‘Sometimes people with the worst pasts create the best futures” says a recruitment ad for the British jihadist group Rayat al-Tawheed, posted on Facebook, which shows a picture of a hooded man, dressed in black, holding a machinegun over his shoulder. Extremists are increasingly recruiting criminals to their cause, offering redemption and camaraderie to dangerous young men who had previously found their sense of belonging in street gangs. Today’s knife crime perpetrators and acid attackers could turn into tomorrow’s terrorists. This is not to suggest that putting on a suicide vest is a crime like any other — it is not — but rather that the same type of person is vulnerable to radicalisation by Islamists and recruitment to a gang. That’s why a more coherent approach is needed to tackle both terrorism and street crime.
A report by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, based at King’s College London, concluded that there was a “new crime-terror nexus” in which two underworlds were starting to merge. “Criminal and terrorist groups have come to recruit from the same pool of people, creating (often unintended) synergies and overlaps,” it said. “Being ‘pious’ is no guarantee that criminal behaviour has stopped, while acting like a ‘gangster’ does not preclude involvement in terrorism.” Analysis of a database of 79 European extremists found that more than half had been incarcerated for offences ranging from petty to violent crime before becoming terrorists, and more than a quarter had been radicalised in jail. Two thirds of German foreign fighters had criminal records while half of Belgian and more than 60 per cent of Norwegian and Dutch jihadists were known to the police. Alain Grignard, head of the Brussels Federal Police, has described Islamic State as “a sort of supergang”. He told the Combating Terrorism Centre in the United States in 2015: “Previously we were mostly dealing with ‘radical Islamists’ — individuals radicalised toward violence by an extremist interpretation of Islam — but now we’re increasingly dealing with what are best described as ‘Islamised radicals’.”
The “sliding doors” synergy between crime and terrorism is illustrated perfectly by two brothers from Moss Side in Manchester: one of them, Raphael Hostey, became a notorious Isis recruiter and went to fight in Syria where he was killed in a drone strike; the other, Junade, joined a gang and was convicted of drug dealing and burglary. There are several other recent cases that demonstrate the connection. Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena bomber, had links with a Libyan gang in south Manchester that had for years been involved in a violent feud with a rival group. The attacker at last year’s Berlin Christmas market had been involved in cocaine dealing linked to organised crime. The Copenhagen gunman who killed two victims in a shooting spree, after pledging allegiance to Isis in 2015, had joined a gang as a teenager and been jailed for a stabbing. Almedy Coulibaly, who killed four people at a kosher supermarket in Paris in 2015, had served time for drug trafficking and robbery, once declaring: “Prison is the best f***ing school of crime.”
According to the King’s College study, the “redemption narrative” of jihadism appeals to young men who are often vulnerable as well as angry. Radical Islam offers a justification for criminality, with up to 40 per cent of terrorist attacks financed by drug dealing, theft and fraud.
These are also people who develop a high tolerance threshold for violence at a very young age. Rajan Basra, one of the authors of the report, says that al-Qaeda attracted middle-class professionals with its heavy emphasis on theology, but Isis recruits from the underclass, in ghettos and jails, by prioritising actions over words. “Its key themes are power, respect, status and violence — all things that would appeal to someone who would be involved in gangs,” he says. “The processes are similar; there is sense of camaraderie, extreme brotherhood, identity and belonging. You have generally got a disconnect between one generation and the next, particularly with the father.” It is a phenomenon explored in the forthcoming Channel 4 drama The State, which conveys what the writer and director Peter Kosminsky describes as the “warmth of the response . . . and sense of community” that Isis recruits received in Syria.
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I recently interviewed Gwenton Sloley, a former member of Hackney’s Holly Street Boys gang who now advises police and the Home Office on diverting young people away from crime. He spent ten years in prison for armed robbery and witnessed an inmate in the next cell being radicalised before going on to commit an act of terror after his release. There are, in his view, clear parallels between the appeal of gangs and the lure of jihadism for those seeking a replacement for the family they never had. “Terrorism is the same as knife crime; it’s just a different uniform,” he says, “but [once the young men are radicalised] they don’t care if they live or die, so the dangerousness gets even more dangerous.”
About 1,000 prisoners have been identified as vulnerable to radicalisation. With jails unstable and often violent, some inmates are turning to what is known as “Prislam” for protection or perks, but for others the attraction runs deeper than that. Ian Acheson, a former prison governor who undertook a government review of Islamist extremism in jails, describes prison as “an incubator for extremism”. He explains: “When you have a supply of highly credulous, extremely violent, impulsive young men facing huge terms of imprisonment and searching for meaning and a sense of belonging, a predator has a large supply of available talent.”
There has long been a debate about whether terrorism should be treated just like any other crime to avoid glorifying it. I am not trying to equate the two: terrorism is an attempt to disrupt and destroy our entire civilisation and liberal democracy. My point is different: if terrorists and criminals are seeking to recruit from within the same group of people then the two problems need to be tackled together. Radicalisation should be dealt with alongside knife crime and acid attacks, rather than as an entirely separate category. The Prevent counterterrorism strategy and the Metropolitan Police’s Trident anti-gun crime unit are two sides of the same coin. The priority should be to identify the disillusioned and alienated young people who are vulnerable to the appeal of jihadism or gang culture and divert them away from both by creating an alternative sense of purpose and belonging. Whitehall opinion is divided: some think counterterrorism is about shooting the crocodiles as they come near to the boat; others think it is necessary to drain the extremist swamp. In fact, the best way to keep the country safe is to find the lost boys in the jungle and give them a home.