Meet the al-Qaeda archetype

Meet the al-Qaeda archetype

Terrorism expert Marc Sageman made waves at an international conference in Washington last week, when he presented his findings on 382 suspected terrorists who have direct or indirect links to Osama bin Laden's network. Sageman found that the terrorist stereotype - of poor, young, single men from the dusty backstreets of the Muslim world brainwashed into committing fanatical acts - doesn't stick when it comes to al-Qaeda. Rather, most of them are well-educated, well-off, cosmopolitan and professional, with good jobs, wives and no history of mental illness. 'Some people at the conference were…a little taken aback', Sageman says. 'I could have been describing them rather than bin Laden's men.'

He found that 'traditional theories of terrorism' offer few insights into the lives and motivations of these new terrorists. Where terrorists are usually seen as being ignorant and immature, as coming from a poor background and a broken family, with no skills and no family or job responsibility, little of this is true for al-Qaeda members and supporters. According to Sageman, even traditional theories about terrorists being 'evil' and 'religious fanatics' do not work for the new lot, a majority of whom had secular upbringings and schooling and some of whom adhere to few strict religious rules. 'I think it's comforting to believe these guys are different from us, because what they do is so evil', says Sageman. 'Unfortunately, they aren't that different.'

Sageman found that, for all the simplistic claims made recently about poverty breeding terrorism, a majority of his al-Qaeda sample were middle or upper class and well-educated. Of his sample of 382, he had information on the social status of 306; he found that 17.6 per cent were upper class, 54.9 per cent middle class, and 27.5 per cent lower class. The highest number of upper- or middle-class individuals was among the Core Arabs (from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen and Kuwait), and the highest number of lower-class individuals was among the Maghreb Arabs from north Africa. Even among those who seem most closely to fit the terrorist stereotype - the Southeast Asians - Sageman found a bias towards being middle class. Out of those for whom he had information about family background and social status, 10 of the Southeast Asians were middle class and two lower class.