30 August 2006
Most al-Qaida Members Are Married, Educated, Expert Says
Increasing job prospects one way for governments to fight back
Washington -- Although terrorist training camps and shelters for terrorists’ widows have been eliminated in Afghanistan, there has not been a decrease in loyalty to the dream that al-Qaida projects to young people, according to Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and terrorism expert who participated in a State Department-sponsored webchat August 30.
"These are essentially romantic young people trying to build a better world. They are ready to sacrifice themselves for this dream, for this utopia. The more they see that their fellow Muslims are being shot at and killed, the more they are ready to join this social movement," Sageman said.
To date, all al-Qaida members have been Muslims, according to Sageman; however, the degree of devotion and their knowledge of Islam have varied greatly. "Basically, these are young men in a hurry," he said.
Al-Qaida members are people who use violence to achieve their goals, Sageman said. "This is what separates violent terrorists from people who play by the rules of society and are willing to effect changes within the social rules."
Surprisingly, Sageman said, three-fourths of al-Qaida terrorists are young, married men, and two-thirds of them have children, often several. During the golden age of al-Qaida, from 1996 to 2001, the group took responsibility for the care of the widows and families of its martyrs. It supported them financially and provided housing in al-Qaida shelters in Jalalabad and Kandahar in Afghanistan. Today, widows of members who killed themselves during terrorist operations no longer are compensated.
Al-Qaida is an international group now with no formal command and control structure, according to Sageman. Most members of al-Qaida are more educated than their peers, he said, and often members are assimilated fully in communities, although lately they are becoming more distant and anti-social. About 62 percent are college-educated, he said.
"The real problem here is the lack of opportunity for educated people," maintained Sageman. "One of the most effective recipes for terrorism is universal education without any job prospects." He said there is discussion on jihadi forums on the Internet of this new trend encouraging terrorists to withdraw from society.
"This process of radicalization must be better understood," Sageman said.
Sageman suggested that governments urgently use law enforcement to arrest young people who are already terrorists but, more important, to prevent new generations from joining the terrorist social movement.
"This is a more comprehensive task, dealing with policy, communication, engagement of the Muslim community to argue that terrorism is beyond acceptable behavior," Sageman said. "The point is to concentrate on the violence part and try to negate it."
The monitoring of financial transactions and the general monitoring of communication among suspected terrorists, with some exceptions in Pakistan, effectively have cut off potential followers from the surviving leaders of al-Qaida, Sageman said. In general, leaders today do not know the identities of their followers and cannot support them financially even if they wished to do so. (See related article.)
"If you look at most of the terrorist operations in the past three years," he said, "you realize that they were self-financed."
A discouraging aspect of the global fight against terrorism has been some countries' attempts to justify suppressing or eliminating domestic dissent, Sageman said. "The U.S. government should recognize this for what it is and distance itself from this trend," he said.
Sageman said he believes the U.S. government made the right decision when it called on the Uzbek government, which shares a common interest with the United States in fighting terrorism, to cease its repression of the country’s population. (See related article.)
Sageman is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. He is an independent researcher on terrorism and is the founder and principal of Sageman Consulting LLC in Rockville, Maryland.
For more information on efforts to fight terrorism five years after the September 11 attacks in the United States, see the State Department's eJournal USA, Rebuilding and Resilience: Five Years After 9/11, and Marc Sageman's essay, Common Myths about al-Qaida Terrorism.
The transcript Sageman’s discussion and information on upcoming webchats are available on Webchat Station.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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