Author: Stewart Bell
Publication: National Post
Date: June 03, 2006
URL: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=8ef8514e-3fa2-44e2-83ee-6073a8e6ea19
They are young, militant and Canadian. And
according to senior counterterrorism authorities, they have been plotting
large-scale terrorist attacks on Canadian soil.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service
acknowledged this week it has been investigating groups of "homegrown"
extremists. In candid testimony to the Senate national security committee,
the agency went on to say that these young followers of the "al-Qaeda
ideology" have been plotting against targets within Canada.
"They are not looking to Afghanistan,
the U.K. or anywhere else," Jack Hooper, the CSIS Deputy Director of
Operations, testified on Monday.
The exact targets of these young terrorists
were not revealed, but it is their profile that is most shocking: young Canadian
Muslims who have somehow become radicalized while growing up in Canada.
They are "homegrown." In other words,
they have emerged from within Canada, rather than infiltrating it from abroad.
They are insiders, not outsiders like Millennium Bomber Ahmed Ressam, who
was behind Canada's last major terrorism scare in 1999.
"Increasingly, we are learning of more
and more extremists that are homegrown," says a declassified CSIS report
obtained by the National Post. "The implications of this shift are important."
Across the Atlantic, the term "European
Jihad" is now used to describe the new generation of young Muslim extremists
who not only live in Europe, but also consider it a legitimate terrorist target.
A Canadian Jihad is apparently underway as
well.
Canada's top national security problem used
to be the homeland terrorism that occurs when foreigners bring to Canada the
violent causes of their countries of origin.
Other people's wars have been seeping into
Canada for decades as a result of what intelligence officials call "the
spillover effect," which is what happened when Sikh terrorists in B.C.
bombed two Air-India planes in 1985.
Homeland terrorists such as the Tamil Tigers
remain a security problem for Canada, but they are no longer the country's
only major threat. Of equal concern to counterterrorism investigators is homegrown
terrorism.
"We have a bifurcated threat at this
point," Mr. Hooper testified. "The threat that comes to Canada from
the outside as well as a homegrown threat, and the homegrown variants look
to Canada to execute their targeting.
"We must be vigilant on two fronts,"
he added, "that which is coming to us from the outside environment and,
increasingly, that which is growing up in our communities."
In Europe, the United States and Australia,
intelligence agencies have been reporting the same trend: loose homegrown
youth networks (some of them virtual networks that exist only in cyberspace)
inspired by al-Qaeda but that operate locally and autonomously.
The suicide bombings in London last July 7
that killed 52, for example, were the work of three British-born Muslims and
a Jamaican-born immigrant who had converted to Islam. "The attacks showed
very clearly that terrorism is a 'homegrown' problem," said a British
parliamentary committee's report on the bombings.
Western jihadist youth counterculture is the
next phase in the evolution of global terrorism. Since becoming a credible
threat in the late 1980s, al-Qaeda has decentralized and spread from its origins
in Pakistan and Afghanistan to the point that a "high percentage"
of the extremists on the CSIS radar screen are now Canadian-born. "These
individuals are part of Western society, and their 'Canadianness' makes detection
more difficult," a "secret" CSIS report notes.
Generation Jihad encompasses a variety of
ethnic backgrounds, and includes Africans and South Asians as well as converts
to Islam. Some are educated and computer-literate, while others have criminal
records and more closely fit the profile of street-gang culture.
But they share a devotion to puritanical Islam,
contempt for non-Muslims (and other Muslims deemed not sufficiently Islamist)
and a seething anger at what they see as the worldwide oppression of Muslims.
On top of that, they believe that terrorist violence is a justified response
to the "war on Islam" they are convinced the West is waging in such
places as Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as within Western countries such as
Canada, which have arrested Muslims for terrorism.
While they look to Osama bin Laden for inspiration,
they are not formal members of al-Qaeda. They often have no apparent connection
to any terrorist groups. Most have never been to a terrorist training camp,
(although some have been trained in Canada, abroad or online).
Rather than taking orders from overseas bosses,
they plan and execute their activities locally, "without input from masterminds
abroad," says one CSIS report. The Internet provides all the indoctrination
and instruction they need. But what truly distinguishes them from the old
guard is that whereas homeland terrorists tended to go overseas (Afghanistan
and Chechnya, for example) to fulfill their violent fantasies, homegrown terrorists
want to fight their jihad right here in Canada. They see Canada as another
battlefield.
This new generation of young radicals is "a
significant threat to national security" and "a clear and present
danger to Canada and its allies," according to de-classified CSIS reports.
"A small number of Islamic extremists
in Canada advocate violent jihad in pursuit of their political or religious
aims," says another intelligence report written in the days after the
London bombings.
"The reasons for this radicalization
are varied and include a general sense of anger at what is seen as oppression
of Muslims throughout the world [and] parental influence."
Intelligence agencies have been struggling
to explain the "jihadization" of Western Muslim youths. What is
driving some of them to embrace extremist violence against their own countries?
The Dutch General Intelligence and Security
Service, dealing with many of the same problems as CSIS, said in a report
released in May that radicalization is a result of the struggle among young
Muslims to reconcile Islam with an increasingly modern, global and secular
world.
"Although Muslims worldwide are faced
with globalization and modernization, young Muslims growing up in secular
Western societies, in which Islam is just one more religious and cultural
movement, are much more acutely confronted with problems of existential and
religious orientation." These youths may turn to the Koran for guidance,
but lacking strong Muslim cultural roots and sometimes ignorant of true Islamic
teachings, they can fall into the trap of believing that to be "good
Muslims," they must adhere to extremist interpretations of the faith,
it says.
"With the help of radical Web sites and
chat sessions they compile a radical 'cut-and-paste' version of Islam from
Koran quotations which they reshape into a revolutionary pamphlet of global
violent jihad," the Dutch security service says.
Tom Quiggin, a former RCMP expert on jihadism
who now works in Singapore, said homegrown terrorists tend to get serious
about religion in their late teens and twenties.
"Their so-called 'religious education'
is usually nothing but cherry-picked Koranic statements heavily laced with
poisonous jihadist messages that bear little resemblance to the actual message
of Islam."
The Intelligence Assessments Branch of CSIS
acknowledges that, "There does not appear to be a single process that
leads to extremism: the transformation is highly individual." But CSIS
has singled out some of the factors that it says are leading Canadian youths
down the path to terror.
One of the most common is family ties. Fathers
with extreme Islamic beliefs are raising their children to be extreme believers.
One example is Ahmed Khadr, the Canadian who sent his sons to training camps
in Afghanistan and encouraged one of them to become a suicide bomber.
Many homegrown terrorists are also radicalized
as a result of a spiritual leader who guides them to extremism. This was the
case with Mohammed Jabarah, who joined al-Qaeda after graduating from high
school in St. Catharines, Ont. His guide was a Kuwaiti cleric named Sulayman
Abu Gaith, who recruited several young boys, many of them now dead or imprisoned.
Another factor is religious conversion. CSIS
reports that Islamic terrorists are actively seeking out Western converts,
who are "highly-prized by terrorist groups for their familiarity with
the West and relative ease at moving through Western society."
As newcomers to the Islamic faith, converts
can be prone to recruitment into extremism because they are unfamiliar with
true Islamic teachings and are therefore vulnerable to manipulation. "The
issue of radicalized converts will grow over the next few decades," a
CSIS report says.
Adds the federal government's Integrated Threat
Assessment Centre: "Much like the attraction of extreme ideologies of
past decades, radical Islam will continue to appeal to the disenfranchised
and those struggling with a personal or spiritual crisis."
The Internet is cited by CSIS as well. The
Internet has been described as the engine propelling the global jihadi movement.
It serves as a virtual training camp, where everything from recruitment literature
to explosives recipes are available for downloading by youths sitting in their
living rooms. "Once hooked into these webs of information, susceptibility
to recruitment increases," CSIS writes.
One of the challenges with homegrown terrorism
is how to respond. Traditionally, CSIS has used as three-tiered approach to
fighting terrorists: prevent known terrorists from coming to Canada; if that
fails, intercept them at the border or airport; and as a last resort, investigate
and deport them.
None of those measures apply to homegrown
terrorists. "When we talk about the homegrown terrorist phenomenon, in
most instances, these are people who are Canadian citizens. You cannot remove
them anywhere," Mr. Hooper testified.
"We have two options," he added.
"We can work in collaboration with law
enforcement to prosecute them or we can work to disrupt their activities."
"Having a jihadist father like Ahmed
Said Khadr, to cite but one example, often leads to an atmosphere of extremism
where the children are raised to see the justification of using violence to
attain political goals," says a Canadian intelligence report.
TARGET: CANADA
1998 "You cannot stop us." A World
Islamic Front letter is sent to police advising that a biological and chemical
weapons attack would be launched in the Montreal subway system. A group of
Algerians is arrested and deported.
1999 "In the summer of 1999, Samir Ait
Mohamed and Ahmed Ressam discussed placing explosives in the Outremont suburb
of Montreal because it was a predominantly Jewish neighborhood," the
FBI says.
Sbell@nationalpost.com
2001 "Special file for our brother Abu
Bakr al-Albani on the nature of his mission. First, the mission. Gather information
on ... the possibility of obtaining explosive devices inside Canada."
-- August 2001 e-mail found on al-Qaeda computer in Kabul.
2001 "In the lead-up and immediate aftermath
to 9/11... there was a conspiracy of eight individuals who had designs to
execute an act of serious violence in the Toronto area," Jack Hooper,
CSIS Deputy Director of Operations, states.
2002 "As you kill, you will be killed."
-- Osama bin Laden in an audiotaped speech that threatened Canada.
2004 "Human Targets: We must target and
kill the Jews and the Christians.... The grades of importance are as follows:
Americans, British, Spaniards, Australians, Canadians, Italians," instructs
Al Battar, an al-Qaeda training manual.
2005 "And now you will get news of what
hurts you." A jihadists video production posted on the Internet repeats
bin Laden's 2002 threat to Canada.
2006 "We have a bifurcated threat at
this point -- the threat that comes to Canada from the outside as well as
a homegrown threat, and the homegrown variants look to Canada to execute their
targeting," Mr. Hooper warns.
