Well good afternoon and welcome to New America on behalf of Amory Slaughter our president Peter Bergen our vice president and head of the International Studies program our sponsor today. Thank you very much for coming. I'm Douglas all of us I'm a senior fellow in the future of war program here at New America And today we're here to discuss this new paper by my two colleagues. I'll introduce in a moment Entitled all jihad is local I'm really excited about this paper because obviously Isis and before that al Qaeda and the recruitment of jihadis is something we talk about a lot And you will often see people on stages not unlike this one debating You know how this comes about how why do people go go join Isis and so on But generally the conversation Ranges on a good day from I think this and you think that and we leave it there and on a bad day I am moat this and you a moat that because for the most part this conversation has been conducted without a whole lot of data What's exciting about our presentation today and the two co-authors here is that we have data Which they will talk about in some detail So let me introduce my colleagues and then I will let them give a brief overview of the paper Nate Rosenblunt to my immediate left your right is a new America international security program fellow an Oxford University doctoral student in sociology and an independent Middle East North Africa consultant He employs mixed method approaches to understanding local conflict and development dynamics in fragile parts of Middle East and North African states He's lived work to conducted field research in Turkey Syria Iraq Lebanon Morocco Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates UAE He can be found on Twitter at his Twitter handle at Nate Rosenblunt and then to my far left your right David Sturman is a policy analyst at New America and holds a master's degree from Georgetown Center for security studies He is work focuses on homegrown extremism I'm sure he's getting some calls today and the maintenance of New America's data sets on terrorism Inside the United States and the relative roles of NSA surveillance and traditional and based investigative tools in preventing such terrorism Prior to working at New America. Mr. Sturman was a contributing editor at Southern Pulse and he interned at the Israeli Palestine Center for research and information in Jerusalem He is a cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College So with that I'm gonna let the two authors talk about this paper We'll then engage a discussion and then towards the end engage our audience and let you ask questions. So Nate Thanks, Doug. I want to thank my co-author David Sturman Peter Bergen Our research assistant Yasser El-Qualti who was very helpful for us as well as New America for its support and thank you all for coming I'm going to do a little bit of a discussion on the methods We used in this paper some of the limitations of the data that we we do have access to Before then passing it over to my colleague David who will discuss the ISIS recruitment that we're analyzing in North Africa and then I'll work on the focus on the Arabian Peninsula So just to get a few bits of logistics and methods out of the way first I want to just talk a little bit about the provenance of the data that we have access to mainly the data that we're using are foreign fighter registration forms of about 3,580 or so registration forms of foreign fighters who joined ISIS between the years of 2013 to 2014 on the Turkish Syrian border These forms are essentially ISIS's record-keeping of foreign fighter new foreign fighter joiners. They have a variety of questions that include Name Nome to Gare even mother's name blood type, but also include a lot of really interesting material on Previous professions education levels religious knowledge countries traveled people who referred them to join ISIS people who facilitated their arrival and a variety of other things and that's the main data from which we will be drawing conclusions today, I'll get to the limitations of that data in a minute, but I would just say this data were smuggled out of Raqqa in March of 2016 We've a look we validated these data Along with the counter-terrorism Center at West Point As well as some of the personal details of fighters that weren't publicly available through my research and research from others So last year we wrote a paper on this topic that looked at The regions in the world that had the highest per capita recruitment rates For ISIS also all over the world included Western China it included of course parts of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula that we're looking at In Lebanon and in other places the difference in This year's report is not just that we're focusing on two regions Which saw some of the highest recruitment rates of foreign fighters to ISIS including? Libya and Tunisia which David will talk about but also Saudi Arabia But also we try to supplement The data on foreign fighter registration forms with other useful information So we use census data in a variety of cases to say okay If fighters who are joining ISIS from Saudi Arabia are reporting a certain education level or a certain level of sort of Work profession or skill How does that correlate to the places that they're from among the general population? Are these representative of these people from the from the provinces they come from or is this a distinct phenomenon that we should take a Look at so we looked at census data. David did some really interesting work looking at protest data, especially in Tunisia I pulled in some data from 1980s onward on the subnational origins of Saudi Terrorists and I'm going to use some of that in my analysis So we incorporate a lot of this additional data Let me say a few brief words about some of the caveats just so we can frame our discussion And so our remarks have some context the first is time These fighters joined basically between 2013 and 2014 the landscape obviously looks a lot different today As the coalition is pushing back ISIS in Syria and Iraq As I spoke to a friend in Derazor basically most people from Arabian Peninsula have basically left already and the the form fighter rates decreased dramatically After 2015 when the Saudi government especially started cracking down on fighters once ISIS attacks started occurring across the Arabian Peninsula in Kuwait and in Saudi and other places This is also limited by location So the the the form fighter forms are recorded on border crossings between Syria and Turkey while of course as we all know Turkey was a huge Transit route for fighters who joined ISIS of course there were other parts in Iraq Lebanon Jordan where people were able to join we don't think that this is Dramatically altered the results of our regions, but it would manifest in other places So Lebanese fighters Jordanian fighters Iraqi fighters Syrian fighters aren't really recorded in the data Couple quick more points There's a point on truthfulness. I think we think that these data of course are going to be more likely to be true than If if fighters were being interviewed by journalists or researchers Some of this information could be validated by ISIS of course so people who referred or people who facilitated ones joining but there are certainly Elements that were omitted in these files and we had to work around that we can talk more about that if you're interested in the Q&A Last couple of points This is only ISIS foreign fighter recruitment Crucially, what's missing here is foreign fighter recruitment to other militias that we're fighting especially in Syria including What was formerly known as Jaffa del Nostra and I'll go into a little bit about that in the Arabian Peninsula section Just to conclude last year. We found that provinces with high rates of recruitment All shared in common a certain kind of grievance they had with the federal government So the repressed regions of Western China Generally under underfunded and under supported regions like northern Lebanon and what my colleague David will talk about in eastern Libya But this year what we found and I'm sort of paraphrasing Tolstoy here is that all happy provinces are alike But all unhappy provinces are unhappy in their own way. So we're going to sort of discuss I think what is really important and the key takeaway here, which is that while there is no Consensus among experts on terrorism about what is driving Terrorism recruitment. I think when you look at these subnational regions of different countries certain trends emerge And these trends are important and they're distinct and we need to address them in different ways So with that being said, I'm going to pass it over my colleague David. Thanks So I'm going to speak about what we found in North Africa Our initial key fundings which will be expanded further in the forthcoming paper But basically our analysis of North Africa Involves three broad conclusions first this was a Recruitment in provinces that shared two structural aspects in common First that they're economically marginalized from the center of their country's economic Their country's economy where most of the good jobs are where oil wealth is centered We're applicable and also they're marginalized politically often those two go together. They're one and it's the same Second we found that in most places. This is a mobilization that Comes from places where there was mobilization in prior years for other jihadist movements as well as for other non jihadist Outbreaks of anger over what appear to be these structural issues That recruitment and mobilization Which ISIS is the latest or perhaps now? the not so latest example of is predated by these other mobilizations and finally where Mobilization occurred where it's not a Product of a long history of mobilization and outbursts of anger whether jihadist or not It's a product of the Arab Spring which really was a massive outbreak of this anger and Spread that anger throughout the region in a way that metastasize the problem So to begin with if we look at The question of structural aspects Well, I'll begin with what we found in Libya by far the clearest example 80% of the fighters from Libya came from eastern Libya and they were almost all centered in two provinces Darin and Benghazi Eastern Libya has historically been marginalized by the then Qaddafi government, which centered its patronage networks largely in the west of the country and funded Tripoli in that area well Simultaneously economically marginalizing the East In particular in marginalized Darin a where we found among the fighters. We looked at there was 70% Underemployment, so that's people who were unemployed in our model. This is people who are unemployed people who State they're working day labor jobs People who report subsistence agriculture works and not I own the farm, but I'm doing agricultural work People who are students in these North African countries students face a particularly poor Employment situation upon graduation in Tunisia, for example, it took on average six years to find a job and also People who report unskilled labor, which is often unpredictable in these North African countries So in Derna, we found that it was 70% We found a similar dynamic in southern Tunisia, which is another hotspot of recruitment inability the second highest per capita province Where fighters were being produced second only to Derna There's also 70% underemployment among fighters and then in the suburbs of Grand Tunis We find a similar level of underemployment and economic struggle, which is important to note because Grand Tunis is The capital of Tunisia And swear a lot of the factory jobs and economic wealth is actually centered And if you're just running a large end regression on provinces You're likely to miss that there is a massive internal inequality within these provinces We found that fighters tended to come from the poorest suburbs of the region Ettenhamen was about two to four times Overproducing what we would have expected based on population That neighborhood or city within the larger Grand Tunis metropolitan area Has an unemployment rate above that of the nation as a whole as well as above the particular province Arianna that it sits in Arianna's unemployment rate was actually below Tunisia at all So what we see is that there's these hotspots of economic marginalization That comes with political marginalization as well Ettenhamen was the hotspot of protest activity during the Arab Spring The east of Libya has historically been a site of resistance and protest against the Qaddafi government and militancy more broadly And southern Tunisia also has a history of tension with the central government of Tunisia So we found this similarity of structural elements The second part is that in each of these places there's a long history of militancy in eastern Libya It's very clear. We can trace it back from the ISIS mobilization. We're looking at in 2013 2014 Benghazi was the capital of the Arab Spring uprising against Qaddafi and Darna also produced many fighters for that if we go back to the Sinjar records and Found in 2007 you get almost exactly the same percentage of fighters in that mobilization as We're found finding in the ISIS records for 2013 2014 in 2008 The State Department added a cable the famous diehard and Darna cable released by WikiLeaks That reports similar conditions and warns of a fighter recruitment in terms very similar to those that Are applicable to the 2013 2014 if you go back further to the 90s you have the Libyan Islamic fighting group Conducting war against Qaddafi again and an uprising against centered in the east particularly in Darna And then if you go further back in the 70s and 80s this region was really at the center of the Muslim brotherhood Opposition to Qaddafi So this really the mobilization in eastern Libya predates the particular ISIS claim to be building the Caliphate If we turn to Tunisia, it's a little different. It's more widespread However, we again see as I noted hot spots in southern Libya or southern Tunisia Particularly Ben-Ghudan, which has historically produced fighters in the early Iraq conflict and other conflicts before As the economy based on smuggling was the center of protest activity During the Arab Spring and we have the suburbs of Grand Tunis, which again were a center of protest activity during the Arab Spring. I've also proved who's many fighters Before in Tunisia There was a massive expansion that may have some aspect to do with ISIS's particular ideological pitch But we're also just seeing fighters coming from areas that have produced Outbursts of anger for decades largely due to these structural factors Finally as I noted where we do see expansion. It's largely about the Arab Spring This is pretty clear in Tunisia where the government fell as a result of Arab Spring protests That were particularly high in the areas that were hot spots in contrast along the eastern coast of Libya in its economic center Where fighters actually came below the national rate There were about half of sorry about a third as many protests per Capita as there were in Grand Tunis and in the south In addition, we see on an individual level when we look at the data about 7.5 percent of the fighters who Mobilized from Tunisia were recommended by one figure who came out of Ansar al-Sharia and then based himself in southern in Western Libya where he was running a training camp in Cyprus and That's again an example of how these dynamics of the Arab Spring really created the foundation that ISIS then built itself at top So the basic conclusion that I'll float for you here that we're still looking at is in many ways the counter messaging and the idea of countering violent extremism that has become a very important part of countering ISIS recruitment Doesn't make sense in much of North Africa Countering ISIS's claim to be building the Caliphate Does not address the problems in Derna where there was recruitment for decades prior to ISIS's rise It has some element in Tunisia, but you're also going to run into this repetitive mobilization of the poor and Angry areas that are being produced by structural factors So we really to the extent we're going to prevent the possibility of a future mobilization It's not going to happen simply on counter messaging. It needs to address these structural issues Thanks, David In contrast, I think the Arabian Peninsula has a has a variety of very distinct Trends that I want to present today before I go into the three arguments that I want to make on ISIS recruitment in the Arabian Peninsula I just want to note that There are a few countries where they're just simply worn enough for and fighter data in the forms to draw any conclusions from so Qatar Oman and the UAE had less than five fighters in each one of those countries and the overall data So my findings don't discuss and the report won't discuss those three countries some supplementary information and qualitative work was done on on Recruitment in those three countries we can discuss those in the Q&A But I just generally want to focus on Saudi Arabia, which had about 90% of the Fighters that reportedly came from the Arabian Peninsula as well as Kuwait Yemen and Bahrain So that being said, I'm going to give you three arguments that I think are really compelling about ISIS recruitment in the Arabian Peninsula Things to think about first that this is a new phenomenon second that the Contexts and motivations appear to be different in each one of these countries and not just from the Arabian Peninsula in comparison to North Africa and then third that The regions with high rates of ISIS recruitment of foreign fighters are ones that have Elite level political and social Connections and that's a very distinct trend from what David just discussed with regards to marginalization And I'm going to discuss those three and give a little bit about what I think the policy implications of each one of those are So the first is that this is a new phenomenon And there are a few points. I want to make under this The first is that we all know that ISIS has recruited a lot of young people to join especially in comparison to other terrorist Organizations and recruitment efforts, but the Arabian Peninsula is distinctly more youthful than the rest of the sample of ISIS recruits it's over so the average age of ISIS fighter from the Arabian Peninsula is over a year younger than the overall sample, but when you dig even more deeply into this Or I should say It's also distinct from the demographic trends of the region as a whole which generally skew older than the rest of the Arab world But when you dig into this a little bit deep more deeply You find that the regions with the highest rates of ISIS recruitment at the sub-national level correlate very strongly with The proportion of those regions that have youthful populations So the youngest populations as a proportion so 15 to 29 is a proportion of the overall Provincial population those the youngest ones are the ones that have the highest recruitment And so I did a bunch of regressions to figure out which trends were most interesting about the overall provincial population Household income so was it poor people that were being recruited education levels? So was it undereducated or overeducated that people that were being recruited the variety of other factors the only The only factor that had a strong significant statistically significant positive correlation was The proportion of a provincial population that was between the ages of 15 to 29 the second piece about this phenomenon that I think is new and important to emphasize is That the fighters that came from the Arabian Peninsula were much less likely to have reported to participate in a previous With that so that in a previous conflict So the question on the form is have you participated in a previous jihad? About 12 percent of the overall sample of fighters that we looked at reported Yes, so places like Libya places like Yemen Afghanistan Chechnya Basia and other places But in the Arabian Peninsula only 5% of the fighters Reported to have participated in a previous jihad and when you look at the correlation between provinces that report Participation in previous jihads. There's no relationship whatsoever between people who participated previously in a jihad and people who joined ISIS So all of this is strongly suggestive of the fact that this phenomenon in the Arabian Peninsula The people who joined ISIS were new to fighting in conflicts and new to fighting or new to affiliations with jihadi organizations as a whole and then Qualitatively when interviewed when interviewing people they also a lot of them would admit that this was very new the two places Where this was most acute were in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia Bahrainese and Saudis would say the places the Subnational origins of fighters in these two countries were places that were new I'm going to discuss a little bit about the Saudi case in a minute But then what's also interesting is where fighters are not coming from and the best example in the Arabian Peninsula is Yemen So in the Yemen ISIS form fighter sample from 2013 to 2014 Only 26 fighters we could locate at its subnational level Which is so about there were about 30 35 fighters from Yemen as a whole when you compare that To rates that were in the Sinjar paper. So during the Iraq War or People who were detained in Guantanamo from Yemen the rates are significantly higher So in the ISIS foreign fighter sample you had about 30 Yemenis out of 3581 total fighters recorded in the Guantanamo case you had a hundred and ten Yemenis being detained out of 770 so four times more Yemenis being involved in a sample that's four times smaller So something is happening here. I have some hypotheses for why that is we can discuss those in the Q&A Um But all of this suggests the phenomenon is new and I think from a policy perspective We need to seriously think about the efforts that the region is undertaking at De-radicalization not just arresting people who are perpetrating terrorist acts But more importantly figuring out ways to prevent future waves of Mobilizations to occur the second thing I'll say is that it appears that not only do these countries have Different motivations than North Africa, but they're different from each other So the two cases I want to focus on here are Bahrain and Saudi Arabia Last year's paper. We talked a lot about the mobilization of fighters from Bahrain I'll say very briefly that in 2011 there was a major Arab Spring demonstration in Bahrain and the Bahraini crackdown required the use and sanctioning of very very violent rhetoric against The majority population of the country, which is Shia by the government, which is the minority of the countries population Which is Sunni and I think the mobilization of Communities in Bahrain that we see where ISIS fighters are coming from Was one that was encouraged by the government the crackdown was violent I think a lot of those guys ended up joining ISIS We can talk a little bit more about this phenomenon in the question and answer But I want to get to a really interesting case, which is Saudi Arabia So in your handout you have it them all the way in the back Is a map at the bottom of three different? maps of Saudi Arabia And so what I did when looking at the recruitment in Saudi Arabia was I looked at the historical rates of recruitment Where were Saudi fighters coming from when they went to Afghanistan or when they went to Iraq or when they went to Bosnia or Chechnya so I look had three different data sets that I looked at to map where Saudi fighters were coming from and the Places Saudi fighters were coming from were completely different than the places where Saudi fighters were coming from who were joining ISIS Previously the fighters that were joining primarily Al Qaeda Affiliated conflicts were from Mecca Medina Jeddah, but this time around the fighters are coming from the heartland of Saudi Arabia So this is an area that we would normally associate with the most conservative regions of Saudi Arabia These are the parts of Saudi Arabia that mobilized a hundred years ago For the Saudi family to establish the Saudi state when we think about Wahhabi Islam I mean this is where we these are the regions of Saudi Arabia that we think about So there are a bunch of different theories about why this has changed And I'm just going to present a few very briefly and then we can talk more about this if it's of interest The first is and I think the most compelling one is that there is a There is a connection between the questions that animate people from these regions And the message of recruitment that ISIS was presenting in the next people aren't so much interested in the sort of slightly more esoteric geopolitical Contest against a far enemy that a group like Al Qaeda is presenting. They're much more interested in Social questions of how to organize Islamic societies. So when you have a group like ISIS, which is declaring an Islamic state I think there is a huge amount of interest in a region like that for a project like that in effect They built an Islamic state, which was the Saudi state a hundred years ago I think you're seeing a mobilization for a similarly attractive message now I was speaking to several Saudis who are from this region about this question And I think the thing that we need to understand about especially in Saudi Arabia, but in the region as a whole There is a question of are we Muslim Saudis or are we Saudi Muslims? And I think even though we Now recognize that this notion of the caliphate was a was a hollow promise and has been full of horrible human rights violations and atrocities at the time at which it was announced it did have a lot of grounding in Islamic law and Islamic theology And I think there are really interesting papers that are written about this I would recommend that you read Graham Woods book about ISIS for example a few other options though It could just be social networks people from these regions could have gone first to Syria and recruited their friends who then recruited their friends You see a snowball effect the other piece of this puzzle that I just want to emphasize very quickly is that Although we don't associate Saudi Arabia with an Arab spring per se There were a lot of demonstrations centered in Qaseem, which is the Nejdi heartland province just next to Riyadh around the detention of the Saudi state by people who were Charged with terrorism crimes, but never tried in court and a lot of the people involved in organizing those demonstrations They're called the Fuku al-Anni demonstrations of the release of the detainees Took advantage of the instability the Saudi state was feeling during the spring to mobilize demonstrations A lot of that was organized by people from Qaseem Most of the demonstrations were in Qaseem and a lot of those people not only joined ISIS later on but also Were responsible for attacks in the Arabian Peninsula Most famously the one where the Saudi fighter traveled from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain and then attacked the Shia mosque in Kuwait So this suggests different motivations. You have a sectarian question You have this question. I think really of the compelling notion of state building The last thing I'll say very briefly is that the regions that we looked at with the highest rates of ISIS recruitment had strong elite level connections and this is true in Saudi Arabia in Qaseem, for example Which has traditionally had very strong access to powerful state institutions like the Ministry of Finance the Ministry of Defense It's also true in Bahrain the most So the the Minister of Defense and the Royal Court Minister are known as khawalids Which is like a part of the Bahraini royal family that is very hard-lined. They've penned very violent anti-shia Poems, I mean there their their rhetoric suggests that There is a large sanctioning of Bahraini communities to violently attack Shias both in Bahrain and elsewhere We don't have to dwell on this but Turkey al-Banali who is an ISIS theologian who was recently killed is a member of a very prominent Bahraini family when asked who referred you to join ISIS almost half of all the Bahrainis Used said Turkey al-Banali was the person who referred them very central to the recruitment in Bahrain very prominent individual His cousin ran some of the state prisons and then also joined Bahrain later So these are well connected individuals the same is also true in Kuwait We kind of know now that Kuwait has had long-standing lax terrorism finance laws Which they've cleaned up recently But the reason they have those is because there's been a very successful business community that has long been politically active and very religiously conservative So what does that mean for what we see going forward and what this is mean for policy? I'm very concerned that future foreign fighter mobilizations will recruit similarly and similarly successfully I don't think there is a strong radicalization effort in any of these countries I think there is a strong criminal effort in many of these countries But I would just conclude and I say wrap up What you know the message is that David and I want to convey here, which is that you know There is no I think the debate about which theory of why people join terrorist groups is Less helpful than thinking about where a certain theory about why people join terrorist groups is most applicable So in some cases it's marginalization in some cases. There's a violent sectarian rhetoric in some cases There is a Theological element to the mobilization and I think we need to be able to first diagnose where people are coming from at a disproportionate level Before we start thinking about what is motivating them to join in the first place. Thank you Great You've given us a lot to think about here I'll try to keep my questions brief so we can get to the audience. We have a lot of practitioners here with us today We were talking backstage earlier, and you alluded here into your presentation that the Al Qaeda the original Al Qaeda message is somewhat esoteric it's Weakened the far enemy over time and then you know on some unspecified Timeline almost certainly outside your lifetime that then brings about the Caliphate and you know, that's a great argument for You know seminary students and technology workers people who can deal with complex concepts But probably isn't gonna sell to your subsistence farmer You know conversely, you know ISIS can be some you know burn baby burn You know let's let's bring about the Caliphate today or you know it happened last year get on board So given these two models and some it kind of makes sense that there would be a much greater economic determinant For the ISIS fighter because he's thinking about his you know present-day Situation now David in your North Africa presentation you almost said exactly that that essentially Joining you know the odds of joining ISIS X is essentially a function of economic deprivation why? You say that on the Gulf it's much more complicated than that I want you to look you know, so if I try to put an xy line over top of you David I want you to say why that's too simplistic for North Africa, and I want you to tell me how much purchase that is getting me in the Gulf So in North Africa, I think what we see is that it's not that there's a correlation between economic stress or poverty and fighter production if you look at Libya it's all centered in the east, but southern Libya The region known as Fuzan produced no fighters in the data. We're looking at and it is actually the poorest part of Libya What the key aspect is is much less that you can take as a Policymaker or threat analyst the economic data and pinpoint from that we should focus on somewhere When you do find a place of high production It shares this aspect of Economic stress there may be other places that are also economically stressed But don't have the history of political mobilization or the political grievance They may also have economic stress in a different way one of the things we Would like to look at in the future is whether there's a difference between What seems to characterize Dairna and southern Libya of many young men who don't have jobs and aren't married and a poverty where people Do have families? But what we find is that there's this long history of Economic and political marginalization combined and when you look at regions that don't share that the happy families of North Africa They don't produce fighters at a high rate and the only cases where you find spots that May be considered happy families when you look deeper It's a function or appears to be a function of substantial internal inequality So unemployment is not actually by census numbers all that high in the provinces of Grand Tunis But when you look at a neighborhood like Etihad man That unemployment rate is similar to what we see in Kibili and the southern part of Tunisia One aspect I'd note just on the ideological aspect that is worth considering is that ideological aspect of jihadism in North Africa Arguably has long been closer to this long of the state-building element than the al-Qaeda Mobilizations in Saudi Arabia North Africa was the periphery of the al-Qaeda Mobilizations in the past al-Qaeda had what's control over its North African? affiliates and it did over its South Asian or Saudi Arabian affiliates. So there's part of a question about whether The lack of impact of ISIS's Ideology here is just it was done decades ago by other groups and we're just seeing the outcome of that When it comes to the Arabian Peninsula, I would just say two things in response to your question Doug. The first is I think people were more animated in many regions by Social issues than the political ones. I think the notion of This being a state-building project at the period in which we are looking at 2013 2014 was very compelling for people in a region that was a lot more animated about The questions of how do you socially organize as an Islamic society as opposed to how do you sort of contest the influence of? Imperialism or colonialism, etc I mean these are the regions of Saudi Arabia that are also protesting the new laws that the kingdom has passed about allowing women to drive I think it will be the source of a lot of Anxed as the kingdom continues down this path of economic reform that it's been promising And the other piece of it is that I think ISIS's message of recruitment has been is very powerful because it's so flexible It's a message of reinvention of self. I mean you can go and be someone new in this place And I think that that's attractive for a lot of people for a very wide variety of reasons So it's not just like that, you know I'm a poor farmer from the Tunisian hinterland and now I have a chance to work as You know an office monkey in the records of foreign fighter joiners, but also it's a it's an opportunity to Structure a society. I think especially in parts of conservative parts of Saudi Arabia where they see the kingdom Growing a little bit further away from that conservative idea of an Islamic State Obviously this has changed a lot since 2014 and of course this notion of an Islamic State has been hollow for many years now And I think a lot of Saudis and a lot of people from the Arabian Peninsula since left, but I think at that time that was very compelling Okay, I'm gonna turn to to your handout. I mean not only have data, but you have maps and these are these are quite powerful So the big, you know middle Centerfold I guess if you will is This map of where you found these recruits came from color-coded on a map of the MENA region Which is extremely useful and then as you said you have these three maps smaller maps on the back that show Saudi Arabia's recruitment over time if You were to make me One of these maps That has this data showing differences over time What do you think would jump off the map at me? Where are recruits coming from now that they have not historically and conversely? I think maybe even more interestingly What are the dogs that are not barking? What are the places that have produced large numbers of jihadists over time? That are in the gray or neutral marking on your map So in North Africa, there are really two examples. I think are interesting historically Versus now and they're both really the examples of dogs that don't bark first as we discuss Libya where as You trace it back just through the decades. It's the same two provinces and they're an eastern Libya It's not a new issue. It's one that the United States and the Libyan government have been struggling with for decades. It's gotten particularly bad now that there isn't really a meaningful central Libyan government with control over the whole country, but It's not a new phenomenon. The other interesting one is Algeria, which did not produce spiders in this case In fact only 26 spiders came from Algeria that's Extremely tiny rate given Algeria's large population and it's surprising because Algeria was one of the foremost producers when you look at the Sinjar records and was the leading source of North African fighters in the past It also has an internal history of jihadism with al-Qaeda and Islamic Maghreb So it's somewhat surprising Algeria does not show up One of the reasons why we suspect that may be the case although one we can't demonstrate Because there aren't enough fighters from Algeria to really get a sense of what the demographics of Algerian fighters are is that this is the product of Algeria's lack of in real Arab Spring movement that it experienced fewer protests the protests were not as Anti-regime as they took on the character in Tunisia and Libya The government did not fall and part of that is just Algerians don't want to repeat the history of the 1990s and Therefore Algeria sat out not just the ISIS mobilization But the last prominent outburst of anger at structural conditions in North Africa Which to me although One would have to get a whole bunch more research from Algeria experts and on survey data on Algeria Really provide some confirming support for this idea that in North Africa. We have a structural problem that predates ISIS To touch on a few places in the Arabian Peninsula I mean I spent a lot of time in this presentation emphasizing the newness of The mobilization in Saudi Arabia and where it occurred and Bahrain so I won't Delve into that anymore, but I will say that one of the places on the map that doesn't show up at all Which is surprising and I only briefly touched on it in the Arabian Peninsula is Yemen and I think ultimately there is a very powerful notion of Commitment, it's called Bayaa you make pledge to the leader of a different You know movement so a lot of people I think in Yemen pledge Bayaa to Osama bin Laden And then I'm in the Wahiri after bin Laden was killed and so there's this notion of like sticky Bayaa You know you you make this pledge you make this promise It's hard for you to switch to another group and when ISIS declared the caliphate in 2014 There were very few al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist organizations around the world that defected even though it's strongly Suggestive that Isis spent a lot of time courting these movements to try and make this declaration of an Islamic caliphate in Mosul in 2014 even more powerful by the fact that they could get all these other affiliates to declare allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi the leader of ISIS But in Yemen we just I think it's one of those places you see how that commitment to the leader of a different organization is Still very strong and the data. I wish I had was on foreign fighters who were joining Places like Hayat Tahrir Hashem, which is formerly Jaffa-Bil Nusrah the main al-Qaeda linked group in Syria. I Believe that it's very likely that we would see a similarly high rate of Yemenis joining a group like that Accounting for the fact of course that Yemen has its own conflict going on right now And there are a lot of people taking part in that and not having to leave at all Outside of the Arabian Peninsula. There were a few other countries. I would want to highlight one. I think is Turkey I think that the political support of the Turkish government to a variety of militants in the Syrian conflict including even You know the al-Qaeda affiliated group at the time called Jabhat al-Nusrah Hayat Tahrir Hashem It's gone on and on and on lots of rebranding lots of videos on YouTube lots of patches and logos, but anyway I Think the Turkish political support for these movements has given citizens in Turkey a Lot of freedom to join these these conflicts And this is a place that I think there's not a lot of really good work being done on what the motivations are and where they're coming from And another place that I would emphasize is Jordan I think that it has been very well documented the involvement of Jordanians in the Afghani conflict the Iraqi conflict our data Doesn't show a lot about Jordan unfortunately simply because I don't think a lot of Jordanians would need to fly to Turkey to end Syria they could simply do it on their own, but I also don't think that there are a very large number of Jordanians represented in Mostly ISIS, but you know Okay You you kind of preempted my last question, but I'll ask it anyway You've been pretty careful about staying in the limits of your data So now I'm going to try to make you do it We're all taught not to do on the first day of graduate school and extrapolate from your data Again, you have these you know wonderful great maps on the back that show the differences between This time period the 13 14 time period you're talking about and historical norms if you had the Data on where everyone else where are the other al-Qaeda affiliated movements? Not the other al-Qaeda, but the al-Qaeda brand where are they getting their recruits and for that matter other Minor jihadi groups that are you know I think there are still some that don't fall under either the isis or the aq umbrellas If you can get the data on these then do you think the current map would look much more like the historical norm? In other words, do you think they are still producing? The these source countries across North Africa across the region are still essentially Producing foreign fighters at the same rates or at least in the same proportions probably the gross numbers wax and wane over time But proportionately does it look the same or do you think something is changing? in the way that jihadist groups Across let's call it this whole family of extremism Across the way that all these groups are recruiting is this or so is this something new or is this just a limitation? We have one snapshot of one segment of the recruitment. I Would say there are two things that have really catalyzed recruitment among the whole variety of organizations Qaeda ISIS and a variety of others and those are the Syrian conflict and the Arab Spring And I think when you think about those two as the sort of key Determining variables, so when it comes to Arab Spring I think like David has mentioned, you know, you have the case of Tunisia where the phenomenon of ISIS recruitment is widespread and And an extraordinarily high rates as compared to a place like Morocco, which has a dispersed ISIS recruitment, but didn't have the extent of the Arab protests that Tunisia had and that for that level is much lower There are obviously other more complicated factors, but let's leave it at that and and then in addition you have The Syrian conflict and I think there's a probably a very strong correlation between the countries that politically supported militants in the Syrian conflict and Fighters that joined militant groups in the Syrian conflict. I mean the Syrian conflict has catalyzed recruitment has catalyzed You know battlefield tactics and strategy has become a safe haven for a variety of organizations And it will be in generation before where you were able to address this in a substantive and systematic way But places like Saudi Arabia I mean like in Kuwait and Bahrain members of Parliament were doing official visits to the Syrian conflict and loading rockets into rocket launchers So like there is huge amounts of state-sanctioned at the time we're looking at Support to fighters going to these places to join a variety of groups And you see lots of cases where people went to join the Free Syrian Army and then over time the slippery slope You know phenomenon occurs and they find themselves getting a salary because they need To eat food and they join ISIS so I think those two variables are hugely important when you think about where fighters are coming from And so I would I would propose one would do a study to see how that relates The only thing I would add on the question of Whether we'd see similar locations had we gotten Al Qaeda Records or the XYZ militia records is I'd return to One of the overall findings of our paper is that we shouldn't be so focused on the overall question but the question of where and Well, it's certainly possible that this would not be differentiated by geography and We can't really say as we don't have access to that data Which one of the sort of suggestions I'd have is to the extent the government has and can release that data That's a major hole in research right now But my tendency would be to think that in North Africa there probably isn't a big difference We sort of see that in Libya that historically the various mobilizations are relatively similar There's not an extensive reason to think that To the extent there was Javanese for a recruitment it was coming from a different place the other reason I'd suggest that is that In Tunisia Isis recruitment really built off of foundations that were shared between Isis and Al Qaeda factions that it was built off of Ansar al-Sharia, which was engaged in a internal split over which way are we going to go and one that wasn't really Resolved conclusively either But split particular individuals within it. So in North Africa, I would tend to think that an area of further study should be looking at that and the incoming hypothesis would be that It's similar dynamics by group whereas in the Arabian Peninsula I think there's reason to begin with the hypothesis that There's a difference between Al Qaeda and Isis and one area to test that that would be interesting is Yemen where there's basically no meaningful Isis recruitment and there's been some reports of large numbers of Al Qaeda Jabhat al-Nusra other Groups recruitment from Yemen whether those are believable or accurate I have no clue, but there does seem to be a Distinction in what's reported versus the Isis files along the group I said that was my last question, but I lied and asked one more very quickly You've talked a lot about how this is bounded geographically and that's a very important qualifier How much is this bounded temporally as you pointed out these records are drawn from a time when Isis is really at its peak You know when otherwise responsible people here in Washington were saying a bag yet is certainly gonna fall and probably Jordan and Lebanon Right after that I mean Isis looked pretty good in this 2013-2014 period from which you're recruiting so let's say the Anti-Isis coalition tomorrow grabs your paper and they're gonna use it as the basis for their future CVE efforts What cautions would you give them about? Hey, we're looking at a period where again, this was about the state building project I'd caution you to not use it now that we're moving into a period that's gonna look more traditional terrorism focused I would just say that it is very very Very impacted by the time. I mean, I think if you looked at post 2015 Isis recruitment you would find very a few people that were coming from Saudi Arabia or the rest of the Arabian Peninsula Both because the Saudi government was starting to crack down on a lot of this a Lot of these departures because attacks were starting to be perpetrated in the kingdom and in the rest of the satellite states around the kingdom But also because no one wants to join the losing team I mean, and that's effectively what Isis became and I think You know this but but but I would caution if we were to do the briefing I would caution people in saying and I think I this bore out in my presentation that like the fundamental Contexts in which these fighters were being recruited hasn't changed and I don't see De-radicalization efforts actually addressing the root causes of these issues in the region In Bahrain, I think it's the most acute of any in the whole Arabian Peninsula With that we will move to questions. Let me give you the ground rule for questions Please raise your hand wait to be recognized once you are recognized Please wait for the microphone. So those that do not have the benefit of being here in the room can hear you once you have the Microphone in your hand, please identify yourself in any relevant affiliations and please ask a Question a question begins usually with a who what where when why and when you ask it adds with a slight inflection at the end Of your voice to indicate there's a question mark there a short preamble to your question is acceptable a Long statement that essentially ends with a so what do you think about that is not? So with this we'll go right here in the jackets I would like to ask about How ISIS recruitment policy strategies work in Egypt after cc's crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood Is there an impact or is there did you see any correlation? Thank you? So I'll talk briefly to that we excluded Egypt from our North Africa region on the basis that when we looked at that data There were a lot of phenomena that seemed to suggest that it shared a mobilization dynamic with other countries in the Levant rather than so much the dynamic that's in Libya Tunisia Morocco and Algeria and therefore for space constraints we found it Risky to analyze that without the comparison of Israel and the Palestinian Territories Jordan Lebanon has that comparison So we haven't really looked too deeply at it it does appear to share similar dynamics more broadly With some of the North African aspects that is the country whose government fell into Arab Spring We do see importance of parts of the country that have been marginalized the Sinai in particular and there's some kind of dynamic with Sinai and The Gaza Strip that shows up in where people are reporting previous job, but really are That's all tentative and we did not examine Egypt since we viewed it as part of a distinct regional grouping that Was seemed to be different from what we were looking at and tied together the North African Maghreb countries Right here in the front John oven given the findings of localized phenomena all unhappy provinces are unhappy in their own way Did you explore the use of qualitative methods that are specifically designed for testing hypotheses in a sample size of one sample size of one being Unique provinces I'm happy in its own way Unit of analysis Okay, yeah, no, I mean I think What we would really love to accomplish with this paper to be honest is like I think this I think this paper in our presentation The goal is to put two dozen research, you know PhD dissertation hypotheses out there for further and more rigorous quality of the oriented testing. I mean these are Strongly suggestive conclusions. We believe they're to be true But I think as you emphasize I think people should be going to these places Where possible? I mean I wouldn't advise anyone go to Derna anytime soon But I think you know some of these places really require some in-depth quality of work to validate or disagree with some of our findings It's a valid question Thank you the woman on the aisle There are your keys from the Carnegie Endowment for Natural Peace question is about political marginalization You mentioned economic marginalization and political. How are you measuring political marginalization? How is it different from economic and how are you testing? So The political marginalization can definitely use more Measures that are better a large part of what we were looking at or that I was looking at in North Africa is the protest data and then the aspects of are these fighters Reporting jobs and other Demographic information that appears to put them within the higher classes part of the issue We tend to do fine in North Africa is that these aren't really distinct phenomena to a large extent There's places where they're obviously not the same, but in Libya economic marginalization is so much a product of the way the patronage system and distribution of wealth and government jobs falls So that's a large aspect of it. I'd also note that our emphasis on the protest data and Qualitative work by others who have looked at the region next in the very back David Galli from the Department of Defense This is a question goes more to North Africa as you've identified the subnational regions that have these economic and social political Nationalization issues is your study going to lend itself to a solution of perhaps Focusing international aid either from intergovernmental agencies or from individual countries like USA to diffid as a way of stanching the the recruitment of ISIS fighters by improving the source of ISIS fighters This is one of the I think key areas that the process of our report really Intervenes in the existing debate There's this current debate, which I'm going to give you the Sort of media narrative obviously within academic and policy circles It's a bit more detailed than this, but it goes something like There's a set of people who say we need to give them jobs and then there's a bunch of people who say jobs for jihadists that won't make any difference and one of their findings is that sort of debate is really Unhelpful to getting at this So in many of the areas in North Africa, we looked at these subnational areas There does appear to be something about being underemployed or not having a stable job that I can't tell you it's causal, but it sure shows up in a lot of these provinces at really high rates in Contrast if you go to the Arabian Peninsula I think the people who say jobs for jihadists. It's an ideological aspect probably have much more of a point in that region that Many of the people from Bahrain. Well, they actually have not great job situations There's a whole bunch of them that are well connected to Institutions of power the other thing so just adding more jobs to that when there's that ideological aspect Is unlikely to help The other thing I noticed that One of the things we need to get a better handle on and that we're struggling with in this paper and the field It's more generally I believe is The measures we're using to understand economic stress North Africa suffers a massive underemployment problem. That's not captured very well by our unemployment data It also many of the jobs of people who actually are owners of businesses are Very unpredictable. There's substantial informal work substantial illicit work even for example in Tunisia Jobs that are was it are often Only one step away from the smuggling economy particularly in southern Tunisia and therefore you get this dynamic that If you just run your classical economic measures It won't pick this up and it failed to pick it up before the Arab Spring in Tunisia that this outburst of anger was coming but when you look at The more qualitative sense or ask people in these regions They'll tell you marginalization or economic stress seems to have something to do with recruitment now those people have often been Historically dismissed as a money-grubbing aspect of CV research. They just want money or Their particular project or it's the head of the Union of course He's going to tell you unemployment is bad for whatever reason he can come up with I would suggest that we should be a lot more trusting of these qualitative statements from people particularly given The high rates of underemployment that show up in the fighter records One thing one, I think I would just add one one concrete policy intervention that I very strongly believe in is For the United States and other countries in Europe to encourage greater trade within the region I think that's an opportunity for a lot of quick wins in terms of economic development I mean the magrub trades less than any other pretty much any region in the world Like for example a province in eastern Morocco called oriental 25% of the income comes from remittances I mean the best economic Chance you have as a Moroccan from that part of Morocco is to leave and yet historically the trade That was a hugely important city in the trade routes in the inland trade routes across North Africa So the lack of trade between Morocco Algeria and Tunisia is choking the economic opportunities And I think with what David is saying It's not just that this is important from an economic development perspective But that it encouraging trade across these countries is a national security and a regional security issue to Right here in front woman in the blue Thank you. This is very important study Diane Perlman from the school for conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason So I have a question about the age factor in terms not just of sort of biological psychological age But also the cohort effect of life experience say having been through Like a zero to 15, you know since 9 11, but also issues of humiliation Tra and V and trauma and the inequality also has like relative deprivation factor in Conflicts so that they're shaped and I thought this out that there's like a 10-year lag effect like kids who were 10 during the Mujahideen became the Taliban and then people who are traumatized later became al-Qaeda and kind of cohort effect of trauma and humiliation There's a there's obviously a really important work that's being done on child soldiers people who are bringing children into these conflicts That doesn't play out so much among the Arabian Peninsula fighters as it does in Central Asia I mean a lot of fighters from Central Asia are bringing their whole family, especially in Western China So there's that element, but I would also say that ISIS recruitment strategies are predicated on impulsivity I think more so than any others we've seen when you look at al-Qaeda recruitment, you know, they they Advocate you build a relationship with the recruit ISIS has preyed on the impulsivity of youth more than any other group and I think When you look for example a German journalist really recently made a few months ago engaged in a conversation on telegram with ISIS recruiters and Basically, they said just send us a video, you know, and then we'll you know We'll have that and then you can you know plan the attack Don't worry about complicated things get a knife and just go out there and do it You know, so I think the commitment mechanism of someone sending a video to the group makes them feel responsible for carrying out an action They promise to do so I think there is a lot of detailed thinking in their recruitment strategy to get people to make Impulsive decisions and it turns out. I mean I was like this when I was a team and you make a lot of impulsive decisions when you're a kid I Guess the only thing I'd add is I think a fascinating area to look at Although one that unfortunately Would be incredibly difficult to figure out a method to do it is Derna where you do have those Transgenerational aspect of the mobilization and you have fighters who are very young I believe the median age we found for them was 19 or 20 at the point that they were entering Syria now whether that has an aspect to do with The impact on children and cohort effects, I don't know my tendency would be to Ascribe that to network effects that have built up that it's home to Milton networks that developed over decades and get re-energized every time there's an outburst of anger, but that's something where If anyone can get a meaningful sample of people whether from refugees or what not It would be an area that could benefit from a lot of discussions there Jumping on that last point Bill Lawrence from George Washington University I would echo what my colleague from George Mason said and actually say that the cohort and the network effects are Many was the same and that the networkers figure out the local cohort issues and the age factors are very important in North Africa I would also add that there is huge value in the data sets you have But there's a lot of missing stuff in the data sets and the first one to jump to mind where the Computer sees in in in Syria fighters going to Iraq and that was a lot of a big early sample of Tunisians Algerians Moroccans and Libyans going to Iraq and that reveals some very interesting things including Another thing you seem to have missed which is the middle-class Fighters one of the reasons Tunisians send so many and continues and so many is not lack of access to capital but access to capital and So looking at upper middle-class and down only more downy will upper class and down only mobile middle class Tunisians is as interesting Let me let me just get to my question. Yeah the the what I would suggest is that your Your conclusions are exactly right, but they're almost still at 35,000 feet and once you drill down as you're saying There are all these other factors my my my question would be this There are lots of profiles out there hundreds particularly in the francophone literature So how would you in sort of generation version two of this study? Capture all of that massive and growing anecdotal information including from returning fighters, which is another great new database Yeah, so I think one of the next steps for research of those Areas to turn to the profiles and to examine them geographically rather than trying to generate the Tunisian profile which If you look at it aggregate in aggregate and we do this with some of the fighter data or are planning to do in the forthcoming Paper you find that they're about as educated as the Tunisian population and there's about as many students as the Tunisian population and they report origins from across the country and it's really easy to come in as a journalist son and get a sample that We'll tell you the story that this is a First a mobilization of the first was the it's the same terrorist dynamic. We've seen in Like multiple terrorism campaigns. There's this orthodoxy and the literature. I believe that terrorism does not have an economic cause and To some extent, I think that's true and we shouldn't undercount the Tunisian mobilization's ability to cut across Classes I would strongly warn though as you get more of local You begin to see that the places that really pop out are these geographically in many ways ghettoized areas that are producing Underemployment numbers at such high rates. I think part of that is like with the Arab Spring the economy really contracted in some ways Particularly for many of these areas that are hotspots And I think this is a dynamic you see in some of the reporting of demographics of particular attackers and major attacks in Tunisia is they will be reported as middle class Because their family is middle class or their family has some wealth, but they individually Often you see they dropped out of School and they were doing day labor or construction work now Looking at those profiles will be useful to determine what comes first the jihadism or the economic aspect But one of my suspicions based on this data in Tunisia is There's an upgrading of people who really are not a bursh wasi into the bursh wasi When really you've got a dynamic of unemployed under employed people who do not have a stake in society And it's not a radicalizing middle-class or at the very least not a radicalizing Stable middle class in any meaningful term James Kipfield. I'm a writer with the Yahoo news I was at your earlier presentation I guess it was like close to a year ago or whenever that was but you had a lot broader take on You know, it wasn't just North Africa and the Middle East Can you say anything meaningful having bored into this part about the motivations the profiles of the Foreign fires that came from the West that came from Europe that came from America Obviously, that's a major concern right now of ours that some of these will be returning But any any interesting comparisons with that subgroup? Yeah, I mean, this is outside the scope of what we're looking at right now, but I am doing a bit of a Social network analysis of fighters who are coming from Europe as opposed to those based in the Arabian Peninsula For example, and what we find is that the fighters from Europe are much less connected both in the number of ties They have to each other and in the strength of the ties that they have to each other Then the fighters from the Arabian Peninsula who are far more interconnected And I think when it comes to what how do we interpret that means with regards to threats? I think what that means is In in there's a theory of social network analysis that suggests interconnected There's a vulnerability due to interconnectedness right so anyone in an electrical grid for example a grid Power station that goes off results in a chain reaction of the whole region's power that goes off So in the case of threats with deeply interconnected networks in this case of terrorist groups in the Arabian Peninsula, for example You know, it's easy to control such a network if you know which nodes to control But if you lose control of those nodes, you have a greater risk of a catastrophic failure so a Mosul for example or Benghazi, I mean so So I think the threat in the Arabian Peninsula is a Greater there's greater risk of systemic failure But when you look at Europe where you have a far less interconnected network of terrorists The threat is not systemic. I mean, you know, we're not going to lose cities of Europe to the caliphate or anything But the threat is a sort of Very small scale one person one person one person threat, which means attacks are harder to stop It's harder to control a network like that because you basically have to have tabs on every single node in the network As opposed to a few nodes with a high degree and a larger interconnected network I mean, but this is outside of the scope of our paper Right here Thanks for the presentation My name is Chris singles from the Commission for International Justice and accountability We were considering Iraq mostly on criminal justice issues So we have some contact with these types of forms much fewer than you do And we're looking at them for criminal justice purposes, of course But one of the things that you mentioned earlier was the slippery slope effect And we've seen that as well from the recruitment forms that we have but to a really small degree So again limited data that we have It's only like it's below 10% of those that were former Fighters with other groups came from the moderate or the FSA type groups and most of them came from other Extremist groups to join I was just wondering how that played out with your work as well because we have this conversation anecdotally about the fighter that comes as a moderate and then is somehow Radicalized in country, but our limited amount of documentation has not shown that at all Yeah, thanks. I mean the answer is I can't give you a good answer So I mean like this is one of the issues about having foreign fighter registration forms that are recorded on the Syrian Turkish border So fighters who are recorded in these forms are entering Syria From Turkey, so they're not fighters who are in Syria switching groups really I mean, there's not enough evidence for us to be able to make any kind of concrete claim John Pilicic State Department Thanks for the talk And I wanted to actually correlate to the issue of criminal justice and build on the point of How some of these things have been addressed in Europe? particularly in the Balkans Where the governments have put in sort of stiff penalties for any person going to partake in any form conflict Have there been debates like this for such stiff penalties in the countries you're studying? Because they seem to have at least in some parts of the Balkans made it that only the real die-hard It's going to go the person who stands to really have a Difficult life back home if they try to do this type of lifestyle is likely turned off Any any research in this in this regard? Yeah So the main source of our data for this paper. It doesn't really talk to that as that registration files and not sort of government statements or terrorism Within the country's overall and also it's 2013 to 2014 the height of the mobilization when People were just beginning to see this as a major problem that required such changes in North Africa, I think it's Really a question of where you look at in Libya There's not all that much because there's not a particularly functioning government on the other hand Sort of the roots have been strengthened and cut off That you would have to take to get to Syria that really cut that down In Tunisia you saw a raft of anti-foreign fighter laws some of them quite strict with age-based travel restrictions In Algeria During this period or during the late part of this period you see a strong military crackdown on the few portions Of the country where there was the effort to mobilize the internal ISIS threat and from the United States Sort of country terrorism reports and other Reporting it sounds like that was pretty successful and Morocco like Algeria has a relatively Well-functioning security service compared to at least Tunisia and Libya during the time period We look at where Tunisia's was politically constrained as a result of the revolution and Libya's had in effect collapsed because of the rebellion and the 2011 NATO intervention And then as far as the Gulf I mean it's outside the scope of our data But it's pretty clearly reported that once the Arabian countries in the Arabian Peninsula faced a domestic security threat as a manifestation of the recruitment of ISIS fighters So basically 2015 and afterwards they cracked down very hard on people going but I mean Even at that point you could go to Saudi Arabia and people would be willingly Willing to talk to you about any number of people they knew who had left to Syria. So I guess my point is that like the underlying motivations And processes of radicalization in the Arabian Peninsula are still not well-addressed Even though the criminal elements are heavily policed And I think that the region faces threats both from al-Qaeda and from ISIS and they're different They come from different places. They're animated by different questions And the fundamental things that they animate them are not being effectively addressed One last question that just goes to the gentleman here Dave Coleson a congressional fellow. Can you give me some of the hypothesis of why there's a higher rate of Yemen fighters in Gitmo Where in Guantanamo? He said there was a higher ratio of Yemen fighters I think it's because there are more Yemenis who are joining al-Qaeda or committed to al-Qaeda than there are Yemenis for ISIS Well with that we do have time for one more I was expecting a little longer answer going once going twice the gentleman in the front will take it Hi, my name is Jack Rupansky unaffiliated. I was wondering if you could maybe contrast or compare the distinction Distinction between flow of foreign fighters and recruitment in other words if if we at the dueling coalition is shut down that the territorial area in Syria is Recruitment going to go away to or is recruitment going to just shift and how might you get at those that kind of information in the future? Yeah, that's a really good question I mean I use recruitment in a broad term and when I think When you think about recruitment you think about like someone from a group reaching out to people that they want to join the group And there's a deliberate process and a clear sort of initiation I mean the way like organized crime in southern Italy might do it, but in these cases like it's not that kind of dry It's a lot more complex. I mean you have people who are seeking out people who help them join Movements like Isis and Isis fight Isis recruiters, you know have clear strategies at trying to facilitate that process So it comes from both sides and it's very complex I mean I and so that's that's kind of how I use it and I think Isis has found a very a very effective formula For having recruitment be very broad. So it's not just joining, but it's also being recruited I mean these data are people who left, you know to join And all terrorism analysis is limited by the quality of the data which we have access to But I don't think I mean I think this data is really To use a word that's often Misused unique in that it you know You don't have the kind of selection effects you might have if a journalist was interviewing a bunch of people Or even fighters who are returning to Tunisia I mean the people who are returning to Tunisia want to return and can return and there's a non-random selection bias in that And they're alive, right? I mean, but yeah, so like I mean So there is an element of this in the fighters who are joining but because the data are so large and diverse I think we can make broader claims about Recruitment broadly rather than just recruitment of people who are willing to pack up their Vindal and fly to Turkey and then enter Syria It can be tough to figure out there is a question that is who recommended you But it's not clear whether that recommendation is What it means whether it means the person met you at the Turkish border and is giving you a sign-off Whether it's they were in a terrorist training camp and you want their in the region and then went over whether it's just someone who Can vouch for you, but had no active Recruitment aspect. I did some digging into this in Tunisia and There certainly is some level of More organized Movement within the region that's worth studying seven point five percent of the whole Tunisian contingent Was recommended by one person who ran this terrorist training camp in Sebrathe We know that he was in direct contact with ISIS in Syria on More or less daily basis and also that there were connections back into Tunisia This has been one of the areas that airstrikes in Libya really focused upon during that period But I can't really tell you whether within Tunisia He was he and his sort of People working with him were Doing a more direct reach out or if it's just people went to Ansar al-Sharia tents and some of them Then radicalized and decided to go to Libya or if it's people just showed up in Libya That's not really something I can necessarily tell you however There does appear to be a difference between Something like that and what we seem to see and other parts of the world Perhaps a little bit in Algeria or I think we see this a lot in the United States Where people are just showing up or they have an online connection they built Something we've seen really in our research here at New America on homegrown terrorism that there's not physical recruitment going on in the US By return fighters or clerics or things like that And I think that's probably a geographic distinction based on extent of networks and extent of marginalization between Somewhere like the US and somewhere like rural Tunisia I want to thank David and Nate for all the work that they've done for you know bringing this data set to our attention I mean has been pointed out there are you know 20 different ways that future researchers can go with this data But nonetheless, this is a great first contribution. I know the paper got caught up in editing hell Do we have a best guess on when it'll be released and on the website? Or stay tuned stay tuned. Thank you very much for coming today on behalf of New America. Happy to have you