By ICSR

On the morning of Wednesday, 31 August 2016, two plain-clothes police officers approached a suspected drug dealer in Christiana, an alternative district of Denmark’s capital Copenhagen. Without warning, the man pulled out a pistol, opened fire at the police, and ran away. A bystander and both officers were hit. (One of the officers was critically injured by a bullet wound to the head.) The suspect was eventually tracked down, and died from wounds that he received during a shootout. His name was Mesa Hodzic, a 25-year old Danish-Bosnian, who was known to the police as a drug dealer.

Two days later, the jihadist group Islamic State (which is often abbreviated as ISIS, ISIL, IS, or Daesh) claimed responsibility for Hodzic’s actions, proclaiming him a ‘soldier’ of the Caliphate. At first, this appeared like a flagrant contradiction. Weren’t jihadists meant to be religious, and refrain from drugs and ‘ordinary’ crime? It soon turned out that Hodzic was not just a prolific drug dealer, but also a member of a Salafist group who had expressed sympathies for Islamic State and appeared in propaganda videos. Rather than being a contradiction, his case demonstrates how blurred the lines between crime and extremism have become.6 Was he a criminal? A terrorist?Or both?

Hodzic is far from the only case in which a petty criminal has turned jihadist. German Federal Police stated that of the 669 German foreign fighters for whom they had sufficient information, two-thirds had police records prior to travelling to Syria, and one-third had criminal convictions. The Belgian Federal Prosecutor said that half of his country’s jihadists had criminal records prior to leaving for Syria. A United Nations report suggested a similar pattern amongst French foreign fighters. Officials from Norway and the Netherlands told us that ‘at least 60 per cent’ of their countries’ jihadists had previously been involved in crime. It was for this reason that Alain Grignard, the head of Brussels Federal Police, described Islamic State as ‘a sort of super-gang.

The phenomenon may not be entirely new. In the mid-1990s, French newspapers referred to operatives of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) as ‘gangster terrorists’ because many had previously been involved in local gangs. Likewise, several of the perpetrators of the Madrid train attacks in 2004 were former criminals, and financed their operation by selling drugs. The merging of terrorism and crime is not without precedent, therefore. Nor can we offer reliable statistics by how much the share of ‘gangsters’ may have risen. Yet it seems clear that their role has become more pronounced, more visible, and more relevant to the ways in which groups like Islamic State operate and frame their message. Furthermore, we believe that the crime-terror nexus – whether entirely new or not – has been under-researched, and that its political and practical implications have not been understood.

The purpose of this report is not to quantify this nexus, but to describe its nature and dynamics, and understand what it means for the terrorist threat and the ways it should be countered. How does criminality facilitate radicalisation and recruitment? What is the role of prisons? Do criminals possess skills that make them more effective as terrorists? How does the convergence between crime and terrorism affect the financing of terrorist attacks?

To help answer these questions, a multi-lingual team of ICSR researchers compiled a database containing the profiles of 79 recent European jihadists with criminal pasts. As far as we know, it is the first database that focuses on criminals who have become jihadists during the post-2011 period. By analysing their pathways, motivations and actions, we were able to ascertain the key factors and dynamics that define the terror-crime nexus in the context of the current jihadist threat.

Read more: Criminal Pasts, Terrorist Futures

Source: ICSR