Families faced with the horror of losing a loved one to the lure of ISIS  propaganda have often chosen collective action in the hopes of  stopping radicalization and emigration to ISIS controlled areas. But other families have chosen to wage their battle privately, taking action to halt the radicalization of their sons and daughters into their own hands.          

While foreign fighters have flocked to fight in Syria since the opening clashes of the civil war in 2011, it has been only fairly recently that ISIS has clamped down on their ability to leave the self-declared caliphate. As the coalition air campaign intensified in the fall of 2015 and efforts by ISIS to seize Kobane failed, the first reports of executions of fleeing foreign fighters began to emerge. Now radical groups, particularly ISIS, have turned their security apparatus against their own foot soldiers, erecting a sprawling network of checkpoints and informants to halt the outflow and carrying out grisly executions of those caught. Naturally, families and friends of potential fighters increasingly see a trip to Syria to fight as a near certain death sentence and have consequently mounted desperate attempts to keep their loved ones at home and away from the fighting.

Some families have taken an active role in physically preventing their relatives from traveling to Syria. Jamshed Javeed, a high school chemistry teacher of Pakistani descent living in the U.K., came to the attention of authorities when friends became concerned about his sudden radicalization. When Javeed revealed intentions to travel to Syria, his parents hid his equipment for fighting in Syria and passport, forcing Javeed to postpone his trip. When Javeed remained resolute in his plan to travel to Syria, his family confronted him and recorded their subsequent 25 minute argument, which was later used as evidence in court. They then reported him to anti-terror police who arrested him three days later at the airport. Outside of the western world, in September 2015 in Riyadh, a father reported his two sons, aged 19 and 21, to security forces when he discovered they were planning terrorist attacks on behalf of ISIS.

To facilitate communication between families and authorities, the government of Australia, at an October 2015 extremism summit, discussed the formation of a "family hotline" where family members could report radicalized young people outside of the existing national security apparatus.       

Other families have been forced to take more extreme action. In May 2014, the mother of Zakariya Ashiq, a then 20 year old British man who was trying to enter ISIS controlled territory, intercepted her son in Turkey and seized his money, debit card and passport, forcing him to return to the U.K.

Increasingly, families have also used the media to appeal to their relatives to return home. In one high profile case, Akhtar Iqbal and Mohammad Shoaib held a televised press conference begging their wives and children to return home from Syria. The men are the husbands of two of three British sisters, Khadija Dawood, Sugra Dawood, and Zohra Dawood, who immigrated to ISIS controlled territory with their nine children in June 2015. After a pilgrimage to Mecca, the group of 12 disappeared, secretly traveling to Syria via Turkey. Similarly, family members of three teenage British girls, who traveled from the U.K. to Syria in February 2015, made televised, emotional pleas for the girls to return home. None of the families, however, was successful.

Still others have come to regret their decision to contact authorities. After British man Yusuf Sarwar left his parents a note stating he had traveled to Syria to fight with al-Qaeda affiliated group Jabhat al-Nusra, his mother reported him missing to the police. When he later returned home, Sarwar was sentenced to more than 12 years in jail. Sarwar’s mother was appalled by the verdict, stating: “As soon as I found out about the letter I went to the police and co-operated but the police have betrayed me and misused me...If I had known they would put my son behind bars I would not have told them about the letter.” She urged legal reform, arguing that, in the future, the parents of other Jihadists wouldn’t come forward knowing their children would be jailed for significant periods of time.

The “mastermind” of the November 13 Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was radicalized in a Belgian prison while serving time for theft. Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket shooters Amedy Coulibaly and Cherif Kouachi also spent time in jail, meeting in a French prison in 2005, where they were radicalized to violent Islamism by a fellow inmate.

The threat of prison radicalization—especially severe in France and Belgium—may feel remote to Americans, but it shouldn’t. During the past two years, dozens of homegrown jihadists have begun to trickle into our prisons, convicted of providing material support to ISIS and other extremist groups. As the Obama administration promotes criminal justice reform and outlines initiatives, we’d do well to include counter-extremism programs in any prison reform package. It would be money well spent.

