AAPSS Annals - "'Homegrown' Terrorists: Theory and Cases in the War on Terror's Newest Front"

By Evan Kohlmann

I have published a new paper in the July 2008 issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS) titled "'Homegrown' Terrorists: Theory and Cases in the War on Terror's Newest Front." As I demonstrate in my paper, the realities of a globalized society now allow international terrorist organizations like al Qaeda to dramatically expand their potential reach by courting sympathizers in dark corners around the world and teaching them how they can best serve al Qaeda's interests—without necessarily visiting an actual military training camp or even speaking directly with al Qaeda. In fact, despite their somewhat haphazard outward appearance, homegrown terrorist cells often possess a remarkable shared connection through reliance on particular al Qaeda training manuals, audio and video recordings, and even Internet chat forums. While these young men (and, increasingly, women) may have no formal contact with any terrorist organization, they can become virtual partners of al Qaeda by carefully studying its online knowledge base and executing terrorist attacks against its enemies. Recent law enforcement investigations have uncovered a surprisingly sophisticated network of budding terrorist "entrepreneurs" lurking in a host of major cities across Europe and North America.

The paper is divided into sub-sections, in which I analyze both the methodology behind "homegrown terrorism", and actual case studies from homegrown terror networks disrupted within the past three years. It can be accessed via the Annals website.

Excerpts:

- "As noted by FBI Director Mueller, Irhaby 007 “taught not just the ideology, but the technology of terrorism” (Mueller 2007). His avid students included not only other budding homegrown terrorists, but even members of al Qaeda itself. In January 2005, another representative of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi sent secret online messages to Irhaby 007, pleading for help in producing new online multimedia projects—particularly an official e-magazine. He admitted, “As for the designs [for the magazine] . . . I can’t open them because I don’t have the program, so please let me have it. . . . Can I send you the magazine so that you can do the design work?” Impressed by his fluency in a host of languages, Irhaby 007 was further requested by al Qaeda to act as its liaison with a U.K.-based jihad support group known as “Tibyan Publications” and broker a deal with Tibyan to translate the proposed new e-magazine from Arabic into English."

- "Some observers have wrongly interpreted the phenomenon of homegrown terrorism and al Qaeda’s efforts to encourage it as proof that al Qaeda supposedly no longer exists as an organization—only as an ideology. To understand the coexistence of al Qaeda as both an organization and—separately—as an ideology, one need look no further than a comparison of the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings (which were directly organized and orchestrated by al Qaeda) versus the subsequent failed July 21 suicide bombings only two weeks later (which were the work of “homegrown” al Qaeda sympathizers). While neither cell likely knew about the existence of the other prior to July 7, the only significant difference between these two incidents was in the quality of their explosives. Unfortunately, the raw intent to kill is sometimes sufficient on its own to end in disaster. When a group of homegrown extremists failed in their bid to detonate several car bombs in June 2007 outside a London nightclub, several members of the cell set off on a spontaneous suicide mission; they crashed a Jeep Cherokee packed with propane canisters into the main terminal of the Glasgow International Airport, but miraculously left no casualties other than themselves. Next time, we may not be so lucky."

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