recruitment – mackaycartoons

Wednesday October 22, 2014

October 21, 2014 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday October 22, 2014

Conservative government orders studies into homegrown terrorism

A day after committing six fighter jets and hundreds of personnel to the fight against the Islamic State, the federal Conservatives are commissioning five new studies into homegrown terrorism and terrorist financing.

Public Safety Canada issued a call for five new research projects into a variety of terrorism-related topics Wednesday, including the domestic impact of international conflict and the role of the internet in terrorist recruiting.

“A prominent threat facing Canada’s national security . . . is radicalization leading to violence, including homegrown violent extremism,” reads the call for proposals.

“These cases are rare, but the impact of an act of terrorism is potentially enormous, with serious and lasting psychological and emotional harm to a large number of individuals, as well as economic impact and/or the creation or escalation of tensions between communities and countries.”

The research will consider a number of questions:

How does the “psychology of the internet” play into terrorist activities and recruitment?
What are the domestic impacts of international conflicts, such as the war in Iraq?
What are the gender dynamics involved in radicalization to violence?
How are resources transferred to terrorist organizations? How are those resources moved and used?
What makes people susceptible to recruitment into violent extremism?

The research will be funded by the Kanishka Project, a five-year, $10 million fund created in 2011 to study security issues.

Despite the government’s mockery of political opponents for searching for the “root causes” of terrorism or “engaging in sociology,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has committed around $5 million to similar research over the last three years. (Source: Toronto Star)

Friday August 22, 2014

August 22, 2014 by Graeme MacKay

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday August 22, 2014

Islamic State ‘has 50,000 fighters in Syria’

The Islamic State group has an army of more than 50,000 fighters in Syria, and recruited 6,000 people in the last month, a monitoring group has said.

Rami Abdel Rahman, the director of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said on Tuesday that the group’s recruitment push was gathering pace every month.

“The number of IS fighters has passed 50,000 in Syria, including 20,000 non-Syrians,” he said.

Al Jazeera cannot verify the observatory’s figures. However, an Islamic State source backed the statement and told Al Jazeera that the group also had 30,000 fighters in Iraq.

Abdel Rahman said the new recruits in Syria included more than 1,000 foreign fighters from Chechnya, China, Europe and Arab countries. He said most had entered Syria from Turkey.

Other recruits included defectors from the ranks of other armed opposition groups, including 200 from the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front.

The Islamic State group, formerly known as ISIL, grew out of the American-led war in Iraq, and entered the civil war in Syria last year. It attempted to take command of Nusra and denounced al-Qaeda’s overall leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as “straying from the path”.

The Islamic State group initially cooperated with some of the armed opposition in Syria, but its abuses against rival rebels and civilians sparked a backlash that began this January.

It has recently taken over vast areas of neighbouring Iraq and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, earlier this year declared himself the caliph of territory captured on both sides of the border. (Source: Al Jazeera)