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Story highlights
Peter Bergen: Jihadi John ID'd as Mohammed Emwazi, a well-born Londoner with college degree
White House has said terrorism rooted in poverty; Bergen: Typically anti-west jihadists come from money, are educated
The ideology of ISIS and like-minded groups is rooted in Salafist ultra-fundamentalist interpretations of Islam
This is how top national security reporters Souad Mekhennet and Adam Goldman of the Washington Post, who broke the story that Mohammed Emwazi has been identified as the notorious ISIS terrorist known as “Jihadi John,” describe him: “a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming.”
They go on to say that Emwazi “was raised in a middle-class neighborhood in London” and attended the University of Westminster, which is a university in London that was founded in the early 19th century.
Emwazi poses something of a problem for the Obama administration’s narrative about who becomes a terrorist and why. Last week, the administration hosted a three-day conference on “Countering Violent Extremism,” which is a government euphemism for how best to deal with Islamist terrorism.
We heard from Obama administration officials and even the President himself that terrorism has something to do with lack of opportunities and poverty. Obama said that “we have to address grievances terrorists exploit, including economic grievances.”
He said, “when millions of people – especially youth – are impoverished and have no hope for the future, when corruption inflicts daily humiliations on people, when there are no outlets by which people can express their concerns, resentments fester. The risk of instability and extremism grow. Where young people have no education, they are more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and radical ideas…”
Peter Bergen
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Tim Hetherington for CNN
The President did acknowledge that terrorists can be rich like Osama bin Laden, who was the son of a Saudi construction magnate and attended the top high school and the best university in Saudi Arabia. It’s hard to imagine someone with more opportunities. Think the Trump family Saudi-style, minus the bling, and throw in a deep admiration for the Taliban.
But, in fact, Osama bin Laden is more the rule than the exception. Take not only Emwazi/Jihadi John, but also the notorious British terrorist, Omar Sheikh, who attended the London School of Economics and who kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.
Take Mohamed Atta, the son of an Egyptian lawyer, who had worked on a doctorate in, of all things, urban preservation at a German university and who led the 9/11 attacks. Or the present leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, a surgeon who comes from a leading Egyptian family that counts ambassadors, politicians and prominent clerics amongst its ranks.
Nearer to home we can also point to the Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan, who was not only an officer in the U.S. Army and a psychiatrist, but is also from a comfortably middle-class family in Virginia.
Let’s also add to the mix Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up a bomb-laden SUV in Times Square on May 1, 2010. He had obtained an MBA in the United States and had worked as a financial analyst for the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics company. His father was one of the top officers in the Pakistani military.
These are not the dispossessed. They are the empowered.
“Who becomes a terrorist?” turns out, in many cases, to be much like asking, “Who owns a Volvo?”
Indeed, New America has studied the backgrounds of some 250 U.S.-based militants since 9/11 who have been indicted in or convicted of some kind of jihadist terrorist crime. They are on average middle class, reasonably well-educated family men with kids. They are, in short, ordinary Americans.
Similarly, in his important 2004 book “Understanding Terror Networks,” psychiatrist Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer, examined the backgrounds of 172 militants who were part of al Qaeda or a similar group. Just under half were professionals; two-thirds were either middle or upper class and had gone to college; indeed, several had doctorates.
In a 2006 study, Swati Pandey and this author examined the educational background of 79 terrorists responsible for five of the worst anti-Western terrorist attacks of the modern era – the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, the 9/11 attacks, the Bali nightclub bombings in 2002, and the London bombings on July 7, 2005.
We found that more than half of the terrorists had attended college, making them as well-educated as the average American. Two of our sample had doctoral degrees, and two others had begun working toward their doctorates.
None of them had attended a madrassa.
Significantly, we found that, of those who did attend college and/or graduate school, 58% attained scientific or technical degrees. Emwazi/Jihadi John reportedly studied computer programming, which makes him typical of the anti-Western jihadist terrorists we examined.
Of course, large-scale insurgent groups such as ISIS and the Taliban recruit foot soldiers who join the cause to get a paycheck. But the people running these organizations are in it for ideological reasons.
An optimistic view
The diagnosis that poverty, lack of education or lack of opportunities have much to do with terrorism requires a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This diagnosis leads to the prognosis that all we need to do to solve the terrorism problem is to create societies that are less poor, better educated and have more opportunities.
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Wounded passengers are treated following a suicide bombing at the Brussels Airport on March 22, 2016. The attacks on the airport and a subway killed 32 people and wounded more than 300. ISIS claims its "fighters" launched the attacks in the Belgian capital.
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Ketevan Kardava/Getty Images
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Syrians gather at the site of a double car bomb attack in the Al-Zahraa neighborhood of the Homs, Syria, on February 21, 2016. Multiple attacks in Homs and southern Damascus kill at least 122 and injure scores, according to the state-run SANA news agency. ISIS claimed responsibility.
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Syrian pro-government forces gather at the site of a deadly triple bombing Sunday, January 31, in the Damascus suburb of Sayeda Zeynab. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a statement circulating online from supporters of the terrorist group.
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LOUAI BESHARA/AFP/Getty Images
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Yemenis check the scene of a car bomb attack Sunday, December 6, in Aden, Yemen. Aden Gov. Jaafar Saad and six bodyguards died in the attack, for which the terror group ISIS claimed responsibility.
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Wael Qubady/AP
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Investigators check the scene of a mosque attack Friday, November 27, in northern Bangladesh's Bogra district. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack that left at least one person dead and three more wounded.
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Wounded people are helped outside the Bataclan concert hall in Paris following a series of coordinated attacks in the city on Friday, November 13. The militant group ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks, which killed at least 130 people and wounded hundreds more.
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YOAN VALAT/EPA/LANDOV
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Emergency personnel and civilians gather at the site of a twin suicide bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, on Thursday, November 12. The bombings killed at least 43 people and wounded more than 200 more. ISIS appeared to claim responsibility in a statement posted on social media.
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Bilal Hussein/AP
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Smoke rises over the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar on November 12. Kurdish Iraqi fighters, backed by a U.S.-led air campaign, retook the strategic town, which ISIS militants overran last year. ISIS wants to create an Islamic state across Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria.
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Syrian government troops walk inside the Kweiras air base on Wednesday, November 11, after they broke a siege imposed by ISIS militants.
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Members of the Egyptian military approach the wreckage of a Russian passenger plane Sunday, November 1, in Hassana, Egypt. The plane crashed the day before, killing all 224 people on board. ISIS claimed responsibility for downing the plane, but the group's claim wasn't immediately verified.
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Maxim Grigoriev/Russian Ministry for Emergency Situations/AP
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An explosion rocks Kobani, Syria, during a reported car bomb attack by ISIS militants on Tuesday, October 20.
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Shiite fighters, fighting alongside Iraqi government forces, fire a rocket at ISIS militants as they advance toward the center of Baiji, Iraq, on Monday, October 19.
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Smoke rises above a damaged building in Ramadi, Iraq, following a coalition airstrike against ISIS positions on Saturday, August 15.
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Iraqi men look at damage following a bomb explosion that targeted a vegetable market in Baghdad on Thursday, August 13. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
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In this image taken from social media, an ISIS fighter holds the group's flag after the militant group overran the Syrian town of al-Qaryatayn on Thursday, August 6, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported. ISIS uses modern tools such as social media to promote reactionary politics and religious fundamentalism. Fighters are destroying holy sites and valuable antiquities even as their leaders propagate a return to the early days of Islam.
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An ISIS fighter poses with spoils purportedly taken after capturing the Syrian town of al-Qaryatayn.
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Smoke rises as Iraqi security forces bomb ISIS positions in the eastern suburbs of Ramadi, Iraq, on August 6.
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Buildings reduced to piles of debris can be seen in the eastern suburbs of Ramadi on August 6.
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The governor of the Asir region in Saudi Arabia, Prince Faisal bin Khaled bin Abdulaziz, left, visits a man who was wounded in a suicide bombing attack on a mosque in Abha, Saudi Arabia, on August 6. ISIS claimed responsibility for the explosion, which killed at least 13 people and injured nine others.
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Saudi officials and investigators check the inside of the mosque on August 6.
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Mourners in Gaziantep, Turkey, grieve over a coffin Tuesday, July 21, during a funeral ceremony for the victims of a suspected ISIS suicide bomb attack. That bombing killed at least 31 people in Suruc, a Turkish town that borders Syria. Turkish authorities blamed ISIS for the attack.
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Protesters in Istanbul carry anti-ISIS banners and flags to show support for victims of the Suruc suicide blast during a demonstration on Monday, July 20.
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People in Ashmoun, Egypt, carry the coffin for 1st Lt. Mohammed Ashraf, who was killed when the ISIS militant group attacked Egyptian military checkpoints on Wednesday, July 1. At least 17 soldiers were reportedly killed, and 30 were injured.
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Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Syrians wait near the Turkish border during clashes between ISIS and Kurdish armed groups in Kobani, Syria, on Thursday, June 25. The photo was taken in Sanliurfa, Turkey. ISIS militants disguised as Kurdish security forces infiltrated Kobani on Thursday and killed "many civilians," said a spokesman for the Kurds in Kobani.
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Residents examine a damaged mosque after an Iraqi Air Force bombing in the ISIS-seized city of Falluja, Iraq, on Sunday, May 31. At least six were killed and nine others wounded during the bombing.
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People search through debris after an explosion at a Shiite mosque in Qatif, Saudi Arabia, on Friday, May 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, according to tweets from ISIS supporters, which included a formal statement from ISIS detailing the operation.
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Iraqi soldiers fire their weapons toward ISIS group positions in the Garma district, west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, on Sunday, April 26. Pro-government forces said they had recently made advances on areas held by Islamist jihadists.
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Photos: The ISIS terror threat
A member of Afghanistan's security forces stands at the site where a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up in front of the Kabul Bank in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Saturday, April 18. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. The explosion killed at least 33 people and injured more than 100 others, a public health spokesman said.
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Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Iraqi counterterrorism forces patrol in Ramadi on April 18.
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Thousands of Iraqis cross a bridge over the Euphrates River to Baghdad as they flee Ramadi on Friday, April 17.
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Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Yazidis embrace after being released by ISIS south of Kirkuk, Iraq, on Wednesday, April 8. ISIS released more than 200 Yazidis, a minority group whose members were killed, captured and displaced when the Islamist terror organization overtook their towns in northern Iraq last summer, officials said.
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Kurdish Peshmerga forces help Yazidis as they arrive at a medical center in Altun Kupri, Iraq, on April 8.
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SAFIN HAMED/AFP/Getty Images
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A Yazidi woman mourns for the death of her husband and children by ISIS after being released south of Kirkuk on April 8. ISIS is known for killing dozens of people at a time and carrying out public executions, crucifixions and other acts.
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Feriq Ferec/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
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People in Tikrit inspect what used to be a palace of former President Saddam Hussein on April 3.
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Khalid Mohammed/AP
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On April 1, Shiite militiamen celebrate the retaking of Tikrit, which had been under ISIS control since June. The push into Tikrit came days after U.S.-led airstrikes targeted ISIS bases around the city.
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Iraqi security forces launch a rocket against ISIS positions in Tikrit on Monday, March 30.
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The parents of 19-year-old Mohammed Musallam react at the family's home in the East Jerusalem Jewish settlement of Neve Yaakov on Tuesday, March 10. ISIS released a video purportedly showing a young boy executing Musallam, an Israeli citizen of Palestinian descent who ISIS claimed infiltrated the group in Syria to spy for the Jewish state. Musallam's family told CNN that he had no ties with the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, and had, in fact, been recruited by ISIS.
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Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Iraqi Shiite fighters cover their ears as a rocket is launched during a clash with ISIS militants in the town of Al-Alam, Iraq, on Monday, March 9.
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Displaced Assyrian women who fled their homes due to ISIS attacks pray at a church on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, on Sunday, March 1. ISIS militants abducted at least 220 Assyrians in Syria.
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LOUAI BESHARA/AFP/Getty Images
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Safi al-Kasasbeh, right, receives condolences from tribal leaders at his home village near Karak, Jordan, on Wednesday, February 4. Al-Kasasbeh's son, Jordanian pilot Moath al-Kasasbeh, was burned alive in a video that was recently released by ISIS militants. Jordan is one of a handful of Middle Eastern nations taking part in the U.S.-led military coalition against ISIS.
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Nasser Nasser/AP
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
A Kurdish marksman looks over a destroyed area of Kobani on Friday, January 30, after the city had been liberated from the ISIS militant group. The Syrian city, also known as Ayn al-Arab, had been under assault by ISIS since mid-September.
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BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Kurdish people celebrate in Suruc, Turkey, near the Turkish-Syrian border, after ISIS militants were expelled from Kobani on Tuesday, January 27.
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BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images
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Collapsed buildings are seen in Kobani on January 27 after Kurdish forces took control of the town from ISIS.
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Rauf Maltas/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Junko Ishido, mother of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, reacts during a news conference in Tokyo on Friday, January 23. ISIS would later kill Goto and another Japanese hostage, Haruna Yukawa.
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Toru Hanai/Reuters/LANDOV
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
ISIS militants are seen through a rifle's scope during clashes with Peshmerga fighters in Mosul, Iraq, on Wednesday, January 21.
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Emrah Yorulmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
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An elderly Yazidi man arrives in Kirkuk after being released by ISIS on Saturday, January 17. The militant group released about 200 Yazidis who were held captive for five months in Iraq. Almost all of the freed prisoners were in poor health and bore signs of abuse and neglect, Kurdish officials said.
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Smoke billows behind an ISIS sign during an Iraqi military operation to regain control of the town of Sadiyah, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, on Tuesday, November 25.
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Fighters from the Free Syrian Army and the Kurdish People's Protection Units join forces to fight ISIS in Kobani on Wednesday, November 19.
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Jake Simkin/AP
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A picture taken from Turkey shows smoke rising after ISIS militants fired mortar shells toward an area controlled by Syrian Kurdish fighters near Kobani on Monday, November 3.
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Iraqi special forces search a house in Jurf al-Sakhar, Iraq, on Thursday, October 30, after retaking the area from ISIS.
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HAIDAR HAMDANI/AFP/Getty Images
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
ISIS militants stand near the site of an airstrike near the Turkey-Syria border on Thursday, October 23. The United States and several Arab nations have been bombing ISIS targets in Syria to take out the militant group's ability to command, train and resupply its fighters.
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BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Kurdish fighters walk to positions as they combat ISIS forces in Kobani on Sunday, October 19.
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Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Heavy smoke rises in Kobani following an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition on October 18.
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Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Cundi Minaz, a female Kurdish fighter, is buried in a cemetery in the southeastern Turkish town of Suruc on Tuesday, October 14. Minaz was reportedly killed during clashes with ISIS militants in nearby Kobani.
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Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Kiymet Ergun, a Syrian Kurd, celebrates in Mursitpinar, Turkey, after an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in Kobani on Monday, October 13.
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Lefteris Pitarakis/ap
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Alleged ISIS militants stand next to an ISIS flag atop a hill in Kobani on Monday, October 6.
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Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images
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A Kurdish Peshmerga soldier who was wounded in a battle with ISIS is wheeled to the Zakho Emergency Hospital in Duhuk, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 30.
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Hadi Mizban/AP
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Syrian Kurds wait near a border crossing in Suruc as they wait to return to their homes in Kobani on Sunday, September 28.
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MURAD SEZER/Reuters/Landov
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
A elderly man is carried after crossing the Syria-Turkey border near Suruc on Saturday, September 20.
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BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
A Kurdish Peshmerga fighter launches mortar shells toward ISIS militants in Zumar, Iraq, on Monday, September 15.
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AHMED JADALLAH/Reuters/Landov
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire at ISIS militant positions from their position on the top of Mount Zardak, east of Mosul, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 9.
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JM LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Displaced Iraqis receive clothes from a charity at a refugee camp near Feeshkhabour, Iraq, on Tuesday, August 19.
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Khalid Mohammed/AP
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Aziza Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, cries for her father while she and some other Yazidi people are flown to safety Monday, August 11, after a dramatic rescue operation at Iraq's Mount Sinjar. A CNN crew was on the flight, which took diapers, milk, water and food to the site where as many as 70,000 people were trapped by ISIS. But only a few of them were able to fly back on the helicopter with the Iraqi Air Force and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.
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Warzer Jaff/CNN
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Thousands of Yazidis are escorted to safety by Kurdish Peshmerga forces and a People's Protection Unit in Mosul on Saturday, August 9.
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Emrah Yorulmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Photos: The ISIS terror threat
Thousands of Yazidi and Christian people flee Mosul on Wednesday, August 6, after the latest wave of ISIS advances.
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Mustafa Kerim/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
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A Baiji oil refinery burns after an alleged ISIS attack in northern Selahaddin, Iraq, on Thursday, July 31.
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A Syrian rebel fighter lies on a stretcher at a makeshift hospital in Douma, Syria, on Wednesday, July 9. He was reportedly injured while fighting ISIS militants.
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Children stand next to a burnt vehicle during clashes between Iraqi security forces and ISIS militants in Mosul on Tuesday, June 10.
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The fact is, working stiffs with few opportunities and scant education are generally too busy getting by to engage in revolutionary projects to remake society. And history, in fact, shows us that terrorism is generally a bourgeois endeavor. This was just as true of the Russian anarchists of the late 19th century as it was of the German Marxists of the Baader-Meinhof gang of the 1970s and of the Japanese terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo in the 1990s.
Post-9/11 research demonstrating that Islamist terrorism is mostly a pursuit of the middle class echoed an important study about Egyptian militants that was undertaken by the French academic Gilles Kepel during the mid-1980s.
Kepel researched the 300 Islamist militants who were tried in the wake of the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Around one in five were professionals such as engineers, a quarter worked as government employees, just under half were artisans or merchants, one in 10 were in the military or police, and only one in 10 were farmers or were unemployed. Of those who were students, around a third were studying in the elite fields of medicine and engineering.
Similarly, the Library of Congress issued a study two years before the 9/11 attacks that asked the question: “Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?” The conclusion, based on a survey of all the published literature, was that there were only a few “major exceptions to the middle- and upper-class origins of terrorist groups.”
There are, of course any number of exceptions to the prototypical middle-class terrorist. The terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris last month and the Copenhagen café that was hosting the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks earlier this month were from the margins of society.
But for every example of poverty or lack of opportunities as a purported rationale for terrorism, it’s easy to supply important counterexamples. The “underwear bomber” Umar Abdulmuttalab, who tried to set off a bomb on a U.S. passenger jet flying over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, is the son of one of the richest men in Africa and attended University College London, which routinely rates among the best universities in the world.
Anwar al-Awlaki, the late leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who tasked the underwear bomber to blow up an American plane over an American city, was studying for his Ph.D. at George Washington University before he took up arms with al Qaeda. Awlaki’s father was a Cabinet minister in Yemen.
What drives terrorism?
So if it’s clearly not deprivation that is driving much Islamist terrorism, what is?
For that we must turn to ideology, specifically religious ideology. And this is where the Obama administration has to perform some pretzel logic. It is careful to explain that the war on ISIS is not a war on Islam and that ISIS’ ideology is a perversion of the religion. Fair enough. But the administration seems uncomfortable with making the connection between Islamist terrorism and ultra-fundamentalist forms of Islam that are intolerant of other religions and of other Muslims who don’t share their views to the letter.
ISIS may be a perversion of Islam, but Islamic it is, just as Christian beliefs about the sanctity of the unborn child explain why some Christian fundamentalists attack abortion clinics and doctors. But, of course, murderous Christian fundamentalists are not killing many thousands of civilians a year. More than 80% of the world’s terrorist attacks take place in five Muslim-majority countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria – and are largely carried out by groups with Islamist beliefs.
This week the United Nations released a report showing that civilian casualties in Afghanistan were at the highest level since the organization started counting them six years ago. The Taliban were responsible for three-quarters of these deaths.
The Taliban and other Islamist terrorist groups are not, of course, secular organizations. To treat them as if they were springs from some combination of wishful thinking, PC gone crazy and a failure to accept, in an increasingly secularized era, that some will kill in the name of their god, an all-too-common phenomenon across human history.
Indeed, while ISIS and like-minded groups and their fellow travelers are not representative of the vast majority of the world’s Muslims, their ideology is rooted in Salafist ultra-fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, and indeed they can point to verses in the Quran that can be interpreted to support their worldview.
A well-known verse in the Quran commands Muslims to “fight and slay the nonbelievers wherever you find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem [of war].” When bin Laden made a formal declaration of war against “the Jews and the Crusaders” in 1998, he cited this Quranic verse at the beginning of his declaration.
ISIS’ distinctive black flags are a reference to a supposed saying of the Prophet Mohammed that “If you see the black banners coming from the direction of Khorasan then go to them, even if you have to crawl, because among them will be Allah’s Caliph the Mahdi.”
In other words, coming out of Khorasan, an area that now encompasses Afghanistan, will come an army that includes the Mahdi, the Islamic savior of the world. The parent organization of ISIS was al Qaeda, which, of course, was headquartered in Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
Last year, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi named himself caliph, which means that in his own mind and in the eyes of his followers he is not only the leader of ISIS but the overall leader of Muslims everywhere.
These beliefs may seem like a crazy delusion to most of us, but it’s important to understand that they are theological in nature, and this theology is rooted in ultra-fundamentalist Islam.
ISIS sees itself as the vanguard army that is bringing back true Islam to the world. This project is of such cosmic importance that they will break any number of eggs to make this omelet, which accounts for their murderous campaign against every ethnic group, religious group and nationality that they perceive as standing in their way. ISIS recruits also believe that we are in the end times, and they are best understood as members of an Islamist apocalyptic death cult.
What does that mean for policy makers? It means that the only truly effective challenges to this reasoning must come from Islamic leaders and scholars who can make the theological case that ISIS is an aberration. This, too, is an Islamic project; it is not a jobs project.