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Document Title:

The Role of Social Networks in the
Evolution of Al Qaeda-Inspired Violent
Extremism in the United States, 1990-2015

Author(s):Jytte Klausen

Document Number: 250416
Date Received:

November 2016

Award Number:2012-ZA-BX-0006

This resource has not been published by the U.S. Department ofJustice. This resource is being made publically available through the
Office of Justice Programs’ National Criminal Justice Reference
Service.
Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) anddo not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S.
Department of Justice.

FINAL REPORTThe Role of Social Networks in the Evolution of Al Qaeda-Inspired Violent Extremism in
the United States, 1990-2015.

Principal Investigator: Jytte Klausen, Brandeis University.
June 2016.

This project was supported by Award No. 2012-ZA-BX-0006, awarded by the National Institute of Justice,
Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the
U.S. Department of Justice.

This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeContents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ........................................................................................................... I
1. INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................... 1
Research Questions ................................................................................................................................ 2
Terminology ............................................................................................................................................ 3

2. MODELING LEADERSHIP AND COORDINATION IN TERRORISTORGANIZATIONS ...................................................................................................................... 4
Globalized Central Command ............................................................................................................... 4“Leaderless” Terror Networks .............................................................................................................. 6
The Terrorist Tradeoff........................................................................................................................... 8

3. DATA AND METHODOLOGY ............................................................................................. 9
Figure 1. SNA Basics ......................................................................................................................................... 10

Data Collection Methodology .............................................................................................................. 11
Assessing Data Bias .............................................................................................................................. 12

4. A CHANGING THREAT PICTURE ................................................................................... 13
Table 1. Conspiracies committed by U.S. residents or citizens inspired or directed by foreign Islamist terrorist
organizations, 1990-2015................................................................................................................................... 14

5. HIERARCHY: THE 1993 BROOKLYN FACTION .......................................................... 17
Graph 1. Jihadist Network 1993-2001. .............................................................................................................. 18

Case Study 1. 1993 WTC ..................................................................................................................... 19
Figure 2. Brooklyn-Based Hub Responsible for 1993 WTC Attacks and “Landmarks” Trial. .......................... 21

6. DIASPORA TERRORIST ORGANIZATION .................................................................... 21
Case Study 2. Hamas and Hezbollah in the United States ................................................................ 22
Graph 2. Hezbollah Network in the U.S. 1993 to 2015. ..................................................................................... 23
Graph 3. Hamas Network in the U.S. 1993 to the Present. ................................................................................. 24

7. AFTER 9/11: HOMEGROWN TERRORISM .................................................................... 26
The British Connection ........................................................................................................................ 27
The Virginia Recruitment Network .................................................................................................... 28
Graph 4. Jihadist Network 2002-2006. .............................................................................................................. 29

A Cell in California .............................................................................................................................. 29
Prison Radicalization ........................................................................................................................... 30

8. THE TERRORIST DOT.COM INSURGENCY ................................................................. 31
Case Study 3. RevolutionMuslim.com ................................................................................................ 31
Graph 5. Violent Incidents Linked to RevolutionMuslim.com. ........................................................................... 32

Case Study 4. Anwar Al-Awlaki’s Online Proselytizing Network ................................................... 33
Graph 6. Jihadist Network 2007-2011. .............................................................................................................. 35

The Foreign Connections ..................................................................................................................... 35

9. THE TRANSFORMATION OF TERRORIST ORGANIZATION .................................. 36
Table 2. Social Network Comparison: Network Evolution from 2001 and Earlier to the Islamic State’s
Recruitment Drive. ............................................................................................................................................. 37

10. THE FOREIGN FIGHTERS ............................................................................................... 39
Chart 1. Number of American Jihadist Terrorism Offenders by Year, 1993-2015. ........................................... 40

The American-Somali Network ........................................................................................................... 41
Case Study 5. Making Hijra to the Islamic State ............................................................................... 42
Graph 7. Jihadist Network 2012-2015. .............................................................................................................. 43

11. DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE ............................................................................................... 46
Chart 2. Ethnicities by Number of American Jihadists. ..................................................................................... 47

12. INFERENCES AND RECOMMENDATIONS ................................................................. 48“If You See Something, Say Something” ............................................................................................ 50
Profile the Networks—All the Networks ............................................................................................ 51
Disrupt Travel to Insurgencies ............................................................................................................ 51

This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeSuppress Internet Producers (Not Consumers) of Online Violent Extremism ............................... 51

APPENDIX .................................................................................................................................. 53
Table A-1: Deceased American Jihadists 1993-2015. ....................................................................................... 53
Table A-2: A Dictionary of Terms in Social Network Analysis. ......................................................................... 55
Articles Published From the Research (Peer Review) ....................................................................................... 56
General Readership ........................................................................................................................................... 56
Working Papers.................................................................................................................................................. 56

NOTES ......................................................................................................................................... 58

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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Rosanne Libretti, Brian Luk, and Giang Nguyen provided research assistance on this project. The author
recognizes also forty Brandeis undergraduate and graduate students who over the past four years haveenthusiastically spent many hours each week coding the data from which this research derives. Funding
for research assistance on the project was provided by the Research Circle on Democracy and Cultural
Pluralism, by the Theodore and Jane Norman Fund for Faculty Research, and by the Office of the Dean ofArts and Sciences at Brandeis University. The patience of John Picarelli from the National Institute ofJustice, who helped bring the project to a fruitful end, is also acknowledged.

This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeEXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1. Purpose of Study: This report analyses the networks and organizations that mobilize and direct
Americans for jihadist action, or that raise money in the US for Hamas and Hezbollah. The study employs
a quasi-experimental method using a control-case design, comparing the network structures of American
terrorism offenders inspired by Hezbollah with those of Sunni extremist groups aligned with Al Qaeda,
and in recent years ISIL.
2. The Problem: How and why do foreign terrorist organizations recruit Americans to their cause? Threeanswers have been proposed to this question:
Homegrown terrorism is a tactic developed by the foreign terrorist organization to further its
strategic interest in attacking Western targets. Command and control is essential to all terrorist
organizations.

Homegrown terrorism is essentially “leaderless”. The root cause of militancy lies at home. US
militants may declare allegiance to foreign terrorist organizations, but this is just a matter ofaspiration.



Terrorist groups are comprised of leaders and foot soldiers, and tailor their operations to meetstrategic goals, including, perhaps most importantly, keeping their numbers up. An emphasis on
recruitment requires an open structure; fundraising requires centralized control over the flow ofmoney; plotting attacks needs a covert and decentralized and covert organization.

2. Data and Methodology: The data were collected as part of the Western Jihadism Project (WJP), a
database of Western nationals associated with terrorist plots related to Al Qaeda and aligned groups,
including ISIL, from the early 1990s to the end of 2015.
Over the past twenty-five years, close to 800 residents or citizens of the U.S. have committed
terrorism offenses inspired by one of the many Islamist terrorist groups that have been active inthis country. Of these, about 560 may be described as “homegrown” terrorists: American citizens
or residents who have been arrested or have died in incidents related to Al Qaeda and its many
affiliates and successors. Foreigners who have attacked the United States, e.g. the September 11
hijackers, or have been brought to trial in the United States, are excluded from this estimate, andare not considered in this study.

Data were also collected on Americans convicted on charges related to Hamas and Hezbollah inorder to assess differences in network organization that are related to the particular objectives ofinternational terrorist groups operating in the United States. All data were collected from court
records and other public documentation. Data collection procedures were designed to facilitatesocial network analysis through the comprehensive coding of information about communications
and relationship between known terrorist offenders.



The study uses a method termed social network analysis (SNA). Developed by sociologists tostudy informal network dynamics, it has proved to be helpful in ascertaining structures, variations
and patterns of change in terrorist organizations.

3. Key Findings: 2015 ended with a record number of arrests in the U.S. related to Salafi-jihadist
inspired terrorism, the highest count since the 9/11 attacks. The 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings and theability of home-based if not necessarily homegrown militants to carry out successful mass shootingiThis resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceattacks in 2015 and 2016 are further indications that the country faces a significant and growing threat
from Americans who are inspired by the Salafi-jihadist ideology and who are guided by recruiters acting
on behalf of foreign terrorist organizations.


Islamist terrorism in the United States has taken many different forms. These range from thepyramidal hierarchy of the Brooklyn-based cell in the 1990s to the family-based criminal
fundraising schemes run by Hamas and Hezbollah and the recent decentralized pop-up cells of
Americans who have become enamored of the Islamic State’s propaganda.

The 1993 Brooklyn-based cell was markedly hierarchical and typical for an enclave-based
terrorist organization that combines proselytizing and recruitment with planning and mobilization
for terrorism. It was therefore vulnerable to prosecution and suppression, and its legacy forjihadist terrorism in the Untied States was minimal. Only actors who escaped abroad were able tocarry on.



Hamas and Hezbollah have used the United States as a base for raising funds, and occasionally asa safe harbor for important operatives. They retained the character of diaspora organizations
focused on supporting organizations in the Middle East and eschewed domestic recruitment andmobilization for violent action in the United States. Highly centralized and vertical networks,
they tend to organize around large-scale family-based fraud conspiracies involving siblings,
parents and children, spouses, in-laws, uncles, cousins, and even more distant relatives. While thecells lacked broader connections within the United States, they were linked to the motherorganizations in Lebanon or Gaza, often through nodes placed outside the United States.



The number of Americans who die abroad in connection with terrorist actions on behalf of
foreign terrorist organizations has risen sharply in recent years. Homegrown American militants
nearly always first want to go abroad to fight. Later, they may be turned around to carry out
attacks at home—or if they are frustrated in their ambition to go abroad, choose to commit acts ofterrorism at home. After the 9/11 attacks, jihadist recruitment in the United States recovered only
slowly, facilitated by travel to Al Qaeda affiliates in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and a webbased proselytizing and recruitment strategy. In the last two years, travel to territories controlled
by ISIL produced an uptick in deaths.



Recruitment networks funneling people abroad look very different from the networks of the pastthat were intent of organizing attacks at home. The Islamic State’s recruitment structure presents
a classic pattern of what is known as a star network, i.e. a communication network in which allnodes are independently connected to one central unit, here the recruiters for the Islamic State.
Flat, dispersed, and highly connected through the central hub, all traffic goes through theleadership based abroad. The peripheral nodes may be comprised of just one person linking up
via a home computer or the node may be a pop-up cell of friends and family communicating withthe central hub. But characteristically those on the periphery have little awareness of each other.

The new network structure associated with social media recruitment prioritizes recruitment over
exercising control and command of violent plots. It is inaccurate to say that it exemplified“leaderless” terrorism as all information and action scripts run through the central hub of the
network, comprised of recruiters and middle-men acting on behalf of the ISIL.



Jihadist recruitment has reached into small and mid-sized cities in every state of the country. The
impact of online recruitment is evident in the diversity of American terrorism offenders, whotoday have come from forty different ethnicities and all races. In 2015 investigations related toiiThis resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justicethe Islamic State were in progress in all fifty states. Given the extraordinary diversity of theAmerican homegrown terrorism offenders, no common denominator and no common set ofgrievances, or even common motivations, can explain what makes a few individuals opt to joingroups espousing violent jihad.
4. Inferences and Recommendations For Policy:
Family members and spouses are often the first to know when a person is about to do something.
American homegrown terrorists rebel against the nation and their parents, and against the American
Muslim community.
Establish a duty to report: State and federal laws should make it a duty to report suspicions about
imminent criminal activity related to terrorism. The legal construction may mirror current rules
regarding the obligation to report child abuse if the family member, teacher, or community
member has “cause to believe” that a risk to the public exists.
But what are bystanders supposed to see? There is a real risk that American Muslims will be unfairly
stereotyped in the absence of a clearly formulated public education program that focus on signs ofradicalization to violent extremism.
Focus on community education: The growing involvement of converts and the diffusion of risk
outside the metropolitan areas suggests a need to educate community leaders, teachers, prison
wardens and social workers in the detection of the signs of dangerous radicalization.
The number of Americans participating in lethal attacks abroad has increased. For this reason and becauseof the intimate connection between perpetrating an attack at home and going abroad—in whateverorder— the expression of a desire to go abroad to fight for a jihadist organization should be treated as an
immediate risk to homeland security.
Disrupt and intercept travel to foreign terrorist organizations and insurgencies: Withdrawal of
passports is one tool.
Preventing the development of hidden communities of extremism should continue be a high priority.
Radicalization takes place in online and offline networks and peer groups.
Profile the networks: Social network analysis may provide a fuller picture of an individual’s risk
profile if it is used to profile all contact points, ranging from social media networks to offline
engagements with other militants.
The focus should be on top-down suppression of the purveyors of extreme political violence rather thanbottom-up elimination of militant social media activists. Many would-be terrorists are caught online. That
does not mean that they radicalized online. Moreover, online data have proven of value to law
enforcement.
Suppress Internet Producers of Online Violent Extremism: Policy should focus on targeting andsuppressing the recruiters rather than retail-level consumers of terrorist propaganda.

iii
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice1. INTRODUCTION
How do terrorists organize? According to the 9/11 Commission Report, it took a tight andcomplex organization to recruit and infiltrate the hijackers into the United States, and to plan andoversee the simultaneous hijacking of multiple airplanes. The investigation also concluded thatthe network was for the most part based abroad, and they found no evidence of substantial
financial support for the hijackers from within the United States.1 There was, however, a local
support network that had been years in the making and questions continue to arise about thepresence of advance men who may have paved the way for the hijackers. The role of Anwar alAwlaki is a continuing mystery, for example. A Zelig-like figure, Awlaki turned up repeatedly as
the hijackers moved around the country before the attacks. Was he or wasn’t he in on the 9/11
conspiracy?
The term “homegrown” terrorism entered the language with the July 7, 2005 attacks on
the London Underground.2 A House of Commons inquiry into the planning of the attacks
determined that the suicide bombers were self-financed by means of credit cards and a car loan
fraud and had put the bombs together by themselves. The inquiry concluded that, “the extent of
Al Qaeda involvement is unclear.” A parallel inquiry conducted by the Intelligence and Security
Committee also discounted Al Qaeda’s role.3 The 2004 attack on suburban trains in Madrid wasblamed on disgruntled immigrants, supposedly with no direct Al Qaeda involvement. The
problem with second-generation Muslim immigrants turning to terrorism was initially seen as aEuropean problem. In a Foreign Affairs article from 2005, Robert Leiken expressed theconsensus at the time: Europe’s angry Muslims were becoming a security problem foreverybody.4
But the explanatory paradigm quickly fell apart. Religious discrimination could hardly
explain why American Muslims and growing numbers of converts also joined the ranks of themilitants, and it became clear that there was only a tenuous relationship between deprivation andsupport for terrorism or participation in terrorist actions.5 Evidence accumulated that theseconspiracies had been directed and planned by Al Qaeda. According to American intelligence
officials, material seized during the May 2, 2011, raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, showed that Bin
Laden had been involved in directing “every recent major Al Qaeda attack” against the West.
The Madrid train bombing from 2004, the London Underground bombings in 2005 (both the onethat succeed on July 7 and one that failed two weeks later, on July 21), and a failed attempt in
1
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice2006 to bomb the New York subway system, were centrally directed by Al Qaeda cadres andwith the involvement of Bin Laden from his exile.6
Then, in 2014, what used to be known as Al Qaeda in Iraq broke away from the Al Qaeda
mother ship and proclaimed a new caliphate, the Islamic State, on Europe’s doorstep.7 A year
later, the Islamic State began to send armed commandos to the streets of Europe’s cities, vowing
to “take the insurgency” to the Western democracies. For a decade it was bombs, bombs, andmore bombs. Recently, mass shooting attacks have become more common. In Europe,
coordinated groups of attackers have returned from Syria on orders from the Islamic State. In
contrast, the San Bernardino and Orlando attacks involved only one or two gunmen who
declared their allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but had no evident direct contact with theIslamic State.
We now know a great deal about these groups. Social scientists nevertheless disagree
about the importance of central leadership and direction in terrorist networks.8 How do foreign
terrorist organizations mobilize Americans to carry out attacks on their behalf? This is thequestion addressed in the present report. A companion study developed and tested an empiricalmodel of homegrown radicalization. That study is published separately.9

Research Questions
The key research questions addressed in this report are:

What is the role of networks and organizations in mobilizing and channeling Americans
for jihadist action?

What are the structural characteristics of the American Islamist extremist networks?

How integrated are those domestic networks with the global Islamist extremist movement
and with the core leadership of Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorist organizations?



How do jihadist leaders balance conflicting organizational objectives?



What role does internet-based proselytizing and recruitment play in stimulating
homegrown terrorism?
The study employs a quasi-experimental method using a control-case design, comparing,in the first instance, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Sunni extremists aligned with Al Qaeda. The Al
Qaeda-aligned group was then divided into three cohorts—the pre-9/11 network responsible forthe 1993 World Trade Center bombing and several other conspiracies (actualized and foiled); the2This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeAl Qaeda-inspired network in the United States after 9/11; and the social media generation ofhomegrown Al Qaeda-inspired networks from the last five years. The data was collected
specifically for this study drawing on a novel data collection methodology used by the Western
Jihadism Project, which was initiated in 2006 by Dr. Jytte Klausen.
The following sections outline three different theories about how terrorists organize torecruit and mobilize homegrown militants. The Hezbollah, Hamas, and jihadist networks
operating in the United States over the past twenty-five years are discussed. Case studies model
the leadership structures of the Brooklyn-based conspiracy behind the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing and the post-9/11 jihadist networks and then the shift to online recruitment and the useof social media for coordination in and around 2010. A final section analyzes the “foreign
fighter” phenomenon and puts the migration of Americans to join ISIL’s “Islamic State” inhistorical perspective.
This report also examines a methodological issue, the utility of social network analysis(SNA) in the study of terrorist organizations. SNA provides tools for the representation andassessment of the structure of social networks and the roles played in them by individuals. The
methodology was widely seen as a solution to the problem of how to track “dark” networks but
skeptics have argued that, in fact, SNA is ill suited to the study of covert networks because theinevitable problems with missing data create a high risk of faulty inferences.10 Our study showsthat, drawing on openly available sources, SNA can throw light on the structures of recruitment
and organization of terrorist groups and evaluate the role played by various individuals, but thatthe methodology has inherent problems in dealing with “fuzzy” boundaries of cells andincomplete data, which are a given aspect of covert networks.

Terminology
The description “homegrown” terrorist refers to Americans—and other Westerners—who are
inspired to carry out acts of terrorism or to support others committing such acts in their homecountry on behalf of a foreign terrorist organization driven by the Salafi-jihadist ideology. 11 The
term implies that the radicalization process occurred while the individual lived in the UnitedStates or another Western democracy. The “homegrown” designation is not used to describe
domestic terrorism involving extremist groups that lack an international dimension—e.g. therightwing Sovereign Citizens, Christian anti-abortion terrorism, or eco-terrorism. Right-wing
3This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceanti-government terrorism is usually referred to as “domestic terrorism”, and adherents of thesegroups are usually described as “domestic” terrorists but not as “homegrown.” Americans whogo abroad to fight with jihadist groups in a country of which they are not citizens and to which
they have little or no ancestral relationship are known as “foreign fighters.” They too arecommonly identified as “homegrown” Islamic terrorists, because they are assumed to haveacquired their beliefs while living in this country.12 However, the designation is not applied toevery American resident who “does something” on behalf of jihadism. Individuals who grew up
in Muslim majority countries and then come to the United States to carry out an attack are notreferred to as “homegrown” terrorists.13 The 9/11 hijackers lived in the U.S. before they carriedout the attacks but they are not described as homegrown terrorists because they acquired theirbeliefs before coming to the country.
The terms Salafi-jihadi and jihadist are used here interchangeably to describe Sunni
militancy inspired by Al Qaeda and aligned and affiliated groups, including ISIL. The terms“jihadist” and “jihadism” derives from jihad, which is usually translated as “struggle in the pathof God.” It is a key principle of the world religion. For the overwhelming majority of the world’s
practicing Muslims, it involves efforts to be a better Muslim and a better person. According to Al
Qaeda and similar movements, however, jihad lays a religious duty on all Muslims to wage war
against unbelievers “occupying” territory that in the history of Islam has been under Muslim
control. The fusion of revolutionary action and religion is the essence of the movement, and it all
hinges on a particular interpretation of the obligations implied by the Koranic injunction toembrace jihad. The suffix—as in jihadism—clearly indicates the political rather than thereligious nature of the ideology.

2. MODELING LEADERSHIP AND COORDINATION IN TERRORISTORGANIZATIONS
How and why do foreign terrorist organizations recruit Americans to fight for their cause? Threeanswers have been proposed to this question, each of which identifies a different cause for thegrowth of homegrown terrorism, and proposes a different remedy.

Globalized Central Command
The broad assumption underpinning this approach is that “homegrown” terrorism is in fact
4This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceorchestrated by a foreign organization in order to further its strategic goals. One camp ofresearchers and analysts have contended that it is “all Al Qaeda,” and that what we callhomegrown terrorism is a direct legacy of Bin Laden’s war on America.14
Business metaphors feature prominently in many assessments of how Al Qaeda operated
when the organization was under Bin Laden’s control. Al Qaeda has been described as a
“trademark” or “a brand”, and the associated groups as “franchises” or “affiliates.”15 This iscongruent with Bin Laden’s intention to transform his organization of Afghan Arabs who had
fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s into a multinational corporation witha rapid deployment force capable of providing logistical support and expertise and discipline to
local militants.16
Spectacular coordinated attacks like the 1998 East Africa bombings and the 9/11 attacks
required vertical command and control structures. Critically important decisions were left to Bin
Laden, who has been described as the “CEO of terrorism.”17 Some evidence suggests that in the
1990s Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda was set up on a template resembling a Third World statebureaucracy, with directorates for requisition and finances, and employment contracts for foreign
fighters stipulating their pay and vacation days contingent on status (married, not married),vouchers in lieu of monetary rewards, etc.18

Hypothesis 1: Homegrown terrorism is a cost-efficient means to attack the United Statesand its allies. Control and command are in the hands of the terrorist leaders because
terrorism is a means to the overarching goal, which is to force the United States and its
allies to withdraw from Muslim countries.

If true, we would expect to see that centrally appointed leaders play a central role in pushingdomestic attacks. Given the right data, it should be apparent that clandestine cells are spun into
the control and command structures of international terrorist organizations. A clear division oflabor may be observed between leaders and middlemen who are assigned to coordinate attacks,
and the grunts who kill themselves while following orders. Adapting to the post-2001
environment, senior leaders and recruiters operate outside American jurisdiction, but local
operatives acting on their behalf select targets, assign individuals to particular conspiracies, andsecure the means used to carry out attacks.
5This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeIf this assessment is correct, the root causes of homegrown terrorism lie in the epic
contest for control in Muslim majority countries such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In order toend homegrown terrorism we should either withdraw from that contest, as Robert A. Pape
proposes, or prepare for a long fight to suppress the jihadist forces.19“Leaderless” Terror Networks
Marc Sageman introduced the concept of a new type of networked terrorism in 2004, anddeveloped it in an influential study that appeared in 2008.20 Sageman contended that Al Qaeda“does not exist anymore.” Western jihadists form their own “leaderless” local groups. They may
act in the name of Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden – or today in the name of the Islamic State –but any connection to these movements is just a matter of aspiration. The root cause of theirmilitancy lies at home.21 The diagnosis suggests a remedy: if only grievances were addressed,
Western Muslims would stop attacking their homelands.

Hypothesis 2: Homegrown terrorism is a bottom-up phenomenon. The cells are selfdirected “bunches of guys,” as Marc Sageman called them, whose relationship to Al
Qaeda and the international terrorist movement started by Osama Bin Laden is“aspirational.” Al Qaeda may endorse their acts of violence but the homegrown terrorists
are volunteers to a movement that is essentially “leaderless.”22

If true, we would expect domestic cells of homegrown jihadists to be autonomous and to havelittle or no connection with each other or to an organization abroad. Each cell is capable of acting
on its own, following a manual that explains “how to do things.” For tactical reasons theinternational terrorist organization is content to allow these cells a large degree of independence
and freedom of action.
Sageman borrowed his description of homegrown terrorism as “leaderless” from adissident Al Qaeda strategist, Mustafa Setmarian Nasar. A critic of Bin Laden, Nasar was a
Syrian better known as Abu Musab al-Suri (“the Syrian”). He is now believed to have died in the
Syrian civil war. Al-Suri launched the concept of “leaderless” terrorism in his book, The Call fora Global Islamic Resistance (ca. 2004). Using case studies of the jihadist movement and othersecular terrorist movements, such as the IRA and the neo-Marxist groups operating in Europe in
6This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justicethe 1970s, from whose mistakes and failures he drew lessons, al-Suri criticized the hierarchicalchain of command favored by Bin Laden and recommended “leaderless” resistance as the
optimal organizational form for the global jihadist movement:23

We know the way of building pyramid organizations and we have seen that it isdangerous because if any member of the pyramid is captured, then anyone with him on
his level, under him, or above him will also be captured until the whole pyramidorganization is destroyed.

But al-Suri was by no means an advocate of a Bakunin-style leaderless insurrection. Independent
cells were to be guided by trained operatives dispatched by the terrorist organization’s command
center. The goal was to protect the leaders and to build resilience against suppression. The rest of
the organization should embody, ideally, the organizational structures of a centralized commandon the Leninist model, with a public outreach section modeling itself on a social movement, anda military wing fielding networked commando cells for the purpose of conducting terrorist
operations. Again, quoting al-Suri:[It is essential] that the Da’wah [proselytizing] to organize others, media work, and fundcollecting are all public and thus incompatible with covert (secret) operations and cannever ever be combined. Bringing these opposites together in our dynamic, Jihadi history
led to real disasters.24
The “leaderless” paradigm took a knock as evidence emerged that major attacks attributed tohomegrown cells had, in fact, been planned in Al Qaeda training camps located in Pakistan. But
might the leaderless concept have become the reality at a later stage, when terrorist recruiters
took to YouTube and then in quick succession to social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook,and many others? Anwar al-Awlaki, whose meteoric rise as an inspirational force in the
homegrown movement owed a great deal to his charismatic presence on YouTube, advocated an
entirely self-directed form for imitative terrorism. “Don’t wait for permission”, Awlaki preached,“do something.” Showing the influence of his education in the United States, Awlaki (or his
editorial assistant, Samir Khan, also American) provided a definition in the Fall 2011 issue of
7This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeInspire, an English-language e-zine: “It allows Muslims to train at home instead of risking adangerous travel abroad: Look no further, the open source Jihad is now at hand reach [sic].” Selfhelp manuals for the aspiring terrorists were disseminated in Inspire. One issue with instructions
for “How to Make a Bomb in Your Moms Kitchen” has featured prominently in arrests made inrecent years.

The Terrorist Tradeoff
Jacob Shapiro has argued that terrorist groups control their members in the same way as businessleaders manage their organizations.25 Terrorist organizations are rule-driven and are comprisedof leaders and followers. Leaders tell followers when and how to fight and how to die. Theybuild up networks to organize across borders. Online, they use networked contagion to spreadtheir message.26 There are leaders and foot soldiers. Foot soldiers are expendable, but must be
replaced. Since terrorist actors play different roles within the organization and within each levelof hierarchy in the networks, no one-size-fits-all model can explain what motivates each andevery member of the organization.27
Recent leaks of intake interviews conducted by Islamic State managers in 2014 provided
clues to the bureaucratic structures underpinning the terrorist organization’s control over the rank
and file.28 The efficient and consistent coordination of complex illegal operations acrosscountries would seem to require a centralized command and control structure whereas
proselytizing and recruitment are better served by the openness associated with social
movements.29

Hypothesis 3: An operational priority of these terrorist movements is to sustain the flowof recruits. Like international corporations, they must maintain a central headquarters
while developing strategies for publicity and recruitment that are adapted to very
different local markets.

If true, recruitment comes before other organizational needs. To stay in business, a terrorist
organization must grow, replace losses, and if possible expand its ranks, while preserving its core
strategic objectives.30 A corollary is that “leaderless” or autonomous organization is itself the

8This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceresult of a deliberate decision on the part of leaders not to exercise direct control over local
branches.
Terrorist organizations need a base, even if temporary, where the leaders and the fighters
can meet and train, and establish households under their control. But the jihadists aspire to a
global reach. Western democracies are at once targets and sites for resource mobilization.
Western civil liberties provide opportunities to find safe harbor for operatives and openings toproselytize and fundraise. Operating both in jihadist heartlands and in the West, theseorganizations thrive on the transformations associated with globalization—increased openness ofsocieties, migration, and the ease with which ideas and influences can be disseminated online.
Ideology is in itself a powerful tool for the coordination of violence because it promotes a seriesof detailed and specific scripts for violent actions; what Charles Tilly called violent rituals.31

3. DATA AND METHODOLOGY
Social network analysis (SNA) was developed by sociologists to study informal network
dynamics. The methodology is conceptually simple, but in practice often becomes complicated.
It builds on the insights of structural sociology, with which it shares some core assumptions. For
some time the methodology has been thought to represent a breakthrough in the study andassessment of “dark” organizations. Valdis Krebs used SNA to chart the social organization of
the 9/11 hijackers, drawing on publicly available information about their travels and cohabitation in the United States before the attacks. A RAND study concluded that themethodology promised to reveal “who really is connected to whom.”32 SNA was quickly adopted
in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency circles, and instructions for how to use themethodology were incorporated into the U.S. Military Counterinsurgency Field Manual in2007.33
The basic idea is that social interaction is a conduit for building social capital, influence andpower. In any network some actors are “rich” and others are “poor” because of connections andplacement in the social organization of the network. In abstract terms, a network is a series ofpoints, or “nodes”, interconnected by communication paths. Communication paths can beasymmetrical, as in “A is a spiritual leader of B” [A  B]. Or the relationship can besymmetrical, exemplified by the statement “A and B travel together” [A  B] (See Figure 1
for SNA basics).
9This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeFigure 1. SNA Basics
A key advantage of social network analysis is that information about communications
between persons in a network, and between persons and entities (places, events, websites, ororganizations), can be coded in a formalized manner and visualized by means of software thatgraphs patterns of social interaction. The focus can be on the position of individual actors(“egocentric” analysis) or on the properties of the networks themselves, focusing on the clusters
and components that comprise the overall network. The researcher may analyze the roles played
by individual nodes in the network and also assess the properties of the network as a whole(dense/diffuse, flat/hierarchical, etc.). SNA “metrics” are algorithms used to describe andanalyze the roles and positions of individual points in the network or the properties of the
network itself. A list of commonly used metrics and their definitions are listed in the appendix inTable A-2.
SNA is demanding of data. Researchers working in SNA have to decide who to include
and who to exclude from the set of actors that is to be analyzed. This can be tricky, particularlyin the case of covert networks where the researcher cannot always know whether the most salient
actors have been identified and included in the study. Mathematical studies have found that SNA
metrics are tolerant of missing data and will yield robust predictions of the most important actors
even if the boundaries change.34 But this is no comfort when the researcher cannot even assess
10This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justicean error margin. (To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, the known unknowns are less of a problem
than the unknown unknowns.)
A more general point is that researchers working from open sources can describe as“terrorists” only those groups and individuals that have been so designated in public, bygovernment and courts, or by their own acts and statements. Naming people as terrorists in theabsence of a public designation exposes the researcher to legal jeopardy and accusations ofscientific malpractice. Charting terrorist networks from open sources documentation must
therefore be an exercise in archival excavation. Despite these limitations, this study will showthat social network analysis can be helpful in ascertaining structures, variations and patterns ofchange in terrorist organizations.

Data Collection Methodology
The data used were collected as part of the Western Jihadism Project (WJP), a database ofWestern nationals associated with terrorist plots related to Al Qaeda. The data collection
methodology is a variant of clio-metrics, the quantitative analysis of micro-level data derived
from narrative records, a method that is used in quantitative historical sociology to map protest
movements and political violence.35 Researchers working from archival records have laboriouslytranslated bits of data into quantitative records that can be subjected to statistical analysis. The
method has successfully been used to analyze social rebellions in 17th and 18th century France
and Britain, the slave economy of the South, and the development of the civil rights movementsin the United States in the 1960s.
To support the present project, data were collected from court records and other public
documentation that identified American citizens and residents who committed terrorist offenses
inspired by Al Qaeda and associated and successor movements, most notably ISIL, from theearly 1990s to the end of 2015. Data were also collected on Americans convicted on charges
related to Hamas and Hezbollah in order to assess differences in network organization that are
related to the particular objectives of international terrorist groups operating in the United States.
About 250 Al Qaeda leaders and international operatives of Western origin or with current or
previous residence in the United States or a Western state were also identified, and included in
the data collection. In all, records have been coded for nearly 5,000 individuals from twenty
Western democracies and about 20,000 relationships and hundreds of terrorist organizations and11This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceterrorism-related entities, ranging from extremist web sites to local and internationalorganizations.
The data derive from three types of publicly available documents: primary sources suchas court records, indictments, judgments; reports published by government researchers or
academic teams; and communications issued by extremists, such as testimonies, social media
productions, and websites. Social media postings made by militants themselves are deemed to bedeliberate publications and are therefore not subject to privacy concerns.
Relational analysis requires relational data. Data collection procedures were designed tofacilitate social network analysis. A codebook was developed for recording communicative acts
between terrorism offenders and between the offenders and collective terrorist entities, such as
foreign terrorist organization, local organizations such as web sites and extremist bookstores andmosques. Relationships were coded to indicate symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships, forexample “adherent of” (asymmetrical) or “brother of” (symmetrical). Every data point has beencoded manually. The coding of demographic information about terrorism offenders was
combined with coding of micro-level data about individuals and their networks.

Assessing Data Bias
Data bias is as always a concern. There is a perception that social network analysis can make theinnocent or the merely curious look like dangerous terrorists. That concern is misplaced. For
practical and legal reasons, only contacts made in the pursuit of terrorist actions were coded. (Forinstance, a relationship between brothers was coded only if both brothers were known terrorist
offenders.) The coding criteria will very probably produce an underestimate of the true size ofthe local networks.36 Which way does the bias go? The advantage of relying on court records isthat the data and the relationships recorded are verified as purposive acts of communication andcontact carried out in the pursuit of activities that are deemed to be terrorism-related. The
disadvantage is that it has to be assumed that we are recording only a fraction of the actual
communications carried out in connection with known terrorist actions—and that individuals
who may have participated, but in non-criminal (or non-public) ways, are missing. One way toassess the impact of bias is to ask the counter-factual question: Would we expect a lesshierarchical pattern to emerge from a data file of, for example, secret surveillance records?
Typically, the assumption would be that secret data is more revealing of leadership than public
12This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justicedata. If so, relying on public data may be assumed to underestimate the real size of the networks
and the degree of hands-on direction exercised by bosses and coordinators in clandestine
networks.

4. A CHANGING THREAT PICTURE
No single measure provides a complete picture of the threat posed by the operations of foreign
terrorist groups and their followers. Capacity to carry out violent actions, the casualty count, andnumbers of arrests are, however, obviously crucial indicators.
The focus here is on violent jihadist networks, but the operations of Hamas andHezbollah in the U.S. are also discussed. Based upon the available information about particulararrest events and the charges filed against the perpetrators, all arrest events were classified bytype and by affiliation to the array of jihadist groups and Al Qaeda affiliates operating in the
United States, and to Hamas and Hezbollah. We identified nearly two hundred separate—or
semi-separate—conspiracies involving U.S. citizens and residents since the early 1990s (seeTable 1). The data may be taken as a measure of the overall threat from Islamist militants basedon the United States. The 9/11 attacks were seen as having originated abroad and were notincluded in the analysis.
Over the past twenty-five years, close to 800 residents or citizens of the U.S. havecommitted terrorism offenses inspired by one of the many Islamist terrorist groups that havebeen active in this country. 37 Of these, about 560 may be described as “homegrown” terrorists:
American citizens or residents who have been arrested or have died in incidents related to Al
Qaeda and its many affiliates and successors. Foreigners who have attacked the United States,e.g. the September 11 hijackers, or have been brought to trial in the United States, are excluded
from this estimate.
The jihadists, Hamas, and Hezbollah have all shown that they are capable of producing
attacks causing massive civilian casualties outside the sites of insurgency. Hezbollah has
conducted operations outside its natural territory in Shiite dominated areas in the Middle East. 84
people died and hundreds were injured in a truck bombing of a Jewish community center in
Buenos Aires orchestrated by Hezbollah in 1994. Nevertheless, Hezbollah has shown no interestin bringing its conflict with Israel to the United States.

13
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeTable 1. Conspiracies committed by U.S. residents or citizens inspired or directed by foreign
Islamist terrorist organizations, 1990-2015.
Organization Plot Type

Number of
Incidents

Plot Target

Plot Means

Years

Hamas

Material
Support7

Fundraising, Logistical
Support, Supplies

Charities (3), Drugs (1),Fraud (2), Public Figures(1)

1997, 2001,
2002, 2004,2013

Violent
Acts

2

High-Value Civilian
Targets, Jewish
Targets, Trains

Bombs (1), Guns (1)1994, 1997

Material
Support33

Fundraising, Supplies,
Violent Attacks

Charities (1), Drugs (4),Falsifying Documents (2),Fraud (14), Robberies (3),Smuggling (7), Weapons
Support (2)1998, 20002013

Recruitment 1

Recruitment

Smuggling (1)2002

Violent
Acts

2

Jewish Targets, Misc.,
Public Figures

Bombs (1), Guns (1)2007, 2011Material
Support61

Foreign Fighter
Recruitment, Material
Support Misc.,
Organizations, Plot
Fundraising,
Recruitment
Fundraising, Travel,
Violent Attacks

Charities (9), Cyber Attack 1999-2013,(1), Drugs (1), Financial
2015
Support (6), Fraud (20),
Logistical Support (9),Propaganda (2), Terrorist
websites (2), Smuggling(7), Weapons Support (4)Recruitment 12

Foreign Fighter
Recruitment, General
Recruitment

Propaganda (3),Recruitment (5), Violent
Acts (4)1998, 2001,
2002, 2006,
2009, 20112013

Violent
Acts

Airports or Airplanes,
Cultural Figures,Embassies, High-Value
Civilian Targets,Infrastructure, Jewish
Targets, Law
Enforcement, Military,
Misc., National
Buildings, Trains

Assassination (4), Bombs(23), Cars (4), Guns or
Grenades (26), Knife (2),Online Threats (3), Other(5), Remote Controlled
Device (10), Suicide (7)1990, 1993,
1999, 20012015

Hezbollah

Jihadists

ALL

84(66 Foiled, 18
Actualized)

202

1990-2015

Explanatory Note: In the context of the present study, a terrorist conspiracy is identified following an
attack, an arrest related to a terrorist action, or the exposure of a plan for illegal activity in support ofterrorism. The incident count includes actualized attacks and foiled incidents, and also financial terrorism,
terrorist recruitment, material support for terrorism, as well as plots involving so-called “lone wolves” andsting operations. No comparable official statistics or compilations of terrorist incidents are available but,to the extent possible, the data collection was cross-referenced against government lists of designatedterrorists, FBI press releases, and the Department of Justice’s National Security Division listing ofterrorism-related cases. Americans who have been involved in foreign terrorist incidents or who are

14
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justicedesignated terrorists are included in the data collection. Conspiracies planned and executed from abroad
are excluded. .The enumeration of the overall threat level roughly corresponds with lists produced byother researchers. An analysis of 26 homegrown incidents by the New York State Intelligence Center
published in 2010 identified various types of bombs as the most common means used by Al Qaedainspired domestic terrorists in the decade following the September 11 attacks.38

Including more recent incidents in 2016, homegrown jihadist terrorists account for about
90 violent incidents in the United States. For some time bombs were the favored means. The
1993 World Trade Center attack was the first jihadist mass casualty attack on U.S. ground. Six
people died in the attack and over a thousand were injured, mostly by smoke-inhalation. Since
the September 11 catastrophe, multiple “homegrown” groups and individuals continued to plot
domestic attacks using bombs. Several planned attacks on New York City could have replicatedthe disasters of London or Paris.
More recently, attacks have taken the form of shooting incidents. The San Bernardino
and Orlando attacks replicated the mass-shooter tactics used by returnees from areas controlled
by ISIL in Syria and Iraq, illustrating the power of mimetic emulation in the dissemination ofterrorist modes of attacks. Shooting attacks have been increasingly common. In 2009 Nidal
Malik Hasan, the Ft. Hood shooter, killed 13 and wounded more than 30 people. In late 2015,
Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married couple, killed 14 people and seriously
injured 22 in a shooting attack against a Christmas party of country employees in San
Bernardino, California. It has been suggested that the couple wanted to detonate a pipe bomb by
remote control that would have hit the first responders, but the mechanism failed.
Overall, American homegrown terrorists directed or inspired by Al Qaeda or otherjihadist groups have since 2001 been relatively unsuccessful in their efforts to carry out attacks
in the United States. Arrests have been effective in curtailing the impact of homegrownterrorism. Over fifty homegrown plots involving sympathizers of Al Qaeda were disrupted
between January 2011 and December 2015. Another twenty jihadist conspiracies had to do withfundraising and material support for Al Qaeda and affiliated organizations. A further eight
involved recruitment rings that sent volunteers to training camps and insurgencies abroad.
Dividing the number of attacks resulting in fatalities by the total number of actualized incidents
in the same period a lethality rate for jihadist domestic incidents of about .55 is obtained. In otherwords, just over half resulted in at least one death. The failure rate is .79, meaning that for every
actualized incident four were averted through preventive intervention.
15
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeIt has often been pointed out that more Americans have been killed by domestic terrorists
than by Americans claiming inspiration from foreign Islamist-inspired groups. By way ofcomparison, Arie Perliger found that individuals belonging to the often xenophobic or racist
family of American far-right groups killed 30-40 people annually in four out of five years since2007. With the exception of the 1995 Oklahoma City attack, far-right terrorists also mostly killon a small scale, with an average of one victim per incident, often law enforcement personnel.39
The jihadists have in recent years similarly focused on attacking law enforcement officers but goafter a far wider range of targets. Small-scale attacks involving assassinations, several shooting
incidents at U.S. military recruiting centers and, in one instance, a Jewish community center,
caused 7 fatalities.40
Fatality counts give a grim measure of terrorism incidents. Until the Orlando shooting (49victims), no incident in the United States produced results on the scale of other attacks since 9/11
perpetrated by jihadists outside an insurgent conflict zone, e.g. the 2002 attack on Australian
tourists at a Bali nightclub (202 victims), the 2004 Madrid train attacks (192 victims) and the2005 London Underground bombings (52 victims), the 2008 Mumbai attacks (116) victims), or
the November 2015 suicide attacks in Paris (130 victims).
Amateurism may be one reason for the relative failure—until recently—of American
domestic cells to cause massive fatalities. The primitive bombs used by the Tsarnaev brothers intheir attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013 killed three people but injured several hundred. Cellsize may be another reason. 41 The Mumbai attack in 2008 was carried out by a group of ten
attackers in 12 coordinated shooting incidents. The November 13, 2015 attack in Paris involved
ten men working in three teams and an unknown number of assistants in the “back office.” They
killed 130 people and wounded nearly 400. One hundred and sixty four people were killed in the2008 Mumbai attack and over 300 wounded by a group of ten attackers. At least four gunmen
carried out the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi in 2013, in which 63 people were killed. It would
be tempting to conclude that small teams and single shooters commit small atrocities, and large
atrocities require bigger teams. On the other hand, a single gunman killed 38 people in the
Sousse beach resort attack in Tunisia in 2015. And then there is the case of the Norwegian farright terrorist, Anders Breivik. Acting alone, he killed 77 people in a shooting attack.
The futility of using lethality statistics to indicate the threat level was amply illustrated inin June 2016, after this research was concluded, when Omar Mateen killed 49 people in a single
16
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceattack. The reality is that Al Qaeda inspired attacks, and now also attacks inspired by ISIL and its“Islamic State”, have presented a significant and growing risk to domestic security since 2001.
The jihadists show a strong preference for mass casualty events, even if rarely successful, whichgoes some way to explain the far greater public attention paid to their crimes. Terrorism is insome measure a game of chance. No doubt exists about the continued intent on the part of ISIL
and other international jihadist organizations to push for attacks in the United States. Therefore,
constant and continued attention to the threat posed by homegrown terrorists inspired by thejihadist ideology is justified.

5. HIERARCHY: THE 1993 BROOKLYN FACTION
All the elements that a decade later produced an infrastructure for the development of thousandsof “homegrown” militants in Western Europe were present in the United States in the 1990s:
leaders and managers from the Egyptian cadre in Bin Laden’s fledging organization, transplanted
extremists who had obtained legal status in the United States through marriage or by exploiting
lax immigration enforcement, and local recruits eager to travel to Afghanistan and Bosnia tofight but also willing to bring the war home.
The 1993 World Trade Center attack was carried out by a group of Egyptian Islamist
militants who had obtained legal residence in the United States. The cell responsible for 1993
World Trade Center bombing and the subsequent foiled attempt to bomb multiple targets in
Manhattan was large, well organized, and surprisingly open about its activities. Their sheikh was
the leader of an Egyptian terrorist organization and colluded with another Egyptian terroristgroup headed by Ayman Al-Zawahiri. The Brooklyn-based group had bigger plans but its
members were arrested before further attacks were carried out. It is commonly assumed that“dark” networks are highly decentralized and generally avoid communications between agents inthe network in order to avoid detection. This was not the case for the 1993 World Trade Center
cell. The members engaged in a measure of cloak and dagger but often meet in public, and the
local attack cell was highly integrated with the broader proselytizing network based at mosquesin Brooklyn and New Jersey. It was also enmeshed with Bin Laden’s fledging Al Qaeda
organization.42

17This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeGraph 1. Jihadist Network 1993-2001.
Explanatory Note: Agents: 199, Organizations: 41, Isolates: 2, Isolate-connected ratio: .01 (2/199) Red =Americans; Blue = International operatives linked to Americans; Green = Organizations, both U.S.-based
and international.

There was coordination between the two Egyptian extremist leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri
and Abdel-Rahman, and also with Ali Abdelsaoud Mohammad, a former Egyptian army officer
who worked as a translator for Ayman al-Zawahiri and toured the United States in the 1980s toraise money for the struggle in Afghanistan (see Graph 1). After settling in the U.S., AbdelRahman continued to function as the leader of the Egyptian extremist group, Al-Gama’a alIslamiyya (“The Islamic Group”). His extensive contacts stretched from Brooklyn to otherviolent conspiracies in the U.S. and Canada and further abroad to Egypt and Western Europe.
These activities were hardly covert. Abdel-Rahman traveled widely, preaching in support of the
18
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceviolent jihad, until his incarceration in 1993. Mohamed was married to an American woman,became an American citizen, and worked as an instructor for the U.S. Army at Ft. Bragg inNorth Carolina. All this while he was also commuting to Afghanistan and later to the Sudan,
taking care of Bin Laden’s affairs. Mohamed and another man in the “Blind Sheikh’s” entourage,
Wadih el Hage, also a naturalized American citizen, moved on to plan the 1998 bombings of the
U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Both men are now serving life sentences in the
United States.

Case Study 1. 1993 WTC
The Brooklyn cell began to plot violent actions immediately after the Egyptian militant sheik,
Omar Abdel-Rahman arrived in the country. Meir Kahane, a militant Brooklyn-based rabbi, waskilled in 1990 by a member of the clique around Omar Abdel-Rahman. The same year, membersof Jamaat al Fuqra, a splinter group from the Nation of Islam, murdered Rashad Khalifa, amoderate imam in Tucson, Arizona. The murder was instigated by Abdel-Rahman, or a memberof his immediate circle of acolytes.
An analysis of the 1993 World Trade Center cell and its follow-up conspiracy, the foiled
Landmarks plot, reveals an integrated structure that centered on Abdel-Rahman. Thirty-fivepeople were eventually convicted in a series of trials related to Abdel-Rahman. Seventy-threepeople linked to the broader conspiracy were later arrested and convicted, or died, in connection
with other terrorist actions.
As a rule, different SNA metrics should be used to assess roles in a particular network,
but in this case the same handful of people appeared—in a variable rank order—in nearly all themetrics, 43 and the different centrality measures yielded broadly comparable ranking of the mostimportant individual actors. Foreign operatives who it later became clear operated on behalf of
Bin Laden were top nodes in the network. Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and Ali Muhammad also
featured in other attacks targeting the United States at home and abroad. The most spectacular ofthese was the 1998 East Africa Embassy bombings. It is shocking, even now, years later, toconsider how freely these two master terrorists and their assistants moved within the UnitedStates.44
The go-to people in the network were Mohamed, al-Awlaki, Babar, Mousa Mohammed,
Abu Marzook and Clement Rodney Hampton-El. Marzook is a senior member of the leadership
19
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceof the Palestinian Hamas, who was deported from the United States in 1997.45 His appearance on
the list illustrates the tenuous but nevertheless important bridges between the leaders of theethno-national Islamist terrorist groups and Bin Laden’s emerging Sunni extremist movement in
the early period. A local representative of Hezbollah also formed a bridge between the otherwise
separate organizations. Marzook was indicted in absentia by the United States on terrorism
financing charges. His co-conspirators were tried and convicted in 2009 in the Holy Land
Foundation case.46
The FBI monitored the Brooklyn-based group responsible for the 1993 World Trade
Center attack for a period. This was in response to concerns by New Jersey casino owners thatthe sheik might be preparing his followers for an attack on their ungodly activities. The FBI
dismissed these concerns, but the group was infiltrated by two undercover agents, one working
for the Egyptians and another for the U.S. government. This did not prevent the first attack but
eventually led to the take-down of the broader conspiracy. (The FBI withdrew the undercoveragent prematurely, concluding that the group presented no risk.)
Our structural analysis of the 1993 cell highlighted how local supporters of the fightagainst the Soviet Union in Afghanistan were deployed to support the domestic plot that targeted
lower Manhattan. Hampton-El was 55 at the time of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and
an injured veteran from the mujahidin’s fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. A Black
Muslim and a local from Brooklyn, he belonged to Jama’at al-Fuqra, a splinter group of the
Nation of Islam that embraced the Salafi-jihadist call to violent jihad.47
The 1993 Brooklyn organization provides an interesting contrast to later conspiracies andattack networks because it operated with remarkable transparency and with little fear of
disruption. It was a strikingly hierarchical organization. In-Degree Centrality can be helpful inassessing roles in the networks. High In-Degree counts reflect a position in the network where
people come to an agent for instructions or information, but the agent rarely makes contact withothers. In the analysis of the Brooklyn-based organization a classic pyramidal structure of cadresand operatives linked to the international network sat under the Sheikh but above the locals who
would go on to carry out the attack (see Figure 2). At the bottom of the organization were thelocal militants who were dispatched first to prepare and then to carry out the attack— and who
ended up in prison.

20
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeFigure 2. Brooklyn-Based Hub Responsible for 1993 WTC Attacks and “Landmarks” Trial.
Explanatory Note: N = 73 persons and 11 entities. * Indicates a government informant.

After the successful prosecution of the cell, its domestic legacy was minimal. Theinternational operatives moved on to the next conspiracy. Broadly, the structural features are
typical for an enclave-based terrorist organization that meshes proselytizing and recruitment withplanning and mobilization for terrorism. The organization was vulnerable to suppression andonly actors who escaped abroad were able to carry on. It may be said to have exemplified theweaknesses of a hierarchical terror organization.

6. DIASPORA TERRORIST ORGANIZATION
Hamas and Hezbollah also ran networks in the United States in the 1990s but these focused onfund raising rather than on mobilizing locals to conduct terrorist attacks. Their organization
therefore followed a pattern of diaspora terrorism quite different from the proselytizing attack
cell that was centered on the Egyptian sheik in Brooklyn. In the early 1990s, the Iranian-backed
Hezbollah was thought to present the most urgent threat to Americans abroad and at home,whether from kidnappings or bombing attacks. Hezbollah’s role in conducting attacks on
American targets abroad warranted these fears, but in the event individuals related to Hezbollah
and Hamas have largely refrained from carrying out violent attacks in the United States.
21
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeCase Study 2. Hamas and Hezbollah in the United States
Hezbollah and Hamas are political organizations with armed militias. They are at once terrorist
organizations and governments that exercise control over base territories. Hezbollah was foundedin the early 1980s by Lebanese clerics living in Iran. In 1983 Hezbollah militants with Iranianbacking carried out a suicide bombing against the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed
63 people. Hezbollah became the dominant Shiite militant group in Lebanon in 1989 after abloody internecine fight with the Amal movement, a secular militia. Hezbollah was also
responsible for two massive bomb attacks against Israeli targets in Buenos Aires and London in 1992
and 1994. Charities run by Hamas-members donated money to the Afghan Services Bureau run
by Abdullah Azzam and Bin Laden, and Hezbollah and Hamas provided material support andtraining to Al Qaeda fighters in the 1990s. More recently, Hezbollah’s intervention in the Syrian
civil war on the side of the Assad regime has deepened the conflict between Shiite and Sunni Islamist
radicals and tied the group more closely to Iran.
Hezbollah’s U.S.-based network is three times the size of Hamas’s, while the jihadist
footprint is three times the size of the other two combined. 44 conspiracies involving Hamas or
Hezbollah operatives based in the United States between the early 1990s and the present wereidentified. 35 of these were associated with Hezbollah and only nine with Hamas. 57 American
residents carried out terrorism offenses in connection with Hamas and 134 acted in connection
with Hezbollah. Just four of the conspiracies involved violent acts: Hezbollah and Hamas were
each responsible for two. The other 40 plots involved various types of material support for
terrorism outside the U.S. Of the 40 non-violent conspiracies, 32 involved fundraising by meansof false charities, fraud, robbery, or smuggling.

22
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeHezbollah

Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook

Dearborn Cigarette Smuggling Case

Graph 2. Hezbollah Network in the U.S. 1993 to 2015.
Explanatory Note: All Interpersonal and Membership Links. Total number of relationships = 774. N =226; Persons = 214 (including 27 orphan nodes and non-ideologically committed criminals = 50) andorganizations = 12. The graph was made in Gephi.

Graph 2 diagrams the Hezbollah network in the United States and illustrates the extent towhich the organizers routinely involved ordinary criminals in fraud and smuggling operations
conducted for the purpose of terrorist financing. Extended terrorist crime families controlled theoperations. For instance, the Berro family conspiracy, a Hezbollah affiliated fundraising scheme,
involved 19 members of the same family, based in Dearborn, Michigan, who engaged in a vast
“bust-out” fraud scheme to defraud banks, credit card companies, creditors, service providers,mortgage lenders and bankruptcy trustees between March 1999 and April 2004. The scheme

23
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justicegenerated up to $1.7 million and was allegedly used to fund Hezbollah. Similarly, Joseph Abedwas convicted for fraud, extortion, and of running a crime-for-hire gang in Roanoke, VA, alongwith his son, brother and nephews. The Abed gang was dismantled in 1997.

Ziyad Khaleel

Ghassan Dahduli

Infocom - Funding
Abed Organized Crime Family

Abdurahman Muhammad Alamoudi

Hamas

Operation Tobacco Road

Holy Land Foundation

Graph 3. Hamas Network in the U.S. 1993 to the Present.
Explanatory Note: All Interpersonal and Membership Links. Total number of relationships = 363; N= 90; Persons = 71 (including 2 orphan nodes) and organizations = 19. The graph was made inGephi.

Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was founded in 1987-88
with support from Hezbollah and Iran. Hamas has tended to rely on long-term American
residents, often citizens, whereas Hezbollah’s leaders were drawn from the organization’s top
leadership who were temporarily based in the United States (Graph 3). As is the case for
Hezbollah, the conspiracies of Hamas involve only a few violent acts. Seven of the eleven
Hamas conspiracies that we were able to identify were related to fundraising. The violent
incidents occurred early. In 1994, a Hamas-sympathizer, Rashid Baz, who was a Lebanese-born
immigrant, shot at a school bus carrying Lubavitch orthodox school children, killing a 16-year24This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceold boy and wounding several others. In 1999 the incident was retroactively classified as
terrorism.
Hamas and Hezbollah also have a history of grass-roots collaboration between illegal
fundraising networks. Two men, Mufeed Attal and Murad Bisharat, were arrested and charged inMay, 2013, in connection with a massive cigarette smuggling scheme dubbed “Operation
Tobacco Road.” This allegedly made $55 million in profits that were distributed to Hamas andHezbollah.
The American diaspora organization of Hamas looks quite similar to that of Hezbollah,
except that Hezbollah has a significantly larger footprint. Jacob N. Shapiro observes in his book
The Terrorist’s Dilemma that organizational choices are determined less by ideology than by
specific political goals.48 Our analysis supports this observation with respect to the operations ofthese two groups in the United States. Hamas and Hezbollah wish to take control of theirrespective designated territories and population groups rather than to provoke a global
insurrection. For geo-strategic reasons neither has an interest in conducting attacks in the UnitedStates at the present time. The metrics used to analyze the network structures indicate that thesewere tightly controlled organizations with hardly any lateral connections to each other or tojihadists operating in the U.S. They have internally hierarchical command structures with
communications moving up and down to one or a few gatekeepers.
Both organizations have used the United States as a base for raising funds, andoccasionally as a safe harbor for important operatives. They retained the character of diaspora
organizations focused on supporting organizations in the Middle East and eschewed domestic
recruitment and mobilization for violent action in the United States. They also have many othersimilarities. Highly centralized and vertical networks, they tend to organize around large-scalefamily-based fraud conspiracies involving siblings, parents and children, spouses, in-laws,
uncles, cousins, and even more distant relatives. While the cells lacked broader connections
within the United States, they were linked to the mother organizations in Lebanon or Gaza, often
through nodes placed outside the United States.49 These are not organizations created toproselytize and recruit new members. When extra manpower is needed, they rely on ordinarycriminals rather than try to convert locals to their cause. Their goal is to deliver the goods to thecentral organization, based abroad.
Nothing suggests that Hezbollah and Hamas have engaged in community-based
25This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceradicalization with the aim of providing a structural infrastructure for enclave-based
radicalization of American citizens. To what extent the two groups can continue to call upon
more or less passive goodwill from within their different immigrant-origin constituencies in thiscountry is an open question. Reports of Hezbollah’s involvement in illicit drug trade in Latin
America, spilling into the United States, continue to capture headlines, as does the group’s close
relations with Iran, but since the 1990s there has been scant evidence of recruitment to violent
political activity in the United States. Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated supporters
now find themselves enemies rather than allies of the jihadists. Indeed, both are targeted for
hostile takeover by the jihadists.
***
Bin Laden officially declared war against “the Americans” in 1996 with the publication of thefirst of his famous fatwas, but in reality it was only in the early 1990s that he began to redirect
his considerable resources to the building of a coalition of jihadist networks to target U.S.
military installations and civilians. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Al Qaeda, Hamas andHezbollah, for all their differences, shared a radical Islamist outlook that was kick-started by the
Iranian revolution in 1979. But the organizational choices made by these groups is less a matterof ideology than the specific operational guidance that they draw from their political goals.
Hamas and Hezbollah may therefore be expected to be—in most ways—the antithesis to thejihadist networks: hierarchical and slim with cohesive operational networks.

7. AFTER 9/11: HOMEGROWN TERRORISM
Bin Laden planned and encouraged a shift to recruiting American passport holders in order tocompensate for the loss of capacity that followed Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S.-led
mission to close his camp in Afghanistan and to deny him the sanctuary from which he had beenable to coordinate a terrorist campaign against the West. The advantages of recruiting Western
citizens were immediately apparent:

In November 2001, the British-based webmaster for Azzam.com, an English-language Al
Qaeda-affiliated website registered in Connecticut, appealed to Pakistanis living in the
United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom to travel to Pakistan, pretending to visit
family and instead join Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, because only they could travel toPakistan without difficulties.50
26This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeWhen informed that Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in 2002 on suspicions ofpreparing to carry out a “dirty bomb” attack, was unwilling to carry out a suicide mission,
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and many other strikes
against American targets, including the murder of Daniel Pearl, a journalist for the WallStreet Journal, reportedly observed that many members were willing to volunteer for amartyrdom mission but “not all brothers could work in the West.”51
A handful of Americans became high-ranking members of Al Qaeda and helped torebuild it after 2001 (see Graph 4). Among the best known are Adnan El Shukrijumah, the son of
an interpreter for “the Blind Sheikh” who grew up in Brooklyn and Florida, and Adam Gadahn, ahalf-Jewish son of a California couple, who created Al Qaeda’s online publications emporium,
As-Sahab. Shukrijumah and Gadahn were killed in U.S. drone strikes.
The most famous of the Americans who departed the country in the aftermath of the 9/11
attacks and subsequently rose to a place of prominence in the global networks was Anwar alAwlaki, who left for the United Kingdom in 2002 under a cloud of suspicion about his role as apossible facilitator for the 9/11 hijackers.52 He began a public career as a speaker, giving lectures
almost daily to students at British universities. In 2005, Awlaki moved to Yemen where he wassent to prison in connection with charges related to the kidnapping of two students. In 2007, after
his release he began to develop his online English-language ministry for violent jihad. Examplesof other Americans who joined Al Qaeda at the time of the 9/11 attacks include Adnan
Shukrijumah, an American who rose in the ranks to become responsible for Al Qaeda’s external
operations, and Adam Gadahn, a Californian, who built Al Qaeda’s media production company.
All three men are now dead, killed in counterterrorism operations.53

The British Connection
The immediate post-2001 history of Al Qaeda’s recruitment in the United States is largely astory of failure. Recruits were few in numbers and belonged either to the suppressed 1993
network or were drawn in by two infamous British sheikhs, Omar Bakri Mohammad, leader ofal-Muhajiroun, and Abu Hamza al-Masri from the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London. Bothmen had attempted to extend their influence to the United States before the 9/11 attacks. Abu
Hamza tried to set up a training camp in Oregon. This never produced any tangible results but
led to his eventual imprisonment on a life-sentence in the United States in 2015.54 A group in
27
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeNew York City known as the Islamic Thinkers Society grew out of the British clerics’
recruitment effort and morphed into a homegrown network that produced some of the UnitedStates’ best-known “homegrown” terrorists but never itself produced a violent incident (seeGraph 4).
Mohammed Junaid Babar may not be well known. He is a Pakistani-American who grew
up in Queens, N.Y., where he came in contacts with a militant group established at a local
mosque by Omar Bakri Mohammed, and his organization al-Muhajiroun. Babar moved to
Pakistan one week after the 9/11 attacks. He was an unlikely recruit to the cause. His motherworked in the World Trade Center and escaped from the collapsing building after the attack.
Babar joined the British al-Muhajiroun and moved to Pakistan, where he became coordinator for
recruits heading to training camps after Al Qaeda reestablished itself in the Pakistani tribal area.
In that capacity, Babar provided assistance to the July 7 bombers and their collaborators who
were involved with a foiled attempt to blow up limousines in central London and a failed second
attack on the London Underground on July 21, 2005. Babar returned to the United States in
2004. A rare instance of a jihadist terrorist who had regrets, Babar became a witness for theprosecution in the trials against the British network.55

The Virginia Recruitment Network
An American-Pakistani recruitment ring based in the Virginia suburbs to Washington D.C. led
by Ali Al Tamimi responded to the call for American passport holders and sent a number of local
residents to training camps in Pakistan. The network had begun to send volunteers to the
Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba even before the 9/11 attacks. At that time Lashkar’s camps
trained its own recruits and also militants referred by Al Qaeda. The network emerges as the
single largest subgroup in the graphing of the post-9/11 network. (The recruitment network ismarked in the graph as the network of Mahmud Farouq Brent, a taxi driver from Baltimore who
was arrested in 2005.) Recruits may eventually have turned to focus on attacks in the UnitedStates, but it is clear that their initial ambition was to join a foreign terrorist organization andfight abroad.56

28
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeGraph 4. Jihadist Network 2002-2006.
Explanatory Note: Agents: 205, Organizations: 53, Isolates: 7, Isolate-connected ratio: .03 (7/205). Red =Americans; Blue = International operatives linked to Americans; Green = Organizations, both U.S.-based
and international. Gray = Agents who appeared in a previous time period and are linked to people who
were arrested or died in the present time frame.

A Cell in California
A California resident, Khalil Said al-Deek, made the top of the list of the next generation of
influential Americans in Al Qaeda’s ranks. SNA analytics brought al-Deek to the fore because
together with Hisham Diab he allegedly recruited Adam Gadahn to the cadre of Americans
working for Bin Laden.57 Diab and al-Deek were both fans of the “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar
Abdul-Rahman, and allegedly heard him preach at a local mosque in Anaheim, California. AlDeek was a Jordanian Palestinian who came to the United States to study computer science. He
married an American and became an American citizen through naturalization. He fought in29This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeAfghanistan and probably also Bosnia. While living in California, al-Deek ran Charity without
Borders, an Al Qaeda support group that was used for a large-scale fraud scheme bilking theState of California. He developed one of Al Qaeda’s first websites for the online distribution of
propaganda and digitalized training manuals. He is reported to have been killed in 2005 inPakistan and was featured in a “Book of Martyrs” released online in 2008, probably by al-Deek’s
protégé, Adam Gadahn.

Prison Radicalization
In 2005, law enforcement disrupted a localized cell that was on the verge of attacking
synagogues and military recruiting centers in the Los Angeles area. It was described by the FBI
as the “the one that operationally was closest to actually occurring.”58 The planned attack wasorchestrated from behind the walls of California’s New Folsom Prison, where the cell’s leader,
Kevin James, had been incarcerated for gang-related robberies since the late 1990s. The plotterswere almost hilariously incompetent. A former follower of the Nation of Islam, James founded
and recruited fellow inmates to his group, Jam’iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheed (JIS), right under thenoses of maximum security prison guards. Mark Hamm, who studied the group as part of a
project on prison radicalization, described it as adapting of gang values to the jihadist project.
Another group that also grew out of the unique African-American experimentation with Islamwas the “Liberty City Seven,” a group based in Miami that aimed to blow up the Sears Towerbuilding in Chicago. The case caused much controversy because of the stunning ineptitude of themen involved, and the FBI’s aggressive use of undercover agents.59 In this case and in the caseof Kevin James’ conspiracy, no links existed to the core of the network. These two groups areprobably unique, certainly exceptional, examples of bizarrely aspirational and “leaderless” cells.
***
By 2004, Americans outnumbered foreigners as perpetrators of Al Qaeda-inspired terrorist
activities in the United States. Yet there were few arrests in the United States, while Western
Europe experienced a number of significant terrorist incidents, including the 2004 and 2005 train
bombings in Madrid and London. “Homegrown” terrorism as a phenomenon is the directconsequence of Al Qaeda’s tactical vision, but for lack of local support structures in the form of
extremist enclaves rooted in the immigrant Muslim community it did take hold in the UnitedStates until recruitment shifted onto the internet.
30
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice8. THE TERRORIST DOT.COM INSURGENCY
Although the power and efficacy of social media recruitment is difficult to gauge, it is evident
that the template for jihadist organization changed radically with the shift to online recruitment
and organization starting in and around 2008 and continuing in the following years.

Case Study 3. RevolutionMuslim.com
Americans played key roles in developing jihadist online messaging and constructing the social
media architecture that helped to boost terrorist recruitment in recent years. A jihadist Internet
entrepreneur, Sarafaz Jamal, was the developer and proprietor of the ClearGuidance-Islamic
Networking Forum-MuslimPad family that pioneered the new architecture. Jamal moved to
Jordan in 2007 and has never been charged with any crimes.60 RevolutionMuslim.com wascreated in December 2007 by two American converts, Jesse Curtis Morton, who went by thename Younus Abdullah Mohammad, and Joseph Cohen, who called himself Yousef al-Khattab.
The anchor site was RevolutionMuslim.com, which was supplemented by nine other sites using
variants of the domain name, e.g. revolution4muslim.com. The sites were linked to a number ofmainstream file sharing platforms, including Scribd, PalTalk, BlipTV, Slideshare, and YouTube
and Facebook. At least six different YouTube channels were linked to the hub.61
Most of the bloggers on the site never met in person, and if they did meet this was only
after they had moved abroad. But when it came to planning violent incidents, the participants
formed small closely-knit cells. They also proved remarkably inept. None of the planned
incidents related to the network’s American members was successful (see Graph 5). The hub was
dominated by converts and was very diverse in terms of the ethno-racial origin of the members.
Trust was created through virtual networking, and in some cases even required love matches tomake the relationships stick. Even then, social cohesion proved tenuous.
RevolutionMuslim.com helped to spawn a new generation in the American jihadi
movement. The founders worked with a Boston-based group comprised of Daniel Maldonado,
Tarek Mehanna, and Ahmed Abousamra, and sometimes including other friends. All weremiddle-class, computer savvy, and college-bound. The group fused in 2000 when its members
started watching violent jihadi videos together. Some traveled abroad, trying to join a foreign
terrorist group several times without success. Disappointed, they debated attacking a mall in the
31
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeBoston area but they failed to obtain the desired weapons. Mehanna translated jihadist tracts andstarted tutoring a group of local youths, who he took to “Ground Zero” in Lower Manhattan tocelebrate Bin Laden’s victory. The Boston area group was deeply involved with jihadist web
forums, including one run by a small group of Britons and the AQI-inspired al-Ekhlas (seeGraph 5). The Boston group unraveled shortly after Abousamra left the United States in late
2006. Maldonado was captured in January 2007 in Kenya while fleeing Somalia, and was sent tostand trial in the United States. He was sentenced to ten years in prison in July 2007. Mehanna
was arrested in 2008 as he attempted to travel to Saudi Arabia. He was convicted on charges ofconspiracy to support terrorism. Abousamra had a degree in computer science from a Bostonarea university and allegedly helped to develop the Islamic State’s aggressive social media
campaign in 2014.62 He was reported killed in Iraq in 2015. (His death has not been confirmed.)

Graph 5. Violent Incidents Linked to RevolutionMuslim.com.
Explanatory Note: Not all plots depicted can be exclusively attributed to Revolution Muslim, but allindividuals on the graph were inspired by or involved with Revolution Muslim.

32This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeAnother American who became radicalized through the group was Samir ibn Zafar Khan,
the New York-raised editor and publisher of Inspire magazine, who was killed together with
Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. Khan began blogging in 2003 under the online
handle Inshallahshaheed (God willing, a martyr). He moved to Yemen in 2009 to work with
Awlaki, and quickly became a prominent figure in AQAP’s online publishing hub, al-Malahim(Epic Battles) Media. By April 2014 the founders and the moderators of the
RevolutionMuslim.com network had all been sentenced to prison terms or had died. Only one ofthe violent plots with which the members became involved succeeded, a knife attack against a
British Member of Parliament, Stephen Timms, who was targeted because of his vote in favor of
the Iraq war mission. The attack was carried out by a young woman who had been instructed via
her online contacts with members of the transnational RevolutionMuslim.com network. The
greatest legacy of the U.S.-based network was its spin-off, the Inspire online magazine.
Case Study 4. Anwar Al-Awlaki’s Online Proselytizing Network
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was formed in January 2009 through a union of the
Saudi and Yemeni branches of Al Qaeda. The organization quickly grew. Al-Awlaki played adual role in the organization as spiritual influence for Westerners and also as operational leaderof attacks directed against Western targets. His influence spread both through directcommunication channels, mostly online, and through the online dissemination of his audios andliterature. He would interact with followers through the comments section of his blog posts, andcorresponded by email with many of these individuals as well. The basis for his appeal was his
ability to formulate jihadist talking points in English and his accessibility through his website
www.anwar-alawlaki.com, which went offline in November 2009 following the Fort Hoodshooting.
Jihad Recollections, an online magazine that Samir Khan created independently in 2009,
lasted only four issues, but it was soon replaced by the Islamic State’s slickest production,
Inspire, an online publication in the form of an e-zine, that first appeared in June 2010. Khan
introduced the concept of “Open Source Jihad” in the second issue: “Look no further, the Open
Source Jihad is now at hands reach [sic].” This issue, published in October 2010, gave
instructions on how to use a pick-up truck “as a moving machine, not to mow grass but mow
33
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justicedown the enemies of Allah.” Later issues carried a serialized manual on how to put together aterrorist attack and injunctions to “do something; pick up a gun” and “how to make a bomb inyour mother’s kitchen.” Inspire recruited more adherents and inspired more plots, especiallyviolent ones, than any of the other hubs.
Awlaki and Khan recast Bin Laden’s message in snappy English-language memes.
Awlaki’s online ministry was largely conducted in English, and it was run by groups of English,
American, and Australian militants associated with AQAP. Khan and Awlaki were both killed byAmerican drone strikes in Yemen in late September 2011. Four years after their death, in
September 2015, APAQ’s bloggers published the fifteenth issue of Inspire. The issue mixed selfhelp advice on how to conduct a violent attack with inspirational biographies of jihadist heroes
and Q and A’s about issues of concern to anyone ready to embrace violent jihad.
We identified 65 people influenced by Awlaki who have been arrested in the UnitedStates in recent years or who have died abroad or at home, in the pursuit of terrorism (see Graph
6). Only a handful communicated with Alwaki directly but all were found to have been
consumers of his online sermons and many cited his influence in their own online statements.
Nidal Hasan, the Ft. Hood shooter, reportedly exchanged 10-20 emails with Awlaki, soliciting
advice, messages to which Awlaki responded in non-specific but perhaps suggestive or codedways.
The picture that emerges is one of small domestic cells and networks—of which theAmerican Somali network is the largest—that became structurally integrated with the foreign
terrorist nodes, specifically, the AQAP and the Somali Al Qaeda-affiliate Al Shabaab.
Paradoxically, the network analysis indicates that the dispersed homegrown terrorist
networks are more connected and more closely integrated with the transnational networks thanwere the pre-9/11networks, made up largely of foreign-origin men operating in the United States,or the pre-social media networks which largely relied on intrinsically risky international travel. A
new generation of English-speaking Westerners—mostly British—who had moved to the inner
circle took charge of “homegrown” volunteers deputized to conduct attacks.

34
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeGraph 6. Jihadist Network 2007-2011.
Explanatory Note: Agents: 215, Organizations: 41, Isolates: 10, Isolate-connected ratio: .05 (10/215). Red= Americans; Blue = International operatives linked to Americans; Green = Organizations, both U.S.based and international. Gray = Individuals who appeared in a previous time period and are linked topeople who were arrested or died in the present time frame.

The Foreign Connections
The focus of the analysis has been on U.S. residents and their direct first-hand contacts withother Americans and to foreign terrorist agents or organizations. For the specific purpose ofanalyzing homegrown terrorism this is a reasonable focus, but it has to be recognized that the
major jihadist movements are transnational, and that this approach does not do justice to themultidimensional structure of their global networks and the role played by international actors infomenting attacks in the United States. Faisal Shahzad, whose plot to set off a car bomb in Times
35
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeSquare on May 1, 2010, failed only because Shahzad did not manage to put the bomb together
correctly, was inspired by Awlaki but was otherwise a “lone actor” with no known connection toother extremists in the United States.
The linked cases of Bryant Neal Vinas, a Hispanic convert to Islam, and Najibullah Zazi,an Afghan-American who moved to Queens, NY, with his family at the age of six, illustrate theclose links between homegrown terrorism and the international organizations. The two men met
in Pakistan in 2008, where they went to a training camp run by Al Qaeda. Vinas converted in
2004, radicalized in part by listening to Awlaki’s online sermons. He traveled to Pakistan in
2007, and while there had contact with both Rashid Rauf, who had grown up in the United
Kingdom, and another Al Qaeda handler, Younes al-Mauritani. Vinas contributed to plans tobomb a Long Island commuter train in Penn Station in New York City. He was arrested in
October 2008 in Pakistan and pleaded guilty to all charges in 2009.
Najibullah Zazi and his American co-conspirators who were planning to bomb the New
York City subway became radicalized in the United States while listening to Awlaki’s sermons.
But they were trained in a camp in Pakistan and Zazi received instruction from Adnan
Shukrijumah, an American who became a high-ranking Al Qaeda operative, and also from Rauf
who may have been Shukrijumah’s boss. Zazi stayed in email contact with Rauf after he returnedto the U.S. in 2009, enabling ongoing operational control by Al Qaeda Core. The plot was
unraveled because British authorities had Rauf under electronic surveillance in connection with aplot he was managing that targeted a shopping mall. It is unclear how close Zazi and his
accomplices came to develop workable bombs when they were arrested.

9. THE TRANSFORMATION OF TERRORIST ORGANIZATION
Islamist terrorism in the United States has taken many different forms. These range from thepyramidal hierarchy of the Brooklyn-based cell to the family-based criminal fundraising schemes
run by Hamas and Hezbollah and the decentralized pop-up cells of Americans who have become
enamored of the Islamic State’s propaganda.
After the 9/11 attacks, jihadist recruitment in the United States recovered only slowly andwith the help of a new web-based recruitment strategy. The ability to push out propaganda online
neutralized geographical constraints and insulated leaders against the alert American law
enforcement agencies. The jihadists lost their integrated networks of leaders and foot soldiers,36This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justicebut the speed of cross-network communication increased. Redundancy also increased, indicatingthat the network became better integrated, with multiple communication pathways now available
to the actors. But in 2012 everything changed when the Islamic State emerged as a central
coordinating actor, once again creating a centralized command and control hubs—but utilizing
online networks for pushing out instructions.
Table 2. Social Network Comparison: Network Evolution from 2001 and Earlier to the IslamicState’s Recruitment Drive.
SNA MetricClique Count
Connectedness
DensityDensity:
Clustering
Coefficient
Efficiency:
GlobalEfficiency:
Local
Fragmentation
Hierarchy
Redundancy:
ColumnRedundancy:
Row
Span of Control
Speed: Average
Speed:
Minimum
Centrality:
InverseCloseness*
Structural
Holes:
Constraint

1993/2001

2002/2006

2007/2011

45
0.532
0.019
0.407

Change1993/20012002/2006-66.42%-36.59%-43.18%+5.72%

134
0.838
0.033
0.385

0.284

0.145

-48.80%0.160+10.42%0.023-85.75%

0.544

0.448

-17.58%0.528+17.78%0.350-33.77%

0.162
0.105
0.028

0.468
0.186
0.014

+189.7%+77.50%-49.85%

0.430
0.151
0.028

-8.15%-18.58%+92.91%

0.964
0.184
0.009

+124.0%+21.63%-68.77%

0.029

0.014

-49.85%0.028+91.15%0.009-68.25%

8.392
0.284
0.091

4.238
0.201
0.071

-49.49%-29.19%-21.43%

7.183
0.215
0.091

+69.47%+6.88%+27.27%

2.504
0.423
0.111

-65.13%+96.60%+22.22%

0.265

0.129

-51.50%0.149+15.80%0.020-86.42%

0.509

0.708

+39.03%0.652-7.80%

0.863+32.31%

52
0.570
0.032
0.504

Change2012/2015
2002/20062007/2011+15.56%18+7.18%
0.036+68.47%
0.016+23.73%0.314

Change2007/20112012/2015-65.38%-93.68%-48.83%-37.66%

Explanatory Note: * Indicates a node-level measure, all network. See Table A-2 in the appendix for an
explanation of terms.

Before 2001, the average distance across the network was 3.52 links, which is anindicator of the expected distance between two randomly selected nodes in the network. In later
years the average distance was 4.97, indicating that the networks was stretched.63 More nodes
were placed outside the U.S., and often U.S. based operatives communicated only through37
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceforeigners or through Americans based abroad. However, in recent years, from 2012 to 2015,
nearly all communication moved online and the American would-be militants mostly havewanted to join the Islamic State. In this environment the average distance shrank to 2.36. Table 2
contains the results for all measures by each time period.
The analysis highlights a dramatic transformation of the domestic jihadist networks.
Before the September 11 attacks, the domestic network was highly integrated and hierarchical,
and members had multiple contact points. The response to domestic suppression was flight or,alternatively, hiding in small cells that communicated through intermediaries. There were few
contacts points between much smaller groups of domestic operatives. Density and cross-network
communication declined after 2001, and changes in the network structure indicate greaterfragmentation. More structural “holes” appeared in the network. (These are, essentially, broken
links. See Table A-2 in the appendix for a definition).
Structural holes may be seen as a strength or as a problem for terrorists. Mark
Granovetter introduced a distinction between what he called “weak” and “strong” links in
networks. Weak links are the indirect links actors have through shared strong links with third
parties. If A is friends with B and B is friends with C, A and C share an indirect link, a “weak”
link. They are part of the same “set.” Granovetter found, based upon studies of real-life
networks, that “weak” links are instrumentally more helpful to network participants than“strong” links. But structural holes may also indicate suppression and disruption of the network’scommunication path through “decapitation” of an important link in the node. For example, saythat node A is Adam Gadahn, an American citizen who was based abroad for most of his life as ajihadist. Node B is Bin Laden, and node C is Ayman al-Zawahiri. Bin Laden communicates with
al-Zawahiri and vice versa, and Gadahn communicates with Bin Laden—but Gadahn does notcommunicate directly with al-Zawahiri. Influence and information flows from C through B to A,
without A speaking directly with C.64 However, elimination of Bin Laden from the chain createsa structural hole that disrupts communication. Therefore, the rise in “structural holes” may be at
the same an indication of the diffusion and growth of the jihadist networks—and of the ability of
the U.S. government to disrupt the networks.
It also appears that the network became more vertical, but now with leaders placedoutside the United States. Small, separate but tightly integrated cells of domestic militants did
not regularly communicate with each other but were tied to leaders situated abroad. The final
38
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceshift reflects the development of the social media and transnational networks. There is now
hardly any lateral contact between actors in the network. Connectedness, clique counts, and otherindicators of density dropped off, swiftly and radically. More structural holes emerge in the
network and redundancy ratios dropped, indicating a “thinning” of the network. Internal network
control collapsed, since the domestic actors do not talk to each other. Yet information flows pickup, as does the speed with which information can pass from one end of the network to the other.
There is leadership in the network, but the leaders speaks directly to each other and to individual
subordinates without intermediaries. Domestic actors are on their own, or isolated within a cell.
Coordination is either one-on-one or through the communication of “scripts.”65 (A “script” is a
program or sequence of instructions that is used to automate computer processes.) All of themeasures indicate an adaptive shift to a flat, non-hierarchical network built upon lateral contact
and with few crosscutting links between the nodes. This structure works well for the diffusion of
information and influence, and for recruiting people to the center: the Islamic State. It is notefficient for the allocation and optimization of network members for the purpose of large-scaledomestic operations.

10. THE FOREIGN FIGHTERS
One feature of the recruitment of Americans to the Salafi-jihadist organizations has beenremarkably constant. As soon as they become radicalized, homegrown American militants nearly
always want to go abroad to fight.
Americans seeking to travel abroad to join a foreign terrorist organization is not a newphenomenon. In the 1980s and 1990s Americans fought with Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups
in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia. After 9/11, as the number of organizations in the Salafijihadist family proliferated, Americans sought to join the group that they thought would be mostwelcoming. Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, AQAP, AQIM, the Islamic State and the Pakistani Taliban
have all sponsored Americans.66 Chart 1 shows the number of Americans who were identified
each year since 1993 as having come to the attention of law enforcement, resulting in arrests or
public designation as a terrorist. The number of Americans known to have sought to go abroad tojoin a foreign terrorist organization is also charted. In some cases arrests foiled the effort to go
abroad, in which case an individual is recorded in both lines.

39
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeNumber of Jihadists

80
75
70
65
60
55
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0

Year
Law Enforcement Contact

Death

Foreign Fighter

Chart 1. Number of American Jihadist Terrorism Offenders by Year, 1993-2015.
Explanatory Note: N = 557. Missing information = 2. Law enforcement contact here includes arrests
leading to charges and convictions, as well as charges filed in absentia and inclusion on the FBI’s Wanted
list. The line indicating foreign fighters include only successful attempts to leave the United States for the
purpose of becoming a foreign fighter. If an individual was arrested before leaving the United States, thearrest is recorded as an instance of law enforcement contact. Deaths may have occurred abroad or athome, in the United States. Years prior to 1993 not included due incomplete data.

In the past few years, domestic radicalization has been closely linked to the rise of miniemirates and jihadist-controlled areas in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. There
was a spike in travel abroad and in arrests from 2009 to 2011, when about forty AmericanSomalis attempted to join Al Shabaab, and again in 2014 and 2015, this time linked to theIslamic State. The impact of stepped-up law enforcement against travel is clearly seen in the
decline of the green line in the chart in 2015.
Fatalities of Americans fighting for foreign terrorist groups have increased apace. (A listof Americans identified as having died in connection with terrorist activity may be found in the
appendix in Table A-1.) Thirteen Americans are known to have died in Somalia, in suicide
attacks or as combatants with Al Shabaab, but there may be more, unrecorded, deaths. The
precise identities of some of the Americans who are reported to have died in Syria or Iraq
40
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justicefighting with ISIL are not known, but 18 Americans are thought to have died there between 2013
and 2015.

The American-Somali Network
The ability of the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab to attract young fighters of Somali origin
became a preoccupation for law enforcement when, over a period of a few years, forty or
more young men from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area traveled to Somalia or attempted to go
there. A number died as suicide bombers. Al Shabaab’s recruitment drive was also successful
among non-Somalis in search of adventure. One was Jehad Serwan Mostafa, the American who
perhaps reached the most senior position within Al Shabaab. Mostafa grew up and attended
college in the San Diego area, and left for Somalia in 2005. He is on the FBI’s Most Wanted
Terrorists List. His whereabouts are not known.67 Another American with no Somali lineage whojoined Al Shabaab was Omar Hammami (Abu Mansur al-Amriki), who grew up in grew up in
Daphne, Alabama. He became a media star, appearing on Al Jazeera. At one point, he livestreamed an attack on himself by his former comrades in Al Shabaab. The group killed him in
September 2013.68
Zakaria Maruf was one of the youths from Minneapolis who joined Al Shabaab and who
left the United States for Somalia in successive waves starting in 2007. Maruf came to the U.S.
as a young teenager and became involved in local street gangs. After joining Al Shabaab, herecruited others in his community via email, social media contacts, and phone calls. He waskilled in Mogadishu in 2009. The American-Somali network so dominated the analysis of
American jihadists fighting in foreign insurgencies that the key actors in the Somali network all
turned up highest in our measures. American Somalis who were ranked as top “influencers” inthe network (Eigenvector centrality) were: Abdirahman Gullet, Mohamed Abikar, Adan Hussein,
Abdiwelli Yassin Isse, and Shirwa Ahmed. Gullet was inspired by Ahmad and Burhan Hassan,
also a friend from Minneapolis. Abikar and Hussein were both friends with Gullet and traveled
to Somalia together, while Isse was a recruiter for Minnesotan Somalis. Ahmed killed 22 U.N.
aid workers and Somalis working with the U.N. in Somalia in October 2008 in a suicide attack.
At the same time, domestic groups emerged that acted as flypaper for young Americans
who became attracted to jihadist rhetoric before they moved on to try, and in many cases fail, tojoin Al Shabaab, or else Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Among the most influential
41
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceorganizations were Abubakar as-Saddique, a mosque in Minneapolis, where some of the young
American-Somalis met; RevolutionMuslim.com, a virtual organization; and two Queens, N.Y.
based organizations, Islamic Circle of North America and Islamic Thinker's Society. All featured
as meeting places for this new generation of radicalized fighters (see Graph 6).

Case Study 5. Making Hijra to the Islamic StateIn 2014 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq renamed itself “the Islamic State” andproclaimed its own worldwide caliphate. It took physical control of a swath of territory the sizeof a mid-sized European country (albeit largely devoid of settlement outside the river valleys),and opened its doors to anyone who could get there—teenager, male and female, former fighters
who had retired and wannabes who had never held a gun. The declaration of a new “caliphate”
provided legitimation to the claim that is a religious obligation for Muslims to migrate to ISIL’s
territory. This was termed making hijra, a reference to the flight of Muhammad from Mecca toMedina to escape persecution in 622.
The United States took a strong enforcement stance from the beginning, arresting anyone
who tried to go to the so-called caliphate in Iraq or Syria. Hundreds of Americans arenevertheless thought to have joined ISIL. The number is low compared to Europe, where as
many as ten thousand individuals have migrated to the caliphate.69 About one-fifth of the number
thought to have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join ISIL have been publicly identified, by name oralias. Though the data are incomplete, it is evident that, compared to previous jihadist
insurgencies, the Americans who have left to go and fight in Syria and Iraq –or have tried to do
so—are younger and are for the most part native-born citizens. Few have family connections to
Syria. Most do not speak Arabic.
By 2014, the American Somalis had switched their allegiance to the Islamic State.
It came as a surprise when a group of ten young American Somalis from Minneapolis tried toleave to go to the Islamic State. (The network is marked in Graph 7.) Until that time, theAmerican Somalis had been seen as instances of diaspora terrorism, linked by kinship ties tohomeland conflicts. The shift indicated that the second-generation American Somalis weresociologically akin to the generic homegrown recruits, and were less tied to ethno-nationalist
affinities. Only one young man from the group, Abdi Nur, made it to the Islamic State. Anotherlocal man, Abdirizak Mohamed Warsame, was arrested and in January 2016 pleaded guilty to
42This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceorganizing the travel.70 Twenty-year old Warsame took the lead in organizing the posse of his
friends. He stands out as a “leader” in the network at large only because the Minneapolis youths
comprised a fairly large cell and Warsame appears to have shown the most initiative inorganizing the young men’s travels. Their contact with the Islamic State was another American,
Douglas McArthur McCain, a 34-year old convert to Islam who grew up in Minneapolis and had
traveled to Syria with Somali friends from San Diego. McCain died in August 2014.

Somali Network

Graph 7. Jihadist Network 2012-2015.
Explanatory Note: Agents: 123, Organizations: 7, Isolates: 13, Isolate-connected ratio: .11 (13/123). Red= Americans; Blue = International operatives linked to Americans; Green = Organizations, both U.S.based and international, and online as well as real-life. Gray = Individuals who appeared in a previous
time period and are linked to people who were arrested or died in the present time frame..

American Somali youths may have been particularly susceptible to the idea of becoming
a foreign fighter because they heard about the opportunity through their friends, brothers, and43This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceonline through role models who had already made hijra to join a foreign terrorist organization. In
these cases, it is not so much that an individual radicalizes. Rather, a whole group is radicalized,
and the individual follows along.71
In late 2014 and the first half of 2015, an uptick took place in small-cell or lone actor
plots inspired by individuals who one reason or another opted to “do something” at home rather
than travel.72 Several of these aimed to use pressure cooker bombs similar to those used by the
Boston Marathon bombers. Others involved plots involving providing support for ISIL andattacks on police, all actions endorsed by ISIL recruiters. Two-thirds of the plots (by our count)
were disrupted due to tracking by the FBI of the cell members’ online activities.
ISIL’s propaganda deftly plays on the rewards of joining up. Promises of the camaraderie
of brotherhood help frame the sales pitch to gullible disenchanted Western youths ready to rebel
against parental controls, school, or to escape a life marked by gangs and drugs. In the caliphate,you will be in charge, it is promised. The mujahidin call the shots.73 ISIL early on delegatedonline recruitment to Western audiences to English-speaking fighters. They were able to tailor
the propaganda to Muslims in the West and also to speak with authenticity derived from theirreal-life exploits. That some of them were notorious for taking part in gruesome acts of violence
provided validity and added to the allure.74
Recruitment networks funneling people abroad look very different from the networks ofthe past that focused on perpetrating attacks at home. The Islamic State’s recruitment structure
presents a classic pattern of what is known as a star network, e.g. a communication network inwhich all nodes are independently connected to one central unit, here the recruiters for theIslamic State. This acts as a central switch or a hub. In a star network the failure of peripheral
nodes does not affect the other nodes or the center. If the hub fails, however, the network
collapses. The American-Somali youths illustrated another aspect of a star network: theperipheral nodes may switch their allegiance to a different hub.
***The star network structure is typical for a new type of organization has come tocharacterize homegrown terrorism in recent years: peer based, disaggregated and diffused, they
become linked to the international network through online friends and peer groups. These werecomprised of teenagers, or “fanboys” (and more than a few “fangirls”), of supporters who may
not be in the insurgency zone but eagerly communicate with friends who are. Flat, dispersed, and44This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justicehighly connected through online media, social media network algorithms can find hardly any
leadership structure in the network (see Graph 7). The peripheral nodes may be comprised of justone person linking up via a home computer or the node may be a pop-up cell of friends andfamily. But characteristically they have little awareness of each other.
Real-life organizations and their tactics drive the online world of Salafi-jihadism, not viceversa. The star-network structure is driven by the prioritization of recruitment over fermenting
localized extremist communities—but also by the architecture of the social media environment.
Building a resilient social media presence requires organization. Online, the recruiters push“scripts” for what to do on frontline open social media platforms and exploit new encrypted
technologies to redirect individuals who appear open to radicalization to engage in directmarketing recruitment tactics.75
Responding to public outcry (and pressures from Congress), the service provider in late2015 started to suppress Twitter accounts that were identified as extremist. Pushing terrorist
communications off frontline social media like Twitter has some short term benefits, perhaps,
but will also have some costs. The policy change significantly degraded the global ISIL-relatedsocial media networks, supposedly making it more difficult for recruiters to market their ideas.76
But suppression may not hamper the ability of the terrorist organizations to exploit online
communications as effectively as is often assumed. Making contact through thinly veiled
recruitment postings is still easy, and non-English and mixed language threads, specifically,
accounts pushing out messaging in Arabic, Urdu, and Russian, continue to flourish.
Suppression efforts coincide with the increased availability of new apps and a choice oftechnologies—specifically the retailing of encryption technologies—that have encouraged theshift of terrorist online communications to the “dark” net. Pushing suppression of extremist
content further from the elimination of direct threats or extreme violence to include
proselytizing, such as, sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki or Inspire Magazine’s recipes for “how tomake a bomb in your mother’s kitchen” jeopardizes a broad range of material that can be used inresearch and undermines cherished civil liberties to publish offending texts and speech. It should
not be done, and probably cannot be done without violating constitutional principles. Pragmaticand tactical concerns also suggest that being mildly tolerant of jihadist extremism online is thebetter approach. Gains may be made in restricting the retailing of extremism to vulnerable youths
only to be lost in prevention capabilities. Online data have proven of value to law enforcement.
45This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeThe ability to push out counter-messaging also depends upon access to data that make it possible
to identify the memes (ideas and symbols) and the population groups targeted by terrorist
recruiters.

11. DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE
The impact of online recruitment is felt, above all, in the diffusion of jihadist extremism acrossthe American map and the demographic mosaic. Twenty years ago, to meet a jihadist you had to
go to a mosque or an extremist bookstore, or perhaps find a discrete Internet café. Today anyone
can meet a jihadist online or in real life. Jihadists are on Facebook and on Twitter, WhatsApp,
and Instagram. You can use PalTalk or encrypted online communications tools like TOR to
speak privately. The third-generation social media environment, sometimes referred to as Web
3.0, has neutralized geography.77 Sitting by yourself in the Midwest, you can feel you are part ofa mighty and populous community. In 2015 investigations related to the Islamic State were in
progress in all 50 states.78

SomaliPakistani

White-European

African-American

Palestinian

Egyptian

Yemeni

Latino-American

Jordanian

Saudi

Afro-Caribbean

Albanian

Lebanese

SyrianSudanese

Uzbeki

Iraqi

AfghanMoroccanSlavicBengali

Algerian

Filipino

IndianIranian

Kuwaiti

LatinoTurkishBosnianChechen

EthiopianKurdishVietnamese

Eritrean

Indo-Caribbean

IndonesianKazakhKoreanLibyan

MalaysianMaldivianNigerian

Qatari

Sub-SaharanTunisian

Ugandan

46
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeChart 2. Ethnicities by Number of American Jihadists.
Explanatory Note: N = 509. Missing = 48. Smaller circle represents ethnicities with three or fewer
individuals.

The population that is potentially vulnerable to recruitment has become remarkably
diversified. In the 1990s, Al Qaeda and the Egyptian networks in the United States drewfollowers from a relatively predictable list of displaced militants from North African and Middle
Eastern Islamist groups and African-Americans whose extremism had already been nurtured
within the fringe of Black Muslim groups that trace descent from the Nation of Islam. Today, no
discernible ethno-national profile exists, as seen in Chart 2. Always high, the ratio of naturalborn Muslims to converts has varied greatly, approximating a 60-40% split in recent years. This
indicates that being born a Muslim is not the crucial factor shaping the chances of becoming aterrorist in the name of Islam.
The new recruitment tactics also drew in far younger followers. Multiple factors play into
the generational shift apparent in the data, and it cannot be said how much of the trend towards
far younger terrorism perpetrators may be explained by online proselytizing and recruitment, but
it has to be assumed to be a significant factor. Teenagers trying to join the Islamic State havereceived much media attention but the risk posed to domestic security by older men—and
increasingly women – should not be discounted. 60% of the offenders who engaged in domestic
attacks in the last five years were under 27 and 80% were under 30, but 1 in 5 of domestic
violent incidents have been committed by men older than 35. Moreover, no specific age profile
exists for non-violent terrorism offenses (e.g. fundraisers and recruiters).
Nevertheless, there is a large—and persistent—age spread between different substrata of
the homegrown jihadist population. Individuals with criminal histories unrelated to politicalextremism, most commonly convictions related to drugs or assault, were on average five years
older than offenders with no prior criminal convictions. The non-criminal element typicallyembraced violent extremism right out of high school or college.79 Among American jihadists,
fifty percent of the non-violent offenders are above the age of 34. Nevertheless, the age ofjihadist-inspired terrorists has declined dramatically over the years, from a mean age in the midthirties in the early 1990s to the low twenties in recent years. The peak age for becoming aforeign fighter dropped from 27 to 21 over the past twenty years.80 Since 2008, 90% of theforeign fighters were between the ages of 15 and 31. Moreover, the number of individuals
joining a foreign insurgency now drops off sharply after the age of 33.
47
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice12. INFERENCES AND RECOMMENDATIONS2015 ended with a record number of arrests in the U.S. related to Salafi-jihadist inspired
terrorism, the highest count since the 9/11 attacks. Jihadist recruitment has reached into small
and mid-sized cities in every state of the country and attracted adherents from some 40 different
ethnicities in the American demographic mix and all races.
Opportunity, access, and persuasion all have a role to play in the current process of
jihadist recruitment. Today all three may be found online. Internet-based marketing of Salafijihadist ideas has facilitated a dramatic demographic change in the demographic composition of
the susceptible population. With over forty different ethnicities represented, stratified by age,
race, gender, and religious background, today’s jihadists are extremely diverse.
The real threat notwithstanding, violent extremism is a marginal problem involving only a few
individuals.
Given the extraordinary diversity of American homegrown terrorism offenders, nocommon denominator, no common grievances, not even common motivations, can predict who
may opt to join groups espousing violent jihad. The root cause lies not at home, in the families ofthe offenders, their communities, or in this country, but with a global terrorist movement that has
been able to piggy-back on modern communication technologies, media, and a globalized social
consciousness to push its belief system into every corner of the world.
Preventive responses must take account of two key factors:Homegrown terrorism is high risk and can happen anywhere; but,The risk population is small, and no specific identifiers mark out who may be a risk.

Rarely do the homegrown militant go at it alone. Friends and family, classmates, and spouses
found online on jihadist dating sites are drawn into small pop-cells dedicated to putting extremist
ideas into practice. Radicalization to violent political extremism is more likely to occur in agroup setting where the adoption of extremist ideas is reinforced by shared emotions, particularly
if the process is accompanied by positive external reinforcements. Watching online extremist
videos and chatting with online avatars from the Islamic State is not sufficient to make someone
take a life-changing decision to join a terrorist group. But with the added effect of groupreinforcement and a deepening involvement with the extremist networks, both off-line andonline, becoming a terrorist can come to seem a desirable cause of action for an individual.
48
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeSocial media extremism and offline activities blend into a contagion vortex. Young men
and women have joined the Islamic State in patterns similar to chain migration, following in thefootsteps of others from their town or neighborhood and settling with friends and family or
newfound peers. The importance of social media maybe explained in part at least by the easewith which it bridges the gap between home and the new life.
The network perspective indicates that homegrown terrorism is rarely “leaderless.” Thecharacterization is misleading, even in the contemporary online media environment, because it
underestimates the degree of deliberation and management that is exercised by those who
operate the networks. All terrorist networks are specialized. Networks created for fundraising aredifferent from those that are designed for recruitment to join a foreign terrorist organization, andthese are different again from networks intended to foster and guide domestic attacks.
Since 9/11 and until recently, most American Islamist extremists have been connected toa core network of jihadist organizations and recruiters based abroad, either through travel anddirect personal relationships with middle-men acting for the terrorist organization. Since thedismantlement of the network responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center, these hubs havebeen located outside the United States. The contemporary network configuration may bedescribed as “glocal”—globally connected and inspired, but taking shape locally in peer groups
and small cells. The resulting network structure is often entirely devoid of cross-cell integration
within the United States, complicating enforcement approaches that historically have aimed topick up overt manifestations of political extremism.
The diffused risk picture and aggressive messaging to “do something”—immediately—
pushed out by ISIL recruiters have proved to represent a formidable challenge. The FBI has
successfully disrupted many cells in recent years but since the Boston Marathon Bombings in2013 there has been an increase in actualized attacked (even if not always successful). A rash ofincidents that were either prevented or involving few victims, often police, took place in 2014.
There were also shooting attacks by individuals who professed their allegiance to the IslamicState. The most notorious were those perpetrated by Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi in Garland,
TX, in May 2015 (whose attack was stopped at the scene), Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez inJuly 2015 in Chattanooga, Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook in San Bernardino in
December 2015, and Omar Mateen in Orlando in June 2016.

49
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeClearly, current anti-terrorism policies have been better at disrupting attacks—andsometimes failed at that—than at preventing radicalization in the first place. Following from thisanalysis, a few recommendations may be put forward:“If You See Something, Say Something”
Alert bystanders are being asked to report suspicious activity. But what are bystanders supposed
to see? Family members and spouses are often the first to know when a person is about to dosomething. American homegrown terrorists rebel against the nation and their parents, and against
the American Muslim community. Spouses are often involved, or if not involved they know thatcriminal action is in progress—and yet they do not inform the police. A duty to report could
perhaps push family and close bystanders to come forward. Parents may fear the repercussions
for their children or deny to themselves that a dangerous situation is developing, or they may
desperately seek the assistance of law enforcement agencies. This has recently led to a number ofarrests. Young offenders are sometimes identified before they have committed serious crimes
when bystanders, parents or law enforcement agencies recognized the risk posed by their Internet
activities or involvement with militant peer groups.
Recommendation 1—Focus on community education: There is a real risk that American
Muslims will be unfairly stereotyped in the absence of a clearly formulated public
education program that focus on signs of radicalization to violent extremism. The
growing involvement of converts and the diffusion of risk outside the metropolitan areas
suggests a need to educate community leaders, teachers, prison wardens and social
workers in the detection of the signs of dangerous radicalization
Recommendation 2—Establish a duty to report: State and federal laws should make it aduty to report suspicions about imminent criminal activity related to terrorism. The legal
construction may mirror current rules regarding the obligation to report child abuse if thefamily member, teacher, or community member has “cause to believe” that a risk to the
public exists. Such reports will be confidential and the source protected against
prosecution, unless the source is also involved in potentially criminal activities (e.g., afriend who has been involved in watching online extremism but does not want to go
further will be protected against prosecution when reporting the activities of othermembers of the group).
Recommendation 3—Develop court-enforced treatment programs: Youthful offenders
may best be dealt with through court-ordered treatment programs. Isolating youthful
offenders from exposure to the influence of hardened extremists—whether in or out of

50
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceprison—is a high priority. If parents know that their sons and daughters will be placed intreatment programs they may be encouraged to turn to law enforcement.
Profile the Networks—All the Networks
Social network analysis may provide a fuller picture of an individual’s risk profile if it is used to
profile all contact points, ranging from social media networks to offline engagements with othermilitants.
Recommendation 4—Disrupt and prevent the development of localized extremist hubs:
Geo-tagging online extremist activities and patterns of arrests indicative of networked
radicalization can reveal hidden recruitment structures.
Recommendation 5—Watch for cumulative influence networks: Social network analysis
methodologies that combine real-life and online network graphing may be more effectivein identifying imminent threats arising from the activities of radicalizing homegrownterrorists than online profiling alone.81 SNA metrics that identify “structural holes” andcliques may be helpful in identifying influence structures that are not immediately
apparent. Travel, contacts with other radicals, and, perhaps most importantly, contact
with sites of inspiration abroad, present a picture of cumulative network relationships.
Disrupt Travel to Insurgencies
Preventing the development of hidden communities of extremism should continue be a highpriority. The European experience with concentrated and sizable radical enclaves in midsized
cities illustrates the risk posed by neighborhood effects. The involvement of former gangmember or soldiers who have converted to radical Islam or, perhaps, who entered militarytraining already radicalized, has been a disturbing new trend in Europe.
Recommendation 6—Continue to disrupt and intercept travel to foreign terrorist
organizations and insurgencies: Monitoring and controlling participation in foreign
insurgencies have become an urgent issue in recent years, as the number of Americans
participating in lethal attacks abroad has increased. Withdrawal of passports is one tool.
Suppress Internet Producers (Not Consumers) of Online Violent Extremism
A policy of indiscriminate suppression of terrorist communication on frontline open social media
platforms is comparable to disconnecting the fire alarms all over the house. It deprives law
enforcement of important tools for tracking domestic terrorist networks by forcing online
extremists to migrate to domains and service providers that exercise less control over content or

51
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justiceno control at all. (Removing online content containing direct threats or that violates the rights ofvictims and their families should remain a high priority.) Pushing online extremism onto
encrypted sites will also make it more difficult for parents, authorities, and concerned bystanders
to detect early signs of radicalization. Moreover, it makes it impossible to deliver targeted online
counter-messaging to population groups considered to be vulnerable to terrorist recruiters.
Current approaches target the consumers of violent extremism online. The focus should
be on top-down suppression of the purveyors of extreme political violence rather than bottom-up
elimination of militant social media activists. Many would-be terrorists are caught online. That
does not mean that they radicalized online. Moreover, online data have proven of value to law
enforcement. Therefore, policy should focus on targeting and suppressing the recruiters rather
than retail-level consumers of terrorist propaganda. Some countries, including France and theUnited Kingdom, have criminalized “the glorification of terrorism” and the possession of certain
types of extremist material with intent to use. Bans on communicating with certain individuals
and enforced bans on the use of the internet are routine aspects of European protocols for dealing
with individuals under probation in connection with international terrorism that could be
implemented.
Recommendation 7—Suppress Producers Rather Than Consumers Of Violent Extremism
Online: Criminalization of material support for terrorism online would enable law
enforcement to monitor online extremism publication hubs, ban people from using theinternet for a period, and even detention.

52
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeAPPENDIX
Table A-1: Deceased American Jihadists 1993-2015.
Name
Mohammed Zaki
Lawrence Nichols Thomas
Bassam Kanj
Mir Qazi*
Hesham Hedayet**
Kamal Derwish
Habis Abdulla Al Saoub
Khalil al-Deek
Ruben Shumpert
Shirwa Ahmed
Mohamud Ali Hassan
Burhan Hassan
Jamal Bana
Zakaria Maruf
Troy Kastigar
Moeed Abdul Salam
Abdisalam Ali
Cabdulaahi Ahmed Faarax
Farah Mohamed Beledi
Keyse Omar Hashi
Samir Ibn Zafar Khan
Anwar Nasser Al Awlaqi
Khattab Al-Kene
Jude Kenan Mohammad
Inaam (alias)
Omar Hammami
Amiir Farouk Zaki Ibrahim
Nicole Lynn Mansfield
Tamerlan Tsarnaev
Abdullah Ramo Pazara
Ibrahim Abdurahman Mohamed
Yusuf Ali
Abu Muhammad Al-Amriki (alias)
Abu Dujana Al-Amriki (alias)
Abdirahman Muhumed
Douglas McAuthur McCain
Hanad Abdullahi Mohallim
Sixto Ramiro Garcia
Moner Mohammed Abusalha
Zale H. Thompson
Eric Omar Harroun
Adam Yahiye Gadahn
Ahmad Abousamra (not confirmed)
Abdul AliyYear of Death Country of Death Cause of Death
1995
Chechnya
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
1997
Kashmir
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2001
LebanonKilled in Insurgent Fighting
2002
United States
Execution
2002
United States
Killed in Police Incident
2002
Yemen
Airstrike
2003
Afghanistan
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2005
Afghanistan
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2008
Somalia
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2008
Somalia
Suicide Attack
2009
Somalia
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2009
Somalia
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2009
Somalia
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2009
Somalia
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2009
Somalia
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2011
Pakistan
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2011
Somalia
Suicide Attack
2011
Somalia
Suicide Attack
2011
Somalia
Suicide Attack
2011
Somalia
Suicide Attack
2011
Yemen
Airstrike
2011
Yemen
Airstrike
2013
Kenya
Suicide Attack
2013
Pakistan
Airstrike
2013
Pakistan
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2013
Somalia
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2013
Syria
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2013
Syria
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2013
United States
Killed in Police Incident
2014
Iraq
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2014
Somalia
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2014
Syria
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2014
Syria
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2014
Syria
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2014
Syria
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2014
Syria
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2014
Syria
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2014
Syria
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
2014
Syria
Suicide Attack
2014
United States
Killed in Police Incident
2014
United States
Suicide/Overdose
2015
Afghanistan
Airstrike
2015
Iraq
Airstrike
2015
Iraq
Killed in Insurgent Fighting

53
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeAbu Usama al-Amriki (alias)
2015
Iraq
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
Abu Dawoud al Amriki (alias)
2015
Iraq
Suicide Attack
Abu Abdullah Al Amriki (alias)
2015
Iraq
Suicide Attack
Raja Muhammad Salman
2015
Pakistan
Airstrike
Shawn Joel Parson
2015
Syria
Airstrike
Abu Bara al-Mexiki (alias)
2015
Syria
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
Khaled al-Dusari
2015
Syria
Killed in Insurgent Fighting
Elton Simpson
2015
United States
Killed in Police Incident
Nadir Soofi
2015
United States
Killed in Police Incident
Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez
2015
United States
Killed in Police Incident
Usaama Rahim
2015
United States
Killed in Police Incident
Farook Syed2015
United States
Killed in Police Incident
Malik Tashfeen
2015United States
Killed in Police Incident
Earl Jackson
2015
United States
Killed in Police Incident
Omar Mateen
2016
United States
Killed in Police Incident* Pakistani. Lived in the U.S. for about four years before carrying out a shooting attack on the CIA’s
Langley campus.
** Egyptian. Probably was a member of the Egyptian al-Gama'a al-Islamiyaa. Lived in the U.S. for nearlyten years before carrying out a shooting attack on the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport.

54
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeTable A-2: A Dictionary of Terms in Social Network Analysis.
A clique of an undirected network is defined as a maximal complete subgraph of three or more nodes.
Computes the number of distinct cliques to which actors in an undirected network belong. The higher
the number the more pathways actors have to contact other actors in the network.
Connectedness and density are different measures of essential the same thing. Both metrics measuresthe degree to which the underlying network is connected. Density is calculated as the ratio of actual
connections to all possible, theoretical connection, if every node was connected to all other nodes.
Efficiency measures the closeness of the entities (or actors) in the network, with global efficiency
measures the geodesic distance between all pairs in the network. This is essentially a measure of thereach that any nodes has to the rest of the network (on average) through neighbors. A low number
indicates that node A’s contacts do not have good contacts to the rest of the network. It may therefore
be said to be an indicator of overall network integration, or vice versa of the degree of isolation that theactors in the network experience.
Fragmentation measures the proportion of entities in a network that are disconnected. The higher thenumber, the less integrated the network. Hierarchy measures the degree of one-way (hierarchical) links
in the network. The measure assumes that links are coded to indicate direction. In this case the network
data were coded to reflect who contacts whom. It should be said that many link types in the data set arereciprocal, e.g. “brother of” or “associate of.”
Redundancy in social network analysis indicates the multiplication of contacts. If A is connected to B
and all A’s contacts also are connected to B, A’s contact does not bring any new information or
influence to the network. “Doubling up” of contacts in a dark network is often seen as a protection
against suppression. Typically, in the online world, terrorists use redundant lateral postings to build
resilience against takedowns. The theoretical expectations in this regard are somewhat ambiguous
because in a classical covert network redundancy would be seen perhaps as source of risk increasing
the likelihood of detection.
Speed and closeness measures are different measures of how quickly information can travel in a
network. The shortest path between two nodes is called a geodesic, and the geodesic distance between
two nodes is the shortest path of communication between the nodes. Minimum speed is defined as the
maximum shortest path length between node pairs (actor A  B) where there is a path in the networkfrom A to B. A hierarchical network may be slow to react because news travels slowly through thechain of command. In contrast, news may travel fast in a centralized but flat network, such as thatcreated by Anwar al-Awlaki’s online community where news and influence can quickly reach the otherside of the network through the center.
Structural holes are gaps in a network. If A knows B and C also know B, but A does not communicate
with C there is a structural hole between A and C. From the viewpoint of law enforcement, growing
structural holes may be seen as a good thing in terrorist networks. If A and C are both in the U.S. and B
is outside the country, the capability for A to conspire with C is reduced because both are dependent on
B to put them in touch.

55
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeArticles Published From the Research (Peer Review)“College Graduates and Dropouts – Pathways to Becoming a Domestic Terrorist Offender. A Comparisonof Recruitment Profiles for “Homegrown” American Jihadists and Associates of the Earth
Liberation Movement and the Army of God.” With Cristina Ferlauto and Rosanne Libretti.
(Under review.)“The Terrorist Age-Crime Curve: An Analysis of American Islamist Terrorist Offenders and AgeSpecific Propensity for Participation in Violent and Non-Violent Incidents” (with Tyler Morrill,& Rosanne Libretti). Special Issue Dedicated to the 20th Anniversary of the Oklahoma City
Bombing.” Social Science Quarterly. Volume 97, Issue 1, pp. 19–32, March 2016. Open access;
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.12249/abstract“A Behavioral Model of ‘Homegrown’ Radicalization Trajectories,” (with Selene Campion, Nathan
Needle, Giang Nguyen, and Rosanne Libretti), Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. Vol. 39, Iss. 1,(2016), pp. 67-83, Open Access:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1057610X.2015.1099995.
“Tweeting the Jihad: Social Media Networks of Western Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq.” Studies in
Conflict and Terrorism. Vol. 38, Iss. 1, (2015), pp. 1-22, Open access:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1057610X.2014.974948)
General Readership“Europe's Real Border Problem. Openness Isn't the Issue.” Foreign Affairs, November 16, 2015.
(Available at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/france/2015-11-16/europes-realborderproblem.)“France on Fire”: The Charlie Hebdo Attack and the Future of Al Qaeda.” Foreign Affairs. January 7,
2015. (Available at: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/142758/jytte-klausen/france-on-fire.)“They’re Coming. Measuring the Threat from Returning Jihadists.” Foreign Affairs, October 1, 2014.
(Available at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iraq/2014-10-01/theyre-coming.)
Reprinted in The New Global Context. A Davos Reader, for the World Economic Forum (WEF)
in Davos, Switzerland, January 2015.
Working Papers(Available upon request)“Exploration of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Twitter Account Activities and Patterns.” With
Christopher Marks (Lt.Col.), Krishan Rajagopalan (Ens.), Dr. Tauhid Zaman. Working paper.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Western Jihadists in the Syrian and Iraqi Insurgencies. Working Paper #4. The Western Jihadism Project.
August 2014. (with Adrienne Roach). Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. (91 pages)“Open Source Jihad”: Online Mobilization for Domestic Attacks. Working Paper #3. The Western
Jihadism Project. May 2013. (with Aaron Y. Zelin and Adrienne Roach). Brandeis University,
Waltham, Massachusetts. (74 pages)

56This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeMapping the Evolution of Islamist Terrorist Networks in the United States: Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al
Qaeda-Inspired Groups, 1993-2013. Working Paper #2. The Western Jihadism Project. August
2013 (with Eliane Tschaen Barbieri, Adrienne Roach, and Zachary Herman). Brandeis
University, Waltham, Massachusetts. (64 pages)
The Demographic Bases of Terrorist Recruitment in the United States, 1993-2013. Working Paper #1.
The Western Jihadism Project. August 2013. (with Adrienne Roach, Eliane Tschaen Barbieri, andZachary Herman.) Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. (61 pages)

57
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeNOTES
1National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Thomas H. Kean and Lee
Hamilton, 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Uponthe United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004):145ff.
Simon Jeffery, Mat Smith, and Agencies, “London Bombs ‘Were First British Suicide Attacks,’”
Guardian, 12 July 2005.
2

3

Home Office, Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005, no.
HC1087 2005-06 (London: The Stationary Office, May 2006); Intelligence and Security Committee,
Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005, no. CM 6785 (London: The Stationary Office,May 2006):26. The assessment soon entered conventional wisdom, see Daniel Benjamin, and Steven
Simon, The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right, (NewYork: Macmillan, 2006):283.
4

Robert S. Leiken, “Europe’s Angry Muslims,” Foreign Affairs 84, no.4 (2005).

5

Alan B. Krueger, What Makes a Homegrown Terrorist? Human Capital and Participation in
Domestic Islamic Terrorist Groups in the U.S.A. (Princeton University, 2008); Alan B. Krueger and Jitka
Malečková, “Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?” The Journal of
Economic Perspectives 17, no.4 (2003):119–44.
Bruce Hoffman, “Radicalization and Subversion: Al Qaeda and the 7 July 2005 Bombings and the2006 Airline Bombing Plot,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 32 (2009):1100-1116. Fernando Reinares,“The 2004 Madrid Train Bombing,” The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osamabin Laden’s Death, ed. Bruce Hoffman and Fernando Reinares (New York: Columbia University Press,
2014):29-60.
6

In 1999 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi launched a new movement under the name of “the organization ofmonotheism and jihad.” In 2004 this became Al Qaeda in Iraq, when al-Zarqawi pledged loyalty to Bin
Laden. The group was previously also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (referred to as
ISIL, and sometimes following a different transliteration of the name as ISIS).
7

8

The term covers acts of terrorism planned or carried out against Western states in the name of Al
Qaeda or like-minded organizations by individuals born (or raised) in the West, see: Jerome P. Bjelopera
and Mark A. Randol, American Jihadist Terrorism: Combating a Complex Threat (Library of Congress
Congressional Research Service: Washington DC, 2010).
Jytte Klausen, “A Behavioral Study of the Radicalization Trajectories of American ‘Homegrown’
Al Qaeda-Inspired Terrorist Offenders,” The U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice
Programs/National Institute of Justice Final Report, Award # 2013-ZA-BX-0005, Brandeis University,
June 2016.
9

For divergent views see: Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones, “Assessing the Dangers ofIllicit Networks,” International Security 33, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 7–44, and Arie Perliger and Ami Pedahzur,“Social Network Analysis in the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence,” PS: Political Science &Politics 44, no.1 (2011): 45-50.
10

The movement descended from Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda is often described as a fusion of
Salafist religious dogma with the conception of, as an immediate obligation to engage in armed struggle,
see: Daniel Byman, “Fighting Salafi-Jihadist Insurgencies: How Much Does Religion Really
Matter?” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 36, no.5 (2013): 353-371; Petter Nesser, “Ideologies of jihad in
Europe,” Terrorism and Political Violence 23, no.2 (2011): 173-200.
1158This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeThe use of the term to designate “domestic fighters” as well as “foreign fighters” is a classic
example of “conceptual stretching”, the adaptation of a category to include a broadening range ofoccurrences that may not really be instances of “the same.” David Collier and James E. Mahon Jr.,“Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis,” The American
Political Science Review 87, no.4 (December 1993):845-855.
12

13

Tashfeen Malik, one of the San Bernardino shooters and the wife of Syed Rizwan Farook, an
American citizen, appears to have been an example of someone who arrived wanting to strike but waitedfor years, see: Richard A. Serrano and Brian Bennett, “San Bernardino Shooters Began Plotting Attack
before Their Marriage, FBI Chief Says,” Los Angeles Times, 9 December 2015.
Bruce Hoffman, “The Myth of Grass-Roots Terrorism: Why Osama bin Laden Still Matters,”
Foreign Affairs 87, no.3 (May/June 2008):133-138; Bruce Hoffman, “Al Qaeda’s Uncertain Future.”Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 36, no.8 (2013): 635-653; Bruce Hoffman and Marc Sageman, “Does
Osama still Call the Shots? Debating the Containment of al-Qaeda’s Leadership,” Foreign Affairs 87,
no.4 (July/August 2008):163-166.
14

15

Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (Columbia University Press,
2004):294; Barak Mendelsohn, “Al-Qaeda’s Franchising Strategy,” Survival 53, no.3 (2011):29-50.
16Peter L. Bergen, Holy war, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. (Simon andSchuster, 2002).
17

Bergen, Holy war, Inc.

Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman, “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq: A First Look at the Sinjar
Records,” Combating Terrorism Center Harmony Project (West Point, N. Y.: Combating Terrorism
Center, 2007).
18

19

Robert Anthony Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York:
Random House, 2005); Robert Anthony Pape and James K. Feldman, Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of
Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
20

Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Marc
Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2008). Jeff Victoroff, “The Mind of the Terrorist: A Review and Critique of PsychologicalApproaches,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no.1 (2005):3-42.
Sageman, Leaderless Jihad; Peter Bergen, Andrew Lebovich, and William Banks, “Post-9/11
Jihadist Terrorism Cases Involving US Citizens and Residents: An Overview” (2012).
21

22

Sageman, Leaderless Jihad, 13ff.

Paul Cruickshank and Mohannad Hage Ali, “Abu Musab Al Suri: Architect of the New Al Qaeda,”
Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 30 (2007):1–14.
23

24

Abu Musab al-Suri [Mustafa Setmariam Nasar], Dawat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah alAlamiyyah: Call of Global Islamic Resistance (December 2004):1374. For an abridged version see: Jim
Lacey, ed., A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto(Naval Institute Press, March 2008).
Jacob N. Shapiro, The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations (Princeton
University Press, 2013).
25

Miles Kahler, “Collective Action and Clandestine Networks: the Case of Al Qaeda,” Networked
Politics: Agency, Power, and Governance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
26

Jacob N. Shapiro, “Terrorist Decision-Making: Insights from Economics and Political
Science,” Perspectives on Terrorism 6, no. 4-5 (2012).
27

59This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of JusticeReuters, “Leaked ‘Islamic State’ Files Shed Light on ‘Underlying Structures,’ Says de Maiziere.”
Deutsche Welle, 8 March 2016.
28

Michael Kenney, “Turning to the ‘Dark Side’: Coordination, Exchange, and Learning in Criminal
Networks,” Networked Politics: Agency, Power, and Governance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,2009).
29

Alexander Gutfraind, “Understanding Terrorist Organizations with a Dynamic Model,” Studies in
Conflict and Terrorism 32, no.1 (2009); Shapiro, The Terrorist’s Dilemma.
30

31Charles Tilly, Politics of Collective Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003):16.

Valdis E. Krebs, “Mapping Networks of Terrorist Cells,” Connections 24, no.3 (2002): 43-52; John
Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, “Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy,”
RAND Monograph Report (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001); Paul K. Davis and Kim
Cragin, eds., “Social Science for Counterterrorism: Putting the Pieces Together,” RAND National Defense
Research Institute Monograph (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2009).
32

33

U.S. Army and Marine Corps, The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual,
forward by David H. Petraeus, James F. Amos, and John A. Nagl, introduction by Sarah Sewall (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007):328.
Stephen P. Borgatti, Kathleen M. Carley, and David Krackhardt, “On the Robustness of Centrality
Measures under Conditions of Imperfect Data,” Social Networks 28, no.2 (2006):124-136; Jennifer Xu
and Hsinchun Chen, “The Topology of Dark Networks,” Communications of the ACM 51, no.10(2008):58-65.
34

Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, “To Map Contentious Politics,” Mobilization:
An International Quarterly 1, no.1 (1996):17-34. Clio is the muse of history; metrics refers to numericalmeasurement.
35

36

The problems posed by incomplete data in the practical application of social network analysis haslong been a subject of debate, see: Malcolm K. Sparrow “The Application of Network Analysis to
Criminal Intelligence: An Assessment of the Prospects.” Social Networks 13, no. 3 (1991):251-274.
The term “Islamist” is used rather than “Islamic” terrorism to distinguish between political belief
system (Islamism) and a faith (Islam and all things “Islamic”).
37

New York State Intelligence Center, “The Vigilance Project: An Analysis of 32 Terrorism Cases
against the Homeland” (December 2010):17.
38

Arie Perliger, Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right (WestPoint: Combating Terrorism Center, 2013):100.
39

The exact number varies contingent on the definition of a “homegrown” incident. A shooting at the
Seattle Jewish Federation Center in 2006 was deemed a “hate crime” rather than terrorism at the time but
a decision was made to nevertheless include the attack in this count.
40

Scott Helfstein and Dominick Wright, “Success, Lethality, and Cell Structure across theDimensions of Al Qaeda,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 34, no.5 (2011):367-382. Helfstein andWright find that Al Qaeda-directed attacks resulted in, on average, 452 dead per attack in comparison to
the 13 dead per attack associated with attacks carried out by “independents.” Including or excluding thecatastrophic casualties incurred in the 9/11 attacks invariably skews any assessment of lethality.
41

42

Bin Laden was listed as number 95 on the list of unindicted co-conspirators, see: United States ofAmerica v. Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel Abdel-Rahman, et al., (S5) 93 Cr. 181 (MBM). His name is redacted
on most copies in circulation.

60
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Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice43

The top organizations in the period were Al Qaeda, al-Farouq Training Camp in Afghanistan where
many Westerners and Americans went, and locally al-Farouq Mosque where al-Kifah Foundation was
based. A couple of shooting ranges where the Brooklyn cell member went to gain experience in handlingfire arms also made the list—for the simple reason, perhaps, that the group members were observed by
the FBI visiting the firing ranges and the trips were provide as evidence in the prosecution of the cell andtherefore evidence of communications between the members that was available.
Chapter 5 in The 9/11 Commission Report describes Sheikh Mohammed’s connection to the UnitedStates in detail and also his role in orchestrating attacks targeting the United States on behalf of Bin
Laden. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Kean and Hamilton, 9/11
Commission Report, 145-174.
44

45

Neil MacFarquhar, “Terror Suspect Freed by U.S.; Flies to Jordan,” New York Times, 6 May 1997.

Press Release, “Federal Judge Hands Down Sentences in Holy Land Foundation Case,” Departmentof Justice: Office of Public Affairs, 27 May 2009.
46

Christopher Heffelfinger, “Evaluating the Terrorist Threat Posed by African-American Muslim
Groups,” Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel 1, no. 6 (2008).
47

48

Shapiro, The Terrorist’s Dilemma.

49

75% of the people in Hamas and Hezbollah were receiving orders from someone else in the
network also based in the United States. Hamas is the more tightly integrated with 98% of theorganization’s nodes (operatives and organizations) in the United States linked to other nodes also in the
country and exhibiting a high average of person-to-person connections. The structure of Hezbollah wasless integrated and more segmented. Some 70% of operatives were linked to other operatives based in the
United States.
50

United States of America v. Babar Ahmed, Affidavit in Support of Request for Extradition (UnitedStates District Court for the District of Minnesota, 2004):13.
“Summary of Jose Padilla’s Activities with Al Qaeda,” report enclosed with letter from Paul
Wolfewitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, to James B. Comey, Deputy Attorney General, 28 May 2004.
51

Over the years, details have emerged building a strong case for Awlaki’s probably culpability as a
facilitator for the 9/11 attacks. Awlaki was interviewed four times by the FBI in the first eight days
following the 9/11 attacks. His phone number had been found among the possessions of Ramzi Bin alShib, the Hamburg-based coordinator for the attack who never made it to the United States. Several of the
hijackers had direct and repeated contact with Awlaki, who allegedly bought airline tickets for two of the
hijackers during their stay in the United States.
52

Greg Botelho and Ralph Ellis, “Adam Gadahn, American Mouthpiece for Al Qaeda, Killed,” CNN,
23 April 2015; Sopfia Saifi, Ben Brumfield, Susan Candiotti, “Pakistan’s Army Kills Al Qaeda
Commander Who Grew Up in U.S.” CNN, 8 December 2014; BBC Staff, “Obituary: Anwar al-Awlaki,”BBC, 30 September 2011.
53

Ray Sanchez, “Radical Cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri Sentenced to Life in Prison,” CNN, 9 January
2015; FBI Press Release, “Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, a/k/a Abu Hamza, Sentenced in Manhattan Federal
Court to Life in Prison,” Federal Bureau of Investigation: New York Field Office, 1 January 2015.
54

55

BBC Staff, “Supergrass Tells of Terror Fight,” BBC News, 24 March 2006.

Mary Beth Sheridan. “Former D.C. Taxi Driver Pleads Guilty in Terrorism Case,” The Washington
Post, 3 April 2007.
56

Joseph Serna and Shelby Grad, “Adam Gadahn: Al Qaeda Terrorist, California Native andGrandson of a Jew,” Los Angeles Times, 23 April 2015.
57

61
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice

58

Rob Harris, “Kevin James and the JIS Conspiracy,” PBS, 10 October 2006.

FBI Press Release, “Leader of Liberty City Six Convicted on All Counts, Four Others Convicted on
Multiple Counts, and One Defendant Acquitted on Charges of Conspiring to Support Al Qaeda, Attack
Targets in the United States,” Federal Bureau of Investigation: Miami Division, 12 May 2009; Damien
Cave and Carmen Gentile, “Five Convicted in Plot to Blow Up Sears Tower,” New York Times, 12 May
2009.
59

60

Robert Crowe, “Job Lured Alleged Al-Qaida Trainee to Houston,” Houston Chronicle, 4 March

2007.
61

United States of America v. Jesse Curtis Morton, Statement of Facts (United States District Court
for the Eastern District of Virginia Alexandria Division, 2011):2.
Brandon Gunnoe, “FBI says Stoughton grad may be working for ISIS,” WHDH, 16 October 2014;
Sean Smith, “Mass. Man accused of aiding ISIS killed in Iraq, reports say,” Boston Globe, 3 June 2015.
62

63

Stephen P. Borgatti, “Centrality and Network Flow,” Social Networks 27, no. 1 (2005):55-71.

This type of association is called a “weak tie.” Incomplete triads such as the one described in thisexample are assumed to be extremely important to the diffusion of ideas and influences across networks,
see Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology (1973):13601380.
64

Randy Borum, “Radicalization into Violent Extremism I: A Review of Social Science Theories,”
Journal of Strategic Security 4, no. 4 (2011):7–36.
65

66

The three plotters, Najibullah Zazi, Adis Medunjanin, and Zarein Ahmedzay, all underwent
weapons and explosives training at an Al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan in 2008. The coordinator of theattack, which was supposed to be matched with attacks against a mail in the United Kingdom and against
a Danish newspaper were coordinated by Adnan Shukrijumah, an American citizen, who left the UnitedStates in 2012.
Rewards for Justice, “Wanted: Jehad Serwan Mostafa,” Rewards for Justice, press release, 20
March 2013.
67

68

Andrea Elliott, “The Jihadist Next Door,” New York Times, 27 January 2010.

69

Different numbers have been given. In early March 2015, James Clapper the Director of National
Intelligence updated estimate of Americans who are thought to have traveled or attempted to travel to join
jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq to 180. Just a month prior, the FBI assessed the number at 150.
70

United States of America v. Abdirizak Mohamed Warsame, Case No. 15-MJ-978-HB, Criminal
Complaint (United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, December 2015).
71

B. Heidi Ellis, Saida M. Abdi, Alisa B. Miller, Matthew T. White, and Alisa K. Lincoln,“Protective Factors for Violence Perpetration in Somali Young Adults: The Role of Community
Belonging and Neighborhood Cohesion,” Psychology of Violence 5, no.4 (2015):384-392.
72 A description the Saleh case and a list of other cases late 2014 and the first half of 2015 can befound on National Public Radio’s website, see Dina Temple-Raston, “New York man Accused of Plotting
To Explode Pressure Cooker Bombs,” June 16, 2015, available at http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwoway/2015/06/16/415060978/new-york-man-accused-of-plotting-to-explode-pressure-cooker-bombs
73

Audrey Kurth Cronin, “ISIS is Not a Terrorist Group,” Foreign Affairs 94, no.2 (2015):87-98.

Jytte Klausen, “Tweeting the Jihad: Social Media Networks of Western Foreign Fighters in Syria
and Iraq.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 38, no.1 (2015):1-22.
74

62This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice75

For a description of terrorist uses of open and closed internet fora, see: Jytte Klausen, Aaron Y.
Zelin and Adrienne Roach, “‘Open Source Jihad:’ Online Mobilization for Domestic Attacks,” working
paper, Western Jihadism Project (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, May 2013).
J.M. Berger and H. Perez, “The Islamic State’s Diminishing Returns on Twitter: How Suspensions
are Limiting the Social Networks of English-Speaking ISIS Supporters,” occasional paper, Program on
Extremism (George Washington University, February 2016).
76

77

The second-generation online media environment emerged with YouTube’s file sharing platform
and other similar lateral applications. By this count, encrypted social media may be regarded as a fourthgeneration phenomenon.
78

Associated Press, “Comey: Extremists Exist in All 50 States,” Washington Post, 25 February 2015.

Jytte Klausen, Christina Ferlauto, and Rosanne Libretti, “College Graduates and Dropouts –Pathways to Becoming a Domestic Terrorist Offender. A Comparison of Recruitment Profiles for‘Homegrown’ American Jihadists and Associates of the Earth Liberation Movement and the Army ofGod,” paper, The Western Jihadism Project (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 2016).
79

Jytte Klausen, Tyler Morrill, and Rosanne Libretti, “The Terrorist Age-Crime Curve: An Analysisof American Islamist Terrorist Offenders and Age-Specific Propensity for Participation in Violent and
Non-Violent Incidents,” in “Special Issue Dedicated to the 20th Anniversary of the Oklahoma City
Bombing,” special issue, Social Science Quarterly 97, no. 1 (2016): 19–32.
80

81

For a proposal of how this may be accomplished in a non-discriminatory way, see: Jytte Klausen,
Selene Campion, Nathan Needle, Giang Nguyen, and Rosanne Libretti, “Toward a Behavioral Model of‘Homegrown’ Radicalization Trajectories,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 39, no.1 (2016):67-83.

63
This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice