Ebook: Counter Terrorism in Diverse Communities

Many communities around the globe with higher standards of living are increasingly attracting immigrant persons who are culturally and linguistically different. In an era of terrorism, culturally and linguistically, new and different faces in a community, present challenges to state and local police authorities as they attempt to identify those who pose a terror threat. This book ties together research and thoughts under the general heading “Counter Terrorism in Diverse Communities.” The presentations were brought together under the auspices of a NATO-Advanced Research Workshop held in Antalya, Turkey in May 2011. The purpose of the workshop was to explore how culturally and linguistically diverse communities can respond most effectively to terrorist attacks.

Participants consisting of academic researchers, law enforcement professionals and terrorism/civil society consultants representing seventeen different countries (Albania, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, Russian Federation, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and United States) focused on why terrorism occurs, the complexities of terrorism, counter terrorism strategies and approaches and on the relation between diversity and terrorism incidents. While military and paramilitary counter terrorism actions represent the common or standard approach, such terms and concepts as community policing, cultural awareness, cultural competency, cultural understanding, language and communications, and deradicalization initiatives became central points of discussion at the workshop. Of particular note a cultural competency dictionary and a terrorism dictionary were introduced at the workshop. The Co-Directors of the workshop-- Dr. Sıddık Ekici, District Chief of Police, Diyarbakir, Turkey and Dr. Igor Osyka, Kharkiv University of Law and Economics, Ukraine must be saluted for bringing together an outstanding group of participants to address a global issue—terrorism.

Mitchell F. Rice

Ph.D., Professor of Political Science and Public Administration

Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA

This chapter reflects the thoughts and ideas in research presented at the NATO workshop “Counter terrorism in culturally and linguistically diverse communities” held in Antalya/Turkey on 8-9 May, 2011 where seventeen countries were represented by scholars and practitioners during the two days meetings. Presentations are categorized under four sub- topics: Terrorism Problem, Terrorism Prevention, Community Oriented Counter Terrorism and Case Studies on Counter Terrorism.

Following an account of jihad-inspired terrorist attacks carried out and foiled in Europe in recent years, in this paper we shall outline and define the task of radicalization research as a recently established aspect of terrorism prevention. A number of findings regarding radicalizing factors will be presented clustered around the categories individual vulnerability, the situation in the current country of residence, the profile of the Islamist movement and conflict-related developments in places of reference for collective identity and the contextualization of these factors in the narrative of Jihad.

Terrorism has been a long standing problem in the history of the mankind. Meanwhile the changing nature of our societies has made counter terrorism more complicated. Scholars and policy makers need to keep in mind that diversity has become a natural part of our communities but it necessitates practitioners and policymakers to adopt themselves to the new conditions for successful counter terrorism in diverse communities. This research looks into the issue whether diversity in a community increases the likelihood of terror incidents in a country. Findings are encouraging and reveal that diversity is not an matter that we should fear concerning terrorism incidents.

The aim of the study is to investigate university students' fearing future terrorism: Perceived personal, national, regional and international threats of terrorism. It aims to examine gender differences in fear of terrorism. Moreover it examines the determinants of fear of terrorism. A sample of 188 students (Mutah University, Jordan) was randomly selected. A questionnaire was developed based on the existing scales. A construct validity of the scale was estimated by the calculating the correlation between a Terrorism Catastrophizing Scale and the current Fear of Terrorism Scale and found a positive significant relationship (0.564, α = 0.000), a sign of strong validity of the scales. The Reliability of the scales is strong and was estimated by Cronbach's alpha at 0.889. In addition to other findings, the research revealed that 42% of students were concerned that they personally, a friend or a relative might be the victim of a future terrorist attack in Jordan.

Terrorism has been one of the major concerns of societies, governments, policy makers, and academicians especially after 9/11. An increase or decrease in trends of terrorism fatalities were regarded as predictors of success or failure of public policies in combating terrorism. In the terrorism literature, it's controversial whether the terrorism related incidents increased continuously as well as fatalities [1]. Despite the notion that fatalities due to terrorism have an upward trend in the world in general in the last few decades, there are still questions with regard the trends in lethality of terrorism. This study presented findings of statistical tests using official datasets covered all terror incidents occurred in Istanbul, Turkey between 1999 and 2009 in an attempt to find empirical evidence regarding the lethality of terrorism as well as some of its correlates. Tests sought correlations among types of terror incidents, identity of terrorist organizations, their targets, modus operandi and fatality rate of terror attacks. The study provided essential information about terrorist attacks' fatality rate and factors affecting them for the practitioners in charge of preventing future terrorist attacks on an example of diversely populated city.

This paper is based on newly declassified Bulgarian State Security operational records from the last two Cold War decades on “Combating Terrorism”. It aims to reveal the organization of antiterrorist coordination in a “close monistic society”, which was the Warsaw Pact area, and to give some new evidences for the still not well known confidential contacts between the two adversary blocs' secret services before the downfall of the Berlin Wall. The Western countries antiterrorist approaches and regional cooperation served as impressive practical examples to the East European Security services on how to organize joint antiterrorist operations. Despite of the ideological and cultural division of Europe in a bi-polar world, the International Terrorism threat became a serious security challenge to both West and East European political systems.

One of the least studied topics in the terrorism literature is leadership in terrorist organizations. Available information in the literature on leaders of terrorist organizations is mostly about top leaders. That is, the information on leaders is usually limited with life stories and some demographic characteristics of the top leader(s). With this fact in mind, the main purpose of this study is to describe background characteristics of Turkish left wing terrorists, identify similarities and differences in the background characteristics of terrorist leaders and other terrorists, and analyze factors that are significant in terms of becoming leaders in the terrorist organizations. This study is based on secondary data analysis of records from members of Turkish left wing terrorist groups. Data utilized in this study were collected through interviews conducted with terrorist prisoners and their court files. The sample size was 1,077 records, out of which fifty subjects identified themselves as leaders. Findings revealed statistically significant differences between leaders and other terrorists in Turkish left wing terrorist organizations. In addition, the logistic regression analysis revealed several factors discriminating between leaders and other terrorists.

Since the collapse of Soviet Union, terrorism and extreme ethnic nationalism have become very serious problems in Russia. This paper discusses the interconnection between terrorism originating from the North Caucasus region and extreme nationalism and proposes solutions on how to counter terrorism through eradication of radical nationalism.

In the last years many Islamic words have become familiar in the Western countries. Most of them are connected to the religion, history, social structures and traditions of the Islamic world, and are coming from the Holy Qur'$\bar{{\rm a}}$n and other Sacred Isl$\bar{{\rm a}}$m texts. They are a very important cultural and religious heritage for the Muslims. However, the meanings of how these words are used in the many documents and speeches made by radical authors are often fairly different from the traditional meaning. In some cases, most of all in the terrorists' speeches, the significance is totally changed. In this paper, we present the results of a comparative and evaluative analysis, started in 2009 and ended in February 2011, of a selected list of 37 Islamic words, such as Had$\bar{{\rm i}}$th, Im$\bar{{\rm a}}$m, Intif$\bar{{\rm a}}$dah, Jih$\bar{{\rm a}}$d. For every word, four aspects have been analyzed: 1) linguistic and semantic; 2) historical and evolutionary; 3) the word significance in radical thought; 4) stability (in time and space) of the semantic meaning.

Development of effective crime prevention strategies requires understanding of the spatial/spatio-temporal occurrences of crime events and then predicting the number, place and time of crime events. In this respect, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) provide efficient tools for analyzing the spatial and spatio-temporal crime events. Similarly developing prediction models for criminal and terrorist activities can directly support crime prevention and counter-terrorism planning, respectively. This study presents a spatio-temporal crime prediction model generated by using time series forecasting with a simple spatial disaggregation approach in GIS. The proposed model is implemented for Bahcelievler and Cankaya Merkez Police Precincts' 2003 crime data obtained from Ankara Police Directorate. Although the proposed crime prediction model is developed for urban crimes, it can be adapted for terrorist activities by using appropriate scales in space and time.

The concept of information society is a powerful idea that has become an integral part of our lives. The power of the information society concept comes from the concept of information that impacts and changes the work patterns and life-styles of people. The purpose of this paper is to enhance our understanding of the impact of information society on people and its importance in terms of terrorism and counterterrorism activities. In this regard, different definitions of the information society concept and definitions of the terms information, society and terrorism are discussed. Then, development of society in terms of sciences and technologies is examined. In turn, how it has become an information society and its effects on terrorism and counterterrorism are explained.

Nowadays, terrorism happens to be an inevitable challenge for the new 21^st century modern globalized society. Within this context this paper reveals multiple aspects of IT being a key enabler for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities' operationalization of the Comprehensive Approach – considered as a tool for countering terrorism. Apart from this, some positive examples of multinational project activities are given based on the latest NATO governance experience, including the new idea for ‘smart defense’ and addressing the modern world resilient societies' security approaches.

Police now find themselves serving communities that have different cultures and speak multiple or different languages. Police are also encountering many immigrant residents who are both linguistically different and have a special, cultural fear of police. As a result, community policing utilizing a cultural competency approach has become the recent development. This paper offers a framework for utilizing cultural competency in community policing programs and services. Following a review of community policing models, this paper discusses the meanings of the concepts culture, competence, and cultural competency and then moves to a discussion of the concept of cultural competency. The paper then addresses a number of cultural competency steps that community policing can take in dealing with increasing immigrant and culturally/linguistically diverse populations. The paper concludes by noting that for police, a shift in philosophy from client-centered programs to more culturally specific, community-based programs may be necessary to achieve organizational cultural competency. This philosophy suggests that compatibility between the police's organizational policies, structures, and processes and the community's cultural/linguistic characteristics would lead to better and more effective community policing service outcomes.

Policing in Northern Ireland has faced many challenges in providing a balanced policing response to a culturally diverse community in the face of an enduring threat from community based terrorism. Over the years mistakes have been made, but today the Police Service of Northern Ireland provides one model of a community based response to policing, whilst still facing a serious threat from terrorism. This chapter will look at the lessons that can be learned from the experience of policing terrorism in Northern Ireland, in particular the development of the partnerships necessary to meet this challenging task. The majority of the research for this article was undertaken during a George C Marshal Center Field Study Trip to Northern Ireland in March 2011.

Radicalization to violence remains a critical subset of the terrorist threat to Canada. As the lead agency in the Canadian law enforcement response to terrorism, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) National Security Criminal Investigations Program takes a number of innovative community-based approaches to the problem of radicalization to violence. One of these approaches is a problem-solving model called CAPRA that was developed specifically for application in a community policing environment. Named for its five component steps – Clients, Acquiring / Analyzing Information, Partnerships, Response, Assessment – CAPRA plays a critical role in reaching out to at-risk communities and helping those communities develop workable responses to the problem of radicalization to violence.

The following chapter first looks at the complicated issue of terrorism and presents a number of scholarly definitions in an attempt to better understand this phenomenon. Next we look at the concept of counterterrorism and then specifically look at a number of counterterrorism techniques that have been used in the past to combat this particular threat. At this point, we discuss possible reasons for terrorism and consider the theory of cultural competency and that of representation as a vehicle to counter terrorist threats. Finally, we look at the Kurdish people in Turkey as a type of case study to understand how the ideas of cultural competency and representation, could be included as part of a counterterrorism policy both in Turkey and abroad.

The attacks of 9/11 caused a focus on the ‘War Model’ of counter-terrorism, which has tended to overshadow the existing role of policing in counter-terrorism. The importance of this role is only now beginning to fully re-emerge. Policing continues to play a critical role in countering terrorism, particularly when this threat emerges from culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Such counter-terrorist policing fulfills a number of roles, such as Community Policing, Paramilitary Policing, Investigative Policing, Intelligence Policing, Protective Policing and Tactical Intervention Policing. All these roles are contingent on the engendering of community confidence, which allows police engagement with the community and the development of local community knowledge. Consequently, such local community knowledge, and the intelligence it generates, permeate the various roles in counter-terrorist policing, and are critical to its effectiveness and success.

Risk perception and risk communication literature document how people make decisions to protect themselves and their communities against natural and manmade threats. In this paper the authors introduce the ideas of employing visual and other storytelling techniques and the sharing of community empowered ethnographies as a means of enhancing counter terrorism strategies and risk communication amongst ethnically diverse communities. It is important to note that historically the therapeutic or altruistic communities that lead to increased mutual support functions amongst victims and others are not an anomaly, but a rule. It is believed that proactive and empowered communities will lead to sustainable altruistic behaviors, which typically emerge only for a short time during the traumatic, post-disaster or post-conflict emergency response periods, but soon dissipate. This is vital if we expect multi-ethnic communities to work together in protecting themselves and fighting terrorism as part of their responsibilities of sharing threat, being prepared and exhibiting resilience.

Terrorism has become a major concern of current governments. Significant energies and resources are being devoted to counter terrorism. Various techniques and strategies are used to detect and destroy terrorist plans. On the other side, terrorists have sophisticated their means of operation. The process has become complex and costly. African countries are also involved in counter terrorism but, due to several internal security and development problems, their effective participation in the combat against terrorism is very limited. They need capacity and skills in order to participate actively in countering terrorism. Education is one of the most appropriate ways for preparing African countries to prevent terrorism. Education provides not only knowledge but also capacity to make informed decisions, strategies and policies. International community should help African countries to strengthen their education through specialized and general training programs. Populations should be educated ways and means of fighting terrorism. The contribution of the entire population is needed in order to succeed in countering terrorism at national and international level.

Since the events of 9/11, police organizations across the world have refocused and strengthened their efforts against terrorism. Besides federal/national and international policing practices, reorganizations have also affected local police. This paper focuses on the local police response to terrorism in the United States and suggests important aspects of counterterrorism, in which local communities that are increasingly marked by a high degree of cultural diversity, need to be taken into account.