Political Concepts

The Terrorism Myth

For European authorities, Syria is now officially the forbidden conflict. This narrative, of Muslims in Europe fighting in Syria has become very pronounced in recent weeks. The threat foreign fighters currently fighting in Syria will pose, when they return home is being debated in national news channels in Europe and many reports and analysis have focused on the numbers going to fight how they will return battle hardned and will likely commit acts of terror on European shores. UK Prime Minister David Cameron said: “We are very concerned as a government and as a country about the threat of terrorism coming out of Syria. And so what we are doing is trying to prevent people from travelling there.”[1] Since the beginning of 2014 European governments have gone to great lengths to criminalise all those who participate in Syria. On closer inspection much of these reports follow a political narrative and are built upon scaremongering rather than actual facts. Assessing the threat of fighters returning from any conflict poses various challenges, but acts of terror remain a small threat at most.

The return of foreign fighters from war zones is not a new phenomenon. Thousands of Muslims received training at camps in Pakistan following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and thousands more received training at camps in Afghanistan between the Soviet withdrawal and the US invasion in 2001. It is believed that at least 20,000 foreign fighters cycled through Afghanistan between 1979 and 2001. Al Qaeda emerged from among these fighters, and the current al Qaeda leadership, including Ayman al-Zawahiri have their roots in the struggle in Afghanistan. Numerous Muslims went to fight in Afghanistan and Bosnia in the late 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s and not a single one of them came back to Europe and committed acts of terror.

Many Muslims went to both Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight following the US invasion. Western intelligence services believed some travelled from Europe to participate. There were also significant numbers of Muslims involved in the first Chechnya War from 1994-1996 and Bosnia from 1992-1995 but these numbers were far lower than those in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, many Muslims traveled to Chechnya and Bosnia to fight Jihad to protect the Ummah who were being slaughtered rather than traveling there to establish the Khilafah. An even smaller number of Muslims have also fought in Libya, Somalia, Mali and elsewhere. Yet despite the tens of thousands of Muslims who have fought in these various conflicts since the 1970s, only a very small percentage have returned to their countries of origin to conduct terrorist attacks. The reason for this was outlined by Stratfor: “One important reason for this is ideology. While many Muslims feel compelled to travel to places like Syria to fight, many of those who do so are not jihadists. Furthermore, there are also differences among those who hold jihadist beliefs. For example, even among the jihadists there are many who believe it is religiously permissible to travel to a place such as Syria or Iraq to fight for Muslims who are being oppressed or attacked (defensive jihad), or who they see as being locked in an internal sectarian fight in Syria, but who do not believe it is permissible to conduct terrorist attacks against civilians outside of such theaters of war. Such people have no qualms about killing armed combatants in a war zone, but they believe that Islam clearly prohibits attacks against noncombatants.”[2]

The narrative coming from the not just Europe but the West is these fighters will receive training in foreign camps and once the conflict is over these skills will be used on the non-Muslims in the West. However the training such individuals receive is not conventional training but the skills needed by a guerrilla fighter in a war zone. These include things such as physical fitness, some hand-to-hand combat and the use of small arms, assault rifles, hand grenades and pistols. Very few fighters ever receive advanced training in the types of skills required to successfully conduct a major terrorist attack. This is because one would need to be trained in terrorism tradecraft which is usually the realm of conventional armies and would include skills such as obtaining fraudulent travel documents, clandestine communications, weapons procurement, bomb-making, surveillance, etc. Most foreign fighters who travel to various theaters to fight are provided with very rudimentary training. In fact the al Qaeda core leadership has for long made the point to its members to conduct simple attacks within their capabilities for what they have been trained for. In the UK specifically there have been 12 terrorism plots, after 9/11. Out of the 66 individuals involved in those only 2 of them had fought in a conflict previously, but both of them had done nothing in the UK, with their experience in Bosnia until the War On Terror was born in the West. The other 64 only went abroad due to the foreign policy of Britain and this political grievance drove them to get training.[3]

The fact remains that terrorism, the use of terror or violence is a tactic utilised by a wide array of individuals, groups and states and something that has existed throughout history. Terrorism did not come into existence on September 11 2001. Terror or violence transcends across various fault lines and there is no single creed, ethnicity, political persuasion or nationality with a monopoly on terrorism. Individuals and groups of individuals from almost every conceivable background from late Victorian-era anarchists, tribal clansmen to North Korean intelligence officers – have conducted terrorist attacks. Muslims however remain miniscule players in the terror league table.

Official data from Europol, which releases an annual terrorism report EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report (TE-SAT), shows that in 2006, 2007, and 2008 only 0.4% of terrorist attacks in the European Union were committed by Muslims. In 2009 and 2010 there were a total of 543 terrorist attacks, of which only 4 were committed by Muslims. This means that only 0.7% of terrorist attacks (again, less than 1%) were committed by Muslims. At the same time separatist groups in Europe committed 397 terrorist attacks, or 73% of terrorist attacks overall. In other words, separatist groups committed 99.2 times (nearly 100 times) more terrorist attacks than Muslims. The reality is terrorism is a relatively minor threat to most people wherever they are in the world, especially America. The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) in its report: ‘9/11, ten years later,’ noted, excluding the 9/11 atrocities, fewer than 500 people died in the US from terrorist attacks between 1970 and 2010.[4] Since 9/11, a total of 238 American citizens died from terrorist attacks. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the average American is as likely to be crushed to death by televisions or furniture as they are to be killed by a terrorist.[5] Whether Europe or the US more people die every year in car accidents, drown in a bathtub, die in a building fire and are struck by lightning then in a terrorist attack.[6]

In conclusion terrorism as a tactic is a relatively minor threat to Europe and the West as a whole. There is more chance of being struck by lightning then a being killed by a Muslim retuning from conflict zone. Muslims returning from conflict zones to Europe is not a new phenomenon and is something that has taken place since the late 1970’s, attacks and plots in Europe started after the War On Terror began rather than fighters merely returning home. It is not only European authorities but the proliferation of 24-hour television news networks and Internet news sites have all magnified this relatively minor threat. The need to fill the airwaves and compete with a plethora of channels has led to bad reporting and misunderstanding that has hyped terror. The outlandish and startling terrorism stories have led to the audience to become impacted by the propaganda leading to the deed becoming far larger than it really is. On September 11, 2001, millions of people in the US and around the world watched live as the World Trade Centre, came crashing down and people leapt to their deaths to escape the raging fires. Watching this sequence of events in real time profoundly affected many people. Such theatrical attacks exert hold over the human imagination. The sense of terror they create can dwarf the reaction to natural disasters many times greater in magnitude. For example and without belittling any deaths, more than 227,000 people died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami compared to fewer than 3,000 people on 9/11. Yet the 9/11 attacks spawned a global sense of terror and a geopolitical reaction that has had a profound and unparalleled impact upon world events over the past decade.

Adnan Khan

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27131707 

[2] http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/assessing-threat-jihadists-returning-syria#ixzz2zwrtiB00 

[3] http://youtu.be/NvAnhFDkiuo 

[4] http://www.start.umd.edu/start/announcements/BackgroundReport_10YearsSince9_11.pdf 

[5] http://www.cpsc.gov/PageFiles/108985/tipover2011.pdf 

[6] http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm