secretary james mattis and joint chiefs of staff chair testify at a house armed services committee on military strategy in afghanistan and south asia. live coverage beginning at 1:00 p.m. eastern on c-span3. now a panel looks at ways to identify and prevent recruitment by isis and al qaeda. america posted the -- new americ hosted the talk. following the panel discussion, they took questions from the audience. this is 90 minutes.

>> we are here to discuss this new paper by my colleagues. i am excited because isis and al qaeda and the recruitment of jihadi's is something we talk about a lot. stagesen see people on debating how this comes about, what do people go join isis and so on.

generally the conversation ranges from i think this, you think that, and ie mode -- i emote this, and you emotet that. what is exciting today is we ta, which they will talk about in some detail. let me talk about my colleagues, and i will love them give an overview of the paper. is a securityt student,xford world employees mixed method roaches understanding local conflict development qualities. found on twitter.

left, david stern and is a policy analyst at new america. his work focuses on homegrown extremism and the maintenance of new america databases on terrorists in the united states and preventing such terrorism. he was a contributing editor at the poll's and interned at the israeli palestine center for research in jerusalem. with that, i will of the two authors talk about this paper. towards the end we will engage our audience and let you ask questions. >> thank you. co-author,hank my

dave sternin. thank you all for coming. i'm going to do a little discussion on the methods used itthis paper before passing to my colleague focusing on north africa. i will focus on the peninsula. first, i wanted to talk a little bit about the provenance of the data we have access to, mainly the data we're using our foreign .ighter registration forms registration forms of foreign fighters who joined isis between 2013 and 2014 on the turkish-syrian border. essentially isis

record-keeping of new foreign fighter joiners, a variety of ,uestions that include names mother stand, blood type but also include a lot of really interesting material on previous professions, education levels, religious knowledge, countries travel, people referred them to join isis, people who facilitated their arrival and a variety of other things. that's the main data from which we will be drawing conclusions to be there i get to the limitations of that date in a minute but i would just say the data were smuggled out of raqqa in march of 2016. we validated these data along with the counterterrorism center at west point, as well as some of the personal details that were not publicly available to my research and research from others.

so last year we wrote a paper on this topic that looked at the regions in the world that had the highest per capita recruitment rate for isis all over the world, included western china, it included of course parts of north africa and the arabian peninsula we are looking at, in lebanon and in other places. the difference in this year's report is not just that we're focusing on two regions which saw some of the highest recruitment rates of foreign fighters to isis, including libya and tunisia, which david will talk about, but also saudi arabia. but also we try to supplement the data on foreign fighter registration forms with other useful information. so we use census data in a variety of cases to say, ok, if fighters are joining isis and saudi arabia are reporting certain education level are

certain level of work profession or skill, how does that correlate to the places they are from among the general population, are these representative of these people from the provinces they come from, or is this a a distinct phenomena we should look at? we look at census data. david did some interesting work look at protest data especially from tunisia. i pulled in some data from 1980s onward on subnational origins of saudi terrorists, and i'm going to use some of that in my analysis. we incorporate a lot of this additional data. let me say a few brief words about some of the caveats so we can frame our discussion and so our remarks have some context. the first is time. basicallyters join between 2013-2014. the landscape obviously looks a lot different today as the coalition is pushing back isis in syria and iraq. as i spoke to a friend, most people from the arabian peninsula have basically left already and the foreign fighter

rates decreased dramatically after 2015 when the saudi government especially started cracking down on fighters once isis attacks started to occur across arabian peninsula in kuwait and in saudi and in other places. this is also limited by location. the foreign fighter forms are recorded on border crossings and turkey while of course as it although turkey was a huge transit route for fighters to join isis. of course, there were other parts in iraq, lebanon, jordan where people able to join. we don't think they systematically alter the result of a region but it would manifest in other places so lebanese fighters, jordanian fighters, iraqi fighters, syrian fighters are not recorded in the data. a couple quick more points. there's a point on the

truthfulness i think we think the data are going to be more likely to be true than if fighters were being interviewed by journalists or researchers. some of this information could be validated by isis of course, people who referred or people who facilitated one joining, but there are certainly elements that were omitted in these files and we had to work around that. we can talk more about that if you're interested in the q&a. the last couple of points, this is only isis foreign fighter recruitment. crucially what's missing is foreign fighter recruitment to --er malicious that were militias that were fighting especially in syria including what was wholly known as al-nusra and i go into low bit about that in the arabian peninsula section. just to conclude, last year we found provinces with high rates of recruitment all shared in common a certain kind of grievance they had with the federal government. the repressed regions of western china, generally underfunded and unsupported regions like northern lebanon and my colleague will talk about

eastern libya, but this year what we found and i'm sort of paraphrasing tolstoy here, is that all happy provinces are alike, but all unhappy provinces are unhappy in their own way. we will swear to discuss i think what is important in the key take away which is while there is no consensus among experts on terrorism about what is a driving terrorism recruitment, i think when you look at the subnational regions of different countries, certain trends emerge and these trends are important and they are distinct and we need to address them in different ways. so with that being said i'm going to pass it over to my colleague, david. >> thanks. so i'm going to speak about what we found in north africa, or initial key findings which will be expanded further and a forthcoming paper. but basically our analysis of north africa involved three broad conclusions.

there was recruitment in provinces that shared huge structural aspects in common that are economically marginalized from the center of their country's economic, their country's economy where most of the good jobs are, where oil wealth is centered. also they are marginalized politically, often the two go together, they are one and the same. second, we found in most places this is the mobilization that comes from places where there was mobilization in prior years for other jobs movement as well as for other non-jihadi outbreaks of anger over what appear to be structural issues. recruitment and mobilization which isis is the latest or perhaps now not the latest example of is predated by these other mobilizations.

