
By: Paul Maley
Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/
THE Syrian civil war is attracting Australian jihadists like no other conflict before it.
Neither the Afghan jihad during the 1980s nor the Balkans conflict a decade later drew Australian Muslims in the numbers currently traveling to Syria.
It is as if the two-year civil war against the regime of Bashir al-Assad is exerting a gravitational pull on Australian radicals, who are drawn to the fight in record numbers, energized by an interplay of ethnic and religious motivations.
The reported deaths of Yusuf Ali and his 22-year-old wife Amira Ali took the number of Australians believed to have been killed in Syria to eight, although like most of the figures coming out of Syria you wouldn’t bet the farm on it. The Australian government has only limited knowledge of its citizens’ activities once they disappear behind Syria’s violent, lawless boundaries.
But the deaths of Ali and his wife represented a grim milestone. Amira Ali was the first Australian woman killed in the war. (The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has yet to officially confirm both deaths.)
A second such milestone was reached in September last year when a Brisbane man, “Ahmed”, drove a truck laden with explosives into a military checkpoint in northeastern Syria, becoming, in the process, Australia’s first known suicide bomber.
(The family of Ahmed, whose surname The Australian has chosen not to publish on legal advice, claim he is alive and well and living in Turkey, a claim privately rubbished by police.)
Amira Ali and her husband were killed in Aleppo last week and the circumstances of their deaths remain unclear.
But like many of the Australians who travel to Syria, Amira Ali was unknown to counter-terrorism officials before her death.
The Australian has been told her husband only came to the attention of intelligence and security officials after he arrived in Syria, depriving authorities of the opportunity to cancel his passport as a way of preventing his departure.
Yusuf Ali is believed to have travelled to Syria with the assistance of the alleged ringleader of a cell of Islamists who are believed to have facilitated the travel of Australian Muslims to Syria.
The discovery of the cell signified a sinister evolution in the Syrian threat as it made clear organised networks were now in place to ferry Australian radicals to the Syrian front.
Federal Attorney General George Brandis hinted last year that the picture inside Syria was changing, with the war drawing hardened radicals with in-country connections to the most violent groups as well as self-starting freelancers attracted by the illusion of glory and adventure.
“There is evidence of some degree of facilitation in relation to matters such as travel which is more than ad hoc,” Senator Brandis told The Australian in November.
“It is the case that those Australians who travel to Syria include people who are ingenues or novices who have been attracted by recruiters and more sophisticated actors.”
Nobody knows exactly how many Australians are fighting in Syria. However, counter-terrorism officials believe between 100 and 120 are “on the tools” – or actively fighting as opposed to conducting humanitarian work.
Importantly, that seems to be a fairly stable number, meaning those who come home are being replaced by new combatants.
Most are Lebanese or Turkish. Virtually all are Sunni Muslims. They enter Syria via southern Turkey or Lebanon, where the Syrian regime has little or no control over the territory.
Increasingly they are taking steps to hide their intentions again, further evidence they are becoming more sophisticated.
When the war began two years ago some openly admitted to officials their intentions.
Now, they travel to Syria via circuitous routes, falsely declaring to Australian Immigration officials a third country as their destination.
Many are dual passport holders, allowing them to leave on their Australian travel documents and then continue their journey into Syria on foreign passports.
Before entering Syria they drop their phones, or “go dark”, as the jargon has it, making it difficult for intelligence agencies to track their movements.
Many, although by no means all, abandon social media sites like Facebook. Certainly the serious players have no social media presence.
While Australian intelligence services and counter-terrorism liaison officers are active in Ankara, Lebanon and Jordan, the fact is Australian security agencies are largely reliant on partner agencies, particularly the Jordanians, for information on what’s going on inside Syria.
ASIO does what it can here. Monitoring the legions of Australians who have travelled to Syria, or those who’ve returned, is now core business for Australia’s spooks, who have identified the threat posed by Syria veterans as a top priority in the years ahead.
Australians who return from Syria tend to get the same treatment: a phone call or a visit from an ASIO officer accompanied by an invitation to meet at a local restaurant or cafe. (For obvious reasons, ASIO is reluctant to disclose the location of its offices.)
Those who accept are interviewed at length, and such is the interest in the Syrian civil war among Australian Muslims that there must be restaurants in southwest Sydney who owe their entire livelihoods to ASIO’s patronage.
Monash University’s Global Terrorism Research Centre researcher Andrew Zammit said most of those who fought in Syria fought with jihadist elements within Syria’s sprawling, fractious opposition movement.
“In Australia there has been no comparable mobilisation of foreign fighters travelling to jihadist-related foreign battlefields,” Zammit told The Australian yesterday. “For Australia it is unprecedented.”
Counter-terrorism officials worry that Australians who fight in Syria will return well-trained, well-connected, experienced in combat and more radicalised by virtue of their experiences.
Zammitt says the link between domestic terror plots and foreign conflicts has been well studied.
He points out that several Australians convicted of terror offences fought or trained with Islamists abroad.
Jack Roche, who in 2004 was convicted of conspiring to blow up the Israeli Embassy, trained in Afghanistan. Faheem Lodhi, who was convicted for collecting documents for a terrorist act, was alleged to have trained with banned Pakistan terror group Lashkar e Toiba, as did Khaled Cheiko, who was convicted as part of the Pendennis trial, which centred on Australia’s largest terrorist conspiracy sprawling between NSW and Victoria.
Zammit said a study examining all Western terror plots between 1990-2010 by Thomas Heghammer, the director of terrorism research at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, found that almost half – 46 per cent – involved a conspirator who had trained or fought with an overseas group.
“The study also found those who did have such training experience proved to be more competent and capable than jihadists without that experience, as you’d expect,” Zammit said.
Still, Zammit says most returning fighters will cause no problems and argues against blanket policy responses such as revoking citizenship, a response mooted by some but widely regarded a legal impossibility. Statistically, about one out of nine returnees go on to become a threat, Zammit says.
“Often what makes the difference is whether the group in that foreign country has strategically signed on to al-Qa’ida and decided it’s worth carrying out attacks in the West.”
If that is the case, Australia has much to be concerned about.
Overwhelmingly, Australian fighters have been drawn to jihadist groups with al-Qa’ida connections, particularly Jabhat al-Nusra, which was proscribed as a terrorist group by the previous Labor government.
But lately it is the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, al-Qa’ida’s main offshoot in the Middle East, which has been concerning security officials.
ISIS, which has been active in Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein, has been re-energised by the Syrian conflict. It is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who in April proclaimed a merger between al-Qa’ida in Iraq and al-Nusra.
That claim, disputed at the time by al-Nusra, presaged intense conflict between the two groups, with reports of open fighting between al-Nusra and ISIS and the poaching by al-Baghdadi of large numbers of al-Nusra fighters.
Two weeks ago ISIS fighters stunned analysts after they captured the Iraqi city of Fallujah, prompting a political and security crisis.
Unlike al-Nusra, which is predominantly a Syrian group fighting a Syrian cause, ISIS is focused on the creation of an Islamic state in the border region of Iraq and Syria.
One senior Australian counter-terrorism official who asked not to be named said the emergence of ISIS had been a “game changer” in the Syrian conflict.
“It’s been rebirthed from another small al-Qa’ida subsidiary to a more substantial fighting body than we expected,” the official told The Australian.
“It provides another, even more violent alternative to people wanting to fight. It represents the vilest of the vile.”
It is unclear how many Australians have joined ISIS. The often shapeless nature of the jihadist opposition, with its shifting alliances and violent competition, makes it hard to tell.
A second official spoken to by The Australian said Australians who travelled to Syria sometimes wound up members of groups they had no intention of joining.
“What we do see is that they (foreign fighters) are moving rapidly between groups,” the official said.
Yehya El-Kholed, a 25-year-old Brisbane man who has travelled to Syria to conduct humanitarian work, told The Australian last year that al-Nusra was “dead”, its influence wholly eclipsed by ISIS.
El-Kholed said ISIS’s interpretation of Islam was extreme, even by the standards of the Syrian civil war.
“Do you know the stuff you put in bread to make it rise, yeast? ISIS wasn’t happy with the yeast because yeast is forbidden in Islam, apparently.
“They didn’t want that to be in the bread so they made a big argument about it,” he said.
To ISIS, it seems, even a humanitarian crisis born of two years of war is no reason to forgo their strict rules of faith.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of MuslimVillage.com.