New america is a think tank in washington dc. The group posted a discussion on how to Counter Terrorism recruitment and how to link them to economic inequality in the middle east. This is an hour and a half. Good afternoon and welcome to good america. On behalf of our president , Vice President , thank you very much for coming. I am a senior fellow here at new america. Discuss aare here to new paper by my colleagues. It is entitled all jihad is l oca. L. Im really excited about this paper because isis and al qaeda and the recruitment of of jihadis is something we talk about a lot. You often see people on stages debating how this comes about, what do people go join isis and so on. Generally the conversation ranges from i think this, you think that, and i emote this, and you emote that. What is exciting today is we have data, which they will talk about in some detail. Let me talk about my colleagues, and i will let them give an overview of the paper. Nate rosenblatt is a security fellow, oxford world student, employees mixed method roaches understanding local conflict development qualities. He can be found on twitter. My far left, David Sterman is a policy analyst at new america. His work focuses on homegrown extremism and the maintenance of new america databases on terrorists in the United States and preventing such terrorism. He was a contributing editor at the polls and interned at the israeli Palestine Center for research in jerusalem. With that, i will of the two authors talk about this paper. Towards the end we will engage our audience and let you ask questions. Thank you. I want to thank my coauthor, dave sternin. Thank you all for coming. Im going to do a little discussion on the methods used in this paper before passing it to my colleague focusing on north africa. I will focus on the peninsula. First, i wanted to talk a little bit about the provenance of the data we have access to, mainly the data were using our foreign fighter registration forms. Registration forms of foreign fighters who joined isis between 2013 and 2014 on the turkishsyrian border. These forms are essentially isis recordkeeping of new foreign fighter joiners, a variety of questions that include names, mother stand, blood type but also include a lot of really interesting material on previous professions, education levels, religious knowledge, countries travel, people referred them to join isis, people who facilitated their arrival and a variety of other things. Thats the main data from which we will be drawing conclusions to be there i get to the limitations of that date in a minute but i would just say the data were smuggled out of raqqa in march of 2016. We validated these data along with the Counterterrorism Center at west point, as well as some of the personal details that were not publicly available to my research and research from others. So last year we wrote a paper on this topic that looked at the regions in the world that had the highest per capita recruitment rate for isis all over the world, included western china, it included of course parts of north africa and the Arabian Peninsula we are looking at, in lebanon and in other places. The difference in this years report is not just that were focusing on two regions which saw some of the highest recruitment rates of foreign fighters to isis, including libya and tunisia, which david will talk about, but also saudi arabia. But also we try to supplement the data on foreign fighter registration forms with other useful information. So we use census data in a variety of cases to say, ok, if fighters are joining isis and saudi arabia are reporting certain education level are certain level of work profession or skill, how does that correlate to the places they are from among the general population, are these representative of these people from the provinces they come from, or is this a a distinct phenomena we should look at . We look at census data. David did some interesting work look at protest data especially from tunisia. I pulled in some data from 1980s onward on subnational origins of saudi terrorists, and im going to use some of that in my analysis. We incorporate a lot of this additional data. Let me say a few brief words about some of the caveats so we can frame our discussion and so our remarks have some context. The first is time. These fighters join basically between 20132014. The landscape obviously looks a lot different today as the coalition is pushing back isis in syria and iraq. As i spoke to a friend, most people from the Arabian Peninsula have basically left already and the foreign fighter rates decreased dramatically after 2015 when the saudi government especially started cracking down on fighters once isis attacks started to occur across Arabian Peninsula in kuwait and in saudi and in other places. This is also limited by location. The foreign fighter forms are recorded on border crossings between syria, and turkey while of course as it although turkey was a huge Transit Route for fighters to join isis. Of course, there were other parts in iraq, lebanon, jordan where people able to join. We dont think they systematically alter the result of a region but it would manifest in other places so lebanese fighters, jordanian fighters, iraqi fighters, syrian fighters are not recorded in the data. Lebanese fighters, jordanian a couple quick more points. Theres a point on the truthfulness i think we think the data are going to be more likely to be true than if fighters were being interviewed by journalists or researchers. Some of this information could be validated by isis of course, people who referred or people who facilitated one joining, but there are certainly elements that were omitted in these files and we had to work around that. We can talk more about that if youre interested in the q a. The last couple of points, this is only isis foreign fighter recruitment. Crucially whats missing is foreign fighter recruitment to other malicious that were militias that were fighting especially in syria including what was wholly known as alnusra and i go into low bit about that in the Arabian Peninsula section. Just to conclude, last year we found provinces with high rates of recruitment all shared in common a certain kind of grievance they had with the federal government. The repressed regions of western china, generally underfunded and unsupported regions Like Northern lebanon and my colleague will talk about Eastern Libya, but this year what we found and im sort of paraphrasing tolstoy here, is that all happy provinces are alike, but all unhappy provinces are unhappy in their own way. We will swear to discuss i think what is important in the key take away which is while there is no consensus among experts on terrorism about what is a driving terrorism recruitment, i think when you look at the subnational regions of different countries, certain trends emerge and these trends are important and they are distinct and we need to address them in different ways. So with that being said im going to pass it over to my colleague, david. Thanks. So im going to speak about what we found in north africa, or initial key findings which will be expanded further and a forthcoming paper. But basically our analysis of north africa involved three broad conclusions. There was recruitment in provinces that shared huge structural aspects in common that are economically marginalized from the center of their countrys economic, their countrys economy where most of the good jobs are, where oil wealth is centered. Also they are marginalized politically, often the two go together, they are one and the same. Second, we found in most places this is the mobilization that this is the mobilization that comes from places where there was mobilization in prior years for other Jobs Movement as well as for other nonjihadi outbreaks of anger over what appear to be structural issues. Recruitment and mobilization which isis is the latest or perhaps now not the latest example of is predated by these other mobilizations. And finally where mobilization occurred, where its not a product of a long history of mobilization and outbursts of anger, whether jihadists or not, its a product of the arab spring, which really was a massive outbreak of this anger and spread that anger throughout the region in a way that metastasized the problem. So to begin with if we look at the question of structural aspects, ill begin with what we found in libya, by far the clearest example, 80 of the fighters from libya came from Eastern Libya and they were all centered in two provinces. Eastern libya has historically been marginalized by the then gadhafi government which centered its Patronage Network largely in the west of the the largely in the west of the the country and funded tripoli in that area while simultaneously economically marginalizing the east. East. In particular it marginalized the area where we found amongst the fighters we looked at there were underemployed. People were underemployed, and our models people who are unemployed, people who report subsistent agricultural work, not i own the farm, but im doing agricultural work. People lower students in these north african countries, students face a particularly for Employment Situation upon graduation. In tunisia, for example, on average it takes six years to find a job. Also people report unskilled labor which is often unpredictable in these north african countries. In durna, we found it was 70 . We found a similar dynamic in southern tunisia which is another hot spot of recruitment. And in the highest secondhighest province, theres also 70 unemployment among fighters. And then in the suburbs of grand tunis we found a similar level of underemployment and economic struggle which is important to know because its the capital of tunisia, its what a lot of the factory jobs and economic wealth is actually centered and if youre just running a large and aggression provinces, youre likely to miss that theres a massive internal inequality within these provinces. We found the fighters tend to come from poor regions. It was two to four times overproducing what we would have overproducing what we would have expected based on population. That neighborhood or city within the larger grand tunis metropolitan areas has an Unemployment Rate above that of the nation as a whole. As well as above the particular province that it sits in. Its Unemployment Rate was actually below tunisia as well. What we see is theres these hotspots of economic marginalization. That comes with political marginalization as well, the hotspot of protest activity during the arab spring. The east of libya has historically been a site of resistance and protests against the gadhafi government and militancy more broadly. And southern tunisia also has a history of pension with the Central Government of tunisia. So we found similarity of the structure. The second part is in each of so we found similarity of the these places theres a long history. In Eastern Libya its very clear. We can trace it back on isis mobilization were looking at in 20132014. Benghazi was the capital of the arab spring uprising against gadhafi and produce many fighters for that. If we go back to the records that were found in 2007 you get almost exactly the same percentage of fighters in that mobilization as we found in the isis records for 20132014. In 2008, the state department added a cable, the report said similar conditions and words of fighter equipment. In words fighter recruitment. In terms very similar to that are applicable to the 20132014. If you go back further to the 1990s, you have the Islamic Fighting group conducting war against gadhafi a gain in uprising, again centered in the east, and then if you go for the that were found in 2007 you get back in the 70s and 80s, this region was really at the center of the Muslim Brotherhood opposition to gadhafi. Mobilization in Eastern Libya predates the particular isis claim to be building the caliphate. If we turn to tunisia, its a lot different. Its more widespread. However, we again see as i noted hotspots in southern libya, or southern tunisia, sorry, particularly has historical produced fighters in the early iraq conflict and other conflicts before, as the economy based on smuggling was the center of protest activity during the arab spring. And we have suburbs of grand tunis which again were sent a center of protest activity during the arab spring. That also proved to many of fighters before. In tunisia, there was a massive expansion that may have some aspect to do with the particular ideological pitch of basis. Isis. The lawyer also just seeing we are also just seeing fighters come from areas that are produced outbursts of anger for decades, largely due to the structural factors. Finally, as i noted when reduce the expansion, its largely about the arab spring. This was pretty clear in tunisia where the government felt a result of arab spring protests that were particularly high in the areas that were hotspots. In contrast, along the eastern coast of libya and its economic center, where fighters actually came below the national rate, there were about a third as many protesters per capita as the were in grand tunis. In addition, we see on an individual level when you look at the data, about 7. 5 of the fighters who mobilized from tunisia were recommended by one figure who came out of sharia and himself in western libya, where he was running a Training Camp. Thats again an example of how these dynamic arab spring really created the foundation that isis set itself to the top. So the basic conclusion that i will float for you here that were still looking at, is in many ways the counter messaging and the idea of countering violent extremism that is become a very important part of countering isis recruitment, doesnt make sense in much of north africa. Countering isis claim to be building the caliphate does not address the problems where there was recruitment for decades prior to isis rise. Thats some element in tunisia which also going to run into this repetitive mobilization of the anger areas that are being produced by structural factors. So we really to the extent where we are going to prevent the future possibility of a mobilization, as i could happen simply on counter messaging. Needs to address the structural issues. Thanks, david. In contrast i think the Arabian Peninsula has a variety of very distinct trends that i want to present today. Before i go into the three arguments i want to make on isis recruitment in the Arabian Peninsula i just want to note there are few countries where there simply were not in a fashion enough foreign fighters data in the forms to draw any conclusions from, so automatic, the uae has less than five fighters in each one of this country and the overall data. My findings dont discuss the report will not discuss those three countries. Some supplementary information and qualitative work was done on recruitment in those three countries and we can discuss those in the q a, but i generally want to focus on saudi arabia which had about 90 of the fighters that republican from the area as well as kuwait, yemen, and bahrain. That is very interesting trend with regards to marginalization and im going to discuss those three and give what they think the policy educations of those are. The first of those is a new phenomenon. There are a few periods i want to make under this. The first is that we know isis has recruited a lot of young people to join especially in comparison pairs into other terrorist organizations and document efforts but the Arabian Peninsula is distinctly more useful than the rest of the sample of isis equipments. The average age of isis biter the first is that we know isis has recruited a lot of young people to join especially in comparison to other terrorist organizations and document efforts but the Arabian Peninsula is distinctly more useful than the rest of the sample of isis equipments. The average age of isis biter from the Arabian Peninsula is over one year younger than the overall sample. When you dig deeply into this for i should say it is distinct from the demographic trends of the regions as a whole which generally you hold older than the arab world. When you dig more deeply into this you find that the regions with the highest rate of isis recruitment at the subnational level correlates very strongly with the proportion of those regions that have youthful populations. When you dig that the youngest population as a proportion, so 1529, over the provincial population. The youngest ones are those that have the highest agreement and i did a bunch of progression to figure out which transfer most interesting about the overall provincial population, household income, for people being recorded, education levels was it under or over educated and the variety of other factors. The only factor that had a strong significant statistically significant positive correlation was the proportion of provincial population that was the ages of 1529. The second piece of this phenomenon that is new and important to emphasize is that income, for people being the fighters that came from the Arabian Peninsula were much less likely to have reported to participate in a previous contract. The question on the form is have you participated in a previous jihad. About 12 of the overall sample of fighters that we looked at reported yes. So, places like libya, yemen, afghanistan, chechnya, bosnia and other places. In the Arabian Peninsula only 5 of the fighters reported to have participated in previous jihad. When you look at the correlation between provinces that were report participation in previous jihads, there is no relationship people who participate previously in the jihad and people who joined isis. All of this is strongly suggestive of the fact that the phenomenon on the Arabian Peninsula and the people who joined isis were new to fighting in