Fighting Terror

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2014, about 17.000 predominantly far-right foreign fighters joined the frontline to fight on both the Ukrainian and the separatist pro-Russian side. The majority of these fighters come from Russia and former Soviet republics, while around 1.000 also joined from the West.

In today's podcast, Lucinda Creighton is joined by Kacper Rekawek, a researcher at CEP and a GLOBSEC associate fellow, to discuss this phenomenon. Kacper Rekawek has been working on Western foreign terrorist fighters engaged in the war in Donbas for the last five years. He is also the author of a CEP report entitled "Career Break or New Career? Extremist Foreign Fighters in Ukraine". Together they explore different aspects of the topic, such as the motivations of western foreign fighters, the context on the ground, transnational extreme right networks and the potential danger these fighters represent for their home countries.

Terrorist financing is an old phenomenon that keeps evolving and remains at the heart of global counter-terrorism efforts. It is the lifeblood for terrorist groups that need funding to sustain themselves and carry out attacks. 

In this 7th episode of our podcast series, Lucinda Creighton discussed this topic with Hans-Jakob Schindler, a Senior Director at CEP and the head of the CEP Berlin office. After taking us through his rich career that led him to the German government’s team investigating al-Qaida, the German Embassy in Iran and the ISIL, al-Qaida, and Taliban Sanction Monitoring Team at the UN Security Council, Hans provided us with some insights on the terrorist financing landscape. He examined various trends and new phenomena, ranging from the use of cryptocurrencies, the role of social media to the financing methods used by right-wing organisations.  

East Africa—a key security partner in the war on terror and a principal engine of economic development on the African continent—is being critically undermined by illicit trade, according to the new report An Unholy Alliance: Links Between Extremism and Illicit Trade in East Africa from the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).  In this 6th episode of the Counter extremism podcast series, Sir Ivor Roberts, CEP senior advisor and author of the report, outlined how illicit trade in the region finances extremism, funds criminal enterprises, and breeds corruption while threatening economic and social structures and leeching vital resources. 

Recent events like the storming of the US capitol on the 6th of January involved several far-right groups that used social media to organise, and the spread of various viral conspiracy theories online indicate that the extreme right is particularly agile in the online ecosystem. In this 5th episode of the Counter extremism podcast series, Lucinda Creighton interviewed CEP research analyst Joshua Fisher Birch on the rise of the extreme right online. Together they discussed the latest trends and developments in the US and beyond and outlined how the extreme right online could operate in the future.

Ensuring security has long been seen as a primarily national competence, but over the years, with the increasing cross-border terrorist menace, the EU has decided to double its efforts and has adopted a more ambitious role in counter-terrorism.  Through a wide range of actions which include numerous pieces of legislation or EU bodies such as Europol or Eurojust that support cross border cooperation, the EU has become a central player in the Counter-Terrorism landscape. 

In today's episode, Lucinda Creighton discussed this European approach with the EU Counter-terrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove who has been at the heart of those efforts for over a decade. 

We are witnessing more terrorist attacks than ever by offenders previously thought to have been rehabilitated. In this episode we hear from Professor Ian Acheson, former Director of Community Safety with responsibility for running the UK government’s Counter-Terrorism strategy, CONTEST, with the Home Office. In 2015, Ian led an independent review of Islamist extremism in prison and probation services in the UK. He has advised governments in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the Middle East on countering violent extremism and is currently a Visiting Professor at Staffordshire University school of Law, Policing and Forensics.

Ian takes us through the deficiencies in the system of ‘early release’ and explains how he intends to improve the detection of terrorist offenders who seek to game the system. Ian also makes the case for allowing terrorist fighters to be returned and prosecuted in their home country, and he highlights the crucial role in including reformed terrorists, such as Jesse Morton, in the reintegration process.

Combating radicalisation at the grassroots level is a fundamental part of all counter-terrorism strategies.  In this episode we are joined by Saad Amrani, the Police Commissioner for the Brussels-Capital Region of Belgium, and Liam Duffy, a UK-based counter-terrorism practitioner to discuss the changes required to effectively combat terrorism in our communities across Europe and beyond, especially in the context of COVID-19 and a pending financial crisis.