Why is Trinidad such fertile ground for the Islamic State?

Simon Cottee, Trinidad's Islamic State Problems, Lawfare, November 17, 2019.

In November 2013 Shane Crawford and two other men pulled off a double murder in a busy town in central Trinidad. Less than a month later all three were in Syria fighting for the Islamic State—the first Trinidadians, or Trinis (to use the local idiom), to do so. By the time the U.S. State Department added Crawford to its list of “Global Terrorists” in 2017, more than 240 Trini nationals had migrated to the so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq. This makes Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a small twin-island republic in the Caribbean, one of the world’s biggest recruiting grounds, per capita, of the Islamic State.

Who are these recruits?

In a recent article published in the journal International Affairs, I presented demographic data on 70 of them:

• Thirty-four percent are adult men, 23 percent are adult women and 43 percent are minors.
• Of the adults, the ratio of males to females is 60:40. This places T&T at the top of the list of Western countries for female Islamic State migrants.
• The average age at time of departure across all 40 of the adults is 34. This is unusual compared to age averages found for all other Western Islamic State contingents; travelers from other countries are, on average, nearly a decade younger.
• Nearly all the adult men were employed at the time they departed to join the Islamic State. The vast majority—90 percent—can be categorized as middle class, while 10 percent can be categorized as lower class.
• Among the men, nearly 80 percent were married at the time of leaving, while among the women all were married, with the sole exception of an 18 year old who left with her family. So, among the Trini individuals for whom we have data, there were no “jihadi brides,” and while in the European and North American context the norm was “bunches of guys” leaving, in Trinidad it was “bunches of families,” of which there were at least 26.
• Forty-three percent are converts, which, though high, doesn’t deviate from the pattern in other Western Islamic State mobilizations, where converts are also over-represented.
• Thirty percent had a criminal record or had been involved in criminal activities prior to their departure, which is also broadly in line with research on European foreign fighters.
• Finally, the vast majority of those who left come from three areas in Trinidad: Rio Claro in the southeast, Chaguanas in west-central Trinidad, and Diego Martin in the northwest. The majority—nearly 70 percent—lived in Rio Claro on or near the Boos Settlement Muslim community led by Imam Nazim Mohammed.
• Many attended Salafi mosques (of which there are fewer than five out of a total of 85 mosques in T&T; Salafi-Muslims in T&T are a tiny minority within a minority).

Push, pull, and a network:

What seems to have pushed them, although “push” is far too deterministic a metaphor, was a profound spiritual disaffection from the very best that Trinidad had to offer, which was a decent life of tranquility and ease on a tropical island that they came to see as sexually permissive, corrupt and lacking in any real value—a sort of anti-paradise. What seems to have “pulled” them to the Islamic State was a conviction that it was the true paradise that Trinidad claimed to be but was not: a pristine society of faith free of corruption, deviance and worldly temptation.

Just as important a question as why they radicalized and joined the Islamic State is how they radicalized and joined. This is really a question about recruiters, facilitators and networks. One of the most striking features about the entire cohort of Trini Islamic State travelers is just how networked it was. Everyone in it was connected to everyone else. They all knew each other, either because they were friends or because they were related.

The node at the center of the network was Imam Nazim Mohammed, who remains in Trinidad and presides over his own religious settlement (a sizable area of land that includes the mosque he leads and around 30 houses he owns) in the rural town of Rio Claro. Mohammed’s network has its roots in the Jamaat al Muslimeen, a group of black Muslims led by Yasin Abu Bakr. In July 1990, 114 men from Bakr’s group, including Mohammed and one of his sons, attempted to overthrow the government of T&T, effectively holding the country for ransom for six bloody days. They didn’t succeed, but the dark legacy of the attempted coup, of which the pro-Islamic State network in Trinidad is a part, lives on. Bakr and his men were imprisoned for their involvement but were pardoned in 1992. After their release, Mohammed began to distance himself from the al Muslimeen leader and eventually established his own religious community in the south of the country, where he embarked on a project of Islamic proselytization and disengaged altogether from domestic politics.

Moreover:

If the authorities in Trinidad are to repatriate its Islamic State-affiliated women, as I am suggesting they should, the price of repatriation must be a serious moral reckoning with what these women have done and, for the vast majority who took their children to Syria, the harms they inflicted on their children by effectively pimping them out to a merciless terrorist group. They cannot return as victims deserving of sympathy but must be held to scrupulous moral account.

This raises some difficult questions. One relates to the custodianship of the children, and whom they live with once they are returned to Trinidad. This is made all the more difficult because many of the children’s extended family members in Trinidad are part of the pro-Islamic State network there.

Another question has to do with capacity and cost: It will not be cheap to repatriate 40 or more children to Trinidad, and their care and rehabilitation over many years will require a long-term investment of resources.

Repatriating the men poses different issues. There is more at the link.