By Adam Rawnsley
The prospect of homegrown terrorists keep U.S. security officials up at night. But although more homegrown jihadis have popped up lately, the so-called “lone wolves” aren’t always as solitary as officials fear; their plotting is amateurish; and they’re a meager fraction of America’s Muslim communities. To put it bluntly, these are the scrubs of international terrorism.
The conclusions come via a new report by Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser for the Rand Corporation and a veteran in the field of terrorism studies. The report tallies the number of Americans “indicted, arrested, or otherwise identified as jihadist terrorists or supporters since 9/11,” to provide a statistical sense of the nature of America’s homegrown al-Qaida affiliates, wannabes and hangers-on.
In total, Jenkins counts 176 domestic jihadis and 32 separate terrorist plots in the decade following the attacks. “Lone wolf” terrorists — self-starter militants with little or no reliance on existing terror networks – have been a prominent concern for law enforcement, since they’re by definition hard to track. But Jenkins’ data might make cops rethink their metaphor. Sure, 22 of the plots — an astonishing 69 percent of the total — involved no more than a single person. But it turns out that many of those involved in “lone wolf” cases were either working for al-Qaida or for undercover FBI agents posing as members of the group.
Jenkins prefers to think of them as “stray dogs” — a term favored by Italian police to describe their Red Brigade terrorists in the 1970s. Like the strays, America’s homegrown al-Qaida fans are “found alone or in packs, estranged from but dependent on society, streetwise but lacking social skills, barking defiantly, and potentially dangerous but at the same time, suspicious, fearful, skittish.”
Jenkins also finds the lupine imagery a poor match for domestic jihadis because wolves are good predators. Homegrown terrorists? Not so much. Of 32 plots since 9/11, not even a third of them proceeded to the point of identifying a specific target or making firm plans. Of the ten plots that did, six were secretly FBI stings. A grand total of two out of the 176 “domestic jihadis” ever got around to building an explosive device on his own. One such bomb was incomplete when its maker got pinched. The other, made by would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, ended in a fizzle.
“Those arrested in stings were demonstrably willing to kill if someone handed them the means,” the report concludes, “but others made little effort to build bombs or acquire guns, which are readily available in the United States.”
The numbers, however, have been growing lately. Jenkins’s data set shows spikes in the number of American jihadists in the last two completed calendar years, with 40 identified in 2009 and 31 in 2010. Somalia’s al-Shabaab terrorist group is a major reason why. Violence and criminality here in the U.S. associated with al-Shabaab shows up as one factor in the larger numbers of the past two years, with 27 individuals connected to Shabaab in some way during the two year period.
Nonetheless, they’re still far from a significant portion of American Muslims. Figures on the size of America’s Muslim population vary, with estimates ranging from 1.8 million at the low end to 8 million at the high end. Jenkins uses an estimate of 3 million, making the proportion of identifiable jihadists among America’s Muslims to be a paltry of 6 out every 100,000. You don’t need to be afraid of your neighbors, in other words, and you the feds certainly shouldn’t demonize them.
Caveats apply. First, Americans who may have secretly slipped off to join a jihadist battlefield in Somalia or Afghanistan by definition couldn’t be counted. The study’s focus is on terrorists acting in pursuit of al-Qaida’s brand of global jihadism, so it excludes data about domestic terror threats related to the more nationally-minded groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
But a statistical tour through homegrown terrorism shows that it’s hardly the simmering cauldron of impending destruction that cable news makes it out to be. In fact, if counterterrorism officials are tossing and turning in bed, contemplating the sheer incompetence of their adversaries is better than Ambien.
Read the original article from Wired Magazine