‘Soft security’ measures also needed to battle home-grown radicalism, experts say

OTTAWA—To many it was a mystery how Andre Poulin, a young man in his early 20s from Timmins, ended up dead on an ISIS battlefield in Syria in the summer of 2013.

To the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security, and Society (TSAS) it was an opportunity to put together more pieces of the radicalization puzzle.

So far, that puzzle points to a two-stage radicalization process where social media is a factor — not a decisive one, but where social contacts are key. And as the puzzle pieces fall into place, researchers believe work like this will show the way forward to a country seeking to stop those like Poulin in their midst.

In Poulin’s odd case, the researchers discovered what the news media did not.

Confidential interviews by TSAS researchers with people who were contacts of Poulin’s showed that the man who converted to Islam in 2008 and changed his name to Abu Muslim travelled to Toronto, where he lived for almost a year not long before he travelled to Syria in 2012.

They discovered Poulin was a housemate of three young men of Somali background who themselves “had radicalized” and whom researchers now believe were forces in Poulin’s radicalization.

They do not know all their names, and even if they did, strict confidentiality and ethics rules govern their work, meaning they cannot reveal the identities of anyone they engage with. These terrorism researchers are delving into the phenomenon of Canadian foreign fighters. So far, the project has collected the stories, contacts and backgrounds of 12 Canadians fighting abroad, many of whom have been interviewed while still in Syria or Iraq.

Funded in part by a federal agency, Defence Research and Development Canada, it is valuable empirical research, building on years of scholarly work into groups like the IRA.

Though CSIS and the RCMP were initially skeptical it would turn up much new, Lorne Dawson, a professor at the University of Waterloo, says the project, in its early stages, is already revealing interesting patterns that could point to ways — or times — when de-radicalization intervention measures might be effective.

For starters, radicalization does not appear to occur solely as a result of watching slick propaganda, says Dawson.

Poulin actually stars in one of those ISIS propaganda films, entitled, “The Chosen Few of Different Lands,” released after his death. It features Poulin’s call to arms to fellow Canadians with a now-familiar plea — later to be echoed by John Maguire, an Ottawa convert who also travelled to Syria to join ISIS, also known as Islamic State.

“I watched hockey. I went to the cottage in the summertime. I liked to fish,” says Poulin. “I was like your everyday, regular Canadian before Islam.”

Dawson and Professor Daniel Hiebert of the University of British Columbia, co-directors of the terrorism study centre, say slick films and social media may be powerful elements but, on their own, do not drive young people who are “everyday, regular Canadians” to acts of extremist violence.

There’s no simple profile of who becomes radicalized to the point of taking up arms, but Dawson said the research shows there is “still an extremely strong role for local inspirational leaders and figures” — friends, peers, mentors. “Very few people radicalize online exclusively,” said Dawson. “It takes face to face interaction.”

They point to the group of four young men in London, Ontario, two of whom died in a terrorist assault on a gas plant in Algeria, the group in Calgary, the group in Ottawa, and now, this week’s revelations of a group of young people who left Quebec to fight with Islamic State.

“We’re dealing with a cluster phenomenon. We’re dealing with a situation where group dynamics are absolutely crucial,” Dawson says.

It comes into play when young people are on a “quest for significance,” searching for their identity. In some cases they may be “drifters” but in many more cases, researchers have found individuals from an immigrant background struggling to “manage two worlds” or “two identities.”

In many of the Canadian cases, the youth are from respectable, middle-class, relatively privileged families, with good levels of educational achievement, perhaps with no prior criminal record or psychological problems. They may have been quite religious as children, and as teenagers are not stereotypical rebels. They wouldn’t be the kind who would up in a street gang. Personal trauma and crises may be “catalysts” but not the source of the radicalization. And there’s no evidence so far that youths have become radicalized in schools.

But they adopt a strong sense of “morality and religiosity. It is not a matter of Islam,” says Dawson, but there’s no question their motivation is “fundamentally religious” and their “conception of religion encompasses political action.”

Often, they undergo a “significant intensification of religion” or a religious conversion as a way of consolidating their new personal identity.

At a certain point in that struggle they are open to the jihadi narrative, says Dawson, because “they are emotionally in turmoil, frustrated and the narrative has a clean simple emotional appeal: ‘what’s bad, what’s good, what do I have to do, what will be the great reward for doing so.’ The fact that they’re compelled to sacrifice for it doesn’t turn them off, it appeals to them.”

They’re looking for a “grand heroic cause, a kind of cause that’s missing from our world. It’s a cosmic cause literally, in the case of ISIS, and then they are willing to throw down their lives because the meaningfulness of that cause transcends everything else.”

But before it gets to that point, research shows, young people will role play, try on the new “jihadi identity” for size. They haven’t completely internalized it yet.

It’s at this point that Dawson and Hiebert believe there is an opportunity for families, friends and mentors to step in, and perhaps turn the tide, for better or worse.

It would take an immense public education effort and support for families and Muslim communities to have difficult conversations, to provide support and resources. Dawson draws the comparison to how we now approach suicide. Just as parents and teachers should never ignore a 14- or 15-year-old who says he’s going to kill himself, Canadians have to respond to young people espousing sympathetic feelings for extremist ideologies from the get-go.

“If someone says, ‘Anyone who is not a Sunni is a kuffar and they should all be killed,’ that’s not a line you let pass. The trouble is if your only recourse right now is to phone the police or the RCMP, it’s not going to happen,” says Dawson.

That’s because the Canadian government has chosen to focus on “hard security” — boosting investigative powers, intelligence gathering, arrest powers. There is no provision in the Conservative government’s massive anti-terror Bill C-51 to provide new resources for de-radicalization programs — the kind of “soft security” measures that Dawson, Hiebert and others say are key.

By that they mean interventions involving law enforcement, teachers, social workers and psychiatrists — resources that are woefully lacking at the moment for Muslim communities across Canada, the Senate committee has heard.

The researchers say Ottawa should look to other countries, pointing to a program in Britain called Channel that draws in police, social workers, psychiatrists and teachers “to deal with the other aspects of that person’s life that need to be fixed, to get them to divert from that path towards radicalization and violence.”

“That’s expensive, but, again: an ounce of prevention, a pound of cure.”

And they urged continued funding for research projects such as theirs. “We don’t adequately understand radicalization yet,” said Dawson. “To put it in simple terms, we’re very worried . . . . If you don’t have a fine enough conception of what’s causing the problem, it’s difficult to develop the most effective counter measures.”