Earlier this month a Knoxville, TN man was charged by federal prosecutors for attempting to help ISIS by conducting translation services for them. Benjamin Carpenter, 31, was the leader of a group trying to aid the violent Islamist terror group by taking their extremist propaganda media out of Arabic and sharing it in English. Essentially the Tennessee man was hoping to work in the recruiting branch of ISIS before the undercover FBI agent stopped him.
FBI Says Terrorism is Alive and Well
As we enter our 20th year since the September 11 terrorist attack by the Khawarij ideologues of al Qaeda the game has changed a bit. While our initial response after the attack was to use military tools aligned with intelligence community para-military operatives to locate and kill terrorists;, we have increasingly shifted to slowing the recruiting. These kinds of cases are not new, and they won’t be going away anytime soon. In fact, they are where most of our efforts should be growing.
Knoxville FBI Special Agent Joel Feaster stated that “This case is a good reminder that international terrorism and homegrown violent extremism is still very much alive and must still be dealt with.”
In Carpenter’s case, the court was shown dozens of ISIS propaganda, recruiting, and instructional items ranging from videos to articles that involved topics like the beheading of ISIS enemies, to weapons of mass destruction.
Understanding the Heart Behind Recruiting for ISIS
At the heart of countering terrorists that are inspired by violent Islamist ideas is understanding their goals and learning how to counter their ideas in the public space. Groups like ISIS and al Qaeda are extreme separatists inside the religion of Islam. For most Muslims they are viewed as outside of Islam itself. Khawarij Islamists believe that their view of Islam is the only view allowed on earth, and that anyone who doesn’t share that view is an enemy and may be killed with God’s blessing. That is the same ideology of the first splinter group that broke from mainstream Islam before there was even a Sunni and Shi’a divide. Those original Middle East based terrorists that would misuse Islam to support their extreme violence were called the Khawarij (in Arabic those who seceded). That little known historical event is why the King of Jordan and other Muslims refer to ISIS as the Khawarij.
You can see the shift in US counter-terrorism policy towards groups like ISIS and AQ away from military action, and towards exposing and invalidating violent Islamist or Khawarij ideology in the 2018 National Strategy for Counterterrorism. It raises the concept and importance of countering ideology to slow recruiting in many ways. Key to countering the recruiters that are luring people like Benjamin Carpenter is knowing how groups like ISIS spread their ideas online. In this case, the FBI got ahead of the recruiters and disabled the ability of one more home-grown terrorist to help ISIS recruit and inspire more people.
irregular Warfare Brings Together Intelligence and Communications
While a few things may change in the Biden Administration’s counterterrorism strategy, I would hazard a guess that the focus on countering ideologies, cutting terrorist funding, and trying to reach possible recruits before ISIS or the next AQ-like group can, will continue. The military is a tool for countering terrorists, but it is not the best tool and it has to be used after it is too late. The real solution to slowing terrorist attacks is not deradicalizing people that are already in terrorist groups—it is stopping them from being recruited in the first place. Many federal agencies outside the military have to do most of that work, as do many people and organizations outside of the government. At the heart of stopping recruiting is understanding the key vocabulary/concepts and getting the right people to counter the ideas spread by groups like ISIS.
