Abstract

In this new series of monthly podcasts, Dr Alessandro Arduino and Dr Ameem Lutfi invite eminent speakers to share what they see in the future of warfare, as well as the transformation and transition of security architecture in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. Through these podcasts, we will observe how uniformed soldiers, or boots on the ground, are being replaced by private military companies and automated weapons, and will also notice a shift in the theatres of war, from territorial borderlands to shared oceans, air and cyberspace.

In this podcast, Mr Raffaello Pantucci will talk about the risks and threats posed by returning foreign fighters.

Listen to the full podcast here:

Full Transcript:

Ameem: Welcome to the fourth episode of the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute’s podcast series “Boots Off the Ground: Security in Transition from the Middle East and Beyond”. In this series, we look at the future of warfare which will see uniformed soldiers, or boots off the ground, being replaced by private military companies, autonomous weapon systems and cyber weapons. My name is Ameem Lutfi and I will be the co-host for the series along with my colleague Alessandro Arduino.

Alex: Thank you Ameem. We are very glad to have with us today Mr Raffaello Pantucci. Mr Pantucci is a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, and now he’s a visiting senior fellow at the Nanyang Technology University here in Singapore at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He has written extensively on terrorism and counterterrorism, as well as China’s relations with its western neighbours.

Raffaello, you wrote a book, We Love Death As You Love Life: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists, that was well-received by the public and academia. Thank you for being here with us today. We are looking forward to getting deeper into your book and your insight on the matter.

Ameem: Thank you again for joining us today, Raffaello. To kick start our conversation, I want to ask you a question about a terminology that’s always been at the back of my mind: how we often use the term “jihadi” or “radical extremist” as a catch-all category for a certain group of people. However, at times, when we use these terms, we lump together very different actors into one category.

So a veteran going from Chechnya to Afghanistan to Syria would be a jihadi, right? But so would a suburban Muslim from England that you talk about in your book. Similarly, a teenager who graduated from a madrasah in a village in Baluchistan who saw joining a military organisation as his only means of employment would also be considered an Islamic extremist, alongside a lone wolf character from New York.

Do you think we need to study these different kinds of actors who come with very different motivations and are produced in very different contexts, on their own terms, or is there value in bringing them together under a catch-all category of jihadi, or extremists, as one group?

Raffaello: Well, thank you for the question, and thank you again, both of you and MEI for the invitation to come and talk to you today. I think it’s an interesting question. Definitional questions are something that academics love, many, many hours of conferences, meetings and books have been used to define issues in some way.

The way I would look at it is that the term jihadi, or violent Islamist extremist, is one that provides a useful catch-all for that broad basket of people that you mentioned because the one thing that runs through all of these individuals, or the particular ones that you identified, is that they all self-identify with being part of a movement that the rest of us would look at as a kind of violent jihadist or Salafi jihadists or whatever sort of term you prefer.

Where the confusion maybe comes in these days is that if we look at some of the individual cases, it’s very clear that they are worlds apart from one other. For example, we look at the case of Omar Mateen, in Orlando, who appears to be a very troubled young Afghan man who went on a shooting rampage in a gay nightclub. There’s been all sorts of speculation about exactly what motivated him. In talking about his attack, he described himself as pledging allegiance to both Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, groups that are opposed to each other. So you’re looking at an individual who’s quite confused, understanding exactly what his motivation was is quite difficult in itself, and it gets even harder when held up against, as you pointed out, a motivated individual who goes off to fight in Syria against the Assad regime.

I think what drives them all is that they all self-identify as being members of this particular ideology, so I think from a discursive perspective, it is useful to at least use this term, in particular, because this term helps define them against maybe an extreme right-wing terrorist or one of these new groups with these new movements we’ve seen emerging like involuntary celibates. So, in those cases, you’ve got attacks, terrorist attacks, happening that look a lot like some of the violent Islamist attacks, but the kind of underlying ideology that’s motivating the individual is different. So I think that’s why these terms are useful in terms of putting these people broadly into a basket, where they self-identify in terms of the attack, the reasons or the ideology that they’re connecting their attack to.

Alex: Raffaello, just to follow up on that, as you know, our podcast is focused on private militaries, mercenaries and private security companies, and as we mentioned before, the first type of jihadi, a seasoned fighter looking for a job, to me sounds very similar to mercenaries. Is that a fair assessment in your opinion? And do you think that in the near future, we might see more organised Islamist private military companies? Something like the Malhama Tactical group that’s been spawned?

Raffaello: Actually, I’m not entirely sure I’d agree with the similarity in a way, because I think that if we think about the people who are mercenaries working for private military companies that we talk about today, yeah, these people are motivated purely by money. And it goes back to the mercenaries that we saw rampaging around Europe in mediaeval times. We had armies of Swiss Guards who were hired by whoever showed up with the biggest pay cheque. And you still see people like this on battlefields, but I think when we talk about people who are would-be terrorists or jihadis or Salafi jihadis, we are talking about people who are motivated by ideology. And it’s the ideology which is driving them to be involved in this activity rather than purely the pay cheque.

Now, I think where this line may start to get a little confused are in cases like Malhama Tactical. But I would argue that I’m not sure that Malhama Tactical diverges from a trend that we’ve seen before in jihadist activity, whereby you do have militant groups. We saw this a lot in Afghanistan, we’ve seen it in Pakistan as well and I think we’ve seen it before that even in Yemen and other places, where essentially, these militant groups run camps that people can come to and people can train at or people, in the case of Malhama Tactical, can fight on battlefields and provide training for people on the battlefields. Because I think while there is an element of payment happening here, in some cases, the individuals who were taking this training weren’t actually that motivated. Certainly, if we went back and looked at some of the people who were drawn to Afghanistan, there was a whole phenomenon of jihadi tourism, right, where you had these young men, who were looking to have an exciting adventure at a training camp with some mates, then they would go there and pay their fees to go to the camp, and then they sort of went home and they said: “Oh, I went to jihad.” They didn’t actually go to jihad, they went to a jihadi training camp in Afghanistan or something but they didn’t necessarily ever, really fight against someone. So that kind of phenomenon, those individuals, their motivations were really about thinking that they were linking up with the ideology.

I think even if you look at some of the sorts of groups, Malhama Tactical is a very good example of this, in some of the work that I know you’ve done on this subject, the group is always fighting or training people who are of a certain ideology and mindset. They may be taking payment to do this training, but it’s kind of a subsistence payment, it’s not a profit payment. It’s not like they’re generating vast income here, that is then going to Swiss bank accounts and making people very rich. They’re doing it to ultimately help enable themselves to train more people to generate more income, to be able to continue the fight ultimately, and in Malhama Tactical’s case, against the Assad regime. So I’m not sure that it’s the same as, the private military companies (PMCs) that you’d see Erik Prince running, where you are dealing with very much more a private enterprise, which is essentially trying to turn war into a for-profit operation. So, I think there’s a distinction to be drawn between those two.

Ameem: If I could just keep this conversation going, one of the questions that come to my mind is even when I think of some of these other private military companies, you would have examples of a large portion of the people who join them having a certain white nationalist ideology, right? So would you say that having those kinds of ideologies, and some data to back this up as well with that, or even let’s say, if you have humanitarianism as an ideological outlook on the world or liberalism as an outlook on the world, does that take away from the fact that you’re, at the base, a paid soldier? So would you say that there’s something particularly different about Islam or Islamic ideologies that sets them apart from the other groups of mercenaries that we were talking about earlier?

Raffaello: Well yes, but I think that if any group that is providing some sort of training or providing an opportunity for people to come and fight alongside them for money, but ultimately is motivated by the ideology rather than money, is a terrorist group or can be a terrorist group. And that is a different kind of entity to a private security company, which is winning contracts from the Department of Defence of the United States or whichever other government, and is being motivated to conduct its military activity solely at the bidding of that nation-state.

I think the point is that when we’re thinking about this kind of privatisation of jihad or privatisation of militancy, it is slightly different because there is still a kind of an ideological thread that will tie these people together. If you go back to the 1970s for example, there’s an interesting phenomenon that we saw happening with groups like the Baader-Meinhof Group or the many leftists that were running around Europe at the time, who would go and train in Yemen alongside Yemeni left-leaning groups, but they were also kind of more motivated by the conflict that’s happening in the country who were also providing training for people like, you know, Carlos the jackal and his groups, and were also providing for Palestinian fighters at the same time. And so you ended up having a kind of agglomeration of people who were all, broadly speaking, kind of anti-establishment and were all, broadly speaking, kind of leftist-ish. But you know, in some cases, these people were paying fees to be at the camps to then ultimately continue their struggles back home.

