Militants often call each other “brother”, and refer collectively to the “brothers” in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq or France. Why?
Partly this is to indicate solidarity, attachment to a common cause, a sense of shared identity and endeavour. Partly it’s because that’s how young men speak, all over the world, but particularly in the kind of environments from which many contemporary militants come.
But it is also because, remarkably often, the term is entirely accurate. Those speaking of being “brothers” are indeed blood relatives, children of the same parents, who often grew up together.
The Paris attackers are reported to have included Ibrahim Abdeslam – a suicide bomber who blew himself up outside the Comptoir Voltaire restaurant – and Salah Abdeslam, who is on the run. A third brother, Mohammed, was reportedly arrested in the Brussels neighbourhood of Molenbeek while returning from Paris and reports differ as to whether he has been released.
Abdel-Hamid Abu Oud, the suspected mastermind of the attacks, recruited his own 13-year-old brother, who travelled to Syria and then was seen in a video in a pickup truck dragging bodies of Syrian army soldiers. And this is all within one – albeit complex – plot.
There are many other examples, in different countries, on different continents:the two Kouachis who attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices in January. The Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the 2013 Boston Marathon. The brother of Mohammed Merah, who killed seven in south-west France in 2012, remains jailed, although his role in the murders and the radicalisation of the perpetrator is not entirely clear.
Fraternal ties are also common among those who travel to Syria, Iraq or other war zones, even if they do not turn to terrorism at home. Few travel alone: almost all make the journey with close friends or family members. Three brothers aged 17 to 21, from Brighton, left the UK to join al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaida affiliate, in Syria. There was Aseel Muthana, a 17-year-old schoolboy who travelled with his elder brother, a medical student, to join Isis. In October, a British court found that two brothers of Iftekhar Jaman, who spoke of “five-star jihad” on the BBC, had spent two years giving help and advice to people seeking to travel to Syria to establish an Islamic state. Both were convicted of terrorist offences.
This may be a brother, or it may be a father. Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, a British aspiring rapper turned Isis recruit, is the son of Adel Abdel Bary, an Egyptian militant who came to the UK in 1991 and was later convicted in New York for his role in al–Qaida’s attack on US embassies in east Africa in 1998. In the UK more recently, along with siblings, parents of jihadis have been detained and some charged with Syria-related offences.This vision of “jihad by family” may be shocking, but it should not be surprising. Ten years ago, US military intelligence officials in Iraqi identified having a close family member already involved as the greatest predictor of an individual becoming involved in violent militancy, Islamic or otherwise.
Research by New America, a nonpartisan thinktank in the United States, showed that more than a quarter of western fighters have a familial connection to jihad, whether through relatives who are also fighting in Syria and Iraq, through marriage or through some link to other jihads or terrorist attacks.
The research also found that of those western fighters with familial ties to jihad,three-fifths had a relative who has also left for Syria.
Another recent study, at Pennsylvania State University, examined the interactions of 120 supposed “lone wolf” terrorists from all ideological and faith backgrounds, and found that, even though they launched their attacks alone, in a large majority of the cases others were aware of the individual’s commitment to a specific extremist ideology. In an astonishing 64% of cases, family and friends were aware of the individual’s intent to engage in a terrorism-related activitybecause the offender verbally told them.
All this offers an important window into the nature of recruitment and radicalisation. Both are often understood to be processes which involve someone who is previously “normal” being “brainwashed” by some outside influence that turns them into someone who behaves abnormally. An alternative explanation for how people are drawn into militancy blames propaganda, via the internet.
The facts, however, contradict this. Terrorism, like any activism, is highly social, only its consequences are exceptional. People become interested in ideas, ideologies and activities, even appallingly destructive ones, because other people are interested in them.
“Recruitment is basically by peers. It is kinship and friendship which really matter, much more than religion or locality or whatever else. There is a strong group phenomenon,” said Dr Rik Coolsaet, a Belgian expert who has studied local militant networks in the country.
The psychological and social barriers to involvement in violence are certainly higher than in other less nefarious activities, but the mechanics of the process that draws people into them are the same.
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