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Volume X, Issue 1 February 2016 PERSPECTIVES on TERRORISM Volume 10, Issue 1 ISSN 2334-3745 Volume X, Issue 1 February 2016 PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM Volume 10, Issue 1 Table of Contents Welcome from the Editor 1 I. Articles Who are the Bangladeshi ‘Islamist Militants’? 2 by Ali Riaz Why is Contemporary Religious Terrorism Predominantly Linked to Islam? Four Possible Psychosocial Factors 19 by Joshua D. Wright How Dangerous Are Domestic Terror Plotters with Foreign Fighter Experience? The Case of Homegrown Jihadis in the US 32 by Christopher J. Wright The Nature of Nigeria’s Boko Haram War, 2010-2015: A Strategic Analysis 41 by James Adewunmi Falode II. Interview In Conversation with Morten Storm: A Double Agent’s Journey into the Global Jihad 53 Interviewed by Stefano Bonino III. Research Note If Publicity is the Oxygen of Terrorism – Why Do Terrorists Kill Journalists? 65 by François Lopez IV. Resources Counting Lives Lost – Monitoring Camera-Recorded Extrajudicial Executions by the “Islamic State” 78 by Judith Tinnes Bibliography: Northern Ireland Conflict (The Troubles) 83 Compiled and selected by Judith Tinnes V. Book Reviews Michael Morell. The Great War of our Time. The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism, from Al Qa’ida to ISIS. New York: Twelve, 2015; 362 pp.; US $ 28.00. ISBN 978-1-4555-8566-3. 111 Reviewed by Brian Glyn Williams ISSN 2334-3745 i February 2016 PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM Volume 10, Issue 1 Counterterrorism Bookshelf: Twenty New Publications on Israeli & Palestinian Issues 114 Reviewed by Joshua Sinai VI. Notes from the Editor TRI Award for Best PhD Thesis 2015: Deadline of 31 March 2016 for Submissions Approaching 126 About Perspectives on Terrorism 127 ISSN 2334-3745 ii February 2016 PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM Volume 10, Issue 1 Welcome from the Editor Dear Reader, We are pleased to announce the release of Volume X, Issue 1 (February 2016) of Perspectives on Terrorism at www.terrorismanalysts.com. Our free online journal is a joint publication of the Terrorism Research Initiative (TRI), headquartered in Vienna (Austria), and the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies (CTSS), headquartered at the Lowell Campus of the University of Massachusetts (United States). Now entering its tenth year, Perspectives on Terrorism has, by the latest count, 6,117 regular subscribers and many more occasional readers and visitors worldwide. The Articles of its six annual issues are fully peer- reviewed by external referees while Research Notes and other content are subject to review by the Editorial Team. This issue features four Articles. The first consists of an effort to profile Islamist militants in Bangladesh by Ali Riaz. He finds that many of them have a middle class and university background rather than coming from madrassahs. The second article by Joshua Wright explores why most religious terrorism is linked to Islam rather than to other religions. Then Christopher Wright looks at the threat emanating from foreign fighters returning to the United States, comparing them with homegrown jihadis who never went abroad. In the last article, James Adewunmi Falode looks at the kind of hybrid war Boko Haram has fought over the last five years in Nigeria, making it as deadly as the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The four articles are followed by an Interview Stefano Bonino had with Morten Storm, the Danish convert to Islam who gained the confidence of Al Qaeda but suddenly lost faith in his new religion after he searched online for ‘contradictions in the Koran’ and found hundreds of them. He immediately lost faith in Islam and soon thereafter began to work for Western intelligence services. The interview provides a fascinating account of radicalisation and de-radicalisation. This issue of our journal continues with a Research Note by François Lopez that explores whether ‘old’ and ‘new’ terrorism treat the media that give them the ‘oxygen of publicity’ in different ways. The Resources section introduces ‘Counting Lives Lost’–the monitoring of the Islamic State’s extrajudicial executions by Judith Tinnes. It also features from her hand another extensive bibliography, this time on the most researched terrorists in the world, those in Northern Ireland. The Book Reviews section features a review by Brian Williams of Michael Morell’s surprisingly frank memoirs on how the CIA fought Al Qaeda and ISIS. Our regular book reviews editor, Joshua Sinai, introduces twenty books on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Finally, the editor reminds PhD thesis writers and their supervisors that the deadline for submitting doctoral dissertations completed or defended last year for TRI’s Best Thesis Award 2015 is only one month away. This issue of Perspectives on Terrorism was prepared in the European offices of the Terrorism Research Initiative by the editor-in-chief. The April issue (PT X 2) will be prepared by the co-editor, Prof. James Forest, at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Sincerely, Prof. em. Alex P. Schmid Editor-in-Chief ISSN 2334-3745 1 February 2016 PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM Volume 10, Issue 1 I. Articles Who are the Bangladeshi ‘Islamist Militants’? by Ali Riaz Abstract Bangladesh has attracted international media attention for heightened militant activities in 2015, particularly after a series of killings of bloggers by a local militant group allegedly associated with Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and after murders of foreign nationals, responsibility of which was claimed by the Islamic State (IS). Islamist militant groups in Bangladesh which emerged in the 1990s have undergone several transformations. Originally grown out of the volunteers who joined the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, these groups have since then taken different shapes. Since the 1990s, five ‘generations’ of militant groups appeared on the scene. In some measures, the militant groups have come full circle: they began as a result of a global agenda fighting an ‘atheist’ Communist system (war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan) to now being part of establishing a global ‘khilafat’ (by joining the IS in Syria and Iraq) via pursuing a circumscribed local agenda for a period in the early 2000s. Despite such transformations, very little is known about the Bangladeshi militants. This article attempts to address this lacuna by examining the socio-demographic profile of Bangladeshi militants arrested between July 2014 and June 2015. The findings reveal a significant diversity among the militants. Contrary to public perceptions in Bangladesh, significant numbers of militants are well-educated and come from a middle class background. Keywords: Bangladesh; Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS); Islamists militants;profiles. Introduction here has been a significant increase in militant activities in Bangladesh in recent years, particularly in 2015. Both Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and the Islamic State (IS) have claimed their presence in the country. The Ansar al Islam (also known as the Ansarullah Bangla Team, ABT) Tclaimed to be the Bangladesh unit of the India-based militant group AQIS and has taken responsibility for the murders of four self-proclaimed atheist bloggers and the publisher of one of the atheist blogger’s book. [1] In a video posted online on 2 May 2015, titled “From France to Bangladesh: The Dust Will Never Settle Down”, AQIS claimed responsibility for six targeted killings in Bangladesh and Pakistan.[2] Additionally, between September and November, there were a total of fourteen attacks allegedly carried out by individuals or groups that claim to be followers of the Islamic State. These attacks have included the murder of two foreigners (and seriously injuring two others, shootings and bomb blasts at Shiite gatherings, attacks on other minority religious personalities, and death threats to missionaries.[3] Not only were the murders of foreign nationals claimed by a militant group unprecedented in the history of the country, but so were the brazen attacks on the Shi’a community in October and November 2015. It was reported by the SITE intelligence group that the IS claimed responsibility for these attacks immediately following the attacks. These claims were reiterated in the IS’s propaganda magazine named Dabiq (issue 12, Safar 1437), published in November.[4] The magazine also claimed that disparate militant groups in Bangladesh have come under the leadership of a proscribed militant organization named the Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). These incidents have been widely covered in global media and have stoked the fear that international terrorist groups, particularly the IS, have gained a foothold in the third largest Muslim majority country of the world. ISSN 2334-3745 2 February 2016 PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM Volume 10, Issue 1 Since 2013 government officials, including security and intelligence officials, have repeatedly claimed that they had arrested the “chief,” “recruiter,” or several “members” of IS and presented these actions as evidence of their success in addressing militancy. However, they abruptly changed their tune soon after the murders of the foreigners in September and October. Since then they have denied the presence of the IS in Bangladesh. Instead, the government has accused the opposition, particularly the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) for these attacks. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina blamed the opposition for conspiring to tarnish the government’s reputation.[5] She also suggested that militants might be carrying out attacks in retaliation for the war crime trials (i.e., trials conducted by the International Criminal Tribunal established by the
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