Making sense of the local soldiers of the global jihad
Abstract
With every terrorist attack it has become increasingly difficult to determine a “standard” profile of the perpetrators to understand where and how radicalisation takes place.
The young men who carried out the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London attacks met in Internet cafés and neighbourhood mosques, in libraries and sport clubs. They watched videotapes of the wars in Chechnya or Bosnia, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Many came from the postcolonial immigration. They were first-generation, like those of Madrid, or second-generation, like London. The 9/11 attackers – most of them from Saudi Arabia – followed international networks to training camps in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen...