Blog Post 4 - Yousuf Sander

Global terror has plagued the international community in increasing frequency and tragedy for the last two decades. The rise of groups like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, and others have left thousands dead and given rise to new fear, and an elusive enemy. These groups have used ever more brutal tactics to stage devastating attacks on civilians in both their home countries and abroad. In the early 2000s, the U.S. began a so-called “War On Terror” to combat the rise of such groups, only to have the even more dangerous organization of ISIS rise out of the ashes of our own operations in Iraq. These groups are hard to fight and even harder to dismantle, so what are our options in the War on Terror? I believe that the problem stems from the ostracized environment in which immigrant Middle eastern communities exist in the West.  As long as we continue to marginalize Muslim communities in the U.S. and Europe, we will continue to be fostering an environment that makes it easy for terrorist groups to recruit people to their cause.

                  For a while now, our strategy has been to carry out targeted attacks on the leadership of terrorist organizations. Often, you will hear about a top-ranking commander being killed in a signature strike from a drone, or in a controlled small operation like the one that killed Osama bin Laden. However, in most cases, these attacks failed to crumble the groups, and only create unnecessary casualties and ill will in the areas we operate in. The issue is that most of the global terror attacks carried out overseas are committed by people already living in the target nation, not terrorists traveling from the organization’s home country. These attacks are often planned and carried out in isolated groups that are hard to detect by members of communities that have been marginalized. These people become radicalized by propaganda spread by the terror groups online and then carry out the attacks, which are then claimed by the organization. Unfortunately, the backlash against the attacks often includes the communities and ethnic groups from which the attackers originate. The backlash, as well as repercussions from our military actions in the Middle East, reverberate through these communities and create tension that makes it easier for terrorist recruiters to convince people to join. The vast majority of the people living in Muslim communities want to be accepted and mean to no harm. Attempts by intelligence agencies to send fake radicals into mosques in order to plot terror attacks have ended when the mosque-goers called the agencies and reported their own agents to them for being too radical. 

            Attacking terror groups in their base of operations can be effective, and has been against ISIS, but in order to combat overseas attacks and homegrown terrorism, we need to look at the communities where radicalization takes place.