Arrests Suggest U.S. Muslims, Like Those in Europe, Can Be Radicalized Abroad

A spike in terrorism cases involving U.S. citizens is challenging long-held assumptions that Muslims in Europe are more susceptible to radicalization than their better-assimilated counterparts in the United States.

Four investigations disclosed in the past 12 months, including the arrests of five Northern Virginia men in Pakistan this week, underscore what the Obama administration asserts is a domestic threat emanating from Americans training overseas with al-Qaeda and related terrorist groups in Pakistan. “We have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror,” President Obama said this month in announcing plans to deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

American Muslim organizations, jolted by the spate of cases, are abandoning their hesitation to speak out about the issue. While underlining that only a tiny minority has become radicalized, two major groups–the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Council on American-Islamic Relations–said this week that they would launch counter-radicalization programs aimed at young people.

Several U.S. and international terrorism analysts say that American Muslims, as a group, remain more prosperous, assimilated and moderate than those in Europe. But the analysts also note that immigration trends, the global spread of a militant Islamism and controversial actions by the United States and its allies since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks increase the chances that U.S. Muslims could carry out a domestic attack.

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Before 2004, Britons in terrorist training abroad looked for overseas targets such as Israel or South Asia, Gohel said. Over the next two years, as British troops fought alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain was stunned by at least four bomb plots by Britons linked to al-Qaeda–and the July 7, 2005, attack on the London transit system that killed 52 people.

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Worse in Europe?

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But just as British authorities identified disenchanted elements among its 800,000-strong Pakistani community, several Pakistani Americans have been detained this fall in cases linked to extremists in Pakistan. At least three of the five Virginia residents were in touch with a Taliban recruiter, according to Pakistani authorities. Other examples include David C. Headley, a U.S. citizen from Chicago who was accused this week of helping to plot the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Najibullah Zazi, 24, a Denver airport shuttle driver and U.S. permanent resident who was born in Afghanistan and reared in Pakistan, was charged in September of testing explosives for an attack, possibly in New York.

The cases of radicalization are not limited to Pakistani Americans. In January, Bryant N. Vinas, 26, a Hispanic American convert to Islam, pleaded guilty to receiving training from al-Qaeda in Pakistan last year.

Daniel P. Boyd, a white Muslim convert who lives in North Carolina, was accused this summer of plotting to attack U.S. military personnel at Quantico, and of leading a group of seven men to fight in the Middle East after Israel’s 2006 war with the group Hezbollah. Last month, U.S. authorities announced the latest of 14 indictments related to the alleged recruiting of more than 20 Somali American youths from Minnesota to join an Islamist insurgency in Somalia. U.S.-backed Ethiopian forces toppled an Islamist government in Somalia in 2006.

Concern about Somalis

Somali Americans are among the youngest, poorest and newest immigrants to the United States, with 60 percent having arrived since 2000 and 51 percent living in poverty.

“We have to look very hard at those who arrived in the last 10 or 15 years,” said Charles Allen, a veteran CIA officer and chief intelligence officer for the Homeland Security Department from 2005 until this year. “We’re having this problem with Somalis, and we’re having it with Pakistanis, and there will be other nations as well.”

U.S. authorities said the American Muslim community is central to countering extremism. In the Minnesota and Virginia cases, parents and community leaders sounded the alarm when the youths disappeared.

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Haris Tarin, the Washington director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said that imams and community leaders in the United States have undergone a profound “shift in attitude” about the extent of the problem.

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