Criminal Pasts, Terrorist Futures:European JIhadists and the Crime Terror Nexus

The prevalence of criminal backgrounds amongst European jihadists is remarkable. Whether amongst ‘foreign fighters’ that have travelled to Syria and Iraq, or amongst those involved in terrorism in Europe, criminal pasts are common. Yet, they remain unexamined. This article presents a unique empirical examination of 79 European jihadists with criminal backgrounds, examining the relevancy of their criminal pasts in relation to their terrorist futures. The results fall into four themes. Firstly, jihadism can affect a criminal’s radicalisation process in two ways: it can offer redemption from past sins, or it can legitimise crime. Secondly, prisons offer an environment for radicalisation and networking amongst criminals and extremists. Thirdly, criminals develop skills that can be useful for them as extremists, such as access to weapons and forged documents, as well as the psychological ‘skill’ of familiarity with violence. Finally, white-collar and petty crime is often used to finance extremism. The results challenge conceptions on radicalisation, and can affect counter-terrorism responses

Terrorism and drugs in Europe. Background paper commissioned by the EMCDDA for the EU drug markets report 2019.

Despite much speculation and conjecture over potential crossovers between terrorists and the drug trade in Europe, no study has examined the issue. This paper fills this gap by empirically examining such crossovers in the European Union between 2012 and 2017. Based on a unique open- source database, two main themes emerge. Firstly, the only area with deep and sustained crossovers is Northern Ireland, where Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have sought to influence or control the drug trade. The consequences are threefold: conflict with “regular” criminals; internal divisions within paramilitaries; and the potential alienation of the very communities they claim to represent. Secondly, many European jihadists have backgrounds in consuming or dealing drugs, and their radicalisation does not always change this behaviour. Indeed, of the 69 jihadists who carried out an attack in Europe between 2012 and 2017, there is evidence that at least 5 individuals (7% of the total) consumed illicit drugs in the days or hours prior to their attack. This suggests that extremists do not automatically break from familiar, habitual, and possibly addictive patterns, and that radicalisation is no guarantee of an absolute, abrupt, and permanent change in lifestyle

Criminal pasts, terrorist futures? Jihadist recruits in Western Europe

The chapter focuses on the phenomenon of European jihadists with criminal pasts. In many Western European countries, significant percentages of Islamic State (ISIS) recruits have criminal convictions for non-extremist offences from the time before they radicalized. Drawing on a database of 101 criminals turned jihadists, this chapter will demonstrate how prior involvement in criminality affects radicalization trajectories, as well as facilitating terrorist operations, e.g. through easier access to weapons, fraudulent documents, and criminal financing. The nexus that this chapter describes is neither institutional nor organizational, but social in the sense that it results from the inadvertent convergence of milieus and geographic locations. In other words, we have found no formalized or explicit collaboration between criminals - or criminal gangs - and jihadist groups, but recruitment in the same (socio-economically deprived) places in Western Europe where both crime and radicalization have been able to thrive.</p