While Europe’s prison radicalization problem is well known, the potential for radicalization in the U.S. has not always been appreciated, except by extremists. In the past, al-Qaeda manuals have specifically identified American inmates as targets for conversion, pointing to their existing disillusionment with U.S. policies. Today, at least seven Americans convicted on ISIS-related offences had already served time in U.S. prisons, often on unrelated charges like drug possession.  While in prison, terror convicts—like attempted al-Shabab fighter Zachary Chesser—have managed to engage in unauthorized meet-ups with other convicted terrorists, raising the fear that radicalization may already be taking root.

As a result of recidivism and jihadist attacks, some countries, like France and Belgium, have awoken to the perpetuation of terror through prison radicalization. These governments have begun to isolate dangerous jihadists from the larger prison population, and are now hiring expert Muslim staff in an attempt to reeducate radicalized inmates. In Saudi Arabia, a major de-radicalization program—boasting a 90% success rate—consists of intense religious debate and psychological counseling within prisons. While these programs lack robust longitudinal data, they mark crucial first steps in tackling a dangerous pattern worldwide.

Unfortunately, the U.S. has yet to implement any de-radicalization programs in its own prison system, although there have been some U.S. efforts to explore de-radicalization in detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Minnesota recently, one judge experimented with a de-radicalization program for an ISIS-inspired teen, but the program came to an abrupt end in April after a box-cutter was discovered under his bed. There are no known plans to expand or replicate the experiment.

Despite the disappointment of the Minnesota intervention experiment, we cannot afford to give up on de-radicalization. We need a tailed approach for prisons designed to both rehabilitate those who enter the prison system already radicalized, as well as to prevent indoctrination of the larger prison population. De-radicalization programs must be subject to detailed examination and rigorous, independent evaluation. But nascent American programs can draw from the seemingly successful characteristics of existing programs worldwide: pro-social and pro-Western education, vocational training, family engagement, and an emphasis on individualized attention.

Fortunately, some of the prison reforms President Obama promoted in July—reduced overcrowding, a crackdown on gang activity, and vocational training—may have the corollary benefit of reducing the threat from emerging jihadist networks. It’s a first step, but more is needed. By addressing this threat now, we can prevent U.S. correctional facilities from becoming factories for jihadism.

Welcome to the first View from Brussels blog post, a perspective from the de facto capital of Europe on the state of counterterrorism, extremism, and radicalisation throughout the European Union.

In response to the growing imperative across Europe to counter violent extremism and prevent radicalisation, the European Union (EU) has launched an initiative designed to improve its ability to fight online recruitment and radicalisation by extremist groups.

This new initiative, known as the EU Internet Forum, was launched on December 3 after first being proposed in April 2015 as part of the European Agenda on Security.

In response to the radicalisation of Europeans, the European Commission has stated that immediate action is needed to stop extremists from exploiting the Internet to radicalise and recruit their citizens, facilitate and direct terrorist activity, and then glorify their atrocities. It is clear that more concrete measures are necessary. The establishment of the Forum comes at a time when an estimated 5,000 Europeans have gone to join the fight alongside ISIS and other extremist groups. These groups are increasingly relying on social media to recruit new followers and spread their violent messages.

The Forum brings together EU Member State Interior Ministers, the EU Counter Terrorism Co-ordinator, major Internet companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Ask.fm, Europol (the European police agency headquartered in The Hague), and the European Parliament. The goal of the EU Internet Forum is to better detect and address harmful material found online utilizing public-private partnerships.

The main objectives of the EU Internet Forum are to:

• Reduce accessibility to terrorist material online by removing content;
• Make better use of the Internet to challenge extremist rhetoric and ideology through the development and dissemination of a counter-narratives; and
• Explore law enforcement agencies’ concerns about new and highly sophisticated encryption technologies that extremists are frequently using to communicate undetected.

The Forum will serve as a platform for collaboration to identify common tools, best practices, and innovative and new solutions to tackle Internet issues involving terrorism and extremism. It will also serve as a hub that links a number of other relevant initiatives, including the EU Internet Referral Unit set up by Europol in June 2015, which is designed to identify terrorist material online and alert the respective Internet companies.

While acknowledging the impossibility of removing all terrorist material from the Internet, the European Commission stressed that more must be done to reduce the immense volume of extremist material that is online and so easily accessible.

Disagreements remain as to the legality of what some consider censorship. Concerns over protecting free speech were also voiced at the inaugural session of the Forum on December 3. “Tackling online hate speech is a delicate exercise that requires us to define clearly where freedom of expression stops and where hate speech starts,” stated Commissioner for Justice, Consumer and Gender Equality Věra Jourová.

However, the bottom line, Jourová concluded, is that “there is growing evidence that online incitement to hatred leads to violence offline. We must step up work to limit and eradicate this phenomenon online.”

By establishing the Forum, the EU is taking a crucial step in working with private companies and law enforcement to combat extremists online. The Forum represents a major step forward in the fight (both online and offline) against extremism and radicalisation in Europe. 

On December 6, 2015, President Obama addressed the American public in the aftermath of the San Bernardino terrorist attack carried out by Tashfeen Malik and her husband Syed Rizwan Farook that killed 14 and wounded 21.

The President had much to say about what his administration was doing to protect against ISIS attacks, but what I found most important was what he had to say to the Muslim community in America:

“But it is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West,” was how President Obama characterized the actions of the shooters. The President added later that while all Americans must do a better job of eliminating anti-Muslim rhetoric, Muslim Americans must do more to address extremism in our communities.

To many Muslims like myself, it is clear that extremists prey on the vulnerable void created by identity politics. The radicalized are not all irrational actors with histories of mental illness. Nor, are they one-dimensional fundamentalists. Many are only one generation away from homelands still burning in violence – Somalia, Pakistan, the entire Middle East. They identify as Muslims, as a cultural identity, as a supra-national identity, irrespective of their level of piety or lack thereof.  These same young men and women see their fellow Muslims dying every day, but are unaware of the complicated local histories that have created the current maelstrom and Islam’s own complicated history and ideological diversity; yet they crave a greater understanding of their faith – their main identity marker.

This is what Islamist extremists, recruiters, and social media propagandists prey on when they peddle an oversimplified diatribe that the West is against Islam. These same young men and women want to help Muslims they see suffering around the world and many were attracted to ISIS because of its perceived opposition to the Assad regime, under whose watch approximately half the Syrian population has either been killed or fled the country as refugees.

Islamist groups like the British-born and subsequently banned al-Muhajiroun seek to start a political movement based on Islam but grounded in an anti-colonial, anti-western interpretation of events, past and present. A startling number of terror plots in the UK have been attributed to the group. Self-styled peaceful Islamist groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, however, espouse the same ideology. To some, they are a “conveyer belt” to jihadism. HT is also allegedly connected to the murders of secular bloggers in Bangladesh, and a lone wolf killing at a police station in Australia this past October carried out by a high school student. The group regularly holds pro-Khilafah (Islamic state or caliphate) conferences throughout the United States.

Worse, by conflating religion with politics, legitimate criticism of the latter is smeared as criticism of the former, creating a chilling effect on speech. This allows the unbalanced Muslim victimhood narrative to spread without pushback, even from Muslims. 

Yet, Islamist violence continues. While a complete picture of Tashfeen Malik, remains under investigation, her connections to extremism are apparent. Whether she was radicalized as student at al-Huda in Multan, Pakistan, as a visitor to the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad, or in a school in Saudi Arabia, Tashfeen became a victim to the same predatory message Islamism spreads without contest. Following the attack in San Bernardino, even some Muslim American organizations, when interviewed by local media, echoed that anti-Western trope by suggesting that the attack was the natural result of western foreign policy.

A true pro-Muslim response to San Bernardino would attempt to reconcile being American and being Muslim as two sides of the same coin, rather than treating this dual identity as a marriage between oil and water. More importantly, a pro-Muslim group would acknowledge the legitimate concerns, fears and anxieties of youth for the world they live in, and stress our duty as a community to create a path for them to channel these negative feelings toward positive non-violent actions for change.

One such movement that was actually born a day after the San Bernardino shootings is the Muslim Reform Movement, in which I participated. A declaration and a press conference followed the gathering.  The movement was featured in a segment on Meet the Press.  The Muslim Reform Movement hopes to build broader coalitions with a diverse Muslim American body that includes all sects, feminists, and others who acknowledge the complex issues within the faith, but want to remain a part of the community.

More can still be done. The broader American community has a duty to support that re-direction by being more responsible in their analysis of Islamist extremism. Give Islamist sympathizers less media time, and instead support the small grass-roots efforts of Muslims who want to push our communities towards a more peaceful, human rights oriented path.