It is a phenomenon that the West is trying to understand for itself — what can be done to reorient the thinking of many of its young men and women who are being drawn to extremist ideologies and are actually part of Islamist groups in West Asia?
At the same time, extremist ideologies and Islamist fighters belonging to the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda continue to hold out in various parts of the region. Yemen continues to be a battleground, with Saudi Arabia and its regional allies trying to reshape the country to fit their strategic vision.
For those living in the region, growth of Islamist outfits, their ability to recruit a large number of fighters and control territory, foreign intervention and state failures are obviously issues to address on a daily basis. A recent session on countering violent extremism at the December 15-16 Doha Forum threw up a range of reasons for Westerners being attracted to militant Islam and actually taking up arms to fight not just in West Asia but also in the West. It also focussed on devising innovative methods to combat the lure of groups like the IS and al-Qaeda.
Oomar Mulbocus, a U.K.-based counsellor, who works with people to understand and counter extremist trends, cited emotional imbalance, resilience of extremist theology and foreign policies of some actors to be among the drivers for young people to embrace extremist ideologies. “The bad guy has 10 solutions,” Mr. Mulbocus stated, pointing to the fact that the gaps in Western societies were being filled by the “bad guys”. According to him, extremist recruiters could “smell vulnerability” among potential recruits.
Local factors
Elisabeth Kendall, Senior Research Fellow, Arabic and Islamic Studies, at Oxford University, who has observed Islamist fighters in Yemen, pointed out that the reasons for recruitment were local. The concern of most respondents who joined militant ranks was issues like access to electricity and water, she felt. Speaking to The Hindu after the session, Ms. Kendall said she believed that there had been a decrease in militant activity in the region, but felt that groups like the IS were reformulating their strategy in a situation where they had lost ground in both Syria and Iraq.
At the Doha session, Anne Speckhard, director, International Centre for the Study of Violent Extremism, pointed out that videos featuring those who had defected or returned from groups like the IS and al-Qaeda were an effective tool in combating extremism.
The Centre’s website has many such videos. One of them features a Belgian national, once an IS member, speaking about how killing civilians is a crime. He is also disturbed by the executions carried out by the group.
It would seem that the psychological insights into why people join terrorist groups — in the region or in the West — are receiving the attention they deserve. Given the tumult in the region, including in Yemen, where there has been a violation of the country’s sovereignty by regional players without the sanction of the UN, it’s also evident that key nations have not learnt their lessons from the havoc caused in the past by Western policy. Regime changes in Iraq and Libya, backed by the U.S. and other Western nations and an attempted regime change in Syria, which have all spawned a myriad lot of Islamist and “rebel” groups, and the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, show that the rule book does not apply to the rich and the powerful. The failure of multilateralism and the continued resort to brute force has much to do with the rise of Islamist extremism in this part of the world. It is time the world recognised this.
Amit Baruah works for The Hindu and was recently in Qatar at an invitation from Doha Forum.
