxford. He is a fellow in the international security program at New America and a research fellow at the Extra-Legal Governance Institute at the University of Oxford. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast,

a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. And here is our conversation with Jasmine L. Gamal and Nate Rosenblatt. Nate and Jasmine, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. Thank you so much for having us, Andy. I'm so, so excited to be here and to be talking to Nate, who's genuinely one of my favorite people.

And thank you, Andy and Abigail, so much for inviting us. I've been listening to the Regular Warfare podcast for a couple of years now, and it's a real pleasure to be here. Yeah, wait a second, guys. We have had comments from the listeners that they'd like to hear the guests argue a little bit more. So let's not start off too much by eulogizing one another. You can still definitely disagree with your favorite people. You just do it with a little bit more love, I think. So for the benefit of our listeners, we're talking here about foreign fighters specifically. Foreign fighters have been drawn to support Islamic extremist groups around the world since the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in

the 1980s, although I believe we didn't refer to them at the time as being Islamic extremists. Depending on which experts you read, we have most recently seen the fourth or fifth wave of foreign fighters with the rise and fall of the Islamic State. And both of you have written that since the fall of the caliphate and most recently the fall of Afghanistan, the conditions in northern Syria and some 10,000 estimated foreign fighters in Afghanistan, but also conditions in places around the world, North Africa and the Middle East and parts of Europe, are such that it's only a matter of time before we see another conflict fueled by this phenomenon of foreign fighters. So, Nate, why don't we begin with you, if you wouldn't mind explaining why you see these

conditions arising again, what those conditions are, and why is it so important? Why should it be so important for U.S. foreign policy going ahead? I think this topic is going to be extremely important, not just in retrospect with the rise of the Islamic State and its ability to recruit over 40,000 fighters from over 100 different countries. I think this is going to be a feature of future conflicts, the idea that people can travel from foreign countries and arrive at another country's civil war. If we use David Malice's definition of foreign fighters as citizens of foreign countries who are fighting in another country's civil war, I think it's going to be a feature of these conflicts in the future. And I think it's

partly because I think what we're going to see in this era of great power competition, which we saw during the Cold War, which would probably be the last example of great power competition, wars that are fought in other countries and smaller countries, countries with fewer institutional capabilities of managing internal stability. And so I think what we'll end up seeing here is more internationalized civil wars. And in that sense, I think Syria, sort of the Syrian civil war over the last 10 years sort of augurs, you know, the future of, I think, 21st century conflict writ large. Anne Barnard wrote a piece about this in the New York Times. I think it's a really prescient piece. And I think what we end up seeing is that, you know,

the problem with foreign fighters is that they prolong civil wars by making them harder and more complicated to resolve. They also exacerbate human suffering within those conflicts because foreign fighters are generally less likely to be restrained in the violence to carry out against civilians. They undermine local efforts to resolve conflicts by interrupting traditional dispute resolution mechanisms. And I think they will be uniquely persistent, both for the reasons I mentioned and, you know, for Jasmine and myself, which we will look at the Middle East and North Africa in particular, I think they'll be uniquely persistent in the endemic conflicts of the Middle East and potentially in the emergent ones as well.

Well, great. Thanks very much, Nate. Jasmine, I saw you nodding your head. Do you have anything to add to that? Thanks, Andy. And thanks, Nate, for that introduction, which I thought was so, so great. But the way that I think about foreign fighters and our response to foreign fighters, both as the US government and other governments is

how wrong we get it. When I think about why the issue of foreign fighters is important, I don't think about it in the sense of what do we do about foreign fighters once they get to the conflict, which I think Nate outlined perfectly. I mean, I agree with everything that Nate said, but, so I will add a but, what is our understanding of the people who travel to these countries to become foreign fighters? How do we stop them from getting there in the first place? So, you know, my emphasis is on the pre-travel period. Why do foreign fighters become foreign fighters? And I don't think it's set in stone that certain people with certain characteristics of certain nationalities become foreign fighters.

I don't think that every North African in France should be on some target list of interest to go to Syria, just because most of the foreign fighters who went to Syria from France were North African. I worry that we're learning the wrong lessons from looking at foreign fighters who have gone to these conflicts. And I'm worried that we're not looking at the reasons that people pick up arms and go fight in another country. And I know that we'll get to this later, I hope, but Thomas Heghammer's article, of course,

Thomas Heghammer, huge scholar, extremely well-respected and for good reason, you know, but he wrote this article about foreign fighters that I really, really had strong feelings about because he talked about foreign fighters as it's almost like an uncontrollable phenomenon. And a lot of what he was saying was about what foreign fighters do once they get to the battlefield. And what I would like to talk about and what I would like the administration to focus on, and other countries as well, is why people decide to become foreign fighters in the first place. Yeah, can I just jump in on that for a second? I want to underscore what Jasmine's saying, because I think very often when we think about terrorism and counterterrorism, we work backwards

from the fact that they have joined the group, and not forwards from the choices that were made along the way to end up having people go to places like Syria or Afghanistan or Somalia or other places. And, you know, I think when we think about, I think General Petraeus was on this podcast before he was talking about the importance of a civilian and military approach to this dimension, I think very often we rely on the military approach, which does almost by necessity have to work backwards from the idea that someone has joined this group. And I think the idea of combining that with more civilian-oriented approaches

means actually thinking forward from the points of initial departure. Nate, you had some case studies in your writings, and Jasmine, you referred to particular countries and regional provinces, and the reason why people joined from those countries. And in both cases, they were not initially propelled by ideology,

by far from it. And they used a great expression, and I'm going to butcher it, but you talk about these hubs, recruiting hubs that are kind of mediating nodes. They radicalize, they funnel the potential recruits, the disillusionment, his frustrations into ideology. But they don't start with ideology. I thought that was a great argument. I know we're going to talk about that. What I want to do

before we get to that, though, is, and this is kind of on the topic of why we're talking about this now, you talk about in your paper, waves of recruitment, and you talk about, you know, experts disagree on number of ways, whether we're on potentially the fourth or the fifth wave. But can you explain why, for instance, right now, we might be in the trough before another wave? Yeah, thanks, Andy. And, you know, I, you know, take no pleasure in sort of concluding from looking through historical data that the conclusion of the dissertation that I wrote on how foreign fighters are recruited is that we have not solved this problem. In fact, I think we're just in a moment of lull. And I worry that with the situation in Afghanistan, we're going to be

distracted from some of the previous mobilizations and repeating the same mistakes which we have done in the past, which is confusing lulls in mobilization for the absence of mobilization. So I think you can look back historically, I'm sure absence of mobilization. So I think, you know, you can look back historically, I'm sure many of your listeners know that, you know, since 1979, there have been a successive series of waves of foreign fighters for transnational jihadist conflicts in particular. I mean, there are foreign fighters that follow a variety of other types of ideologies, but particularly for transnational jihadism, you know, there have been waves to Afghanistan in the early 80s. And then you could think about some of the mobilizations to Yemen or Somalia or other

places in the 90s, and then in the 2000s to Iraq, and then the 2010s to Syria. And I think, you know, one of the key reasons why these sort of peaks and valleys occur, you know, I rely a lot on David Mallett's, you know, historical comparative analysis of foreign fighter mobilizations, where he basically says, I think, you know, the reason why so many transnational jihadist fighters migrate from conflict to conflict, and in fact, what sets them apart from other foreign fighter mobilizations, like for, you know, international socialism or others, is that governments around the world are consistently unwilling to repatriate, prosecute, and reintegrate citizens all over the world. And so you end up having these quasi-stateless pseudo-militias migrating from conflict to conflict and simply peaking when there's opportunity. So these sort of conflict migrants are the sort of first movers, but their intervention into different conflicts sparks a wave of followers who come. And so, you know, I think we can see that really clearly. And I know it's in the memory of your listeners when it comes to the mobilization of foreign fighters to Iraq, who then essentially became the founders of ISIS in Syria. It's exactly what I mean. It's taking advantage of an opportunity to grow once again. And I worry that we have left behind a lot of these foreign fighters and their families in places like

northeastern Syria, while we focus on the situation in Afghanistan. And those are the next hubs of the foreign fighter mobilization for the next conflict. To conclude, I would just say, I think it's really critical that we take advantage of this lull to put in place policies that prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, rather than, you know, mistake this lull for an absence of the problem. Jasmine, what Nate just talked about there was something that you've written about too. And you both described the same conditions in slightly different terms. And for you, essentially, you don't use this term, but you're describing what is a perfect storm gathering, for instance, in northeast Syria. Would you care to comment a little bit about that? It's actually a very sensitive question because back when 9-11

happened, and there were a lot of people at the time saying, well, the reason that 9-11 happened was because people were upset that America has done X, Y, and Z in a foreign country. And that was a very taboo thing to say. You could not say that because you were perceived to be saying that we brought this on ourselves. And so when you try to have that conversation now with European countries or other countries, Morocco, Tunisia, the countries that had the most foreign fighters, the US, who actually didn't really have that many foreign fighters going into Syria comparatively. When you try to have that same type of conversation, well, what are you doing so wrong

in France that so many French citizens felt that they wanted to go live in Syria, you still are not allowed to have that conversation. You still are not allowed to ask that question. So that hinders us as a policy community from asking the questions that pertain to the origin of the problem. Why did they become foreign fighters in the first place? What were they missing? What were they seeking in their lives here in this country? And I do think that that unwillingness to talk about it is to our detriment because it prevents us from understanding the root cause of the phenomenon in the first place. So that's the first point that I wanted to make. We are vastly understudied and under-researched when it comes to the root cause of the problem of foreign fighters across the board. The second question is what happens when they become foreign

fighters? What happens when they go and actually become foreign fighters? The issue that I had with Thomas Heghammer's article, which talks about sort of almost like a cadre of foreign fighters that goes from country to country, you know, almost like an alumni group or something like that, you know, I had a bit of a problem with that, because I don't think that at least based on my research, and what I've seen, I don't think that it's a given, certainly not empirically supported, that a significant number of foreign fighters have gone from conflict to conflict to conflict. I mean, Thomas Hagehammer mentions very famous names, obviously. Zarqawi, I think he talks about, you know, like the linkages between Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan.

And I think that's all very well and good when it comes to the leaders of these movements. But when it comes to the foot soldiers and the people who are recruited to fight the fight, I really don't think at all that it's a given or that it's empirically supported that the vast majority of the army of foreign fighters in one country necessarily goes to the other. Jasmine, we're definitely going to come back and talk about those two things, because one of the themes here is that, and here I'm speaking collectively, the United States can be very critical of other countries, and we don't always look internally. But before we get onto that, Nate, I want to follow on. Jasmine had a really good point. All her points were really good, but one in particular, when she was talking about

Peg Hammer's argument, the cheese bell argument, you know, the argument that he presented, unfortunately, has become kind of the easy button shorthand for American understanding of foreign fighters, right? So I think it's very important, what Jasmine just said, countering that argument, this common preconception. And I wanted to see if you had anything to add to that. Yeah, sure. I mean, like, I think we've dove into the complexity of this topic really quickly. I feel like we've jumped directly into the like 12 foot deep part of the pool. Whereas, you know, like my academic instincts are always to sort of like meander slowly from the shallow end to the deeper end. And I think it's great. I would just caution the listeners, you know, to be very careful about ascribing generalizations around motivations to any of these fighters. Because, you know, I think when you really dig into research and interview yourself, people who do this kind of thing, what you end up learning is that you find you interview 10 people and you get 10 different stories. And I worry that when we generalize

motivations, you know, we take like the sort of most common expressed sentiment, we lose a lot on the cutting floor about this story. And it's, you know, I think it's really one of the biggest challenges of doing interview-based research in this kind of environment. But I do also think that, you know, we all, when we work on a topic that's as complex as terrorism, I think we need to be really appreciative of the fact that human beings are not the weather, right? Like we have agency. And in some sense, I think a lot of people go because they seek the agency that they don't have. I mean, in some places where I have learned that there are concentrated hubs of recruitment, you know, life generally is really, really hard. There's a perception that there are concentrated hubs of recruitment, you know, life generally is really, really hard.

There's a perception that there's an insurmountable barrier to, you know, socioeconomic mobility, to making life better for your kids. And so people make decisions on what they see is available to them. And I think in some cases, the question we need to be asking is, why is the idea of going to fight in Syria being an idea of making one's life better? How does that idea become implanted in certain places and not others? A lot of foreign fighters justify their mobilization, or I would say the rhetoric around how groups justify foreign fighters to mobilize is around the idea of a defensive war, that we're going to a place to protect people from something. So why is it that in some places,

we see this phenomenon of foreign fighting become embedded within the idea of something that young kids can do in this neighborhood or this town? It's, I think, partly to do with the fact that there are so many other foreign fighters. And it's also partly to do with the fact that these communities are extremely politically, socially, and economically isolated. And that informality is a way of life. I mean, a lot of people don't have titles to own land, they don't have, you know, so like, when you think about how highly informal these communities are, and then you think about, okay, I want to help, you know, support the people of Syria, you know, from the oppression of the Assad government and its foreign backers, right? Like, if we felt that way in our own communities, we could do things like, you know, donate money to, you know, different charities, or even like provide expertise to expatriate organizations who are trying to sort of make plans for what would happen in sort of Syria and how to protect Syrians, or even lobby your government to say, we want a no-fly zone

to protect Syrian civilians. None of the people who are living in these communities have those options. And so their real option is their body. And I think they go to places and once they decide to go, their choices are mediated by people who have connections and resources. And those are the people who are ultimately, in a lot of respects, choosing who the people they're recruiting end up joining. And in my research, I found a lot of people who end up joining in communities that are under-resourced and that there are a lot of fighters. Ultimately, when they choose to go to Syria, the choice of what group they join is made for them.

Yeah, Nate, that's a great point because this question of motivation in terms that don't relate directly to religion is important because it offers the potential for preemptive measures. Jasmine, you've conducted extensive research on this particular subject. Would you mind sharing some of your observations? Right off the bat, I will tell you that I personally don't have the numbers of, you know, which foreign fighters went because, you know, of ideology versus need versus, you know, all of these different things. I don't really have the statistics about that. But I will say a couple of things. First of all, I think that as Western countries, we really have forgotten what it means

to pick up arms to defend a principle or an ideal. We did that as Americans a very, very, very long time ago. You know, Europeans did that a very, very, very long time ago. So the idea, the very idea of picking up arms to defend a principle or an idea or an identity is not enough to be a bad thing. This is not a defense of foreign fighters. I'm just trying to put the issue into context. There were so many reasons, for example, why people picked up arms to go fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. And, you know, lest people forget, we supported those fighters when they were fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. And we certainly did not call them foreign fighters. We called them freedom fighters at the time because they happened to

support what we wanted. Fast forward decades later, people are picking up arms to go fight in Syria. There were many, many, many reasons, many complicated reasons why people picked up arms to go to Syria. For sure, you had the people that just wanted to fight and kill and were bloodthirsty and were mercenaries. But were those the majority of people who went to fight in Syria? I would argue absolutely not. If you think about what the battle in Syria entailed, you had an autocratic, bloodthirsty ruler who had put down peaceful protests with massacre after massacre and was not giving Syrians the opportunity to speak, to grow, to breathe, to be themselves, to have a dignified, and I think dignity is such an important word in this

conversation, such an understated reason for why people pick up arms and go fight, to reclaim their dignity. But Jasmine, let me interrupt you here, because I really, I think it's important, because I want to check the assumption here, what we're saying, because how do you go from someone who's saying, you know, I want to fight to reclaim dignity or have some agency over my future, which is generally dictated by larger social forces. I have no control over either in my own country or in my home country if I'm a foreign fighter. But then how do you square that with the atrocities that so many foreign fighters in particular have perpetrated in the countries and the conflicts that they travel to and participate in? I think that's a very good question. I want to bring up the, as soon as you said that, my mind went to the Stanford experiment where a group of students

was selected. Some of them were assigned prisoner roles and some of them were assigned guard roles and they actually had to leave early because the people in the guard roles became so vicious. You have the same thing with the Nazi experience in Germany in World War II where you had ordinary people become horrific. Are these people inherently evil? Are these people inherently bad? No, something happens. Something happens. Something

happens. We don't know what, because thankfully we have not been in that context. Look at the, you know, the case that I find one of the most disturbing is Shamima Begum, who was the 15-year-old British woman from Bethnal Green, who was recruited by her best friend to go to Syria, woman from Bethnal Green, who was recruited by her best friend to go to Syria, 15 years old. In any other context, we would have called her a child soldier and we would have spent money and resources to rehabilitate her. But because again, and this is why I'm saying there is something unique about the Islamic element, the Islamic threat, the Islamic religion, the Islamic ideology, whatever you want, all of that stuff. You know, this 15 year old woman was brainwashed, recruited by her friend, best friend. She's like, come to Syria. It's so great. We can live the life of the

prophet. I mean, remember that a lot of the people who went to Syria didn't go there to fight. They went there because they wanted to live the life of the prophet. They wanted to live in a place where they wouldn't be ostracized for wearing a hijab. I mean, there were so many reasons, right, why people went there. And we classified all of them as foreign fighters. And this is what I said early in the podcast. Like, the first thing I said was, we don't do the work on the front end. Let me jump in here, because sadly, we're running out of time. And I want to move on to the topic of what comes next. Both of you have written that the conditions that caused waves of foreign fighters in the past have, if anything, intensified. And now the United States has

just withdrawn from Afghanistan, where the UN estimates there are approximately 8,000 to 10,000 foreign fighters who are suddenly left without a sense of purpose. Nate, should US policymakers be concerned about this prospect? Yeah, great question, Abigail. Maybe I'll touch specifically on the Afghanistan context and then zoom out a little bit and think about that future next 10-year concept. So the UN, that future next 10-year concept. So the UN, which has, I think, in the last 10 years, the Office of Counterterrorism, the UN, and CTED at the UN, has really distinguished itself with some excellent, cutting-edge, field-based reporting on the movements of various insurgent and terrorist groups, I think, particularly with regards to ISIS. And then I think now, in June of 2021, they produced a report on the situation in Afghanistan.

And there was a really interesting section near the end about what the status of foreign fighters was. And I'll just maybe lay out a little bit about what is in the report. I mean, it's just a couple pages on foreign fighters. So I encourage your listeners to just look it up if you're if they're interested. But the upshot was that there's a they estimate about eight to 10,000 foreign fighters are in Afghanistan now from mainly from Central Asia, and also Western China. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. You're you're even seeing the trickle of fighters out of Syria, for example, particularly those who were, you know,

from Western China, or even part of the various insurgent groups in Central Asia who migrated to Syria. And when people would interview them, they would say they were in Syria to get combat training, right. And so I think the idea of taking advantage of this opportunity in Afghanistan to get closer to home makes a lot of sense. And so there's been some reporting I've heard of people going from Idlib in Syria, across the border to Gaziantep in Turkey, over to Zan and then crossing the Turkish-Iranian border, and then going across Iran, and then across on the Iranian-Afghani border by Mashhad. And then with the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, I mean, I think this is going to be a really critical place for our counterterrorism efforts going forward, especially with regards to thinking about the potential threats foreign fighters pose.

I think it's going to do a couple things. One is, I think it's going to require the United States to have an open dialogue with the Taliban about these threats, because I think that Taliban, of course, is a very heterogeneous organization. And so there are some real sort of true believers that are waiting and hoping and supporting the end of days jihad, right? And I think there really are people who believe that there. And I think there are others who want to take on the responsibility of running state. And I think it's going to be really critical to engage on the diplomatic side with certain figures in the Taliban to understand the evolution of the threat of foreign fighters and the camps that they're setting up in Afghanistan. And then, of course, I think, you know, obviously, China is going to be very concerned about this as well. I think of all

the countries in the region who may be most concerned, this is actually a place where the interests of China and Russia and the United States all intersect when it comes to thinking about the threat emanating from Afghanistan. So maybe an opportunity for some common ground seeking between these three different countries, whereas in a lot of other contexts, there may be more competition. I think in this case, there's some potential for cooperation, which I think, frankly, the Biden administration is really looking for when it comes to counterterrorism. I think their frame on counterterrorism is trying to find opportunities for cooperation rather than a go-it-alone approach, which I think they've seen as being the sort of driving force of the last 20 years,

and one of the biggest reasons for the failure of the last 20 years. One rule we know about how terrorist groups behave, and there are a few proven, empirically proven rules. It's one of those things that social science pays a ton of attention to because it's so hard to explain. But one rule of how terrorist groups behave is that they always migrate almost osmotically to the paths of least resistance. And so anytime there's an opportunity for them to migrate to a place where there's opportunity for them to grow and train and advance, they're going to do so. And so I think it's going to be incumbent on us to think about what are those sort of areas of limited statehood, some of them I call them

ungoverned spaces, but I think they are governed, they're just not governed by states, right? And so what are those spaces? And we're seeing them pop up in a lot of places without the kind of resources and attention that we've had to deal with them in the past. Yeah, you guys have explained beautifully, I thought, kind of the perfect storm conditions that are forming again. We're going to continue the wave analogy. We're in a trough before a wave. You've explained very well, you know, why should this be important? And then you went on to explain, which I thought was, it's not a commonly accepted point, that you can't just dismiss even a group as the Islamic State, even an extremist group as commonly being all being zealots, that comes into play, not just when we're talking about repatriation, preventing

recruitment methods, but also when it comes to our reluctance to negotiate, right? I'm going to give you a really quick vignette. We're not supposed to give vignettes, but I'm going to give it to you anyway, because I think it explains why it's such what you two just said is very powerful for me. So as commander of a task force in Iraq, one of the things we did obviously was capture the enemy material. We've got an acronym for everything, right? CEM, cell phones, documents. And of course, being from the UK myself, I was particularly interested in the number of guys who ended up in ISIS from the UK. And this dissonance that you mentioned, Nate, between looking through their cell phone pictures and everything, seeing kids from, you know, sort of areas that I recognize, suburban London backgrounds and

school uniform, and then equating them with the atrocities that were being committed. It really kind of shook me because it was much easier to fight them thinking that they were all homogeneously bad, but it's much easier to prevent their recruitment in the first place, understanding what you two have just explained. So great, great job there. All right, I want to go on just a couple more questions about recruiting. You know, there's a lot of talk about remote radicalization. And there's talk about now the physical caliphate has gone away, that the next thing, that's the thing that we really need to worry about, right? What are your thoughts about the efficacy of remote radicalization? Have we seen an end to personal recruiting for extremist causes? Do you think that's going to

all move into recruitment by the internet? I think we spend way too much time being concerned about recruitment online. I think online recruitment, more often than not, facilitates the process of joining and deepens the indoctrination. But I think when it comes to thinking about the totality of the challenge of foreign fighter recruitment for large-scale phenomena like the way ISIS recruited 40,000 people, it did not lead recruitment in many contexts. I wrote this paper in 2016 called All Jihad is Local. The starting point of all this is the context where it's happening. But let me explain the context behind the assertion, the sort of hot take I just laid out. When you look at where within the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, ISIS

recruited, about 75% of ISIS foreign fighter recruits in the, let's call it the Arabic speaking world, countries where Arabic is the majority or predominant or official language of the country. In the Arabic speaking world, 75% of ISIS foreign fighters came from regions that constituted about 11% of the Arabic speaking world's total population. Basically, what I'm saying is the vast majority of fighters are being recruited in a very small number of places. And the fact that they're so concentrated, and that so many of them are so concentrated in a small number of places, makes it clear to me that in-person recruiting far from being dead is very much alive. And I would say even more than that

is essential to growing a movement at scale. You have to have these kinds of sort of local cross-friend network in-person relationships because it brings you into the group, validates these emotions that Jasmine is talking about, these values that you feel violated by, the discrimination you feel, right? The lack of agency you feel, the lack of mobility you feel, the frustrations around being able to advocate on an issue you think is important, like the suffering of Muslims in another country, for example, right? The in-person connection is the thing that brings you into the movement. And then once you're involved in volunteering your time and going to study sessions and things, you end up watching things like YouTube videos and that sort of thing. Again, this is in places where there is a hub

of recruitment. You know, I don't know if I necessarily agree with Nate on this one. I was really listening carefully to what he was saying. And I think I would offer Nate a couple of pushbacks. First, I think online recruitment is much more powerful than you've made it out to be in your intervention. When it came to recruitment to go fight in Syria, recruitment over the last year and a half of the pandemic, when people were literally just stuck at home, you know, most of the time, I don't necessarily agree with you that there had to be an in-person recruitment push. but I would say that it wasn't so much the presence of an in-person recruiter as much as the presence of other people who are also being recruited online,

who are going to these countries. So the hub that you talk about is like, okay, well, all of my friends are going. They've also all been recruited online. They've also all been talking to people online as opposed to, well, there's someone here talking to me in person and telling me to go. In our field and in this conversation, it's sort of a conventional wisdom that the online recruitment gets you interested and the in-person conversation is the push that gets you to go. I've never agreed with that. conversation is the push that gets you to go. I've never agreed with that. I've never thought that that was supposed to be conventional wisdom because we've seen it happen in some cases, but we haven't seen it happen in a lot of other cases. And I just don't know that there's enough evidence to say that you need an in-person push from a recruiter, not from other people who are

going to join the fight. So I do want to say there's a difference between in-person recruitment and in-person sort of in-group as like J.M. Berger would talk about like in-group activity. So that's one thing that I wanted to say. I think another thing that I wanted to say was Nate was saying something about how recruitment of these people, it was definitely a proactive push to go fight against or to protect Islam. Nate, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you did mention protecting the faith or doing this, that, or the other. Or you said that these might've been people who were actively looking online for opportunities to join the fight.

I don't want us to discount the number of times that people were recruited passively. The number of times that people were on one website and then one thing led to another, or they were on a chat and then someone tells them, hey, why don't you join this other chat? I mean, there were a lot of people that were recruited to Syria, especially females, that certainly were not online looking for a jihad. Okay, so there's a fantastic piece on Netflix called The Social Dilemma that perfectly, perfectly depicts exactly what Jasmine just said.

It depicts how someone can become rapidly radicalized when actually just looking for community. I highly encourage all of our listeners, if they haven't already, to watch it. Totally worth your time. Okay, so thanks to social media, we know more about foreign fighters and how they are recruited than we would have 20 years ago. That's a great way to sum up what we've been talking about radicalization occurring at the community, at the personal relationship levels. Nate,

would you go into what preventative or de-radicalization efforts work at that community level? Sure. And this is where I have to stand for ideology for a minute, since it's been so much derided in this conversation, which is at the point at which you're doing that thing with your other friends. The thing that I think we constantly discount when we think about the staying power of things like transnational jihadist movements in particular, and in comparison to things like the sort of far right and neo-Nazi movement, which is that in the transnational jihadist movement, there's a much more elaborated, well-established, detailed curriculum of indoctrination, which then takes those things that you're doing with your friends and creates

sort of a wrap around them of myth making or meaning. And so it's at that point we say like, you know, people want agency, people want this and that. Okay, okay, sure. And so it's at that point we say like, you know, people want agency, people want this and that. Okay. Okay. Sure. But at the point at which that gets redirected into things like I'm doing this because, you know, God told me to, you know, you start to lose the ability to intervene in a meaningful way to redirect that often very valid concern to something that's more sort of pro-social, socially beneficial, not necessarily something that's going to cause so much harm. I'll say a couple of things. One thing is that I think the Biden administration's immense focus on great power competition, it's at our detriment when it comes to thinking about other issues, because a lot of

these issues that we're talking about really have nothing to do with great power competition they have to do with human rights with looking at the root causes of why people join terrorist movements and the root causes of why certain countries in the region evoke these feelings in certain people i I find it very unfortunate that the Biden administration is so eager to pivot to great power competition that they're letting go of a lot of things that I think we could be doing better now in order to prevent huge, huge problems in the future. Look at the way we left Afghanistan, for example. There was such a rush to leave Afghanistan because of the intent to focus on competition with China and with Russia

and so on, that we inadvertently left behind so many people that we worked with, that we left behind women that we didn't have a plan in place to help them protect. We left without giving our allies a heads up. All of these second, third, and fourth order effects of our near obsession with great power politics that I think, having worked at the Pentagon for eight years, is going to come back to bite us. What do I mean by that? for eight years is going to come back to bite us. What do I mean by that? When I first started working at the Pentagon, I started working in the fall of 2008. President Obama had just been

elected. And at that time, we were dealing with Iraq issues. We were dealing with mostly Iraq, I would say, in the Middle East. And then eight years later, I found myself, and this is part of why I left government, after eight years of working 15 hour days on problems where I was incredibly frustrated that we were not addressing the root causes of, to find myself eight years later working on the same exact problems that I started working on when I first joined government. And I was like, no, this is not it. This is not the way. Government is not the way to solve these issues. And so I fear that the Biden administration is not really doing much to change that. They're not looking at root causes. My organization, the Institute for Strategic

Dialogue, based out of London, our CEO, she really, really believes and says this over and over again, that human rights has to be part of counterterrorism. There has to be a human rights centered paradigm around our counterterrorism efforts. And you have not seen that from any US administration over the last 20 years. And you're not seeing that from the Biden administration now. So to answer your question, Abigail, how does this look any different in the future? It doesn't to me. It doesn't because we're not focusing on root causes. We're not centering human rights. And we're doing the same sort of semi-structured, you know, we're paying attention now, we're not paying attention now, we're paying attention now, we're not paying attention whack-a-mole strategy that we've been

doing for the last 20 years. And it has not served us. And I don't believe that it will serve us moving forward. So that's a great way to sum up what we've been talking about, right? Like it's at the community level, at those relationship levels. So Nate, we've got a lot of listeners who are in policy, but we also have listeners in the military and preventing extremists in our own ranks is a really big question right now. We're all going through mandatory training on it. And then policymakers, our congressional listeners are thinking about how to address the full

range of extremists, both here and abroad. And you talked about how it has worked at the community level. Could you go into what has worked at the community level? And what should we really be focusing our resources on? Yeah, thanks, Gabby. That's a good question. I'm going to make a point, which is just basically going to tee up Jasmine to go into it in more depth, because I know she has a really, probably a much more informed opinion about this. But it's going to raise an acronym that I think many of your listeners will probably know, a much maligned one.

And, you know, I have my own gripes with it. And so this is a separate podcast, but it's Countering Violent Extremism, CVE, right? And I think this is an extremely faulty approach for a variety of reasons. It can be very flawed for a many number of reasons. I'll mention two pitfalls that I often see, and then the place where I think it can be successful, and that's how I would answer your question, Abigail. The two flaws are often, one, that they work at a too large scale.

So they're looking at, let's do CVE in this community because it's a community threat. So our theory of change is we're going to work at the community and say, if we can shore up moderate voices in the community, then we're going to prevent this kind of recruitment in the community. The problem is that it's impossible to measure. You can measure how much programming you did in the community, but you can't actually measure whether or not it worked with regards to whether or not people were recruited. And so what I would say is a more effective approach on this is to look at individual level interventions, is to make the unit of

analysis the individual, because I think psychologists have done really great work on identifying characteristics that make people at a greater propensity to use violence. And ultimately, with regards to people abroad, people in our military, we should not be in the business of policing thought. It's the action that matters. And so when we think about how we design interventions, it's thinking about how do we work with individuals to either take the thoughts that they have and just convince them not to act on them or to redirect those concerns in different ways. I'll just end by saying when it comes to, you know, extremism in the military, I lived in Iraq for three years and spent a lot of time with the special forces operators that were based in northern Iraq. And, you know, one night I was spending maybe too much time, you know, we had a few beers and we were chatting and the person said to me, I'm here to kill Muslims. And I thought, wow, if I was your commander, I could not send you home. Right. And I don't think it's going to be up to the military to say, we're going to test everybody's thoughts and then kick people out of the military if we don't like

their thoughts, right? But as a commander, if I was this person's commander, I would say, I'm going to keep a very close eye out on this person and say, anytime that person steps out of line, there's going to be a time when there needs to be disciplinary action because there is that underlying concern. And I think that knowledge is only possible in the community, in the unit. And so the job for all of us when we're dealing with this threat, before it becomes like the indoctrination, travel to Syria, starting to do incredible amounts of harm. And at that point, obviously, it's a question of, you know, force and control. And we need to be thinking about the other means we have at our disposal. Before all of that, we need to be employing communities and the knowledge of what people are thinking before they end up acting on it, because we can ultimately do a lot to introduce them to different groups of friends, as Jasmine said,

different groups of friends who can help create different pathways for people's futures. Thanks, Nate. That makes perfect sense to me, your point being that there is room for intervention between the thought and the word and the deed. But then once someone becomes radicalized and they move to a zone of conflict, they start doing bad things. Obviously, it becomes quite a different proposition. And

the only solutions are either what we call kinetic solutions or the process of de-radicalization, which becomes much more difficult. And Jasmine, you get the final word here. What are your thoughts? What's your advice to policymakers for addressing this problem going ahead? Okay, so one thing I wanted to say about Nate's anecdote about this person who said, you know, I want to, what did you say, Nate, like, I want to kill Muslims or fight Muslims or whatever. I encountered that also. And I'm sure you had Andy as well in your time there. And I completely agree that it's a matter of feeling safe enough in your environment to say that. It's the same thing if we take it on a macro level in terms of what happened in the US,

the racist attacks, the attacks against Muslims after Trump was elected, it wasn't that all of a sudden these people became racists. They just felt comfortable talking about it. And so when it comes to Abigail, your question about what do we do? And Nate was talking about CVE, counter violent extremism. The truth is that the answer is like very, very not sexy and very kind of boring and very long term, which is that you have to change the narrative. Again, it's not it's not something that you could easily put into a policy memo. It's like, how do you put into a policy memo, change the narrative, you know, fix the way that you talk about things. I think it has to come from the very top, but it has to go all the way to the very bottom.

But I just think it is so important and it's a low cost way of addressing the problem. It doesn't have anything to do with guns or military or raids or prison or anything like that. It is literally talk differently. Jasmine Elkamal and Nate Rosenblatt, thank you so much for coming on today. It was just an awesome conversation. Really appreciate it. Andy, Abigail, Jasmine, an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.

Well, thank you both so much. Thank all of you. And I genuinely think that I could have, even though it's 9.15pm my time in Paris, I literally could have spent the entire night talking about this, foregoing dinner with friends and everything that came with that. So I hope that tells you how much I enjoyed this conversation. Thanks again for listening to episode 37 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Kyle and Shauna will discuss soft and great power competition with General Richard Clark and Linda Robinson. The following week, Shauna and I will host Admiral Mike Rogers and Jackie Schneider to discuss the world of cyber.

Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. One last note. What you hear in this episode are the views and positions of the participants and do not represent those of West Point,

Princeton, or any U.S. government agency. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.