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| Young militant islam: Imane Laghriss was jailed in 2003 for planning a suicide mission in Morocco. Marc Perelman |
A new, younger jihadi threat emerges
Terrorism experts say radical groups are targeting teenagers as young as 14.
By Marc Perelman | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitorfrom the December 28, 2007 edition
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Casablanca, Morocco - With a greeting that was as telling as it was macabre, Imane Laghriss dropped her satchel on the table of a trendy coffee shop here recently.
"It's stuffed with explosives, watch out!" snapped the young woman, echoing the grim humor commonly heard among Moroccan teenagers. But Ms. Laghriss's remark carried with it a degree of stark reality.
Four years ago, she and her twin sister, Sanae, were arrested for planning to blow themselves up inside Morocco's parliament. They were 14 at the time. The two were sentenced to five years in jail in 2003. After serving 18 months and nearly two years in a juvenile center, they are now free.
But while Imane claims to have forgone violence, she still holds the same radical ideology that inspired the unrealized plan. She surfs radical websites and says she wants to go to Iraq to fight US troops – "but not civilians."
The two women represent the leading edge of what security analysts and terrorism experts say is an emerging threat facing both Western and Arab countries: younger jihadis who have been recruited over the Internet or inspired to act through militant Islamist literature or videos. What's more, analysts say, these young radicals often don't belong to a centralized group and may even act on their own.
"As I speak, terrorists are methodically and intentionally targeting young people and children in this country. They are radicalizing, indoctrinating, and grooming young, vulnerable people to carry out acts of terrorism," said Jonathan Evans, the director general of the British MI5, the security service, in November.
He warned that teenagers as young as 15 and 16 have been implicated in "terrorist-related" activities as a result of a deliberate strategy pursued by radical Islamist groups.
On Wednesday, Pakistani police arrested a 15-year-old boy for allegedly trying to blow himself up at a rally for opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, who was killed Thursday as she left an election rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. In September, a 15-year-old killed 30 people when he drove a truck full of explosives into an Algerian naval barracks.
And, in mid-November, the US declared that Omar Khadr, a Canadian national detained in Guantánamo Bay, was eligible for trial by a military commission, making him potentially the first minor to be tried for war crimes. He was arrested in Afghanistan when he was 15 and accused of killing a US soldier and conspiring with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.
Analysts say this younger, more diverse, disparate, and more unpredictable crop of operatives is a prime recruiting pool for Al Qaeda's off-shoots as the terror network becomes increasingly decentralized.
"We now face organized groups as well as individuals with no clear links to terrorist groups, some of them quite young," said Khalid Zerouali, who heads Morocco's effort to combat transnational crime at the Interior Ministry. "It makes it that much harder for us to identify them."
According to Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communications at the University of Haifa in Israel and the author of "Terror on the Internet," there are more than 5,000 websites "serving the global jihad," many of which are forums and chat rooms.
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