Washington, January 22: Since 2001, al-Qaida is believed to have dispatched three men to blow up American airliners. Two of them tried but failed to set off explosions, and the third backed out of his assignment.
What made him different? A new study suggests family ties may have played an important role. The report to be released this week by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy looked at dozens of terrorists in trying to figure out what motivates terror dropouts and how others might be influenced to turn their backs on violent operations.
Michael Jacobson, who wrote the study, said one of the key differences in the case of British student Sajid Badat was his continued connection to his family, which had emigrated from Malawi to Britain before he was born.
Badat, then 21, didn’t go through with a December 2001 shoe-bombing operation. He stashed the bomb under a bed in his family home in Gloucester, England.
British intelligence tracked down Badat two years later using evidence found on shoe bomber Richard Reid, who attempted to bring down a plane in December 2001 and is serving a life sentence in a high-security US prison. More recently, a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was charged with trying to blow up a
Detroit-bound airliner last Christmas with explosives sewed into his underwear.
Families can play either a positive or negative role in a terrorist’s plans, something al-Qaida recognizes. Lead September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta instructed his compatriots to cut off ties to their families. However, the two 9/11 conspirators who dropped out were both in touch with their families against al-Qaida instructions.
In one case, it was al-Qaida’s seeming indifference to the plight of the wife of one of its operatives that ultimately turned him into an American informer.
The reasons terrorists and extremists reverse course vary but could point a way to encourage more dropouts, Jacobson says.
One effective method: puncturing the mystique of terrorist leaders. Jacobson said the 2006 dissemination of videotape of slain al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi not knowing how to fix and fire a jammed machine gun was a good example.
Highlighting the hypocrisy of killing civilians and other Muslims in terror attacks can also be effective, Jacobson found. The US should also publicize the fact that leaving such groups is possible, he says.
-Agencies