ON Monday a Cape Town teenager was caught trying to board a flight to Saudi Arabia where she planned to join Islamic State, the terrorist group that has claimed thousands of lives and seized numerous locations in the last few months.
While her parents noticed that she had seemed adrift before she attempted to join the militant group they say they only found evidence on the day she left and were shocked.
So what prompts a person to join a terrorist organisation and is there a ‘profile’ for a terrorist?
The short answer is ‘no’, although there are many common perceptions about this.
The first that must addressed is that terrorists are uneducated.
It’s easy to assume why the opposite should be true. If you’re smart enough to get into university and get a degree then surely you’re smart enough to know that killing another human being is wrong, right?
However, few people know that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most prolific terrorist and founder of Al Qaeda, graduated from King Abdul Aziz University with a degree in engineering.
Mohammed Emwazi, the man believed to be Jihadi John, the British terrorist who has carried out numerous beheadings of Islamic State hostages, has a degree in business management.
While it would baffle many that educated men like Emwazi and bin Laden would make such horrifying decisions, it must be noted that most analysts and psychologists agree that terrorism doesn’t point to a problem with intelligence or religion but rather with society.
Many of the things acceptable to society today may have been unthinkable thirty or forty years ago, and with that comes a change in morals.
Though it’s hard to imagine any circumstance where murder is acceptable, lawyers often play on ‘extenuating circumstances’ to lower the sentence of a client.
If a man with a clean record murders someone who has, say, raped his daughter, he is likely to get a lighter sentence than someone who has a previous conviction, albeit for something like petty theft, and has murdered a random person in bar fight.
Although murder is seen as the worst kind of crime, there are many that would defend the first murderer’s actions based on their own feelings, and that’s how terrorism works.
Most terrorist organisations tend to have a problem with a particular country’s leadership, a feeling shared by many, some of whom may identify with such organisations and choose to join them.
CBS News recently revealed that around twenty thousand foreigners have joined Islamic State, a large number of them being teenagers.
An Al Jazeera journalist recently investigated the cause of this and found that the teenagers saw jihadists as ‘pop stars’.
While they know that what they are doing is wrong, they see the global coverage they receive and interpret it as popularity.
And while the majority of the world seems to condemn their actions, their execution videos are often accompanied by images of their fellow terrorists and supporters cheering them on in the background.
While terrorism used to be seen as a foreign attack, as the strength of terrorist organisations grow and the number of foreigners joining them is rapidly increasing, many now live with the fear of losing their lives to someone they know.