and finally where mobilization occurred, where it's not a product of a long history of mobilization and outbursts of anger, whether jihadists or not, it's a product of the arab spring, which really was a massive outbreak of this anger and spread that anger throughout the region in a way that metastasized the problem. so to begin with if we look at the question of structural aspects, i'll begin with what we found in libya, by far the clearest example, 80% of the fighters from libya came from eastern libya and they were all centered in two provinces. eastern libya has historically been marginalized by the then gadhafi government which centered its patronage network largely in the west of the the

country and funded tripoli in that area while simultaneously economically marginalizing the east. in particular it marginalized the area where we found amongst the fighters we looked at there were underemployed. people were underemployed, and our models people who are unemployed, people who report subsistent agricultural work, not i own the farm, but i'm doing agricultural work. people lower students in these north african countries, students face a particularly for employment situation upon graduation. in tunisia, for example, on average it takes six years to find a job. also people report unskilled labor which is often unpredictable in these north african countries.

in durna, we found it was 70%. we found a similar dynamic in southern tunisia which is another hot spot of recruitment. and in the highest -- province, there's also 70% unemployment among fighters. and then in the suburbs of grand tunis we found a similar level of underemployment and economic struggle which is important to know because it's the capital of tunisia, it's what a lot of the factory jobs and economic wealth is actually centered and if you're just running a large and aggression provinces, you're likely to miss that there's a massive internal inequality within these provinces. we found the fighters tend to come from poor regions. it was two to four times overproducing what we would have expected based on population.

that neighborhood or city within the larger grand tunis metropolitan areas has an unemployment rate above that of the nation as a whole. as well as above the particular province that it sits in. it's unemployment rate was actually below tunisia as well. what we see is there's these hotspots of economic marginalization. that comes with political marginalization as well, the hotspot of protest activity during the arab spring. the east of libya has been a site of resistance and protests against the gadhafi government and militancy more broadly. and southern tunisia also has a history of pension with the central government of tunisia. so we found similarity of the structure. the second part is in each of

these places there's a long history. in eastern libya it's very clear. we can trace it back on isis mobilization were looking at in 2013-2014. benghazi was the capital of the arab spring uprising against gadhafi and produce many fighters for that. if we go back to the records that were found in 2007 you get almost exactly the same percentage of fighters in that mobilization as we found in the isis records for 2013-2014. in 2008, the state department added a cable, the report said similar conditions and words of fighter equipment. -- in words fighter recruitment. in terms very similar to that are applicable to the 2013-2014. if you go back further to the 1990s, you have the islamic fighting group conducting war against gadhafi a gain in

uprising, again centered in the east, and then if you go for the back in the '70s and '80s, this region was really at the center of the muslim brotherhood opposition to gadhafi. mobilization in eastern libya predates the particular isis claim to be building the caliphate. if we turn to tunisia, it's a lot different. it's more widespread. however, we again see as i noted hotspots in southern libya, or southern tunisia, sorry, particularly -- has historical produced fighters in the early iraq conflict and other conflicts before, as the economy based on smuggling was the center of protest activity during the arab spring. and we have suburbs of grand tunis which again were sent a -- center of protest activity during the arab spring. that also proved to many of fighters before. in tunisia, there was a massive expansion that may have some

aspect to do with the particular ideological pitch of basis. -- isis. -- lawyer also just seeing we are also just seeing fighters come from areas that are produced outbursts of anger for decades, largely due to the structural factors. finally, as i noted when reduce the expansion, it's largely about the arab spring. this was pretty clear in tunisia where the government felt a result of arab spring protests that were particularly high in the areas that were hotspots. in contrast, along the eastern coast of libya and its economic center, where fighters actually came below the national rate, there were about a third as many protesters per capita as the were in grand tunis. in addition, we see on an individual level when you look at the data, about 7.5% of the fighters who mobilized from

tunisia were recommended by one figure who came out of sharia and himself in western libya, where he was running a training camp. that's again an example of how these dynamic arab spring really created the foundation that isis set itself to the top. so the basic conclusion that i will float for you here that we're still looking at, is in many ways the counter messaging and the idea of countering violent extremism that is become a very important part of countering isis recruitment, doesn't make sense in much of north africa. countering isis claim to be building the caliphate does not address the problems where there was recruitment for decades prior to isis rise.

that's some element in tunisia which also going to run into this repetitive mobilization of the anger areas that are being produced by structural factors. so we really to the extent where we are going to prevent the future possibility of a mobilization, as i could happen simply on counter messaging. needs to address the structural issues. >> thanks, david. in contrast i think the arabian peninsula has a variety of very distinct trends that i want to present today. before i go into the three arguments i want to make on isis recruitment in the arabian peninsula i just want to note there are few countries where there simply were not in a fashion enough foreign fighters data in the forms to draw any conclusions from, so automatic, the uae has less than five fighters in each one of this country and the overall data. my findings don't discuss the

report will not discuss those three countries. some supplementary information and qualitative work was done on recruitment in those three countries and we can discuss those in the q&a, but i generally want to focus on saudi arabia which had about 90% of the fighters that republican from the area as well as kuwait, yemen, and bahrain. that is very interesting trend with regards to marginalization and i'm going to discuss those three and give what they think the policy educations of those are. the first of those is a new phenomenon. there are a few periods i want to make under this. the first is that we know isis has recruited a lot of young people to join especially in -- pairs into other terrorist organizations and document efforts but the arabian peninsula is distinctly more useful than the rest of the sample of isis equipments. the average age of isis biter from the arabian peninsula is over one year younger than the overall sample. when you dig deeply into this for i should say it is distinct from the demographic trends of the regions as a whole which

generally you hold older than the arab world. when you dig more deeply into this you find that the regions with the highest rate of isis recruitment at the subnational level correlates very strongly with the proportion of those regions that have youthful populations. --n you dig that

the youngest population as a 15-29, over the provincial population. the youngest ones are those that have the highest agreement and i did a bunch of progression to figure out which transfer most interesting about the overall provincial population, household income, for people being recorded, education levels was it under or over educated and the variety of other factors. the only factor that had a strong significant statistically significant positive correlation was the proportion of provincial population that was the ages of 15-29. the second piece of this phenomenon that is new and important to emphasize is that the fighters that came from the arabian peninsula were much less likely to have reported to

participate in a previous contract. the question on the form is have you participated in a previous jihad. about 12% of the overall sample of fighters that we looked at reported yes. so, places like libya, yemen, afghanistan, chechnya, bosnia and other places. in the arabian peninsula only 5% of the fighters reported to have participated in previous jihad. when you look at the correlation between provinces that were report participation in previous jihad's, there is no relationship people who participate previously in the jihad and people who joined isis. all of this is strongly suggestive of the fact that the phenomenon on the arabian peninsula and the people who joined isis were new to fighting in conflicts and new to affiliations of the hottie organizations as a whole and when interviewing people they also would admit that this is very new and the two places where this is most acute was in

bahrain and saudi arabia. bahrain and saudis would say the places, the subnational origin of fighters in these countries were places that were new. i'm going to discuss a little about the saudi case in a little bit. what is also interesting is where they are not coming from and the best example in the arabian peninsula is yemen. in the yemen isis foreign fighter sample from 2013 to 2014 only 26 fighters were at the national level, about 35 fighters from yemen as a whole. when you compare that to rates were during the iraq war or people who were detained in one time and open yemen the rates are significantly higher. in the isis foreign fighter sample you have about 30 yemenis out of 3581 total fighters recorded. in the guantanamo case, you had 110 yemenis being detained out of 770. four times more yemenis being involved in a sample that is four times smaller.

something is happening here. i have some hypotheses. we can discuss that in the q&a. all of this suggest the phenomenon is new and i think from a policy perspective need to seriously think about the efforts of the region undertaking deradicalization, not just arresting people who are perpetrating terrorist acts but more importantly figuring out ways to prevent future waves of mobilizations to occur. the second thing i will say is that it appears that not only do these countries have different motivations than north africa but they're different from each other. the two cases i want to focus on here are bahrain and saudi arabia. last year's paper we talked about the mobilization of fighters from bahrain. i will say briefly that in 2011 there was a major arab demonstration in bahrain and the bahraini crackdown required the

use and sanctioning of very violent rhetoric against the majority population of the country, which is shiite by the government which is a minority of the population which is to be. i think the mobilization of communities in bahrain that we see where fighters are coming from was encouraged by the government and cut down the file and a lot of those guys ended up joining isis. we talk more about this phenomenon in the question and answer but i want to get to an interesting case which is saudi arabia. the handout you have in the back of map at the bottom of three different maps saudi arabia. when i looked at their equipment is saudi arabia i looked at the historical rates of equipment and where were saudi fighters coming from went to afghanistan or iraq or when they went to bosnia or chechnya. i looked at three different data sets and the place where they were coming from were completely different than the

places where saudi foreigners were coming from to join isis. previously the fighters that were joining primarily al qaeda affiliated conflicts from mecca, medina but this time around fighters are coming from the heartland of saudi arabia. this is an area where we normally associate with the most conservative region of saudi arabia and these are the parts of saudi arabia that mobilize 100 years ago for the saudi family to establish the saudi state. these are the regions that we think about. there are a bunch of different theories about why this has changed and going to present a few briefly and then we can talk more about this if it is of interest. i think the most compelling one is there is a connection between the questions that animate people from these regions and the message of equipment that isis was presenting.

people aren't so interested in the slightly more esoteric, geopolitical context against the far enemy that a group like al qaeda is present. they are much morenterested in social question of how to -- more interested in social questions of how to organize islamic society. when you have a group like isis which is declaring in islamic state i think there is a huge amount of interest in a region like that for a project like that and in fact they built an islamic state which was the saudi state 100 years ago, i think you're seeing a mobilization for similarly attractive passage now. spoken with stories from this region and we need to understand that in the region as a whole there is the question of are we muslims saudi's or rv saudi -- are we saudi muslim and i think even though we now

recognize the notion of the caliphate was a hollow promise and it's been full of horrible human right violations and atrocities at the time at which it was announced it did have a lot of grounding in islamic law in theology. i think there is interesting papers that have been written and that's what few other options could be a social network, people from these regions could've gone first to syria and recruited their friends and recruited their friends and the snowball effect. the other piece of the puzzle of what subsequently is that although don't associate saudi arabia with an arab spring. there were a lot of demonstration centered in the heartland province next to the ryad and around the detention of the saudi state people were charged with terrorism christ but never tried in court and a lot of the people involved in organizing the demonstrations the release of the detainees took advantage of the

instability the saudi state was feeling during the arab spring to mobilize demonstrations a lot of that was organized by people from the city and a lot of those people joined isis later on but also were responsible for attacks in the arabian peninsula, most famously the one where the saudi father tried it from bahrain and attacked the shiite mosque in kuwait. this suggest different motivations. the last thing i will say briefly is that the regionsthat we looked at with the highest rates of isis agreement had strong elite women. for example, it's true in bahrain the most desperate so the minister of defense and the royal court minister are known as.

which is part of the bahrain royal family that is very hard lined and very violent anti-shiite opponents and their rhetoric suggest that there is a largestation in bahrain communities to violently attack shiites both in the firing and elsewhere. we don't have to do all this but turkey was the nicest theologian is a member of a very prominent bahraini family and when asked who referred you to join isis

almost half of all bahraini and use him as the personthere for them. he settled to the equipment in bahrain a veryprominent individual. his cousin iran some state prisons andpoint bahrain later. these are well-connected individuals. the same is true of kuwait. we know now that they have a long-standing finance laws that they cleaned up and they have those is because there's been a very successful business community that has been politically active and religiously conservative. what does that mean for what we see going forward and whatdoes this mean for policy. i'm concerned that future reform fighter mobilizations cute similarly and successfully. i thinkthere is a strong the radicalization in these countries and there's a strong criminal effort in many of these countries. i would conclude and wrap up what the message is that david and i want to convey here is there is -- i think the debate why people join terrorist groups is less helpful than thinking about where a certain theory

about white people join terrorist groups in most people. in some cases it's marginalization and other cares there is a theological element to the mobilization and we need to be able to first diagnose where people are coming from at this level where we start thinking about what is motivating them to join in the first place. thank you. >> great. you've given us a lot to think about here. i will try to keep my questions so we can get to the audience. we were talking backstage earlier and you alluded here in your presentation that the al qaeda original message was somewhat esoteric. it has begin the far enemy over time and on some unspecified timelines almost certainly outside your lifetime that then brings about the caliphate and that's a great argument for seminary students and technology

workers and people who deal with complex concepts but probably isn't going to sell two years since farmer. conversely, isis can be burn, baby burn but let's bring about the caliphate today and it happened last year, get on board. given these two models and it makes sense that there would be a much greater economic determinant for the isisfighter because he is thinking about his present day situation. david, in your north africa presentation you almost said exactly that that essentially joining the odds of joining isis acts is essentially a function of economic deprivation why. you say that on the gulf it's much more complicated than that. if i try to put an xy line over top of you david, i want you to say why that is too simplistic support north africa and i want you to tell me how much purchase then getting me in the gulf. in

north africa, i think, what we see is that it's not that there is acorrelation between economic stress or poverty or fighter production. if you look at libya it's all centered in the east butsouthern libya, the region known as. [inaudible] produced no fighters. it is actually the poorer part of libya. the key outside is much less that you can take policymaker or for analyst the economic data and from that we should focus on some work so that when we find a place of high production it shared the aspect of economic strength. there may be other places that are also economically struck but don't have the history ofpolitical mobilization or the political grievance. they may also have economic stress in a different way.

one of the ways we would like to look at in the future is whether there is a difference what things characterized in southern libya and many young menwho don't have jobs and aren't married and poverty wherepeople do have family. what we found is there is a long history of economic and political marginalization combined and when we look at regions that don't share that the happy families of north africa they don't produce fighters at a high rate. and the only cases where you find spots where they may be considered happy families you look deeper it's the function or appears to be a function of substantial internal inequality. on a permit is not actually by consensus number all that high in the provinces of. when you look at neighborhood like [inaudible] that the permit rate is similar to what we see i the southern part of tunisia.

one aspect i note on the ideological aspect is that worth considering is that ideological aspects of jihad is him in north africa arguably have long been closer to islamic state building elements than the qaeda mobilizations in saudi arabia. north africa was theperiphery of the al qaeda mobilizations in the past al qaeda headcontrol over north africa affiliates and over it south asian were saudi arabian. there's a part of the question about whether the lack of impact isis ideology here is done decades ago by other groups and were just seeing the outcome of that. thingsuld just say two

in response, doug. the first is that i think people manymore animated in regions by social issues than the political one. this being a state-building project. what we we are looking at in 2013-2014 was compelling for people in the region that was a lot more animated about the questions of how to use socially organized in islamic society as opposed to how do you contest the influence of materialism or colonialism et cetera. these are the regions of saudi arabia that are also protesting the new laws that the kingdom has passed about allowing women to drive. i think it will be the source of a

lot of angst as the kingdom continues down this path of economic reform it has been promising. the other piece of it is the message of recruitment is powerful because it is so flexible it is the message of the invention of self. you can go and be someone new in this placeand i think that is attractive for a lot of people, through wide variety of reasons. it is not just that i'm a poor farmer from the tunisian hinterland and i have a chance monkey in an office foreignrds of fighters, but it's also an structurey to

society. especially in parts of conservative saudi arabia where they see the kingdom growingfurther away from that conservative idea of islamic state. honestly this has changed a lot since 2014 and of course this notion of an islamic state is hollow for many years now and i think a lot of saudi's and people on the arabian peninsula have left. at that time it was significant. i'm going to turn to your handout. you have not only data but maps and these are quite powerful. the big, middle centerfield, if you will, is this map of where you found these groups from color-coded on the map of the region which is extremely useful. then you have these three smaller maps on the back that showsaudi arabia recruitment overtime. if you are to make me one of these maps that has this data showing differences over time what do you think would tilt off the map get me?

where are recruits coming from now that they have not historically and conversely, i think, more interestingly what are the dogs that are not barking? where are the places that have produced large amounts of jihadist overtime that are in the gray or neutral marking on your map? >> in north africa there are two examples that are interesting. untreated historically persons now. they are both really good examples. first, as discussed libya where they as you trace it back to the decades it is the same to provinces and their in eastern libya. it's not a new issue. it is one that the united states and the libyan government have been struggling with for decades. it's gotten particularly bad but there has been really a meaningful libyan government with control over the whole country. the other interesting one is algeria which did notproduce fighters in this case. only 26 fighters came

from algeria. that's an extremely tiny rate given algeria's largepopulation and it's surprising because algeria was one of theforemost producers when you look at the record and the leading of north african fighters in the past. it also has an internal history of jihadism with it is somewhat surprisingthat algeria does not show up. one of the reasons why we suspect that maybe the case although one we can'tdemonstrate because there aren't enough fighters from algeria to get a sense of what the demographics of algerian fighters are is that this is a product of algeria's lack of movement. it experienced fewer protest and the protests were not as anti- regime as they took on the character in they did not -- part of that is they don't want to repeat the history of the 1990's.

therefore, algeria sat out not the isis mobilization but the last permanent outburst of anger at structural conditions in north africa. which, to me, although one would have to get a whole bunch more research from algeria. it really provides this idea that in north africa we have a structural problem that predates isis. >> to touch on a few places i spent a lot of time in this presentation emphasizing the newness of mobilization for it to occur in bahrain. i won't delve into that anymore but one of the places on the map that doesn't show up at all is surprising and i briefly touched on it is yemen. i think ultimately there is a very powerful notion as

commitment, you make a different leader of a moviement. notion of this stickiness. you make this pledge and promise to it's hard to switch another group, and when isis declared the caliphate there was very few al qaeda affiliatedorganizations around the world that expected even though it is strongly suggestive that isis had a lot of times coordinating these movements to try to make this declaration

caliphate in mosul and in 2014 more powerful by the fact that they could get these other affiliates to declare allegiance. it's one ofthink the places where you ho wthe of theent to the leader stillent organizations is strong. foreign had data on originally joined main al qaedae

in syria.up i believe that it is very likely that we would see a similarly highrates training accounting for the fact that yemen has its own complex going on right now and there's a lot of people taking part in that and not having to leave at all. so there are few other countries i want to highlight. one is turkey. i think the political support of the turkish government due to a variety of militants in the searing conflict including even the al qaeda affiliate group at the time has gone on and on and on. i think the turkish political support for the movement has given citizens in turkey a lot offreedom to join these conflicts and this is a place where thereis not a lot of work being done what the motivations are and where they are coming from. the other place i would emphasize is jordan it has been well documented in the iraqi

complex and it doesn't show data about jordan simply because a lot of jordanians need to fly to turkey but they could do it on their own. i also don't think there are a large number of jordanians. you preempted my last question but i'll ask it anyway. you have been careful about saying in the limits ofyour data so now i'm going to try to not do on the first day ofgrad school and extrapolate from your data. you have these wonderful maps of the fact that show the differences between this time period, 13, 14 time period and historical norms. if you had the data on where everyone else and where are the al qaedaaffiliated movements but the al qaeda brand where are they getting their recruits and for that matter, other minor jihad groups that are some that still don't fall under the isis

or jihadi umbrellas. if you could get the data on these then do you think the current map would look much more like this historical norm and in other words do you think they are still producing these source countries across north africa and their essentially producing foreign fighters at the same rates or in the same portions in the gross numbers last overtime but proportionately does it look the same or do you think something is changing in the way that jihadist groups across, it was called the family of extremism, across the way that all of these groups are recruiting. is this something new or a limitation of have one snapshot of one segment of the group? >> i would say there are two things that have helped improvement among the full variety of organizations. al qaeda, isis. others and those are that the syrian conflict in the spring. when you look at those two as the key determining variables so,when it comes to arab spring like david had mentioned the caseof tunisia where the

phenomena in of isis agreement is widespread and an extraordinarily high rate as compared to morocco which has a dispersed isis went but you didn't have the extent of arab protest that tunisia had and for that level it's much lower. there are obviously more completed factors but let's keep it that. in addition, you have the syrian conflict and there's a strong correlation between countries that politically supported militants in the searing conflict and fighters that joined militant groups in the syrian conflict. it catalyzed treatment, equipment and battlefield tactics and strategy has become a safe haven for a variety of organizations and the generation before we were able to address this in a systematic way. places like saudi arabia members of parliament were doingofficial visits of loading rockets into rocket launchers and there's huge amounts of sanctions at the time where we are looking at to support fighters that are going to these placesto join a variety of groups. in cases where they went to join the free syrian army and overtime the phenomenon occurs and they find themselves getting to they want food and they join isis. those two variables are hugely when you look at where fighters are coming from. i would propose one would do a study to see how that relates.

i would add on a question of whether he sees similar locations had we stopped al qaeda recruitment record for the xyz militiarecord and how to return to the overall findings of our papers is that we should be so focused on the overall question of where and it's certainly possible that the we can't really sayaccess to that data which one of the suggestions i would add isthe extent of the government has and can release that data is a major -- what does --

in north africa, my tendency is to think there isn't a bigdifference. we see that in libya that historically the various mobilizations of relatively similar there's not an extensive reason to think that to the extent that there was recruitment it was coming from a different place. another reason i'd suggest is that in tunisia the recruitment built off foundation that was shared between races and al qaeda factions and it was built

off of [inaudible] which was engaged in an internal split over which way are we going to go. one that wasn't really resolved either but particular individuals -- north africa would tend to think that an area further studies should be looking at in the incoming hypothesis would be that it's similar dynamics for us and the arabian peninsula, i think there is reason to begin withthat hypothesis that there is a difference between al qaeda and thatand one area to test they is yemen, where meaningful isis agreement. reports ofbeen some aqeda.umbers of al

other group payments from yemen whether those are believable or accurate, i have no clue. there does seem to be a distinction between whatis reported versus. >> talked about how this is bounded geographically and that's a very important important qualifier. how much of this is found in temporarily as you pointed out, these records are drawn from a time when isis was really at its peak. when otherwise responsible people in washington weresaying a baguette will certainly fall on jordan and lebanon right after the fact. isis looked pretty good in this 2013-2014 from which you are recruiting. let's say the anti- coalition grabs your paper and the use it as the basis for their

future efforts. what cautions would you give them about hey, we arelooking at a period where again this is the faith building project. i would caution you to not use it now that were moving into. that would look more traditional terrorism focused. >> the time and if you looked at 2015 isis recruitment you would find. [inaudible] because the saudi government was starting to crack down on these departures because the tax work needed to be perpetrated inthe kingdom and the satellites around the kingdom but alsobecause no one wants to join a losing team. that is effectively what isis became. i would caution that if we were to just briefly i would say and pour out in my presentation that the fundamental context in which these fighters were being recruited hasn't changed. i don't see the radicalization efforts actually address these issues in the region. in bahrain i think it's the most acute of any in the whole arabian

peninsula. >> we will move to questions but let me give you the groundwork for questions. please raise your hands, wait to be recognized. once you are recognized please wait for the microphone so that those who do not have the benefit of being in the room can hear you. once you have the microphone in your hand, please identify yourself and any relevant affiliation. please ask a question. the question usually begins with a who, what, when, why and when you ask it as a slight infection in your voice to indicate a? a short preamble to your question is acceptable, a long statement that essentially ends with a what you think about that is not. with this we will go right here

to the man in the jacket. >> i'd like to ask about how isis recruitment posted strategies. [inaudible] is there any impact or did you see any correlation? --ya, tunisia, >> so, i will talk briefly to that. with we did egypt from our north africa region on the basis that when we look at that data there was a lot of phenomenon that things that adjusted shared a mobilization dynamic with other countries rather than so muchthe dynamic in libya, tunisia, morocco and algeria. therefore first constraint we found it risky to analyze that without thecomparison of the palestinian territories as that

comparison. we have not really look too deeply at it but it does appear to share a similar dynamic with some of the north african sites but is the country his government founded the arab spring. we do see the importance of marginalized the cyanide particular and there some kind of dynamic with sinai and the gaza strip that shows up in where people are reporting previous jihad. that is all tentative and we did not examine each of them and we viewed it as part of the sustained regional grouping that was seem to be different from what we were looking at and tied together the north african country. right here in the front. john hogan. [inaudible] all unhappy provinces are

unhappy in their own way. the use oflore qualitative methods that are specifically designed to test hypothesis. did you test any sample size of one? one beingsize on what? these provinces are unhappy. [inaudible conversation] >> yeah, ok. no, what i would love to

accomplish with this paper to be honest is the fact that this paper in our presentation the goal is to for more rigorous oriented testing and we need are strongly suggestive conclusion we believe to be true but i think as you emphasized people should be going to these places where possible. i wouldn't advise anyone to go to. it is a valid question. political marginalization, how are you measuring this and it different from economic and how are you testing? >> so, the political marginalization can definitely use more measures that are

better. a large part of what we were looking at or that i was looking at in north africa is the protest data and that looks at the fighters reporting jobs and otherdemographic information that appears to put them within parts of the other issue is we define not distinct phenomenons and there's places where there ishonestly not the same but in libya economic marginalization isso much a product of the ways the patronage and thedistribution of wealth and government jobs. that is the large aspect of that. i would also note that our emphasis on the protest data and qualitative work by others in the region. >> great. galloway. this is a question that goes more to north africa. since you have identified the subnational regions that have the economic and social

political marginalization issues is your study going to lend itself to a solution of perhaps focusing international aid other than intergovernmental agencies and individual countries like usa as a way to stanchthe recruitment of isis fighters by improving the source of isis fighters. >> this is one of the key areas that are report intervenes the existing debate. there is a current debate which i will give you the media narrative obviously within academic and policy and it's a bit more detail but it goes something like there is a set of people who say we need to give them jobs and then there's a bunch of people who say jobs for jihadists, that will make the difference. one of the findings of the debate is that it is unhelpful to get at district and many of the areas of north africa we look at the subnational areas they don't appear to be something about being underemployed or not having a stable job that i can't tell you is causal but shows up in a lot of these provinces.

hundred at really high rates. in contrast, if you go tothe arabian love the people who say jobs for jihadists is anideological aspect and probably much more a point then many of the people from bahrain actually have not great job situations but there's a whole bunch of them that are well-connected to institutions

of power. the other thing they are struggling to get a better handle on in the field and measures we are understand. they suffer a massive underemployment problem in north africathat is not captured well by our unimportant data. many of the jobs of people who actually are owners are very unpredictable and there is substantial informal work and illicit work and evenfor example

in tunisia. only one step away from a especiallyeconomy, tunisia.rn therefore you get this dynamic that if you would just run your classical economic measures it won't mix us up and it failed to pick it up for the arab spring in tunisia that the outburst of anger was coming. when you look at the more qualitative sense of people in this region they will tell you marginalization or economic stress seems to have something to deal with permits. those people have often been historically dismissed as money grabbing aspect of tb research and theywant money for their particular project or the head of the union that of course he will tell you one employment is bad for whatever reason he can come up with but i would suggest that we should be a lot more trusting of these

qualitative statements from people particularly given the high rate of underemployment that show up in the fighter record. >> one thing i would add is one concrete policy intervention i verystrongly believe in for the united states and other countries in europe is to encourage greater trade within the region. that's an opportunity for a lot of wins in chart of economic -- pretty much any region of the world for example, a province in eastern morocco 5% of the income comes from reminiscent andthe best economic chance you have is to leave. yet, historically the trade that was a hugely important city in the trade routes in the inland trade route across north africa so the lack of trade between morocco, algeria and tunisia economicg the opportunity.

perlman from george mason. some of the questions about the age factor in terms of not just a biological age but the. [inaudible] of experience they haven't been through like zero-15 since 911 but issues of humiliation, and be in trauma and the inequality has a relative deprivation factor in conflicts that they are shaped. it's a ten year lag effect so kids who wereten during the. who wereds

yearsrs-old in those qaeda and ital humiliation. is more workre being done. >> a lot of fighters from central asia are bringing their whole families and if that element but i would also say that isis recruitment strategies are predicated on impulsivity. i think more so than anyothers we have seen when you look at al qaeda recruitment. they advocate that you build a relationship with the crew. isis has prayed on the impulsivity of you more than any other group and i think when you look for example a german journalist recently a few months ago engaged in a conversation with isis routers and they basically said just send us a video and then will have that and you can

plan the attacks. don't worry aboutcomplicated things, get a knife and just go out there and do it. the commitment mechanism of someone sending a video to the group makes them feel responsible for carrying out an action. there is a lot of detail thinking in their current strategy to get people to make impulsive decisions and it turns out that i made impulsive decisions when i was young kid, to spread i guess theonly thing i would add is that it is fascinating area to look at although one that unfortunately would be incredibly difficult to figure out a method is where you have the generational aspect of the mobilization and you have fighters who are -- ibelieve the median age we found was 19 or 20, that was the pointthey were entering syria. >> now, whether that has an aspect to dowith the impact on children and cohort effect, i don't know. my tendency would be to ascribe that to network effects that build up in that it's home to militant networks that evolve over decades and get reenergized every time there is an outburst

of anger but it's not something where if anyone can get a meaningful sample of people, itm refugees or whatnot, couldbe an area that benefit from discussion. lawrence. my colleaguewhat from george mason said and say the cohort of the network effects are the same that the networks figure out the local

factorse issues in important in north africa. i would also say that there is a huge value in the data that you have but there's a missing stuff in the data set. the first one jump to mind for the computers seasons insyria fighters going to iraq and that was of early example oftunisian tunisian, algeria, libya is going to iraq and that reveals some very interesting things including another thing you seem to have missed which is the middle class fighters. one of the reasons tunisia since so many is not lack of access to capital but access to capital. looking at upper-middle-class it is interesting. >> let me just, if i could.

>> what i would suggest is that your conclusions are exactly 35,000 feethey are once you go down, there's other factors. this -uestion would be files outlots of there, hundreds, particularly in literature and how would you, in generations, a version to astudy capture all of that in growing anecdotal information from returning fighters which is another great new database. i think one of the next steps for research in this area is to turn to the profiles and to examine them geographically rather than trying to generate the tunisian profile which is if you look at the aggregate and we do split some of the data to you findoming and

that there is about as educated asthe tunisian population and there is about as many students of the tunisian population and they report origins from across the country. it is easy to come in as the journalist and get a sample that will tell you the story that the mobilization of the is the same terrorist dynamic we have seen in multiple terrorismcampaigns. i believe that terrorism does not have an extent, itd to some is true that we shouldn't undercount the tunisian --bilization ability to u cut across classes, but i would get vocalarn as you poppingn to see places

many waysre in ghettoized areas that are numbersg unemployment at such high rates. i think part of that is with the arab spring, the economy really contracted in some ways particularly for many of these areasthat are hotspots and i think this is a dynamic you see in some of the reporting of demographics of particularly attacks in tunisia is they will be reported as muscle because their family is middle-class or their family has some wealth but they individually often they dropped out of school and they were doing day labor or construction work. now, looking at those profiles will be useful to determine what comes first, the jihad is him or the economic aspect. at the very least, it is not

class ining middle any meaningful terms. writer with yaoo news. your earlier presentation, close to a year ago, but you had a broader take on not just north africa and the middle east but can you say anything meaningful having board in this part about the motivations, the profiles of the foreign fighters that came from the west and came from europe and obviously that is a major concern right now about ours about returning and is there any interesting persons with that subgroup? >> sure, yes. this is outside the scope of what we're looking at rightnow but i'm doing a social network coming from europe as opposed to those in the arabian peninsula and what we find is that the fighters from europe are much less connected both in a number of ties and the fighters from the arabian peninsula are far more interconnected. when it comes to what we see as threats what that means is there is a theory of social

network analysis there's a vulnerability due to ness.connected greater threat of systemic failure but when you look at europe, we have a far less interconnected network of terrorists, the threat is not systemic. citiesnot going to use cities of-- lose europe to the caliphate or

anything. sort of on at is one person, one person, one person threat which means attacks a harder to stop. you basically have to have some every single note of the network is supposed to some few notes at a high degree and a larger interconnected network. this is outside the scope of our paper. right here. >> then we'll go to the gentleman behind you. >> thanks for the presentation. my name is chris.

we were considering criminal justice issues, so we have some contact with these types of forums. we are looking at them for criminal justice purposes of course, but one of the things you mentioned early was the slippery slope effects. we have seen that as well from the recruit forums that we have, but to a really small degree. belowd data, but it is 10% of those that were former fighters with other group from moderate or other groups and most came from other extreme groups enjoying privileges. we had this conversation and it totally about the fighters. >> there is not enough evidence for us to make any kind of concrete claim, right? >> state department, thanks for the talk.

i wanted to talk to the issue of criminal justice and build on the point of how some of these things are addressed in europe. where the government has stiff penalties for anyone taking part in foreign conflict. has there been in a study on this? they seem to have at least, in some part of the balkans, we have made it diehard in the gulf. a person is likely turned off. any research in this regard? oureah, the main source of data for this paper does not really talk to that as a registration style, and not sort of government statements or terrorism within the country overall. 2013-2014, al qaeda, the

mobilization one people were changes.nning those in north africa, i think it is really a question of what you look at. in libya, there is not all that much because there is not a particularly functioning government. on the other hand, sort of the root strengthened and cut off, then you would have to get to syria. that cuts it down. in tunisia, you saw a raft of anti-foreign fighters. some of them quite strict with travel restrictions. oralgeria, during this time during the late part of this time, you see strong military crackdown on the few portions of the country where there was an

effort to mobilize the internal isis threat. and from the united states, sort of country terrorism reports and other reporting's. it sounds like that was pretty successful. and morocco, like algeria, has a relatively well functioning security service at least compared to tunisia and libya during that time. tunisia was politically constrained as a result of the revolution, and libya had an effect collapsed because of the rebellion and the 2011 nato intervention. >> as far as the gulf, it is that once the arabian countries in the arabian peninsula faced a domestic security threat as a manifestation of the recruitment of fighters, basically 2016 and afterwards, they crack down very hard on people going but i mean,

even at that point, to go to saudi arabia, people would be willing to talk to about any number of people they knew who had left syria. i guess my point is like, to underline motivation and processes of radicalization in the arabian peninsula, we're still not well addressed. even though the criminal element are heavily policed, and i think bothegion faces threats from al qaeda and isis and they are different. they come from different places and are animated by different questions. the fundamental things that animate them are not being fully address. >> we have time for one last question. this gentleman here. eighte colson, congressional fellow. can give give me some of the hypothesis of why there is a higher rate of fighters in gitmo? in guantanamo you said there was

a higher ratio of yemen fighters. >> i think it is because there are more yemenis who work committed to al qaeda then there were yemenis to isis. >> time for one more, i was expecting a little longer into. i want, going twice, the gentleman in the front will take it. jack,name is unaffiliated. i was wondering if you could contrast or compare the distinction between foreign fighters and recruitment. in other words, if a dueling coalition shut down the territorial area in syria, well recruitment go away, too, or will recruitment shift and how much can you get that kind of information in the future? >> yeah, that is a really good question. i used recruitment is a broad

term. when you think about recruitment, you think about someone from room reaching out to people that they want to join the group. there's a elaborate initiation, organized crime in italy might do it. in these cases, it is not that cut and dried. you have a lot of people are seeking out people to have them join movements like i says, isis recruiters have a clear strategy and are trying to facilitate that process. it comes from both sides and it is but very complex. so that is kind of how i use it, i think isis found a very effective formula for having recruitment be very broad, so it is not just joining but it is also being recruited. i mean, these data are people who left to join and all terrorism is limited by the quality of the data we have

access to. i don't think -- i think this i guess the word is often misused, unique. and that, you know, you don't have the current selection of fact you have if a journalist is interviewing a bunch of people. toa fighter once to return tunisia, the people who return one to return and can return, so there is a nonrandom selection bias in the sample. because the data is large and diverse, we can make rutter claims about recruitment rather than just recruitment of people who are willing to pack up and go to turkey and syria. >> it can be tough to figure out who recommended you, but it is not clear whether that recommendation is, what it

means. whether it means the person may elect the turkish border, whether they were at a turkish training camp and you went there in the region and then went over or whether it is just someone who can vouch for you but had no active recruitment outside. i did some digging into this and tunisia and there is certainly some level of more organized movement within the region that we are studying. 7.5% of the whole tunisian contingent was recommended by one person who ran this arab training camp. we know he was in direct contact with isis in syria, more or less on a daily basis. and also that there were connections back into tunisia. this is one of the areas that airstrikes in libya really focused upon during that time. but i cannot really tell you was,er within tunisia he

he had sort of people working with them who were doing a more direct reach out or if it was just people went and some were radicalized in the cited to go to libya, or of people just showed up in libya. that is not really something i can necessarily tell you. i think there does appear to be a difference between something like that and what we seem to see in other parts of the world, perhaps a little bit in algeria or i think we see this a lot in the united states, where people are just showing up or they have an online connection. something we have seen really an hour research here in our home grown terrorism. i think that is probably a geographical thing based on

extensive networks and the expanse of marginalization between somewhere like the united states and summerlike rural tunisia. x i want to thank david and nate for all of the work they have done to bring this data sent to our attention. as we have pointed out, there are 20 different ways future researchers can go at this data but nonetheless this is a great first contribution. i know the paper is held up with editing but to have a best guess when it will be released on the website? >> stay tuned. [applause] announcer: coming up, former equifax chair richard smith testifies about the hacking that expose personal information of

140 5 billion consumers. he appears before the house energy and commerce committee at 10:00 a.m. eastern and you can see it on c-span3. live coverage of the senate banking committee also live at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span3. you can follow live coverage of both hearings at c-span.org or our free c-span radio app. do?ork and work to >> i am an entertainer. >> ok. uso? rides no, i was actually called by the uso but i am an entertainer, i don't want to go much past that. cher? this >> yeah. >> ok. and you spent the day at walter reed? >> yes. they were great men. the men who took me around work in the services. they were falo