Why average people decide to become terrorists

The Orlando nightclub shooter, Omar Mateen, reportedly called 911 and pledged his allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, at some point during Sunday’s attack. Now once again we are asking ourselves how an average American could suddenly become capable of committing such a terrible act against his fellow countrymen.

This threat is often shorthanded as “radicalization.” But how it happens, what drives it, and whom it can affect are all commonly misunderstood. And seeing the gap between the way we often talk about radicalization and how it actually works is the first step to understanding and combating it.

Radicalization is the process by which individuals (or groups) come to adopt extremist views, particularly sociopolitical or religious views. But becoming “radicalized” is not the same thing as becoming a terrorist. Not all individuals who adopt radical or extremist views will decide to engage in violence.

Nor is radicalization unique to any one religion, ethnicity, nationality, or gender identity. As terrorism analysts William McCants and Clint Watts put it, “Anyone can potentially sympathize with a terrorist organization if the conditions are right.”

The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, for example, was perpetrated by two white former US Army buddies who held views associated with the extreme right-wing and militantly anti–federal government Patriot movement. As reported by the New York Times, a recent study by New America found that since September 11, 2001, “nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims.”

The FBI’s own report on terrorist acts in the United States between 1980 and 2005 “identified 318 events (including bombings, arson and malicious destruction, and shootings); only 7% of those events were attributed to Islamic extremists.”

The point is while it seems Mateen may have been influenced in part by Islamic extremist ideology, and that this form of radicalization must be taken seriously, radicalization in general can and often does occur in many other forms.

Adopting extremist views and committing horrendous acts of violence in the name of some “righteous” cause, be it religion or politics or just plain old hatred, isn’t something that only Muslims, or Arabs, or immigrants, or any other group of people do. It’s something humans do.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of factors that might make it more likely for someone to radicalize and adopt a violent jihadist ideology: societal factors and individual factors. None of those mean someone will radicalize for sure, nor do the absence of those factors mean it won’t happen, but they’re the things that typically coincide.

First, here are a few of the societal factors that are typically associated with a higher risk of radicalization:

And here are a few of the individual risk factors. Again, it’s not an exhaustive list, and people still have individual agency, but this is meant to help you get a sense of what the experts look for:

I have bad news: There is no standard model of the radicalization process — although (understandably) that hasn’t stopped scholars and law enforcement agencies from trying to construct one. The process differs by individual, and since there is also no standard profile of the “typical” radicalized individual, there is no one single model of how individuals radicalize.

Even if we focus just on Westerners who become violent jihadists, those individuals tend to come from wildly different backgrounds. They’re typically attracted to an extremist ideology for a whole host of different reasons, and take any number of different paths to get there.

You probably have an image in your head of the “typical” radicalized individual: male, 18 to 24 years old, angry, devout, ultra-conservative Muslim, etc. You know, this guy:

But that’s not the whole picture. Not even close.

The profiles differ even more depending on whether you’re looking at the United States or Europe, and even from one country to another within Europe.

Just consider, as examples, these three individuals. As you read their stories, you may start to see that there’s no such thing as a standard path to radicalization:

1) Stephen Gray is a 32-year-old former British air force serviceman who served in the Iraq War in 2004. Gray, who was born to Christian parents, eventually became disillusioned, left the air force, converted to Islam, and began working as a bricklayer. He was jailed last month for terrorism offenses after trying twice to travel to Syria to fight with either ISIS or the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front (apparently he wasn’t particularly concerned which).

2) Aqsa Mahmood is a young woman from a wealthy neighborhood in Scotland who in 2013, at age 19, dropped out of Glasgow University to marry an ISIS fighter in Syria and is now one the group’s top recruiters, extolling the virtues of being a jihadist bride on Tumblr and Twitter. As reported by the Daily Beast, “At [age] 15 a process of radicalization appears to have started — apparently hidden from her parents and most of her friends — and she spent increasing amounts of time locked away in her bedroom and interacting on radical Muslim chat forums.”

3) Nidal Malik Hasan was a 39-year-old US Army psychiatrist when in 2009 he opened fire at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding 28. As an Army psychiatrist, part of his job was to counsel soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from their combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems the constant deluge of stories got to him, as he was reportedly motivated to kill by “a hatred of American military action in the Muslim world and a desire to protect Taliban leaders in Afghanistan.”

Prison, the internet, social media, and personal ties to friends and family members who are already radicalized are the most common ways people become exposed to extremist ideologies.

Whether a person is exposed to these ideas sitting alone in her bedroom reading the latest issue of ISIS’s propaganda magazine and gradually being persuaded by the violent words and images on the screen; by spending time with a cellmate, friend, or loved one who is already indoctrinated and is eager to spread the “truth” of his newly acquired beliefs; or by interacting on social media with strangers whose ideas and beliefs seem profound and exciting, the common element is exposure to the ideology.

Terrorist groups like ISIS know this, which is why they focus so much on spreading their propaganda in multiple formats — digital magazines, brutally violent videos, an army of useful idiots who parrot their ideology constantly on social media, and individual recruiters who actively seek out people susceptible to radicalization.

The common perception is that radicalization happens at the mosque. But in fact, with a few notable exceptions, individuals are likely not exposed to violent extremist ideology from the imam at the local mosque.

In fact, it is much more likely that an imam who sees someone in his mosque heading down the path to violence will try to intervene to correct that person’s misconceptions about Islam, get the person’s family involved, or even report the person to the authorities. For this very reason, people who do embrace a violent jihadist ideology tend to stop going to the mosque.

Even when security services are able to identify the radicalized individuals in their communities, it can still be difficult to predict which of those individuals are likely to take the next step and engage in terrorist violence (and thus should be watched closely) versus which are just passive sympathizers. The latter category is just too large for everyone in it to be watched, and in any case, sympathizing is not a crime.

This seems to have been the case with the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen. The FBI previously investigated Mateen several times, including in 2014 when it learned of his connection to Moner Mohammad Abusalha, a fellow Floridian who had traveled to join the Nusra Front, ISIS’s al-Qaeda-affiliated rival in Syria, and become the first American suicide bomber in Syria. However, each time the FBI ended up clearing Mateen.

Here’s the bottom line: People are influenced by more than just external factors. Any one person who decides to join a group like ISIS or carry out attacks in its name is going to be driven most of all by his or her own personal and internal motivations. And that’s exactly what makes dealing with radicalization so hard.