A series of terrorist attacks in Paris last year and in Brussels in March were carried out in the name of the Islamic State group (IS) by gunmen and suicide bombers mostly of French and Belgian nationality and of North African origin.
In an essay entitled ‘ISIS is a revolution’, a study of the power and attraction of the Islamic State group (IS) published last December by digital magazine Aeon, anthropologist Scott Atran wrote: “As pundits and politicians stoked the recent shootings in California into an existential threat; as French troops were deployed in Paris; as Belgian police locked down Brussels, and US and Russian planes intensified air attacks in Syria following yet another slaughter perpetrated in the name of the so-called Islamic State, it was easy to lose sight of a central fact. Amid the bullets, bombs and bluster, we are not only failing to stop the spread of radical Islam, but our efforts often appear to contribute to it.”
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Atran, who holds dual US and French nationality, is a research fellow with Oxford University, a director of research in anthropology at the Paris École Normale Supérieure and the French National Center for Scientific Research who also teaches at the university of Michigan and John Jay College in New York. He and his team of researchers have conducted dozens of interviews with young Muslims in Europe and North Africa, including among communities notably drawn to the jihadist cause, and with captured IS fighters in Iraq and members of the al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda ally in Syria. They were present as observers during the battle of Kudilah in the northern Iraqi province of Erbil, when IS forces were confronted by a coalition of Kurds, the Iraqi army and Sunni tribesmen.
“While many in the West dismiss radical Islam as simply nihilistic, our work suggests something far more menacing: a profoundly alluring mission to change and save the world,” wrote Atran.
During a visit to France for the publication in French of his essay, he was interviewed by Mediapart’s Joseph Confavreux in which he argues why he believes IS will never be routed in Europe and the middle East as long as the very particular “revolution” it represents, and the attraction it holds for would-be jihadists, continues to be misunderstood.
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MEDIAPART: Are there still many things to learn about the Islamic State group which, so much the focus of attention since the Paris and Brussels attacks, is the subject of books regularly published every month?
SCOTT ATRAN: The social and religious fabric, the ideas, the desires, the dreams and the stories of IS fighters remain little known, or in a superficial manner. And the reality of IS is interpreted according to the consequences this organization has on our societies, by focusing on causes that might appear to us to be familiar, but which don’t realise the power of attraction of IS. We resort to notions that are empty of meaning, like nihilism or brain washing. And we place the violence of IS down with the only one we know of, criminal violence. If individuals join themselves to this violence, they can only be criminals.
Thus it is not explained from where comes this global movement capable of attracting the adhesion of tens of thousands of people from about one hundred countries, and which has succeeded in constituting, in two years, an enduring base in the centre of the Middle East despite a coalition of 60 nations against it. To describe IS fighters as nihilists is to prohibit oneself from understanding the integrity and moral character, within their own logic, of their engagement. But for that it is necessary to understand that men and women prefer to join an organization that advocates clear principles, but in opposition to Western values, such as a hierarchy between sexes.
MEDIAPART: The idea of “Islamisation of radicalism” as set out by Olivier Roy in explanation of the terrorism led by IS does not satisfy you. Why?
S.A.: Despite the quality of his work, Olivier Roy seems to me to build his analysis from the particular case of France. In this country, the hotspots are certainly the neighbourhoods where one can witness what he describes, but in Britain the hotspots are firstly the universities, and in the Sudan Is recruits among the wealthiest members of the population. A friend recently told me that the 17 best students of the best medical faculty in Khartoum had recently joined IS.
Certainly there are problems in France of marginalisation and criminality, a difficult search for identity which can push some youngsters into joining IS, but that explains too much or not enough. If one considers that there exist perhaps 3,000 young Muslims implicated in radical and terrorist networks, that figure must be compared with 20 million French citizens seeking their identity and, let’s say, some three million Muslims who are marginalised. A government which thinks of preventing the existence of these 3,000 people by reducing the problems of these three million marginalised Muslims will be taking the wrong track, even though that doesn’t mean that nothing should be done for these three million. It is like wanting to kill a fly with a huge canon.
Every revolutionary movement, and Islamic State is a revolution, every important political movement, stands on an initial base that is susceptible to receiving the message. That was true during the French Revolution or the Bolshevik revolution. In France or in Belgium, the base receptive of IS’s message is found in the world of petty criminality, notably because young Muslims are over-represented in prisons.
As was well illustrated by Nobel economics prize-winner Gary Becker, one becomes a petty criminal for reasons linked to a relationship between cost and opportunity, when it is difficult to mix in the life led by the majority and that there are existing networks that allow one to live from petty criminality. The Islamic State comes along and says to these petty criminals, either active or about to be, ‘Use the know-how that you have been forced to learn to liberate not only yourself but also your fellows and all humanity’.
All the interviews that my team and myself have been able to have with individuals who passed through Al-Nosra or IS show that they had the feeling of moving from a miserable destiny to that of a saviour, and several of my students subsequently said ‘Me too, I’d like to have the possibility of doing something grandiose’.
The enormous power of IS comes from there, whatever the particular case of France. The power of attraction of IS is to penetrate whatever circle and to look for, in an intimate manner, the frustrations, the demands, the ambitions, to marry them to their own story and action plan. To recruit and convince just one person they can spend hundreds of hours. It is for that reason that the counter-propaganda deployed by some governments, the ‘de-radicalisation centres’ which resemble centres for smokers or those for turning around petty criminals, are ridiculous and incapable of being a counterweight to the force of conviction of IS.
MEDIAPART: You write that what explains the force of IS and the determination of its combatants is an engagement for the cause and the spirit of comradeship. How can it be fought against? Does not the military option, while it is not sufficient, remain necessary? What lessons do you draw from the battle of Kudilah in the northern Iraqi province of Erbil, in which the Islamic State was pitched against Arab Sunni tribes allied with Kurds from the national Iraqi army and the peshmerga from the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan? What were you able to observe closely?
S.A.: That it will be very difficult. In this locality, the inhabitants originally and within a few weeks accepted Islamic State which they call Al-Thawra – “the revolution”. The IS militants announced a general amnesty for all the inhabitants, and then progressively found out who among them were police officers, or who were involved in politics, and executed all of them. But they also addressed the poorest, asking them ‘Why does this sheik, who is nevertheless from your family, own several cars, land and a large house whereas you have nothing?’ The Sunni allies of the international coalition are principally sheiks of large tribes or families. What will they do if they re-take the villages? Will they take back their land and kill the poor who occupy their houses? A sheik who was killed last week fighting IS had explained to me that he couldn’t care less about Iraq but that he wanted to recover his house which had fallen into the hands of ‘a son of a bitch from his family’.
And the ‘will to fight’ among IS militants is well stronger than what I’ve been able to see on the other side, except for certain Kurdish fighters. They depend notably on the ‘inghamasi’, the kamikaze fighters who wear explosive vests which the IS sends to the front at the beginning of attacks. What’s more, the equipment of the IS does not resemble columns of tanks that can be easily destroyed by bombardments. It is spread out and nomad.
Elsewhere, when the American command explains to me that the coalition will soon have 12 battalions, equal to 50,000 men, to re-take Mosul where about 10,000 IS fighters are reported to be, that works in classic military theory, with perfect coordination between the different army units. But the Iraqi army is very far from that. Even when there is a so-called joint operation between the Kurd peshmergas and the Iraqi army, in reality it is carried out with Kurdish fighters within the Iraqi army. There are divisions between Kurds and Sunnis, between Sunnis, between Sunnis and Shiites, which is doubled up with distrust on the part of all of them towards the United States.
I talked with a ranking officer of the coalition who told me that despite his growing feeling of managing to militarily contain IS, even to chip away at its territory, it was not going well, because of these divisions and because Ramadi was less recaptured than destroyed. And he added: ‘You can’t do the same thing at Ramadi and Mosul, a town of almost two million inhabitants. Do you think that by recapturing and destroying Grozny the Russians obtained the support of the Chechens? They above all put in train future wars’.
If all these a priori unsolvable problems are successfully resolved, we will certainly perhaps manage to deflate the attraction of jihadism, for without a permanent extension of the Caliphate the IS project will lose its power of fascination. An overwhelming military force could, then, destroy the command structure, the organization and the current army of IS. But what will become of the Sunni world, ever more fragmented? And what is there to propose if we successfully do away with IS on the military front?
