Brussels attack

Brussels Station Bomber Was Secretive and a Loner

The man had earlier been held for a minor drug offence, but since then had maintained a low profile, even on social media.

Belgian police officers stand guard in central station in Brussels, Belgium, June 21, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Eric Vidal

Brussels: The first details about the man shot dead as he tried to bomb Brussels‘ Central Station highlight the shadowy new challenge to security services across Europe – the lone-wolf militant.

The 36-year-old Moroccan who part-detonated a suitcase packed with nails and gas bottles on Tuesday appeared to have acted alone, was virtually unknown in his home area and had never been identified by police as a threat.

From Nice to London, men acting alone with guns, knives or trucks have carried out deadly assaults following calls by ISIS for followers to attack in their home countries, rather than fight in Syria and Iraq as it loses ground there.

Belgian authorities have identified the Brussels attacker only as OZ. A Belgian security source told Reuters he was Oussama Zariouh.

In an overnight raid, investigators found in his home bomb-making materials similar to the chemicals used in the attacks by ISIS on Brussels airport and metro that killed 32 people last year.

Zariouh had lived in the poor Brussels borough of Molenbeek since 2013. But unlike the militants who helped plan the 2015 Paris attacks and who also lived there, Zariouh was largely unheard of, according to interviews with residents.

“Oussama is not an uncommon name, so I’ve heard the name, but here, in this area, no I don’t know him,” said a Belgian-Moroccan woman called Jamila who lived near Zariouh’s home, echoing the sentiment of other residents.

According to Molenbeek mayor Francoise Schepmans, Zariouh had been investigated only for a minor drug offence.

A Facebook account with his name and matching details said he had graduated from a Moroccan university in 2002 and was self-employed. His postings showed no obviously radical comments or militant links and attracted very few responses.

“Do it on your own”

The account, not updated for a year, showed many shots of Zariouh, clean-shaven or with a thin beard, apparently alone at the wheel of a car.

“The fact that police couldn’t find him in their databases is a bit of a shock, given that lots of searches and raids have been made since the Paris attacks in Molenbeek,” said Bruno Struys, a Belgian author who writes on Islamist fighters.

So far, no group has claimed responsibility for the abortive Tuesday attack. Kenneth Lasoen, a security and intelligence expert at the University of Ghent, said its clumsiness showed a lack of operational support.

“This looks like the work of a lone wolf,” Lasoen said. “He did not know what he was doing. If this had been Daesh [ISIS], he would have had better instructions about how to do this awful act.”

After Zariouh part-detonated his suitcase bomb, he ran downstairs to the station platforms, then ran back up to the concourse and towards a soldier on a routine patrol, shouting “Allahu akbar” – God is greatest, in Arabic.

The soldier shot him several times.

Zariouh’s isolation may reflect militants’ greater need for secrecy as Europe’s security forces step up their surveillance, after years of under-funding of spy services and squabbling among governments.

“Because of the heightened security, if militants want to be successful in a planning an attack, they cannot make their intentions clear to anyone, because at some point that will be picked up by the intelligence services,” Lasoen said.

“Daesh is saying: as much as you can, do it on your own,” he said.

(Reuters)

By Pushing Muslims to the Margins, Cruz and Trump Would Make the US Like Europe

Making it legitimate to think (and act) hatefully towards Muslims in America would do nothing more than marginalise them.

Source: Getty Images

Consider what the two Republican presidential candidates, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, are proposing in the aftermath of the Brussels attacks.

Cruz wants to “patrol and secure” Muslim neighbourhoods in America because that’s what’s required in “a neighbourhood where there is gang activity”.

Which gangs and which neighbourhoods could he possibly mean? The wealthy suburbs of Chicago, where American Muslim doctors have their palatial residences? Remember that immigrant American Muslims are “slightly more affluent and better educated than native-born Muslims,” according to the book Being Muslim in America, published by the US government’s Bureau of International Information Programs.

Remember too that 24% of all Muslims in America and 29% of immigrant Muslims have college degrees compared to 25% for the US general population. “Forty-one percent of all Muslim Americans and 45 percent of immigrant Muslims report annual household income levels of $50,000 or higher. This compares to the national average of 44 percent,” says Being Muslim in America.

So which neighbourhoods and gangs could Cruz mean? The ethnic pockets where Somalis, Bangladeshis, Bosnian and Pakistanis live just because those people happen to be Muslim? These are not ghettos and nothing like Molenbeek, the Brussels neighbourhood, where conditions are ripe for discontented Muslim youths to turn to radicalism. Molenbeek has long had a reputation for lawlessness, with high levels of petty crime — muggings, drug dealing and burglaries. Its new prominence as a haven for jihad-minded men is hardly a surprise.

Perhaps Cruz is imagining the same sort of situation in Muslim-dominant areas in the US? Which ones? Perhaps he means some Somali gang or the other in Minneapolis? I don’t know of any, but they must surely exist. But to describe them as ‘Muslim gangs’ would be like calling Hispanic gangs in Los Angeles ‘Catholic anti-nationals’.

In any case, was there “gang activity” in mass shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s neighbourhood in San Bernardino, California, before he set out with his equally disturbed wife to murder innocent people? What patrol could have picked up the increasingly deranged thoughts of an American-born-and-bred man who worked in the local country office and just happened to be Muslim?

Trump doesn’t want Cruz’s patrols (though he would support them “100 per cent”). He wants to keep Muslims out of America altogether because of the “hatred” they feel.

This is mad, bad and dangerous talk. Dangerous because it will excite Islamophobes and freelance agents of patriotism who believe that “homeland security” equates with being anti-Muslim.

It is profoundly unfair to demonise America’s Muslims. A 2011 Pew Research Centre poll found that the vast majority wanted to “adopt American customs”. Only 20% of those surveyed said they would prefer to “be distinct”. Half of the respondents said that many of their friends were non-Muslim and almost 80% rated their community as an “excellent” or “good” place to live.

In Europe, Muslims or coloured people generally would find it hard to say exactly the same and with quite so much enthusiasm. This, because Europe, unlike America, has not emerged from the melting-pot and visually different “foreigners” can remain separate for generations.

The UK, France, Belgium and other European countries struggle to integrate Muslims. Belgium has a particularly hard task because it has done so little to tie in its second-generation Muslim youths. The unemployment rate for Belgians of North and sub-Saharan African descent is between 40 and 50%. The Belgian establishment remains totally unrepresentative of the demographic change that has already occurred. The police is a case in point. Last year, the BBC reported that of Antwerp’s 2,600 police officers, only 22 are non-white.

So far, America has been very different in its treatment of — and response from — its Muslim community, which is estimated at anywhere between two and seven million (more likely the latter). This is, as President Barack Obama pointed out on Wednesday, in a rebuke to Cruz and Trump, part of what keeps America safe.

Making it legitimate to think (and act) hatefully towards Muslims in America would do nothing more than marginalise them. No one would be any the safer. Not the Muslim community. Not America.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a senior journalist. She tweets @rashmeerl.

This article was originally published on www.rashmee.com, and is republished here with the permission of the author.

What’s on the Table for Modi’s Visit to Brussels

The free trade agreement, counterterrorism and other key areas of cooperation will be up for discussion at the India-EU Summit.

Narendra Modi will attend the EU-India Summit in Brussels on March 30. Credit: PTI

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Brussels for a day on Wednesday, March 30, he is unlikely to make headlines in a city still reeling from the terrorist attacks of a week ago. But European Union officials say Modi’s decision to attend the EU-India Summit amid heightened security concerns in the region is a welcome sign that both sides are keen to re-establish a relationship that has been languishing in recent years.

What’s on the agenda

Held after a gap of four years, the 13th EU-India Summit will focus on counterterrorism, more so in the aftermath of the Brussels bombings. Trade and investment will also figure high on the agenda. EU officials hope that the summit will give fresh political impetus to the free trade agreement (FTA) talks, started in 2007 and suspended in 2013.

“We are not expecting a miracle on the FTA, but we do hope for a political impulse and signal from both sides that there is a commitment to work towards an agreement, and that it is still on the cards,” a senior EU official told The Wire.

European officials hope the closed-door summit will yield a joint statement and an agenda that will serve as a road map for EU-India cooperation in what is referred to as Action 2020. This includes concrete priority actions for the strategic partnership between the two sides over the next five years. Declarations on a water partnership, and an energy and climate partnership are also expected to be announced.

“There is a willingness on the EU’s side to support India’s and Modi’s initiatives, especially in the fields of energy, Swachh Bharat (Clean India) and water management, and we are very well-placed to contribute to all these,” an EU official said.

Diplomats on both sides are also hoping to thrash out a common agenda on migration and mobility to cover legal and irregular migration, international protection and migration, and development. Major sticking points include the EU’s demands to reduce duties on cars and car parts, and wines and spirits, while India wants easier visas for skilled professionals and has demanded data security status, which is crucial for its IT sector to do more business with EU firms.

The summit will also discuss cooperation in the fields of research and innovation, the digital market and human rights.

On foreign policy, the two sides will discuss the latest developments in their neighbourhoods. EU officials say that they are particularly happy that India is playing an active role in Afghanistan and hope to discuss areas of cooperation in that country, ahead of an EU summit on Afghanistan in November. Other countries to be discussed include Pakistan, Nepal, North Korea and the Ukraine.

For the India-Belgium bilateral, terrorism and trade will also figure prominently in discussions that Modi will have with his Belgian counterpart, Charles Michel, who will be accompanied by officials from the top 20 Belgian companies currently doing business in India and those hoping to do so.

EU officials also said they are expecting the European Investment Bank (EIB) to announce a significant investment for a mass transit project in India. “This will enhance the current exposure of the EIB in India significantly,” noted an EU official.

Engaging with EU leadership

Hosted by the EU, the European side will be led by Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, and Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission. Although this is Modi’s maiden visit to the EU headquarters, he has previously met Tusk and Juncker on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey in November last year. Frederica Mogherini, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and Cecilia Malmstrom, the European Commissioner for Trade, will also be present.

According to an EU official, the summit will be “an opportunity for Modi to really engage with the EU leadership. Modi has a very personalised approach to foreign policy, and it is important for EU leaders that there is some visibility of their engagement with him, and hopefully, some concrete results will follow. The EU as an entity has been absent in Modi’s world, but at the same time he has been engaged with the key member states, including Germany, UK and France. There have also been several bilateral interactions with smaller members, including the Netherlands and Ireland.”

“The Indian side has been actively pushing for a counter-terrorism declaration, which is now expected to take centre stage in light of the recent attacks, but was always on the cards,” an EU official close to the negotiations said. “This is a key challenge for both of us, and an area of cooperation which we would like to see significantly strengthened.”

“Counterterrorism is something that is extremely crucial for us,” Manjeev Singh Puri, India’s ambassador to the EU, said at a recent policymakers’ lunch, organised by Friends of Europe, a Brussels-based think-tank. While India strongly condemns all terrorist attacks, “we believe that while the other guys are plotting (attacks), we, as governments and government institutions have the great ability of large-scale collaboration (to stop them). That’s our asset and we must pool that together,” he added.

The event, which brought together key stakeholders, including senior officials from the EU and international institutions, members of European Parliament, diplomats, academics and business two weeks before the summit, was an attempt to brainstorm on the subject of “moving relations beyond trade”.

“It’s time for a more serious conversation on refugees, peace and security in Asia, Africa and the Middle East,” wrote Shada Islam, director of policy at Friends of Europe, in a paper calling for a fresh start to EU-India relations. “In other areas, the focus must shift to a more practical, pragmatic and operational agenda which seeks to find common ground between Modi’s aspirational modernization drive and EU initiatives to boost growth and jobs.”

While the EU is India’s largest trading partner, largest foreign investor and largest foreign investment destination, India is only the EU’s ninth largest partner, accounting for a paltry 2.1% of the EU’s total trade. “This is an indication that so much more is possible,” a top EU official said at the event. “We would certainly like to build on the convergence of our political and economic agendas.” Referring to the Make in India initiative, the official said it provided a “very large overlap with the EU’s agenda for jobs, growth, fairness and democratic change.”

“There needs to be a readiness to go forward on both sides, and a political push from the top will really help to tap the vastly underdeveloped potential in our relationship,” urged a diplomat at the policymakers’ lunch. “We don’t have a track record on implementation. Implementation is the key for a new beginning – for a vastly invigorated partnership.”

Meeting the Indian diaspora

Modi’s Brussels visit will include meetings with top Indian businessmen in Europe, including a delegation of diamond traders from Antwerp, where India’s Patel community dominates the diamond trading hub – the largest in the world, with about 84% of the world’s rough diamonds transiting through here. He will also hold separate meetings with members of the European Parliament, and a delegation of Indologists.

The day will end with a jamboree to address the Indian diaspora, in the style of other similar gatherings for Indians in the UK, Germany and the US. Organisers say they expect a crowd of about 5,000 people, who have registered through the Modi in Brussels website.

EU officials, however, are anticipating Modi’s engagements with the Indian diaspora will eclipse the summit. “It’s more likely that the headlines after this summit will be ‘Modi meets 5000 Indians in Brussels’ rather than ‘Modi meets Tusk and Juncker’,” an official said wryly.

What Happens to Journalistic Ethics When the News Site is a Photo Studio

The practice of manufacturing events – and emotions – by setting up or recreating scenarios that can be photographed is undermining photojournalism

From the Instagram posting by Khaled Al Sabah

Khaled Al Sabbah, a young, award-winning photojournalist, was caught on video getting a child to strike a mourning pose following the Brussels terror attacks. The footage has sparked a debate on the ethics of photojournalism.

In my own work as a photojournalist, I have often witnessed my colleagues orchestrating the re-enactment of a situation, such as two political leaders shaking hands, or signing MOUs. I have asked them why they do so, and the response always is that they don’t want to miss a picture. However, in focusing on the moment, they not only fictionalise their narratives – which is unethical – they also ignore the larger context of what they’re reporting on.

This is the difference between a photojournalist, and a technician: the latter is hyper-focused on pushing for one photographable moment, without paying heed to the consequences or ethical implications of doing so.

Of course, some stagings involve the mechanical reproduction of a moment – a repeated handshake or a smile or a wave – while others, like the posed shot in Brussels, confect an event or an emotion, turning the photographer and her or his camera into an actor or creator rather than a chronicler of the moment.

Across the world, the response of serious photojournalists has been unforgiving.

“Bad luck for him (Al Sabbah), but he shouldn’t have done it. I guess the pressure by his employer, or a tight deadline, or the need to make a living have eroded his ethics and he gave in,” John Vink, a Belgian photojournalist, told me in an email.

Reinhard Krause, global pictures editor at Thomson Reuters declined to comment on the photo but shared with me the Reuters Code of Conduct, which details the organisation’s rules for staff and freelancers. On the subject of staged pictures, the code says, “Reuters photographers, staff and freelance, must not stage or re-enact news events. They may not direct the subjects of their images or add, remove or move objects on a news assignment.”

Reuters cut ties with freelance photographer Adnan Hajj after it found that he had altered two photographs from Lebanon. Reuters also withdrew all 920 photographs by him from its database.

Despite the setting out of clear guidelines and the possibility of disciplinary action, the practice of staging photos is distressingly common.

As American photojournalist Ed Kashi says, “This event is yet another sad example of photographers, often young but not always so, who feel compelled to amp up their image by making the scene fulfil a vision or message that they either want to tell, or feel the public will want to see. Unfortunately it erodes the public’s trust in our profession, at a time where we are losing that trust at a rate never before witnessed. The ethics of photojournalism preclude directing or setting up anything, except for portraits.”

Altaf Qadri, a photojournalist with Associated Press says, “We, as responsible photographers, must never stage anything. It’s totally unethical. If we lose credibility, we lose everything.”

Photojournalism is, first and foremost, about patience, staying alert, and upholding ethics. Sometimes, in the process, the photojournalist may miss out on a story. However, this is not a licence to set up or recreate the story.

Images tell a story but journalism is about fidelity to the story and not the image. Sometimes, an unstaged image, taken out of context, can end up telling a story different from what actually unfolded. I’d like to present an example from my own work. Close to three hundred journalists had gathered on the steps of Sonia Gandhi’s residence in 2009 after the Congress won the elections for the second time. As photographers, we were there to capture Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh smiling, waving their hands, and engaging in gestures of one kind or another.

I was among the throng, taking many gigabytes worth of photographs in rapid fire. When I returned to my workspace, I looked through what I’d taken. A particular image caught my eye – in it, Sonia Gandhi is taking a large stride forward, leaving Manmohan Singh behind. Singh, as he usually did, seems to be looking sheepishly at her.

Manmohan and Sonia Gandhi in May 2009. Credit: Shome Basu

When my magazine editor saw it, he said we could run it with a strapline suggesting that Sonia Gandhi was remote-controlling Singh. But since I’d been there, I knew the context in which I’d taken the image. In that moment, Manmohan had asked Sonia Gandhi to speak first, and the odd body language that I’d captured occurred in a thousandth of a second during that process. But my picture got published not because it was true to the reality of the event I had witnessed but because it conformed with the political perception in the corridors of Delhi that Manmohan was a puppet in Sonia’s hands.

Another instance of an actual photograph conveying odd body language was a recent image of French president Francois Hollande and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi at the rock garden in Chandigarh in January 2016.

Narendra Modi and Francois Hollande, Rock Garden, Chandigarh, January 2016. Credit: PTI

As Modi was walking with Hollande through a set of sculptures, a superfast, motor-driven camera froze a moment which again involved a fraction of a second. History will archive both these images as representations of fact but the circumstances which produced them were very different. ‘After an event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality it would never have otherwise enjoyed.’ This is what Susan Sontag said as a critique of the medium in her book On Photography.

In moments like these, the tricky question of truth-telling remains, when such gestures speak for themselves. There are also graver questions of representation, such as whether it is ethical to take and publish pictures of people in the immediate aftermath of tragedy. The recent debate about the use of Jet Airways stewardess Nidhi Chaphekar’s picture, taken soon after the Brussels attack in the airport, outlines this last problem. That the photographer herself was conflicted was evident by the interview she gave in which she confessed to experiencing a huge sense of relief when she read how Chaphekar’s relatives were happy to learn – through the photograph – that she had survived the terrorist attack.

Ultimately, the person holding the camera is freezing moments in history and journalism requires that those moments be fact and not fiction. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s body of work, including his collection The Decisive Moment, was in some way an outcome of his intense shyness. Preferring photography over verbal interactions, Cartier-Bresson was akin to an invisible being who recorded the times he lived in. This is the photographer’s work: to stick to the story, and responsibly serve as a window into the unseen and unheard world.

How ISIS Games the Media as an Avenue for its Theatre of Terror

The manner in which the group reaches and radicalises young impressionable people around the world is a lesson in the power of communication

Explosions at Brussels airport in Belgium Tuesday. Credit: PTI

The attacks in Brussels on March 22, claimed by the ISIS terror group, has brought renewed attention to the group’s extended reach, far from its strongholds in Syria and Iraq. Similar worries were voiced in the aftermath of the San Bernardino and Paris attacks, and closer home with the arrests of 14 men earlier this year on charges of sympathising with the terror outfit. While the motives of such attacks are often open to speculation, it is important to find out who the perpetrators are and how they planned the attack.

As is increasingly evident from these attacks, ISIS is bringing into its fold impressionable young people from around the world. A January 2015 study by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence estimated that 20,730 foreigners had joined the group. Although the majority of these recruits are from Middle Eastern nations, a substantial number are from Western Europe. How ISIS reaches and radicalises them is a lesson in the power of communication. The questioning of those detained in India helped explain to some extent how ISIS operatives approached, recruited and trained them, but crucially it also reinforced the group’s reliance on a solid communication strategy and its success gaming New Media avenues to disseminate its propaganda.

ISIS’s online presence is driven by the goal to “inspire or recruit people with borderline personalities” to join the group.

New Media and the theatre of terror

ISIS and other contemporary terrorists have increasingly turned to New Media as a means of generating a mass psychological impact on an audience that is more targeted and varied than that typically offered by traditional media. This is – with the Internet becoming a useful platform for the distribution of “uncensored and unfiltered” versions of events. Terror groups increasingly use social media networks – which are most popular with the youth – to establish a direct virtual connection with their target audience. An ongoing project, Monitoring Terror on the Internet, estimates that there are more than 10,000 active terrorist websites. This is indicative of the growing belief among militant groups that establishing a presence in cyberspace is perhaps as crucial in the long-term as any violent action on ground.

Where ISIS departs from the norm in terrorist usage of the web is how extensively and effectively it uses the medium. Social media has been a critical component of ISIS’s strategy. The group uses it to disseminate its violent agenda in a bid to instil fear in the territory it controls as well as among the perceived enemy, besides fundraising and recruiting those vulnerable enough to be drawn into the process of radicalisation. Its media strategy has been, “to recruit, radicalise and raise funds,” while making a spectacle of its conquests to garner greater attention.

This shock-and-awe strategy can be better understood through what Gabriel Weimann and Conrad Winn describe as the “theatre of terror,” a metaphor that examines modern terrorism as an attempt to communicate messages through the use of orchestrated violence.

Much like the effort that goes into producing a theatrical performance, acts of terrorism too require planning, precision and attention to detail. While the terrorists write the script and enact the drama, the theatre of terror is only made possible when the media provides the stage and the audience. For ISIS, the Internet in general and social media in particular have become an endless stage for its repeated performances of brutality. The Internet has expanded the group’s scope of operation, allowing it complete control over its communications by using the developed world’s own cyber infrastructure. Skilfully using the medium to display and distribute its well-planned and well-produced propaganda, ISIS has succeeded in building a sense of mystique around its operations. Its slickly-made videos are obvious reflections of the goal to reach a mass audience, but more importantly, they are rooted in the desire to put on a dramatic spectacle of terror to get mass attention.

Intimidation and persuasion

Despite only gaining worldwide prominence in June 2014 when it took control of Mosul, a large strategic city in northern Iraq, ISIS’s notoriety has magnified through its shock-and-awe modus operandi. The group has filmed and widely distributed videos of the brutal killings of civilians, soldiers, journalists and aid workers, as well as the pillaging and destruction of cultural heritage sites.

But who is the group targeting with such content? In ISIS’s case, the target audience can be categorised into two groups based on the response the content is designed to generate: (1) the group’s supporters and sympathisers, for whom the content is meant to be informational and inspirational, to encourage donations and recruitment; and (2) the perceived enemy (the West, regional governments that support the West and individuals who oppose ISIS’s motives) and people in the territory it controls, for whom the content is meant to intimidate and frighten, to project ISIS’s absolute brutality. Although the group has dedicated content intended for promotional and recruitment purposes, its infamous videos and social media campaigns aim to target both categories of the audience.

Grab from a video showing an ISIS man with two Japanese hostages. Credit: Twitter

The on-camera killings are dramatic productions intended to elicit emotional responses from the viewers; the videos are meant to shock and frighten viewers, and to intimidate the enemy by projecting strength, savagery and a lack of mercy.

Besides repulsing and frightening the enemy, these theatrical displays of terror serve another purpose – to connect with existing and potential young supporters in a bid persuade them to join ISIS’s ranks. The videos are targeted at the plethora of youngsters who have grown up watching movies that bare the same aesthetics, and who thus likely view violence as cathartic and a just means to counter the enemy.

In 2014, with global attention turning towards its activities, ISIS recognised the potential to connect with a wider Western audience and launched the al-Hayat Media Centre to produce material in English and other European languages.

Al-Hayat publishes Dabiq, a digital English-language magazine, which is translated to other languages, including German and French. The high-production value magazine is a perfect accompaniment to the group’s ‘snuff films’, which boast modern-style moviemaking techniques, with clear narratives, multiple camera angles and polished editing, and are aggressively distributed across social media alongside other propaganda content.

Gaming Twitter

The most lucrative and unrestricted platform to connect with supporters and spread propaganda has been Twitter. A Brookings report on the group’s Twitter activity estimates that at least 46,000 accounts on the social networking site were used by ISIS supporters from September through December 2014, though not all were active simultaneously. Despite repeated attempts by Twitter to stymie ISIS’s propaganda and recruitment efforts by suspending accounts linked to the group, supporters and sympathisers have maintained tens of thousands of active accounts. The social networking site continues to remain at the forefront of the group’s social media offensive, with a reported 500 to 2000 hyperactive accounts tweeting ISIS related content at any given point, the report estimates.

ISIS has proved to be adept at navigating Twitter to maximum benefit, employing tested social media strategies and utilising software to amplify the distribution of its messages. For instance, its Arabic-language app, Dawn of Glad Tidings, was extremely successful with numerous people signing up for it. Although no longer active, the sheer volume of tweets sent out from the app during any particular time was enough to dominate online content and conversations. Similarly, social media conversations have also been manipulated by dedicated hashtag campaigns where ISIS supporters have repeatedly tweeted specific hashtags at certain points of day so that they may trend on the site, encouraging further dissemination, as was seen immediately after the Brussels attacks.

Milder content

But not all ISIS online propaganda content is violent. The group regularly shares arguably staged images of life in the territory it controls, depicting idyllic utopian scenes. Interestingly, it also seems to have tamped down the radical rhetoric. British photojournalist John Cantlie, who has been held captive by the group since November 2012, appears in many propaganda videos, most recently on March 19. The imagery is subtle and unlike ISIS’s usual propaganda videos, but as expected Cantlie is seen criticising Western foreign and hostage policy. In other videos, he is seen describing the situation in Mosul and other Syrian cities as being far more favourable than portrayed by the West. Similarly, an Australian doctor appeared in a propaganda video exalting the group’s health services and urging other Muslim health experts to join him.

ISIS’s move to include such non-violent content in its propaganda efforts points to a noticeable shift in the group’s media strategy. On-ground violent operations may help seize territory, but to secure popular support ISIS also needs to be seen as an altruistic group that can shun violence and take on a benevolent role when needed.

Ideological insurgency

To better understand ISIS’s social media strategy, its successes and its impact on how other terrorist groups use communication as a strategy, a holistic study is required. A thorough socio-cultural and psychological approach would help understand the motivations of not just the fighters on ground, but even of those who feel strong enough about a cause to access, view and share violent, barbaric content online, and who may even be inspired to join the group.

By virtue of the media-oriented strategy it has adopted, ISIS controls the information it extends to the audience, and thus has substantial control over how it is perceived. Although many news media organisations have been cautious in what content they reproduce, especially the snuff films, by reporting on the group and redistributing its images and videos they inadvertently partake in the status-conferral process. Indeed, incidents like the Brussels and Paris attacks, and San Bernardino are newsmakers – videos and images in the immediate aftermath of the attacks are repeatedly shared and transmitted via social and traditional media; images of perseverance and defiance in the face of terror also add to the narrative.

ISIS is waging an ideological insurgency as much as a territorial one. As it continues to lose ground in its bastion in Syria and Iraq, ISIS will likely step up efforts to remain relevant and win people over for its plans to establish a caliphate. Through the use of modern technologies to network, recruit, raise funds and spread psychological warfare, ISIS wants to one-up the West; by resorting to large-scale terrorist attacks, ISIS is bringing the insurgency to their turf.

Could Super Recognisers Be the Latest Weapon in the War on Terror?

The wider recruitment of a special breed of facial recognisers in police forces, and in agencies such as the passport office and border control, is very important in the fight against terrorism.

Three suspects in the Brussels airport bombing caught on CCTV. Belgian Police

In the wake of the terror attacks on Brussels, Belgian police rapidly identified two of the suicide bombers that carried out the attacks: brothers Khalid and Brahim el-Bakraoui, both Belgian nationals. The identification came after the police released CCTV images showing three men at the airport in Zaventem in the hope that people might recognise them and come forward with information.

The search for the third man wearing the white jacket and hat in the CCTV image has become the immediate focus for the massive police operation. He was thought to be carrying the most powerful bomb which failed to go off, prompting him to flee. The unexploded bomb was later safely deactivated by experts.

BREAKING: Third bomb deactivated at Brussels airport, official says.

— The Associated Press (@AP) March 22, 2016

It is clear the release of images plays a massive role in the manhunt – a taxi driver is said to have come forwards after recognising CCTV images of the three men he earlier dropped off at the airport. But looking at the grainy CCTV footage, it is hard to make out the blurred features of the suspects. So how easy is it to actually identify someone from a CCTV image?

The hunt for the third man involved in the Brussels bombings is underway. Source: Belgian Federal Police

You may not have heard of “super recognisers” – people who literally never forget a face. In the UK, the London Metropolitan Police has its own super recogniser squad who have been shown to have extraordinary powers of recall when it comes to identifying people from an image or photo.

Both in policing and at border control, unfamiliar face matching – rather than face memory – is key to successful operation. Super recognisers have been shown to perform significantly better than control groups in a number of tasks related to identification. So could this enhanced ability to spot a face in a crowd be used in the fight against terrorism?

Face off

A group of current Met Police super recognisers were assessed with the Glasgow Face Matching Test (GFMT), a standardised test of unfamiliar face-matching ability. In this task, participants are shown pairs of faces and are asked to determine whether they show the same person or two different people.

The GFMT sounds like a deceptively simple task, show a person two faces and ask whether they show the same individual or two different people. However, the key thing here is that they are unfamiliar faces – and our research has shown that unfamiliar face recognition is hard and highly prone to error.

In fact, error rates in this task for the average person range from 15-20% – and we know from previous findings that even a group of passport officers perform no better, even those with years of experience in matching faces.

So how did the super recognisers do? Well, their performance on the GFMT unfamiliar face-matching task was outstanding, where average error rates in the comparison group – of police trainees – reached 19%, average error rates for the super recognisers fell to just 4%, with one officer reaching perfect levels of performance.

Could super recognisers be key in the fight against terrorism? Source: Dmitry Kalinovsky/Shutterstock

In a second experiment, the demands of the task were increased by replacing the GFMT faces with those of male models. Models often alter their appearance and in this way the authors could test super recogniser’s unfamiliar face-matching performance for faces that varied in appearance to a greater degree. This type of task also mirrors an offender’s change in appearance, using of different hair styles, beards, and clothing.

Once again, the super recognisers outperformed the control group – a group of university students – on the models task, with error rates falling from 27% among the control group to 10% in the super recognisers.

In a third test the super recognisers were presented with a familiar face-matching task using celebrity face images. The photos were all pixelated to mirror a forensic identification situation in which only low-quality CCTV images would be available. The super recognisers again scored significantly fewer errors (7%) compared to the control group (27%).

Facing the facts

These findings provide more evidence for the view that there are wide individual differences in face recognition ability across individuals in the population. And that people’s level of ability appears to be innate – training or years of experience makes little difference to the level of performance.

Across these three experiments using both unfamiliar and familiar faces in both easy and difficult viewing conditions, the Met Police’s super recognisers consistently outperformed the control groups.

The wider recruitment of this special breed of recognisers in other police forces and in agencies such as the passport office and border control – where accurate unfamiliar face matching is vital to the nation’s security – is very important in the fight against terrorism and could go some way to bolstering national security efforts.

Much has been said about Belgium’s security failures in the aftermath of the latest attacks on Brussels. But it isn’t just the Belgians who are struggling to keep a track of the jihadi networks within their country. The latest talks have renewed calls for a Europe-wide intelligence agency that could share information quickly and easily between countries. Because it is clear that for long as terrorists can cross borders, we need security that can do the same.

David James Robertson is Research Fellow @ York FaceVar Lab, University of York.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Belgium’s Deadly Circles of Terror

Coordinated bombings in Brussels may have been in the works for some time, aided by an underworld where crime and extremism blur together.

People walk away from the Brussels airport after explosions rocked the facility on March 22, 2016. Credit: PTI Photo

Over the past several months, Belgian counterterror officials told me they were working nonstop to prevent an attack and that the danger had never been so high. Today, their worst fears came true when coordinated bombings struck the airport and a subway stop in Brussels.

As part of my work on a forthcoming ProPublica/Frontline documentary about the terrorism threat in Europe, I traveled recently to Belgium to investigate the nation’s central role as a staging ground for the Paris attacks four months ago.

“It is just a matter of time before terrorists will succeed in attacking Belgium,” federal prosecutor Eric Van der Sypt told me weeks ago in Brussels.

The concerns of Van der Sypt and other officials were driven by events as well as surveillance of suspects in Belgium and Syria. In December, Belgian police prevented two alleged plots, one by the remnants of the Belgian-led group that hit Paris in November and another by a radicalised motorcycle gang, the Kamikaze Riders. In the ensuing months police pursued fugitives linked to the Paris attacks and intercepted menacing phone chatter and WhatsApp chats filled with photos of jihadis posing with guns, camels and corpses in Islamic State’s dominions in Syria.

In one intercepted phone call to Brussels, a Belgian militant in Syria discussed his friend Bilal Hadfi, a Belgian suicide bomber who died in Paris in November, according to counterterror officials. The militant’s mother warned him not to do bad things like his friend Bilal or she would pray for him to go to hell. The militant asked what the friends were saying about Bilal back in the “sector,” the tough Molenbeek suburb of Brussels where many of the Paris attackers grew up.

“Are they talking about him? Are they praising him? Are they saying he was a lion?” the militant said. “For them, the jihad is all about recognition on the street, in the neighborhood, the glory,” a counterterror official told me.

The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Brussels attacks. Investigators are trying to determine whether the perpetrators were part of the group of Belgians who provided support for the Paris plot. At least two suspected Paris plotters had remained on the run after the arrests Friday of Abdeslam and another suspect.

“We think there was a bomb maker who survived, someone who had put together the vests in Belgium, and we don’t think it was one of those who died in Paris,” a senior French counterterror official told me before the Brussels attacks. “Usually they don’t want to lose someone with those kinds of skills in an attack.”

It is also possible a separate cell carried out the attack in Brussels. A Belgian counterterror official cited intelligence reports that 180 European operatives were trained by the Islamic State and deployed back to their home countries during the past year. Some of those operatives, including at least three of the Paris attackers, used fraudulent passports to pose as Syrians and concealed themselves in the chaotic flow of refugees and migrants across the European Union’s borders.

Officials describe the threat in Belgium as concentric circles: Hundreds of hard-core terrorists intent on striking Europe after express training by the Islamic State in what a captured French suspect described to interrogators last year as a “factory of terrorists” in Syria. Extremists willing to fight and die without leaving home. Gangsters who drink and gamble, yet support the Islamist cause with guns, cash, cars and documents. And loose networks of petty criminals and associates willing to shelter notorious fugitives like Salah Abdeslam, the suspected Paris attacker arrested last week in his native Molenbeek.

The size, volatility and street gang-like mentality of that underworld help explain how Abdeslam dodged authorities for four months – and how bombers eluded security forces on high alert and struck the Brussels airport and a subway stop near the European Union headquarters today. The estimated casualty count so far: more than 30 dead and 230 wounded. The convergence of crime and extremism in has reached dangerous levels in Belgium but reflects a larger European security challenge.

“You have so many people who are adrift, who are involved in common crime and decide terrorism is a shortcut to paradise,” said Dolores Delgado, a chief counterterror prosecutor in Spain. “It gives them a chance to get revenge on society. It is a virtual army of people who follow a demented ideology whether they go to Syria or remain here. A large number of people who are ready to help an attack.”

France and Belgium are the top targets because they have sent so many fighters to Syria, where they train with thousands of French-speaking jihadis from Tunisia and Morocco. The Belgian counterterror official said: “When the recruits arrive in Syria, they are asked, ‘Do you want to fight here or go back home to Europe to be a martyr?’ If they want to go back to Europe, they are given express training, a week of arms and explosives, then sent back. It’s as quick as possible.”

The coordinated attacks on the airport and the subway appear to have been in the making for some time, officials said Tuesday. The timing, however, may have been driven by fears that the arrests last week would expose other militants operating underground in Belgium, especially if Abdeslam and the other suspect cooperated with investigators.

“I don’t think the attack was organised quickly as revenge for (Abdeslam’s) arrest,” said Delgado, the Spanish prosecutor. “The alert has been at a high level ever since the Paris attacks. It could be that they sped up a plot because they thought Abdeslam might collaborate. But their overall goal is to spread terror and chaos.”

The fugitive Paris suspects and Tuesday’s bombers benefited from the support of an underworld where crime and extremism increasingly blur together, making the threat even harder to identify. The phenomenon exists also in France, Denmark and other nations with sizeable populations of working-class, alienated children and grandchildren of Muslim immigrants. But it has reached dangerous extremes in Belgium. An increasing number of recruits and supporters of the Islamic State are violent criminals who radicalise rapidly, yet don’t necessarily adhere to a fundamentalist lifestyle.

The Kamikaze Riders are a prime example. Their profile is rare in the world of Islamic extremists: a motorcycle gang with all the trappings of that subculture, yet radicalised and was implicated in a plot for an attack in December.

In Belgium, gangsters often provide crucial support to terrorist operations without even bothering to maintain a veneer of piety. Police describe robberies of fast food stores and drug dealers that, after further investigation, turn out to be done to finance trips to join the jihad in Syria. Even supposed hardcore Islamists break the rules: In calls caught on a wiretap, investigators listened to a veteran Brussels extremist scold his daughter for wearing a short skirt, then borrow money from friends and arrange for the services of a transvestite prostitute, officials said.

Referring to some of the Paris plotters, a Belgian counterterror official said:“These guys are not stereotypical Islamists. They gamble, drink, do drugs. They are lady killers, wear Armani, fashionable haircuts. And they live off crime.”

Petty criminals, friends and relatives, mostly of Moroccan descent, helped the clean-cut Abdeslam live underground in the capital despite an aggressive dragnet. They were motivated by family and friendship ties and a deep-seated hostility toward mainstream society that often doesn’t have much to do with religion.

“When you do a raid on a house, in normal areas people talk or help if they think someone was a terrorist,” Van der Sypt said. “People are not collaborating in Molenbeek. They are throwing stones at the police. It has created a community of people who don’t go to school anymore when they are 11 or 12. They are very good criminals as teenagers. They become kingpins at 18.”

Once again after Tuesday’s attack, Belgian police were kicking down doors in search of fugitives suspected in the airport bombing. At least one fugitive was said to be on the run, and police found bomb-making equipment and an Islamic State flag during a search.

“We have to develop a new mentality because the profiles have changed so much,” Delgado said. “Immediately people start talking about bombing Syria, about war overseas. But the terrorists live in the West.”

This story, originally published on ProPublica, was co-produced with Frontline.

India’s Vulnerability to ISIS Recruitment Very Low, but Divisive Domestic Politics Could Change That

The aggressive nationalism fostered by the BJP, accompanied by minority bashing and the vicious nature of the politics around the beef ban can lead to the kind of alienation that could attract youths to organisations like ISIS in the longer run.

The aggressive nationalism fostered by the BJP, accompanied by minority bashing and the vicious nature of the politics around the beef ban can lead to the kind of alienation that could attract youths to organisations like ISIS in the longer run.

What is Narendra Modi thinking? Credit: PTI

The bombings in Brussels once again brings out the vulnerability of the EU against terror attacks by ISIS. The fact that the attack came within days of the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, a main accused in the Paris bombings, shows that the ISIS networks are able to easily overcome, indeed overwhelm, the elaborate security apparatus of a modern state. Brussels is the headquarter of European Commission and ISIS knows the significance of hitting this city.

While the EU appears most vulnerable to ISIS given that an unusually large Muslim youth population from Europe (about 4,000) are known to have been ideologically attracted to the terror outfit, India seems to be placed in a positively rare category where only 23 cases have surfaced of Muslims youths actually joining the ISIS fight to establish a world caliphate. According to security expert Ajay Sahni, the founding director of Institute of Conflict Management, the bulk of the 23 Indians who joined ISIS did so after spending a few years in other countries as NRIs. This means those recruited directly from among India’s Muslim community has been less than 10 so far, says Sahni. He also says another 27 youths have been arrested in recent times on the suspicion of developing potential links with the ISIS to fight in Syria and Iraq.

The real perspective that Sahni wants to offer is that India’s Muslim population feels virtually no affinity with the ISIS cause of establishing a world caliphate through violent means.

It was not surprising, therefore, that most security and strategic affairs experts who spoke on Indian TV channels after the Brussels attack concurred that India must have done something right to keep its Muslim youths from getting psychologically and emotionally attracted to ISIS’s grand plans. But some of this may get endangered with the ongoing polarisation of the polity along communal lines under the NDA regime, which could eventually alienate Indian Muslims.

Even American scholars today agree that India is by and large free from being infected by the ISIS ideology. A recent report by the Heritage Foundation, a well-known US think tank, gave data for over 30 countries from where ISIS had attracted nearly 25,000 foreign fighters to join its ranks in Syria and Iraq. These include over 4,500 fighters drawn from western, mainly European, nations. The biggest numbers are of course drawn from ISIS’s immediate neighbourhood – Tunisia (6000), Saudi Arabia (2275), Jordan (2000), Russia (1700), France (1550), Turkey (1400) and Morocco (1200).

India does not figure among the 30-odd countries mentioned in the article.

Credit: Heritage Foundation

India doesn’t figure on this table because it is statistically negligible – only about 23 Indians have joined ISIS and another 27 were in the process of joining and subsequently arrested; just 50 members from a country of 1.2 billion. Compare this with about 4000 EU citizens from a population of about 500 million.

This clearly brings out the relatively negligible vulnerability of India at present. But it may not remain so for ever.

Many political analysts feel that the Sangh Parivar is promoting policies that seem aimed at reinforcing the institutional bias against the Muslim community. The aggressive nationalism being fostered by the BJP, accompanied by minority bashing and the vicious nature of the politics around the beef ban are but examples that can lead to the kind of alienation that could attract youths to organisations like ISIS in the longer run.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi must also resist the temptation of playing an anti-ISIS white knight on the global stage by needlessly committing India disproportionately to the war on terror in the West Asia. A top home ministry official told this writer that India’s interests are best served by keeping a low profile because Europe is possibly paying a price for a messy partnership with the US in their war on terror for over a decade.

Currently, there are some think tanks close to the Modi establishment who are building a case for upping the ante against the potential threats to India from ISIS. The Rajasthan government recently organised a closed-door conference in Jaipur in collaboration with the India Foundation and Vivekanand International Foundation, at which National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar were present. Those who attended the conference came out with the feeling that an influential group advising Modi wanted to greatly exaggerate the involvement of Indian citizens in the ISIS project in West Asia.

Ram Madhav, the BJP general secretary, stunned everyone by suggesting that 537 Indians had already joined ISIS and for each person who has been recruited another 10 were in the process of being enrolled. By his calculations, over 5000 Indians have already joined or are in the process of joining ISIS.

Sahni, who was present at the conference, rejects this figure outright. “We don’t know where this figure is coming from,” he says.

Most other scholars and security experts present at the conference, including those from the US, did not agree with the figures presented by Madhav. As shown in the table published with this article, even American security sources puts Indians recruited by ISIS at well below the three-digit figure.

Why are people around Modi exaggerating the participation of Indian Muslims in ISIS? Is this meant partly to feed the domestic political constituency, putting the Muslim community on the back foot and fuelling the narrow nationalism campaign? The real and present danger is that if India bites more than it can chew in the global war on ISIS, it could become as vulnerable as Europe is today. One only hopes that men around Modi who want to build him up as a major player in the war on ISIS are aware of these risks.

How Radicalisation Happens and Who Is at Risk

The bombings in Brussels once again calls attention to a serious crisis: the radicalisation of citizens outside the Middle East by extremist groups.

People walk away from Brussels airport after explosions rocked the facility in Brussels, Belgium Tuesday. Credit: PTI

Two bombings in Brussels have killed dozens of people and injured over 100, only days after one of the Paris attackers was arrested in the city’s Molenbeek suburb. The Islamic State (ISIS) has reportedly claimed the attack.

As they recover from the shock of the attacks, people are asking why this happens, and who the people carrying out these suicide missions are.

That such attacks could be launched from inside a European country once again calls attention to a serious crisis: the radicalisation of citizens outside the Middle East by extremist groups.

A willingness to embrace violence

The actions of the shooters like those in San Bernardino, Paris and very probably Brussels are difficult for most people to understand. But the work of scholars specialising in extremism can help us begin to unravel how people become radicalised to embrace political violence.

Security experts Alex Wilner and Claire-Jehanne Dubouloz define radicalisation as a process during which an individual or group adopts increasingly extreme political, social or religious ideals and aspirations. The process involves rejecting or undermining the status quo or contemporary ideas and expressions of freedom of choice.

Newly radicalised people don’t just agree with the mission and the message of the group they are joining; they embrace the idea of using violence to induce change.

And some members of these groups become radical enough to actually get involved in violent operations personally.

So how often does this radicalisation process happen in the US?

A recent report published by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University provides troubling statistics on Islamic State (ISIS) support in America: As of the fall of 2015, US authorities speak of some 250 Americans who have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria/Iraq to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The report goes on to say there are some 900 active investigations against ISIS sympathisers in all 50 states. As a result of these active investigations, 71 suspects have been charged for terrorism-related activities – and those charged share some interesting characteristics.

The average age of the suspects is 26 years, and the vast majority of them (86 percent) are male. About 27 percent were involved in a plot to carry out violence on U.S. territory. The suspects are diverse in terms of race, social class, education and family history. Forty percent of those arrested are converts to Islam. A large majority – 58 out of 71 – are American citizens.

Countries in the Arabic Peninsula have the highest rate of ISIS sympathisers, but the number on U.S. soil is higher than many would expect.

Twitter census

A group like ISIS attempts to grow its number of supporters from the mass population by using propaganda. Here social media plays a crucial role.

Take the example of the Australian physician who now serves in a hospital run by IS in Raqqa, and serves as a recruiter on YouTube.

Other facilitators like this doctor might provide different types of support – such as financial, logistical, technical or material.

A Brookings Institute report, The ISIS Twitter Census, uses social media metrics to map the geographical distribution of IS supporters. It also reveals tweeting patterns, follower ratio and the number of accounts followed.

The most interesting finding shows that the U.S. is fourth in the world and the U.K. 10th for IS-supporting Twitter users who can be located.

While these numbers are small set against the total number of Twitter accounts connected with ISIS (46,000), they still indicate a surprisingly strong online support base for ISIS in these two countries, which are clearly high up ISIS’ target list.

The top locations claimed by IS-supporting Twitter users. Brookings Institute

The top locations claimed by IS-supporting Twitter users. Credit: Brookings Institute

The findings from these two reports also highlight some of the key recruitment and radicalisation mechanisms use by ISIS.

Who is susceptible?

The work of psychologists Clark McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko provides a good model for understanding the types of people who are most likely to be attracted to the message ISIS is selling.

Like Sunnis in Syria or Iraq who have been victimised by those countries’ governments, among the key targets for radicalisation are individuals whose political grievances can’t be channeled into an existing political system. One example is the Canadian citizen who left his country to be part of what he views as a utopia: the restoration of the Caliphate.

Once they’ve joined up, individuals may stay engaged in terrorism activities because of the power of love between individuals. The Paris attacks were undertaken by two brothers and two cousins. The attackers in San Bernardino were husband and wife. The Boston bombers were brothers.

The suffering of marginalised people under particular regimes is another key factor.

Between 2011 and 2013, Iraq saw a serious rupture between the Sunni and Shiite communities. The government of Nouri Al-Maliki, who is Shiite, had Sunni political leaders arrested and Sunni soldiers removed from the army. Excluded from the institutions of the Iraqi state, which did little to keep them safe, many Sunnis decided to join ISIS, which was filling a security vacuum.

Meanwhile, in Western countries like France and the U.S., the isolation of still-excluded Muslim communities makes disenfranchised youth ripe for radicalisation.

Competition between terrorist groups can further increase radicalisation inside violent groups, leading to more and deadlier attacks.

Over the past several years, for example, ISIS has stood up against al-Qaida, defying its leadership and competing for support from the same demographics.

Immediately after the Paris attacks, which were planned and perpetrated by ISIS, al-Qaida claimed responsibility for an attack on a hotel in Mali.

The direct competition between the states of Iraq and Syria and ISIS for the control of territory and oil resources leads only to more violent struggles and the need to attract more fighters from foreign countries.

At the mass level

Violent groups like ISIS use jujitsu-style strategies, exploiting the reaction of their adversaries to their advantage when they attack Western targets.

Governments in countries such as Belgium, France, the U.K., Russia and the U.S. play into their hands by ordering large-scale military retaliation and stirring hostile anti-Muslim political rhetoric. These reactions help extremist groups improve cohesion in their ranks and rouse support from their target audiences.

The Brussels suburb where some of the Paris attackers lived. Credit: EPA/Stephane Lecocq

Addressing the rank and file, ISIS uses hate discourse to dehumanise its opponents and devalue their lives. This perception of Westerners and nonbelievers justifies acts of extreme violence such as beheading foreign hostages such as Japan’s Kenji Goto, persecuting of Coptic Christians and burning alive prisoners such as Jordanian pilot Moath al-Kasasbeh.

When their own followers die, ISIS uses martyrdom as powerful tool to convince the target audience that the cause is worth suffering and dying for. Martyrs become heroes who are publicly celebrated and recognised on the Internet.

Overwhelmed

So, can we expect ever more people around the world to be radicalised to join ISIS? The outlook is mixed.

Despite the successes of its recruitment and radicalisation campaign since 2011, recent media reports show that IS is struggling to integrate different groups of foreign fighters into its combat forces in the Middle East and North Africa, raising the prospect that competing loyalties could fracture the group and undermine its ability to project an appealing recruitment message.

As far as the fight against IS recruitment goes, this is a ray of hope. But there’s plenty of bad news too.

Counterpropaganda strategies deployed by the US on the Internet have been criticised as ineffectual. According to the Rand Corporation, deradicalisation programs have had mixed results.

And as the recent attacks in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere sadly demonstrate, the resources to fight radicalisation are often simply not there.

As a Belgian counterterrorism official confessed only a week before the March 22 attacks, “Frankly, we don’t have the infrastructure to properly investigate or monitor hundreds of individuals suspected of terror links, as well as pursue the hundreds of open files and investigations we have.”

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Brussels Hit by Multiple Blasts

At least 28 people were killed and 130 injured in a coordinated terrorist attack in Brussels, Belgium, earlier today

At least 34 people have been killed and over 170 injured in a coordinated terrorist attack in Brussels, Belgium, earlier today.

Two blasts occurred at the departures area of Zaventem airport around 8 am local time (12.30 pm IST). One hour later, an explosion hit Maelbrook metro station, which is close to the main European Union buildings. Belgium raised the terror threat level across the country to four, the highest possible, shut down all public transport in the city and advised locals to stay indoors.

Brussels airport. Credit: Twitter

In a news conference, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel confirmed that a suicide bomber was responsible for the airport blasts, but did not confirm the number of people killed and injured. The metro operator STIB-MIVB has confirmed that 15 people were killed and 55 injured in the Maelbeek metro station blast, while some reports are claiming 13 were killed and 35 injured in the airport attack.

Cities across Europe have tightened security in the wake of the attacks.

Explosions at Brussels airport in Belgium Tuesday. Credit: PTI

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj tweeted that an India Jet Airways crew member is among those injured, although some reports are claiming that a second crew member is also among those injured.

However, an Indian lady crew member of Jet Airways is injured. She has been rushed to the hospital./2

— Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) March 22, 2016

The attacks come four days after the capture of Salah Abdeslam, the accused logistical planner of the Paris attacks, in Brussels.

Later in the evening, the terrorist group ISIS (Daesh) claimed responsibility for the explosions.