Victory in the US is difficult without victory abroad. The Islamic State will have to be demonstrably defeated on its home ground for its glamourisation to end. Without this, even the most serious efforts will fail
The serious terrorism threat facing the United States was once again underlined on July 16, when a Kuwait-born gunman, Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, killed four US marines and injured three persons at Chattanooga, Tennessee. It came a little more than two years after April 15, 2013, when two bomb blasts near the finishing line of the Boston Marathon, killed three persons and injured 264. On November 5, 2009, Major Nidal Hasan went on a shooting rampage at a military facility at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 and wounding 32. Even earlier, on February 26, 1993, a truck bomb explosion at the underground parking facility under the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, killed six people and injured around a thousand.
Though few and spread out in time, these incidents warrant serious attention: The last three occurred despite the slew of measures that followed the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, which killed over 2,900 persons. These included the enactment of the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Act, Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, and the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Act, which amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shifted its directive from law enforcement to terrorism prevention — returning (to) the emphasis on proactive domestic surveillance. local police establishments went for the adoption of ‘intelligence-led policing’ stressing future-oriented, risk-based intelligence.
In fact, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, appointed by President George Bush after the outrage, said in its report, “Countering terrorism has become, beyond any doubt, the top national security priority of the United States. This shift has occurred with the full support of the Congress, both major political parties, the media, and the American people.”
Yet, chinks remain. A New York-based Council for Foreign Relations’ backgrounder, Militant Extremists in the United States, by Jonathan Masters, quotes Code of Federal Regulations’s Richard Falkenrath, as saying, “The federal Government has a quite limited domestic intelligence programme and capability. The Government does not have an unfettered right to collect information on Americans. It’s a very complicated legal and executive order framework, which governs when and how the Government can collect information of potential threats domestically.”
The enactment on June 2 of the US Freedom Act, which replaces the US National Security Agency’s bulk phone-records collection programme with a more restrictive measure that will keep the records in the hands of phone companies, has once again focused on the trade-off between national security and citizen’s right to privacy. According to a report, an independent analysis of hundreds of terrorism cases in the US revealed that the NSA’s collection of phone records has had no distinguishable impact on preventing terrorist acts. On the other hand, senior Government officials had told the US Congress’s House Intelligence Committee in 2013 that The US Government’s sweeping surveillance programmes had disrupted more than 50 terrorist plots in the United States and abroad, including a plan to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.
The question of intelligence gathering has become especially important because white supremacists and other Right-wing elements, whose latest act of violence was the killing of nine African-Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, pose a more serious threat than the jihadists. According to a dispatch by Scott Shane in The New York Times of June 24, 48 persons have been killed by non-Muslim terrorists — mostly white supremacist and Right-wing elements — in the US against 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, since September 11, 2001.
A pertinent question in the present context is whether Abdulazeez was a ‘lone wolf’, an expression which, according to an FBI report on terrorism, stands for individuals “who commit acts of violence outside of the auspices of structured terrorist organisations or without the prior approval or knowledge of these groups’ leaders.” A US Department of Homeland Security study found that attacks by such individuals constituted one-third of all extremist acts of violence since 1995 against just 6.5 percent in the 25 years prior.
Attacks by these individuals, which especially concerns the FBI because they are hard to detect, are set to rise as White supremacists and other Right-wingers increasingly resent the growing salience of Hispanics and non-whites in the US’s life. Equally, Islamist militants are likely to increase their attacks as the Islamic State, under heavy aerial strikes by America and its allies, seeks to retaliate inside the US.
Further, the number of ‘lone wolf’ terrorists may well increase given the effectiveness of online propaganda by the IS and Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Nidal Hasan had been influenced by Anwar al-Awlaki, ideologue and recruiter of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who was subsequently killed in an American drone strike. The effectiveness of online propaganda explains why an increasing number of young Muslims from the West are travelling to North Africa and West Asia to join organisations like the Islamic State and Al Shabaab.
According to an intelligence estimate in 2014, more than 100 of the IS’s foreign fighters were American, 500 British. One reason for this is a search for an identity, which, for them, is that of a poor migrant at home. The IS gives them the glamourised identity of a militant jihadi. The other is the search for a sense of belonging which they lack in the US and the West. A CNN report by Ben Brumfield quotes Richard Barrett of the strategic intelligence service provider Soufan Group, as saying, “The general picture provided by foreign fighters of their lives in Syria suggests camaraderie, good morale and purposeful activity, all mixed in with a sense of understated heroism, designed to attract their friends as well as to boost their own self-esteem.”
Countering the IS’s appeal and propaganda will be difficult without removing the causes of the alienation both feed on. This will not be easy. Also, the IS’s robust survival despite aerial strikes by the US and allied forces and their support to Iraqi, Peshmerga and other forces hostile to it, is helping it to project itself as a gallant fighting force, triumphing over heavy odds and out to establish sharia’h rule the world over. Affiliation to it helps marginalised young persons, oppressed by a sense of their own irrelevance and insignificance, to project themselves as valiant jihadis on cyberspace.
The IS will have to be demonstrably defeated on its home ground for its glamourisation to end. Without this, even the most serious efforts will fail its influence from growing within the US.hiranmay