Now, what’s interesting about it, of course, is that this kind of model, which ultimately, for the host, provides an income stream, still requires everyone to be broadly pushing in the same direction. But it then does also throw out some interesting connections and links, which is again, very similar to what we’ve seen happen off jihadist battlefields, or any foreign fighter battlefield where you’ve got lots of these foreign fighters mobilising together, which is that by being there together, you kind of create all sorts of connections and ultimately, it throws up attacks later, which kind of go in different directions.

So you know, the Palestinian cause and the cause of the leftists in Europe became very close. And we saw all sorts of attacks happening, where they were kind of feeding off each other or supporting each other and in part, I suspect, that was a result of the fact that they’d all trained together and got to know each other at these camps that were being run. So, you know, all of that has a kind of ideological underpinning to it, which again, is very different to what we’re seeing in, as I said, private security companies that are doing this for a purely commercial enterprise.

Alex: Raffaello, if I could ask a question about another area of expertise of yours: linking the Middle East, Central Asia and China. Can you tell us a bit more about China’s approach to combating terror, both at home and on their sites and personnel abroad? Is China simply mimicking Europe and the US in this fight against terror? Or do you see them doing something different? And by doing something differently, I am especially looking at the role of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) as CEO and the menace of terrorism in Central Asia.

Raffaello: Thank you, a question, as you know, that is very close to my interest. I’ll start with the SCO because I think the SCO is kind of a good example in some ways of China’s external instrumentalisation of terrorism as a narrative to create a kind of mobilising structure to bring people together. And if we think about the SCO, the interesting thing about the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is that from the beginning of its creation in 2001, before that it was the Shanghai Five, it was really about defining China’s borders with what was the former Soviet Union. The one thing that we saw them all gathering around at that time was the idea of counterterrorism.

When they emerged as an entity and as Uzbekistan joined the initial Shanghai Five of Russia, China, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in 2001, you know, the first thing that they did was create something called a regional anti-terrorism structure, which was housed in Tashkent and was intended to be a kind of entity for them all to think about countering terrorism in the region together. It, of course, got a very unfortunate acronym of Rats, which, as a Russian diplomat once said to me, is the problem you get when there are no native English speakers in the room.

But the key thing about it was that terrorism became an issue that all of the parties who joined the SCO in the first place kind of agreed on. These were all ultimately authoritarian states, one-party states, which believed that any sort of threat or group that was kind of against the state was in some ways, by definition, a terrorist because by being against the state, you’re anti-establishment, therefore you’re trying to overturn the law so, therefore, you are a terrorist. They all kind of agreed on that, and they had all, by the way, suffered problems of terrorism in some shape or form over time.

So it became a very easy thing for the entire group of countries to get together on and agree on. They all agreed on what a terrorist looks like. And they all agreed that terrorism is a problem. So terrorism became kind of the useful flag that they could all gather around. Now, what’s fascinating to me is that I don’t think the SCO, in practical terms, has done a huge amount in counterterrorism in its history. They conducted these sorts of training exercises they called counterterrorism exercises, but to the rest of us, they looked really like military exercises and military exercises that tended to be focused on goals that, for the rest of us, wouldn’t be counterterrorism goals. They were concerned with invading islands that were causing them problems, they were mobilising to shut down a village which had become rebellious, they were using aircraft to sweep across a vast piece of territory.

These were not counterterrorism activities that the rest of us would regard as being counterterrorism. When we think of counterterrorism activity, it is really about dealing with small cells that are launching attacks against civilian targets, mostly within our countries, mobilising people who are already within our countries, which is a different kind of concept. It’s a much more police-driven enterprise. But I think from Beijing’s perspective, and I think from the other members of the SCO’s perspective, it’s actually a much more fundamental thing to deal with, and it requires a much more fundamental and large scale response because you’re dealing with something that is fundamentally a threat to the state in a very existential way, and therefore has to be quashed. And I think this also, by the way, brings me on to the second point.

More broadly when thinking about China and its response, I think we do have to separate its response at home versus its response abroad. And I think in terms of the response at home, we’ve seen an approach, which is, in many ways, unsurprising and an extension of what one would probably expect China to do.

To deal with such a problem, which is a kind of fundamental push to change a vast chunk of our society or, you know, change a vast chunk of China’s society, and to change it in terms of really redefining how it thinks of itself. From China’s perspective, they have a problem of terrorism within the country, which is mostly concentrated on the Uyghur community who live for the most part in Xinjiang. It is China’s largest province which accounts for a sixth of the country’s land mass but is vast and empty, and has this population of 10 million Uyghur Muslims who live mostly on this sort of southern corridor but are kind of scattered around the entire region.

These people have got a very strong sense of ethnic identity that’s very different and apart from Han Chinese. And this has led to attention and attention that’s articulated itself as militancy and in some cases, terrorism. And from China’s perspective, to get this population kind of back on its side, it has required not only a kind of massive economic programme to redevelop the region to make these people feel like they have a stake in society, but also a very heavy-handed security response.

Beyond that now is a push to try to get these people to rethink how they think of themselves. So it is to really try to kind of, almost, change the Uyghur sense of identity, so that it doesn’t feel that it’s apart, so that it feels that it’s part of China. And to do this, they are using this incredible programme of re-education camps, as they call them, where essentially people are getting shuffled off to get re-indoctrinated into who they are, or who they think they are. This is then the beginning of a path to eradicate the ideas of separatism and terrorism and extremism that may linger within them. And this led to an incredible programme of cultural transformation and eradication in some ways, which is a very sad story to see.

That’s what they’re doing internally. Of course, this kind of programme is one that you really can’t extend outwards. Nor do I think China wants to explore, because it’s not something that they care about outside of their borders. Beyond their borders, counterterrorism is a much more practical enterprise that is just about protecting their people.

Then it comes to a very much more practical kind of approach, and the primary approach I think China likes to take with counterterrorism abroad is basically to get the locals to deal with it. Essentially, they would like local partners in whichever country they are in to protect their people. Now, unfortunately, those local countries aren’t always able to deliver this outcome, and we’ve repeatedly seen instances of China getting attacked in Central Asia, we’ve had murders of diplomats going back a few years, in mostly Kyrgyzstan, we’ve had a bomb attack on their embassy in Bishkek. In Pakistan, we’ve had several attacks against Chinese interests there, both workers but also diplomatic enclaves. And there, we can see a failure of the local authorities to protect.

In those cases, you are seeing China starting to mobilise private security companies and trying to get private security companies to try to protect their people. Interestingly, you’ve also seen a softer approach, which is basically to try to pay off locals in a way. And sometimes, this is as mercenary as going out and paying: finding out who’s the local potentate needing to be paid off, paying him off or hiring his boys to provide your security, thereby protecting you.

Additionally, running corporate social responsibility programmes, or things they think go with social responsibility programmes, making sure that they build stuff in the local community. This makes sure the local community doesn’t feel as aggrieved that you’re there and feels like they will protect your interests and your assets. And all of this kind of comes under the broad rubric of protecting your assets, and to some degree, counterterrorism as well.

 The final thing I’ll add is that you can see an increase in Chinese willingness to provide equipment and support for local security officials, and I think this is very interesting. In Central Asia in particular, we’ve seen a real push to try to help build up the local capacity. It used to be the case that China will kind of just leave this to the Russians, quite frankly, but increasingly, you can see they’re investing a lot more in trying to build up the local security capability to protect their people and their assets, and also to help China have stronger connections to the security apparatuses in these countries. It’s quite a long answer to a fairly brief question. I apologise, but anyway, thank you.

Ameem: That was a great response. And it gave us some great insight into what’s happening in China. Raffaello, I want to ask a question about your scholarship. I was reading one of your articles in The Wall Street Journal, specifically, the one which you wrote after the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. You made a very intriguing argument saying that the dismantling of organised terrorist groups might not bring the peace that we envision. To quote directly from the article: “The West is moving into an age of isolated and even meaningless terrorism, an age when leaders contribute more conceptually than tactically. Before long, we may look back through rose-tinted glasses to the time when terrorism was made up of easily comprehensible networks and leaders.” Now, can you elaborate a bit more on why you think that an unstructured terror group might be a dangerous proposition for all of us?

Raffaello: Thank you for the question. The concept I was working towards is that if we look at the way we see terrorism articulating itself, increasingly, we are seeing individuals launch attacks. This is not a uniform trend because I think classic terrorism still exists, we still have large groups that are eager to launch attacks, and are keen to do very much the same sorts of things that we’ve seen happen in the past.

On the one hand, we’ve got people who are identifying with an ideology, clearly feeling part of that ideology, and are launching an attack to advance that ideology. But we’ve also gone beyond that in that we are starting to see the emergence of individuals who are doing things that look like terrorist attacks, but the ideology that’s behind them is not clear. And it becomes very difficult to separate these from acts of mass violence, or public shootings, but because of the methodology that they’ve used to launch the attack, it kind of looks a bit like a terrorist attack to the rest of us. It becomes very difficult to separate what is an act of mass violence against other human beings because of an individual’s anger and what is a terrorist attack, which is launched from an individual or a group of individuals who are being directed into trying to advance a very specific ideology.

We do have to remember that terrorists ultimately do have a goal, and the goal is the message of whatever group they’re trying to advance. They’re trying to change something in society because they see this injustice, that the world isn’t paying attention to this injustice, and they need to do something about it to wake us all up, and violence becomes a method through which they are shaking us out of our stupor.

Now the problem is if you are looking at an attack from a structured terrorist organisation, you may not agree with the ideology that underpins it, but you at least have a sense of an understanding where it’s coming from. We can look at a group like al-Qaeda, and we can say this idea of establishing this global Caliphate, of throwing out the West from the Middle East, of creating a world in God’s great image seems like a crazy idea in some ways to other people, but at least it’s an idea that is vaguely coherent and has a structure to it.

 It gives us a sense of: okay, so this is the problem, this is the idea that we’re dealing with, so this is what we need to counter it. If we move into an age where you’re looking at acts that look like acts conducted by these groups but are conducted by individuals because they’ve got issues in their own lives, or they’re just angry at society or something else altogether, the problem is how do we respond to that?

If we were to see, for example, a group of people launch an unstructured attack of this sort, to advance some crazy ideology that five of them concocted together online, but it was an attack of such magnitude that we would look at it and go, “oh my god, what has just happened here? We must be dealing with some sort of a terrorist attack in a structured way, so we must respond to it in a structured way”, we must respond to it in that kind of away, and then oftentimes, it’s the response to the attack that causes more damage than the attack itself.

There’s a real danger in that we might misread what’s going on. We’re looking at instances where we see acts of mass violence that are so incomprehensible to us, that seem to be motivated by ideologies that just don’t make any sense. How are we going to react to them? How will that impact us as a society?

If you think back to the attack that Anders Behring Breivik did in 2010, where he detonated a bomb in downtown Oslo, and then drove out to an island, Utøya, and murdered a bunch of kids who were at a political camp together. The immediate reaction to that attack was kind of confused. You saw initially people were saying, “Oh, this is a jihadist attack of some sort” because on jihadist forums, you saw people praising this attack. But the jihadists didn’t know either, they thought this was potentially one of their own and so they were shouting about it. It turned out to be a lone individual, who was instead advancing a very different ideology and advancing it in a very, very bizarre way which made sense to him. He put a huge manifesto that sort of seemed to articulate this lunacy in a certain way. But it was very incomprehensible.

However, initially, the reactions went a different way, and it created tensions within Europe, where there was a sense of another horrible Islamist attack. And this created social tensions within our societies where the minority community certainly felt aggrieved, they felt that we have to protect ourselves from this. It fed social tensions that ultimately caused ruptures within our society that were quite damaging.

That’s the danger I was trying to inch towards is the fact that we might look at some of the attacks happening in the future, that will potentially come from these unstructured ideologies, but we won’t know how to react to it, and our reaction might be such that it causes more damage in some ways than the attack itself.

It might even be a complete red herring in terms of what the attack is. The attack might just be individuals mobilising to do something together because they met on 4chan or Reddit and decided there that they needed to do something because they were angry at trees, and decided the best way to do this is to blow up five cities around the world. How are we going to know that initially? How will we react to them? How will our governments react to that? How will society react? The damage that can be done could be difficult to deal with. If you’ve got a structured group pushing an ideology, at least you kind of know where to start your reaction in general.

Ameem: Just to follow up on this issue of unstructured violence, it’s a very interesting idea and at some levels a very difficult problem to deal with. What, in your opinion, should be the approach in dealing with such groups? And I ask this question specifically because with some of the organised groups, you could essentially treat them as guerrilla fighters, right? So you map out the intelligence network, you map out their organisational structures, and then you look at the material they’re producing, and so on.

But these lone fighters, one of the approaches that I’ve seen that is very common with trying to figure out the lone warrior, is to fill in the lack of knowledge of the organisational or support structure with a more structured opinion about their ideological outlook.

A lot of the academic scholarship gets back to the ideological question, that we were discussing earlier, searches for one mention of Ibn-Wahab or similar theorists, even if it’s incoherent or tangential reference, and devolves into a long detour mapping out the writings and intellectual trajectory of the referred scholar.

I always thought that, at some level, we, as academics, fall into this trap of overreliance on ideology and end up inflating the value of studying these texts. Do you think that studying the ideologies and the writings are still the best way of approaching this problem?

Raffaello: The problem of ideology is a very complicated one. The key thing to remember is that you are not dealing with a situation of “either/or”; they’re all happening at the same time. I would say there is still value in understanding the ideology because ultimately, the ideology does become the golden thread, if you will, that ties a whole bunch of people together. The degree to which they are motivated by it to conduct the act, or the degree to which they think they’re motivated by it to conduct the act, or the degree to which they think they understand or are connected with the ideology to conduct the act, is very different.

I always remember when I looked at British terrorist cells and looked at how they have grown over the years, it was interesting to see that when I looked at the different groups, and the cells in particular, and at all the little network guys that were going to launch an attack, you’d always find certain figures present within the cell. You will always find a charismatic person who was in charge of getting everyone together; you always tended to find, this might be more specific in the British or Western context, a convert, and the zeal of the convert, because they’ve newly discovered this, is pushing everyone else forwards because they’re proving themselves and the others will need to as well. You will also always find one who’s the ideologue of the group. This was the person who would read Wahab’s books or knew who Abdullah Azzam was, or who’d read the Quran and explained things to the others. These kinds of believers were always quite critical. Now, I don’t say that they always got their interpretations correct. These are not necessarily ideologues who had any conception or understanding of what they’re talking about, but to the others, they did. But it was always quite an important figure to have within the cell because it did give them a sense of being part of this kind of ideological movement.

So I don’t want to completely throw away the importance of ideology and the need to understand it because I think it stills play a role in terms of giving a background to the group, of giving a sense of identity, if you will, to the organisation.

I always remember an anecdote from Iraq that someone told me. Apparently, at one point in a certain part of Iraq where the Americans were dealing with the insurgency in a very active way, they realised there were a couple of local mullahs who were quite important because they would give blessings to the fighters before they went out to launch their attack. The Americans started targeting those people, and they noticed that by targeting those people, the pace of the attacks slowed down within that part of the country then.

I think there is a role for ideology, so there is a role in trying to understand the ideology, to understand how it kind of got to where it got. That opens up a role, in terms of some of those people, in trying to persuade them to get away from the ideology, or for some of the others who think they’ve been motivated by the ideology, to try to push them away from it and having that kind of discourse with them can, in some cases, start to push them in a direction of maybe move away from it and disengage from it.

 I think de-radicalisation is very, very difficult, but I think at least getting them to disengage from the ideas is possible and to do that, you have to have a pretty good understanding of what you’re fighting against. So I think there is still a role for that within the sort of counterterrorism struggle. But when we’re looking at some of these other people I’m talking about, and we’re looking at people who’ve got a very kind of unstructured ideology, or I would argue don’t have an ideology, these are probably individuals who have other issues who are using the ideology as an excuse to conduct an act of mass violence. I think that’s different, and in those cases, I do question the value of understanding the ideology sometimes.

Additionally, in some cases, the ideology may not necessarily be a very useful one. It’s almost an individual idea, just a micro ideology, it is one guy’s thoughts. In that case, I think we need to think more in psychological terms, and examine what’s going on in this person’s life such that he feels as though this is the only outlet of expression he has, and how do we address that, which is probably a different form of engagement. I think the difficulty is we do all of these things at the same time, to some degree, and we need to fine tune which one is a more relevant approach to deal with whichever case we’re looking at in front of us.

Alex: Raffaello, thank you. You just mentioned the broad picture of ideology and radicalisation, and quite importantly also, the focus on the zeal of the convert. Here in Singapore, there is a sense of palpable concern about radicalised locals returning to this region to continue their activities. In your opinion, how real is this threat? And what is the best way to deal with this rhetoric next?

Raffaello: The issue of foreign terrorist fighter returnees is a fascinating one, because, in a way, it hasn’t articulated itself as the problem that we all expected. As you mentioned about the battlefield in Syria and Iraq that drew so many people in, we went very quickly from worrying about that to worrying about attacks coming home.

To some degree, that’s understandable why.  We look at the attacks in Paris and Brussels, which were very clearly individuals who were sent back to launch these atrocities, and we thought there’s going to be lots of others like these. And we did see in Europe several attacks from individuals who had been to the battlefields and then were sent back, or returned, to launch attacks.

I think what’s interesting is that outside the cluster in Europe that we saw, we have not seen that many emerge. The foreign fighters problem is a shoe that hasn’t quite dropped. From my understanding, what we’ve seen happen here in South-east Asia is broadly quite similar, in that there were lots of people who went off, there were some who came back, but we haven’t seen that many show up in terrorist attacks quite yet.

I think the question to ask is, what kind of a timeline does this happen on, which is the key issue in some ways. In the past, we have seen foreign terrorist fighter flows turning into terrorist problems in countries in South-east Asia; there were several terrible attacks in the post-9/11 period against targets mostly in Indonesia. Also, there was a large plot disrupted here in Singapore to attack several Western targets like high commissions and embassies that were based here. So you can understand where that preoccupation came from. But I don’t think we completely understand the timeline between someone going abroad to become a terrorist fighter and coming home to launch an attack.

The other thing to remember is that people who go off to become foreign terrorist fighters don’t go to become foreign terrorist fighters because they want to come home to launch attacks. There might be some people among that group who ultimately want to get towards that goal, but really, their motivation is to go abroad and be involved in that activity abroad. So I suspect what you’ll see happen with a lot of these individuals is they will go look for the next battlefield. That’s why, for example, what we saw happening in Marawi was very interesting, because there, you saw a kind of indigenous battlefield show up within South-east Asia, and it became a lightning rod for lots of people to go to.

In some ways, that is where the bigger concern needs to lie at the moment. Of course, we need to worry about these people coming in to launch attacks, mobilising other cells around them, coming back home with direction to do these sorts of attacks, groups like IS or al-Qaeda, to see these networks of foreign fighters that are at home as potential cells that they can use to launch attacks. But I think in some ways, the bigger concern has to be how if another kind of Marawi was to emerge, where you have an area where a group was able to mobilise and launch a large scale attack, which then becomes a new jihadi battlefield that lots of others would be drawn to. That could become a problem in itself because it multiples. The more volumes of fighters you have out here end up creating new networks, which then ultimately creates a concatenation of events, and they can create cells back home in countries like Singapore.

It implies a problem of viewing foreign terrorist fighters through too narrow a lens, where we expect that there’s an immediate causal link of an individual who goes to foreign terrorist battlefield, joins up with a group that has an ideology to launch attacks back home, comes back, and then there is an immediate attack. I’m not sure it always works like that because I don’t think that’s always the motivation of the individuals, and I also don’t think it’s as immediate a process as that in every situation.

Finally, you have to remember what the groups want and if you look at a group like IS or al-Qaeda, to me, their motivations at the moment seem very focused on battlefields elsewhere. al-Qaeda is trying to rebuild its brand through re-establishing itself as a group that is the standard-bearer for oppressed Muslims in parts of the Middle East. IS is trying to rebuild itself similarly. All the franchises and networks that they have around the world are trying to recreate that same narrative in the local context they’re operating in. At the moment, I don’t know how actively the core organisation is telling people to launch attacks. If people do great, it looks good for the global organisation, but I’m not sure how many resources they’re deploying in that direction. And in some ways, that kind of resource deployment might be what we’d see through the foreign terrorist fighters flow.

Ameem: Raffaello, just to continue this discussion, moving it slightly westward into the UAE and Saudi Arabia, where they are concerned about the return of a very different kind of foreign fighter, and you mentioned it in your last response, the more seasoned fighters from Syria or Yemen, who might have been fighting as a proxy for the UAE or Saudi Arabia itself. How should these “jihadi veterans” be integrated back into society once they return home?

I ask because one of the pieces I read recently about the end of the Dhofar rebellion in Oman in the 1970s talked about how the Omani government offered to pay all those rebel soldiers a retirement pay out basically, all those who gave up arms would get the same pension as their army soldiers. Is this, especially for the more organised veteran fighters, a practical solution at all?

Raffaello: The difficulty comes in trying to assess how much do these fighters think they were fighting for a proxy for their government or for a proxy that manipulated them into thinking they were doing this for their government. There’s a key distinction there because if you’re an individual who’s fighting for an organisation that you know was essentially a proxy group for a government, you are doing it for a pay cheque. In that case, demobilising the way you described could be quite effective because you’re essentially motivated by the pay cheque.

If instead you’re dealing with an individual who went to fight alongside a group who ultimately was being manipulated as a proxy, but the individual didn’t think that was what the group was, and they joined for pure, ideological reasons, then the motivation is very different. In that case, what is required to get that individual to demobilise will be quite different, and a pay cheque might not be the answer. It could help give them an immediate sense of re-engagement with society, but it won’t necessarily completely solve the problem.

In some ways, the model you described is very similar to a deradicalisation programme the Saudis ran for a very long time for people who had gone off to fight in jihadist battlefields in Iraq or elsewhere. Essentially, people would come back, they would surrender to the government, they would apologise, and the government would give them a life. The government would give them a job, a house, a wife in some cases, give them a whole structured life and also have an imam engage with them regularly to talk through how the individual had interpreted the Quran was incorrect. The programme worked up to a point, but it didn’t deal with the problem, and there were several high profile participants in the programme who went back to a life of violence.

That indicates to me that this approach does not always deal with people who are motivated by, to some degree, ideology. Different people join these groups for different reasons, and the problem with deradicalisation programmes is that there is no single answer. The motivations held by people to join these groups are as numerous as the number of people who join these groups. It’s almost impossible to create a silver bullet that will deal with the entire problem. So these programmes might work for some people, but they won’t work for everybody.

Additionally, different things will work in different places. If a programme works in a specific country in a specific context, it won’t necessarily translate to success anywhere else. Some lessons are important though, and that is where governments should be focusing on, to see what experiences are useful from these different programmes. It is also key to understand what doesn’t work which one can see from what others have tried.

Alex: Thank you, Raffaello, for these important and useful insights. Now to end this interview, I want to ask a question that we plan to ask all our guests: what will the future of warfare and counter-terrorism look like in the coming 30 years? You already mentioned there is no silver bullet, but if you were to try to look into a crystal ball, what do you see the situation looking like in 30 years?

Raffaello: Thirty years is long enough that theoretically, I’d live long enough to remember it, which is always dangerous when you predict because then, you’ll see whether it comes true or not. Henry Kissinger believed in making predictions so far that you’d be dead by the time it happens, so it doesn’t matter whether you were right or wrong, and if you happened to be right, everyone will look back and say what a brilliant man.

My thoughts about where terrorism will go in the future is we will see an awful lot of what we see at the moment, but we need to think a little more dynamically about what kind of micro-ideologies might emerge that can use the global, interconnected world we have in ways that will look terrifyingly like a large organisation but actually might be made up of a small group of people. That’s important because the threshold of accessibility to some quite dangerous technologies is getting lower and easier all the time.

We also live in a time when you can form relationships online that feel like real relationships, and people are acting in extreme ways to advance of those relationships. There are some crazy ideas out there, and you see a potential confluence coming down the line leading towards some giant atrocity which will look like terrorism and will be terrorism, but it will be the result of five people scattered around the world who got together on a chat forum or new app and made a decision to do something together, but it was just those five guys. To us at the receiving end of that violence, it could be very confusing at its first instance. Additionally, if it is carried out in a certain way, it could prompt a response from governments that makes the situation so much worse.

I can see this happening in the future. A micro-ideology motivating a group of people, scattered around the world, to launch some sort of bio-attack or chemical/nuclear attack in five cities randomly around the world, leading to blindsided governments thinking they need to react in some way, the public outcry needing them to react in some way, and they will stumble and react in a way that will exacerbate local community or social tensions, which will ultimately outsize the problem beyond what they were originally facing. I wonder if this is the sort of problem we will start seeing in the future.

We are also very bad at predicting what ideologies will pop up next. Looking at the extreme right wing, it was very obvious, in retrospect, it was going to emerge the way that it did, but we didn’t see that. We can think about some of the other ideologies out there that might articulate themselves in extreme ways, and the whole thing we are seeing right now surrounding involuntary celibates, men who aren’t able to find women and are using mass violence as a way of expressing their anger, it’s crazy but it’s becoming a weird sub movement that’s developing online.

Since we aren’t very good at predicting what movements will arise, we should not be surprised by some of the weird movements that will pop up in the future.

Ameem: Raffaello, thank you so very much for joining us today. I think you gave us some excellent food for thought on a group of people we hadn’t talked about on this podcast until now and it has been great listening to your insight. Please allow me to thank the rest of our Boots Off The Ground team at MEI without whom this podcast could never have been possible, namely Eugene Lim, Lim Wei Chean, from the Events and Communications Team and MEI Associate Director Carl Skadian. Also special thanks to all our listeners. Please follow us on the various social media platforms and send us your comments and feedback, we love to hear from you, and make sure you don’t miss our next podcasts! That’s all for today. Thank you.

This transcript was preared by Sukriti Kalra, Intern, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore.