#Greenbirds: Measuring Importance and Influence in Syrian Foreign Fighter Networks

Project Title

The Syria Conflict: the Evolution of al Qaeda and other Militant Movements after the Arab Spring

Lead / Author

The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence / King’s College London

Relevant Dates

Report published April 2014.

Description

This report examines the question of how Western ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ receive information about the conflict in Syria and Iraq, and who inspires them. It is the first publication from a larger study utilizing the conflict in Syria as a case study to explore the local conditions that have given rise to the conflict; the nature and identity of militant groups, what they believe, their modus operandi, as well as the participation of foreign terrorist fighters, and wider implications for the security of Western countries, including Canada.

Core to the research is the development of an in-house database containing the social media profiles of Western and European foreign fighters in Syria. For this report, data on 114 foreign terrorist fighters are analyzed, 7% of which were classified as being non-European Westerners – i.e., Americans, Australians and Canadians. The data include a total of 121 unique accounts: 86 from Facebook and 35 from Twitter. Through a network analysis of the accounts, two clerics – one an American; the other Australian – are identified as key influencers and spiritual authorities for these foreign fighters, and both are profiled in the report.

Select Findings

The study found that a large number of the foreign terrorist fighters examined received their online information about the conflict in Syria not from official social media accounts maintained by groups like ISIS, but rather from so-called ‘disseminators’: private individuals who spread written and visual information gathered from the conflict, but who may have never set foot inside Syria themselves. For example, at the time of the analysis covered by this report, of the thirty-two most popular Twitter accounts followed by individuals in the dataset, the researchers found that ten were those of ‘disseminators’, while only one was the official account of a fighting group. Of the remaining twenty-one most popular accounts, thirteen were those of other foreign terrorist fighters. 

Taking into account both Facebook and Twitter, the researchers also highlight the prominent role of a small number of spiritual authorities who foreign terrorist fighters in Syria turned to as sources of inspiration. Two of the most popular are identified as Ahmad Musa Jibril, a US-based cleric; and Musa Cerantonio, an Australian convert to Islam. Though the researchers assessed that there was no evidence to suggest that these individuals were physically involved in facilitating the flow of foreign fighters to Syria, the two are portrayed as having played key roles as cheerleaders: i.e., providing encouragement, justification, and religious legitimacy for initially joining and then continuing to participate in the conflict.

Further Information

#Greenbirds: Measuring Importance and Influence in Syrian Foreign Fighter Networks

Related Initiatives

Jamie Bartlett and Louis Reynolds, “The state of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism,” Demos, 2015.

Lorenzo Vidino et al., “Terrorist chatter: Understanding what terrorists talk about,” NPSIA, 2015.

Ragheb Abdo, “Assessment of A Foreign Fighter's Twitter Trajectory: Before and After Travel,“ The SecDev Group, 2014. 

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