MEDIAPART: What can be envisaged?
S.A.: The profile of those who join IS or al-Qaeda should be closely studied. They are not individuals but groups of friends, brothers, parents, neighbourhood relations. If I was a [police] investigator, the one thing I would ask today of [arrested Paris terror attacks suspect] Salah Abdeslam is if he knows why someone from within his close circle would never join terrorist groups. Why is it that Mohamed Abdeslam didn’t follow the same path as his brothers Salah and Brahim? If we succeed in answering this question, we’ll have covered a lot of ground to know how to block this epidemic.
In all my investigations, I have observed that all terrorist and criminal activity depended on a vast social network which has nothing to do with these terrorist and criminal activities but without which these activities could not exist. Why, in [the Brussels suburb of] Molenbeek, was Salah Abdeslam able to find refuge over a period of months while he was wanted by every police force? Because he was hidden by people close to him who belong to the same life environment as him, who are not at all terrorists but who have built walls against the rest of society, more solid than two-metre tall steel barriers.
If we want to fight terrorism effectively, there is no other choice than to engage ourselves - that doesn’t mean infiltrate – close up with this world that we ignore. If we continue to content ourselves with meetings of experts on de-radicalisation we will have only academic quarrels of no use. I am on the same wavelength as Churchill when he said that to beat Hitler he was ready to do a deal with the devil. I am for making pacts, in the Middle East with al-Nosra, with al-Qaeda, with those who it is possible to talk to, and in the West with all the Salafists and Islamists who are ready to live alongside us without wanting to do away with all our liberal values. That doesn’t mean compromising oneself, freedom of speech and opinion are not negotiable. But it is necessary to associate with people who are active within their own communities, allowing them to do so with autonomy, without trying to destroy them, to co-opt them or to assimilate them.
I was sent to Morocco by the American State Department to “evaluate” an aid programme aimed at creating centres for deprived youngsters who it was feared would become jihadists, and for which the US Agency for International Development had spent millions of dollars. I came across groups of youngsters who watched jihadist websites, but also pornographic websites, and who had invented an affiliation, an identity, and a language for themselves made up of a mix of French, English, Spanish and Arab. None among them intended to join the jihad. I told the State Department that it was the best programme that I had seen for a long time, but they decided to close it down immediately, saying that the American Congress would never be able to accept that the American taxpayer should fund that.
MEDIAPART: What do you say to the governments who consult you on what to do in the face of jihadism?
S.A.: I tell them first of all to stop doing what they do. Not only does it not work, but it feeds future terrorist acts. The 9/11 attacks cost al-Qaeda 400,000 dolars and the United States subsequently spent 4,000 billion dollars to wage war on terrorism, whereas the insecurity linked to terrorism has only become worse. When you repeat, ad nauseam, the same thing that doesn’t work it is called, in psychology, madness. Governments have invested in remedies that correspond to a way of thinking which they are no longer able to free themselves, despite the reality.
Then I explain to them that the solution to terrorism carried out in the name of Islam won’t come from me, nor leaders, but from Muslim communities engaged in their local context [...] We pay much too little attention to psychological and social questions, which can only be resolved in their contexts and with engaged actors, even if it isn't by offering the best jobs to potential jihadists that we will solve the problems.
MEDIAPART: We hear more and more that IS is on the retreat, territorially, financially and politically. Why do you think that we give ourselves illusions of an imminent death of IS?
S.A.: All this background noise that we hear in the media does indeed appear to me to be premature. Even if we manage to kill whoever identifies themselves today with IS the same problems will perpetuate, even become worse. Between 2007 and 2009 in Iraq, during what was called “the surge”, there was the elimination of 80% of al-Qaeda’s numbers, which had already renamed itself ISIL [Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant]. Despite the elimination of between 10,000 and 15,000 “high-value targets” as they were called, the payments to the families of martyrs, the taxes levied, the command structure, did not disappear. And the organization even reinforced itself amid the Syrian chaos.
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- This interview was originally carried out in French, and can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse