The challenge of family pair terrorists

The following is adapted from Friction: How Conflict Radicalizes Them and Us by Clark McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko (the second edition is scheduled for release in November 2016)

The terrorist attacks in Brussels have brought increased attention to the phenomenon of attacks by brothers. Khalid and Ibrahim el-Bakraoui both died in suicide attacks in Brussels on March 22, 2016. But they are only the most recent of a string of brother terrorists who have produced a new challenge to security services and terrorism analysts.

Tzarnaev brothers Tamerlan and Dzhohar attacked the Boston Marathon with home-made pressure-cooker bombs. Kouachi brothers Cherif and Sayid attacked the office of Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo with Kalashnikov automatic rifles. Abdesalam brothers Brahim and Salah carried out terrorist attacks in Paris, one brother blowing himself up at a café while the other escaped capture until two days after the Brussels attacks.

It would be a mistake, however, to reduce this new challenge to “terrorist brothers.” In the U.S. husband and wife Sayed Farook and Tashfeen Malik attacked California’s San Bernardino Regional Office of Public Health with military-style automatic weapons, killing fourteen of Sayed’s co-workers. This case deserves new attention in the context of the Brussels attacks.

San Bernardino

On December 2, 2015, Sayed Rizwan Farook, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, attended a Christmas party that was held by his employer, the San Bernardino Department of Public Health. He left early, and when he returned, he was accompanied by his wife, Tashfeen Malik — a recent immigrant to the U.S. from Pakistan. They had a 6-month old daughter they left at home with Farook’s mother.

Farook and Malik entered the party dressed in ski masks and black tactical gear, including vests loaded with rounds of ammunition and explosives. Using assault rifles the husband and wife opened fire on the party gathering. They fired between 65 and 70 rounds in the course of about four minutes, and left before police arrived, leaving behind three pipe bombs that failed to detonate. A total of 14 people were killed in the attack, and 22 others were injured.

A key question in this case is about timing: When were Farook and Malik first radicalized to violent action?

Farook’s childhood friend Enrique Marquez has told investigators that he bought the two automatic rifles used in the attack, and gave them to Farook in 2011 and 2012. Marquez says that he and Farook were considering an attack in 2012 but gave up their plans when the FBI arrested a group in nearby Riverside California who had been planning to join al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Thus Farook was moving to violent action before he met Malik, and before Islamic State declared itself the new caliphate in 2014.

It seems Malik also was seeking violent action before the couple connected. In 2012 Malik sent an email in Urdu to friends in Pakistan expressing her desire to join in jihad. She seems to have met Farook on an internet dating site, meeting him in person for the first time in Saudi Arabia when Farook made the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in 2013. In 2014 Malik traveled to the U.S. on a K-1 fiancee visa and the couple were married. In email messages before their marriage, Farook and Malik talked of martyrdom and jihad, suggesting that readiness to join in jihad was part of what brought them together.

Farook and Malik were apparently both ready to participate in jihad against the West before they met and before Islamic State rose to prominence in 2014. Together they strengthened their commitment to action, a commitment strong enough to leave their daughter an orphan.

From this timeline, it is clear that, whatever symbolic value was represented by pledging allegiance to Islamic State as the couple moved to their attack, Islamic State cannot be the source of the couple’s radicalization to violent action. It cannot be the brutal interpretation of Islam advanced by Islamic State that moved them. It cannot be the new caliphate claimed by Islamic State that inspired them. In short, the San Bernardino attack cannot be attributed to Islamic State; before Islamic State existed, Malik and Farook were seeking jihad and Farook was preparing weapons for their own jihad.

Family pairs and lone wolves

Neither Malik nor Farook was part of any larger group or organization. Each was self-radicalized to seek jihad even before they met. In their close relation as husband and wife, and as parents of a child, they seem to have felt as one and acted as one. Although not lone wolves in the sense that they did not act alone, they also differ significantly from a traditional terrorist group, especially where it comes to identifying them and tracking their actions. A looming threat from the Tsarnaev brothers, or the Kouachi brothers, would likewise be difficult to detect.

The challenge of Family Pair Terrorists

Unlike a terrorist cell of unrelated individuals, siblings and spouses living together do not raise suspicions for neighbors or security forces. Financial transactions between family members are seen as routine, whereas these could be red flags for security officials when transactions are between unrelated persons. There is little chance of one member of the pair betraying the other one’s trust and cooperating with the authorities, or of an outsider infiltrating their two-person plans. Detecting and preventing a terrorist attack is thus more difficult for family pair terrorists than for other kinds of terrorist groups. In other words, from a security standpoint, family pair terrorists look a lot like lone wolves.

Similarly, the psychology of radicalization in a family pair is likely closer to that of a lone wolf than to that of a traditional terrorist group member. Family members — brothers or spouses — are likely to share personal grievances (one brother’s experience of discrimination is felt keenly by the other brother). They are likely to share attitudes about political grievances. They are likely to have gone through the same life transitions that can result in unfreezing (loss of social ties such as moving to a new country or losing family members). They can train together to use weapons (as Farook and Malik did) or to build bombs (as the Tzarnaevs did). Finally, in a pair one person may dominate, as Tamerlan Tsarnaev dominated his brother Dzhokhar, so that the weaker individual is more an extension of the stronger than an equal partner (We thank Lisa McCauley for this suggestion).

Family-pair terrorists create a social structure that has most of the lone wolf’s camouflage, yet allows for some of the specialization and social support found in traditional terrorist groups and cells.

In short, family pair terrorists can be more like lone-wolf terrorists than a traditional terrorist group, in both the psychological origins of their radicalization and in their potential for evading security services. With governments becoming more efficient at identifying terrorist networks, terrorists have undergone an evolution of their own. Family-pair terrorists create a social structure that has most of the lone wolf’s camouflage, yet allows for some of the specialization and social support found in traditional terrorist groups and cells. As more information about family pair terrorists becomes available, it may be possible to develop a psychology of radicalization to violent action that is specific to this new social form. It is already possible to recognize that family-pair terrorists have the advantage of greater capacity than a lone-wolf terrorist with little or no increase in vulnerability to detection of their plans.