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Brussels Terrorist Brothers: Why Does Jihad Run in the Family?
Brussels attack brothers Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui join a long line of terrorist siblings, and they won’t be the last. Particularly in groups bound by ethnicity or religion, it is common for members of the same family to become involved in the organization. From the perspective of the terrorist group, engaging family members can help sustain both the commitment of participants as well as increase the likelihood of strong operational security. Many siblings are recruited into terrorist groups together, with the older sibling often facilitating the entry of the younger family member. British twin sisters Zahra and Salma Halane, for example, arrived in Syria in 2014 and proceeded to try to recruit their younger siblings to join them. We observed this phenomenon during the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris by the Kouachi brothers and, at the Boston Marathon, by the Tsarnaev brothers. Statistics prove that is not simply a random phenomenon. Six of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were brothers, and according to the research of Mohammed Hafez, as many as 25 to 30 percent of cases of terrorist acts involve members of the same family. Research from the New American Foundation showed that a third of Western foreign fighters had family connections. When siblings join terrorist groups, they typically are deployed together in the same operation, although occasionally at different locations. That appears to have been the case with the Bakraoui brothers in Belgium, and it also occurred in Russia in 2004 with Amanta Nagayeva, a Chechen woman who detonated herself onboard Volga-AviaExpress Flight 1303 from Moscow to Volgograd on Aug. 24, killing everyone on board. Her sister Rosa killed herself and 10 others outside the Rizhskaya subway station in Moscow within a week. Posted by: Besoeker 2016-03-25 |
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