News and Media

In the late Summer of 2014, as I sat in the canteen of the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM) in Warsaw, a report on RT (Russia Today) caught my eye. It zoomed in on four Frenchmen who traveled to Donetsk to fight in the Ukraine war on the side of the pro-Russian separatists. To say that my jaw fell would be an understatement, but one thing immediately became clear—what I was watching were foreign fighters. Throughout the next five years, I dedicated ample time to research and write about the issue (see, e.g.: here and here) and got the likes of The Economist and the Financial Times to cover my work. The world was interested but, despite my best efforts to convince everyone that the otherwise was true, treated the issue more as an interesting oddity and not a serious security concern. The fact that the conflict, in the meantime, got “frozen” and many of the foreign fighters disappeared from the frontline only further diminished any possible interest.

This was more than unfortunate. According to the most recent yet to be published estimates put together by a friend who now works at PISM, Arkadiusz Legiec, more than 17,000 foreign fighters joined the conflict in Ukraine. Yes, 15,000 of them had been Russians which observers would see as a “consolation.” Nonetheless, more than 2,200 had been non-Russians and this includes around 1,000 Westerners, including around 35 Americans, mostly of extreme right-wing persuasion on both sides of the conflict. Now, let’s remind ourselves of the mobilisation of foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) into the ranks of ISIS and ask if the numbers presented above should not be a cause for concern? For a few years, it seems, they clearly have not been as these foreign fighters have not gone terrorist and thus have not turned into FTFs. Imagine being asked about this issue on numerous occasions at seminars, conferences, meetings, and briefings, and then being met with a shrug when luckily unable to point out to a single terrorist attack in which these attackers had been involved. No terrorism seemed to have equalled an absence of a problem and all were ready to move on. I could have issued my warnings that “after their returns [to their home countries] such [foreign] fighters could, perhaps influenced by Anders Breivik [the 2011 Norwegian solo actor who killed 77 people in two consecutive terrorist attacks in Oslo], commence terrorist activities aimed at the European Union’s socio-political order or inspire such attacks by other members of the far-right milieu,” but this clearly was not enough.

As the world was clearly moving on, the alumni of the war in Ukraine were not idle:

• Some rebranded as anti-ISIS fighters in the ranks of the Kurdish Peshmergas in Northern Iraq;
• Some allegedly participated in an ill-fated coup attempt in Montenegro;
• Others switched into private military contract work or worked on developing strong links with paramilitary organizations in Central-Eastern Europe; and last but not least, and the most recent,
• Some former French foreign fighters on the pro-Russia separatist side took part in the yellow-vest protests in Paris as members of the marchers’ “security detail.”

At the same time, the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, which hosted some of the extreme right-wing foreign fighters in the conflict, attempted to enlist foreigners into their unit in, e.g., the U.K. or Germany. Interestingly, the other side, followed suit and organized “speaking tours” for its extreme right-wing foreign fighters.

Change of attitude towards this issue, however, was coming and it took one terrorist attack for the paradigm to shift. On March 15, 2019, two consecutive mass shootings took place in Christchurch, New Zealand. As a result 51 people died and one man, Brenton Tarrant, was charged with murdering them. It later emerged that Tarrant, who had traveled widely in Europe and donated money to far-right groups in Austria, held extreme right, racialist views, and also probably ventured into Ukraine, which at the time was consumed by, depending on one’s point of view, either a civil war or an “anti-terrorist operation” against the pro-Russia separatists of eastern Ukraine. Tarrant’s alleged “manifesto” justifying his murderous actions in Christchurch revealed that he could have borrowed a lot from individuals he may have encountered in the far-right European milieu, including combatants or, to be more precise, foreign fighters in Ukraine. Tarrant’s later alleged acts shocked the world and revealed the possibility that “a white supremacist foreign fighter” might have committed the first act of international terrorism.

Tarrant might have met with (wannabe) members of what Jean-François Thiriart, a neo-Nazi post-World War II ideologue and theoretician, called “European brigades,” i.e., a collection of European “national revolutionaries,” organized into military units, fighting in foreign wars to gain the necessary experience to return to Europe and wage future “European revolution” against the liberal and transatlantic order. Around a thousand such foreign fighters were present in Ukraine at the height of the conflict in 2014/2015. Most of these came from the larger neo-Nazi or far-right milieu and rushed to Ukraine to fight on either side of the conflict. The fact that they disagreed over which side to support—Ukraine, fighting to preserve the territorial integrity of its country (an understandable nationalist goal to some) or the nascent pro-Russia separatists (a seemingly equally understandable nationalist goal to others)—rendered Thiriart’s concept null as the European “patriots” prioritised squabbling over forming a united front to prepare for a future “European revolution.” At the same time, however, the lack of “brigades” does not necessarily equal the death of Thiriart’s other concept, the “outside lung” or sanctuary where the “revolutionaries” can organize and consequently use it for a return to Europe. As hundreds of European nationalists and neo-Nazis trekked east to partake in war there, and later returned home, facing very few legal sanctions, it seemed that Ukraine could still play the role of such a “lung.”

It seems likely that in Tarrant’s case, Ukraine indeed had been the “lung.” What is more, further evidence linking him to the European far-right milieu in general and the foreign fighters in Ukraine in particular soon emerged. The spinning Black Sun, or “kolovrat,” essentially a reworked swastika, adorned the cover of Tarant’s document. Both the Azov Battalion (later regiment), which featured the most prominent of the pro-Ukraine foreign fighters, and the so-called Rusicz Group, the spearhead of neo-Nazi sentiment in the ranks of the “separatists,” featuring a string of foreign fighters, utilised this symbol in their logos and propaganda materials. Moreover, Tarrant’s call to defend “white” civilisation against external enemies mirrored “reconquista,” the jargon used by the aforementioned units, which in a racialist, exclusionist fashion targeted the “Asian hordes” attacking Europe (Azov) or “fake Slavs” who slavishly followed their Western, either Anglo-Saxon or Jewish “masters” (Rusicz).

Consequently, the reverberations of this war in general, and the involvement of foreign fighters in it, are now felt globally. Moreover, the topic begins to attract wider interest and is now being covered by the likes of VICE News and by Ali Soufan in the New York Times. Additionally, Tarrant’s actions and his manifesto are now recycled and reproduced by other active shooters, most recently by Patrick Crusius, the alleged El Paso Shooter from August 2019. The paradigm has clearly shifted, years after I saw the four Frenchmen in the aforementioned RT report on the foreign fighters in the war in Ukraine.

I am more than glad to see the Counter Extremism Project pick up the issue and devote more of its energies to the “other” foreign fighters. In my view, it is more than warranted. Ukraine war might not have been the extreme right wing’s Peshawar (the Pakistani city which “hosted” the foreign fighters bound for Afghanistan; its former “alumni” went on to play prominent role in jihadist networks globally)—a university or a springboard to “greater” things in the future but another threat is in the air. Paradoxically, only now might the frozen achieve some of the Peshawar-esque qualities as, according to Pavol Klymenko, “Eastern Europe’s far right” (in this case Ukrainian) is no longer copying their Western brethren. Nowadays, it “is exporting its models to the West” as it attempts to make contact with the far right organizations in the West, and recruit them into their sphere of influence or ranks of its military units for perhaps another round of fighting in Ukraine. The exporters have the street cred—they fought in a war and came out, in their view, on top. This is and will be a powerful magnet for adrenaline hungry and violent Western right-wing extremists. Thus, the story of the foreign fighters in the Ukraine war is not over. Let’s not, this time, overlook its subsequent development.

Kacper Rekawek, PhD, @KacperRekawek, is head of national security program at GLOBSEC in Bratislava, Slovakia. He has 15 years of experience in research and policy related to CT and CVE. He has published extensively on Irish republican terrorist groups, European jihadism, and foreign fighters in the Ukraine conflict. 

The international Islamist network Hizb ut-Tahrir wants to bring its anti-Western rhetoric to a Chicagoland hotel.  

Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), the “party of liberation,” has been linked to religious extremism around the world. Nonetheless, the group’s U.S. chapter, HT America, has for several years held events around the Chicago area, as well as in Virginia, Washington D.C., and Michigan. HT America’s annual Khilafa Conference is a conclave extolling the virtues of establishing a global Islamic caliphate and condemning democratic values.

Last year, HT originally booked its confab at the Holiday Inn & Suites in Carol Stream, Illinois. However, the hotel made the responsible decision of canceling the reservation after the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) alerted it to HT’s history and examples of its extreme rhetoric. Unfortunately, the group found an alternative location. Now, HT is planning to return to the Chicago area on April 14 for its annual conference, and Chicago’s hospitality industry should follow Holiday Inn’s example by uniformly revoking the welcome mat.

Although HT doesn’t explicitly call for violence, it indoctrinates the impressionable to a way of thinking that can and has led members down the slippery path to a life of extremism. Among HT’s infamous alumni are 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and former al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. ISIS executioner Mohammed Emwazi, a.k.a. “Jihadi John,” reportedly attended HT events while in university in England. In 1996, former HT leader Omar Bakri Muhammad co-founded the outlawed British terrorist network al-Muhajiroun, which has reportedly been tied to half of the terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom between 1995 and 2015.

HT seeks to transform Muslim governments into a single Islamic caliphate based on an ultra-conservative interpretation of the Quran. HT intends to do this through grassroots outreach in order to sway Muslims to effect change through popular protest.

HT America insists that this goal pertains only to Muslim nations, not Western countries like the United States. Nevertheless, HT leaders based in Western democracies have spoken out vociferously against the Western values of freedom and tolerance. At past HT America conferences, speakers have excoriated democracy as un-Islamic and urged Muslims not to participate in elections. At HT’s April 2018 conference at Belvedere Chateau in Palos Hills, Illinois, featured speaker Haitham Ibn Thbait asserted that HT is working “to revive the Islamic ummah (global Muslim community) from its intellectual decline and liberate it from the thoughts and systems of the ways of kuffar (infidels).”

HT America has further accused the United States of leading an international cabal of colonialists. The group believes that its political positions are rooted in the “struggle against the disbelieving imperialists.” HT America further believes that “greed, death and destruction” are the “core symbols” of the American dream, and only Islam can provide a functional alternative to the “superficial glamour and mirage of democracy and freedom.” All of these statements are readily available on HT America’s website.

Abroad, the group’s rhetoric is equally extreme. Abdul Wahid, executive chair of HT Britain, has condemned valuable and necessary extremist deradicalization programs for “making people less Islamic.”  In Australia, HT leaders have called for the death penalty for those who leave Islam and outright called Jews “the most evil of Allah’s creatures.” In addition to these individuals, all of HT’s international chapters follow the guidance of the movement’s global emir, Ata Abu Rashta, who has accused America of conspiring against the global Muslim community, and called for violent attacks on Jews living in Israel. This extreme rhetoric informs HT chapters across the world.

HT has been banned in 14 countries, including Germany, Turkey, Russia, and Jordan. Using freedom of speech as a shield for its odious rhetoric, HT remains free to operate within many Western democracies, including Australia, Great Britain, and the United States. Ironically, HT literature has denigrated free speech for encouraging “immorality among women, vice, profanity, and corruption.” Through its own rhetoric, HT has shown that its core mission is the elimination of freedom and tolerance through a radical ideology.

Private U.S. corporations have no obligation to provide HT with a venue or platform for extremist speech. The Chicago Marriott Oak Brook canceled an HT event in 2010, and the Meadows Club in Rolling Meadows refused to host HT’s annual conference in 2012. And, of course, the Holiday Inn’s parent group, Intercontinental Hotels Group, canceled HT’s reservation last year. Chicago’s hotel chains and conference centers should follow these courageous examples by thoroughly rejecting HT’s brand of extremism and denying the group a venue this year.

The demand for antiquities and other cultural property sold through online retailers and social media has skyrocketed since 2015—the sales volume is estimated to reach $9.58 billion in 2020, according to a 2017 policy brief published by the Antiquities Coalition, a U.S.-based think tank that campaigns against cultural racketeering. Unfortunately, this rapid growth also translates into increasing online sales of illicitly exported, stolen, or forged cultural objects. In fact, the majority of objects offered for sale on the Internet carry no authentic documentation, according to a 2018 UNESCO report.

Virtual galleries and online auctions—through sites like eBay, Trocadero, and LiveAuctioneers, to name a few—provide platforms for both businesses and private individuals to sell and purchase antiquities in a quick but also potentially dubious manner. In most cases, online sales not only lack secure documentation of either provenance (an antiquity’s prior legal ownership history) or provenience (its “findspot” in an archaeological excavation), but also offer vendors the ability to conceal their identities and quickly disappear.

The structure of the online antiquities trade and increasing demand is likely also driving industrial-scale looting of archaeological sites, particularly in conflict zones. Buyers interested in owning a piece of history may risk purchasing objects that support organized criminals or are part of terrorist financing activities. In May 2015, the U.S. military raided an ISIS compound in Syria and found information outlining the terror group’s potential involvement in the excavation and trade of antiquities. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as well as Skype and WhatsApp have allegedly been used to trade antiquities and close deals.

Following the arrest of the Aboutaam Brothers in 2017, authorities gathered further evidence of ISIS-looted antiquities entering Western art markets in 2018. On March 28, Spanish authorities arrested Jaume Bagot Peix and Oriol Carreras Palomar—known experts and dealers in ancient art—on suspicion of illicit antiquities trafficking and knowingly financing terrorist activities. According to Spanish authorities, Bagot and Carreras led a network that illegally acquired antiquities originating from archaeological sites looted by ISIS-affiliated terrorist groups, before selling the artefacts in their gallery in Barcelona. They also hired foreign intermediaries to acquire and ship the antiquities via third countries to conceal their origin and avoid alerting authorities. The network began operating in late-2014, but didn’t attract attention until October 2016 due to fraudulent import records. During a police raid in 2018, Spanish authorities seized numerous artefacts originating from the northern regions of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania in Libya, particularly from sites in Apolonia and Cyrene that had been raided by ISIS affiliates. Some artefacts showed imperfections that indicated a violent extraction without the use of adequate archaeological techniques.

Antiquities Coalition chair Deborah Lehr said that “[i]f confirmed, [this] will be a smoking gun that ‘blood antiquities’ are reaching the international art market…” and probably affirms the necessity of a recent, and controversial, legislative proposal in the European Union (EU).

The U.N. Security Council has already passed resolution 2347 (2017), addressing this very issue. In paragraph 17, the resolution outlines a range of measures on how governments and private sector stakeholders should reorganize the antiquities sector to harden it against the misuse by terrorism financers. In 2018, the EU emphasized the need to counter illegitimate art trafficking believed to encourage organized crime, money laundering, and terrorist financing. In fact, “the illicit market in works of art can be as profitable as for drugs, weapons or counterfeit goods,” said Corrado Catesi, Interpol’s Works of Art Unit coordinator.

Indeed, the EU reached a provisional interinstitutional agreement in December 2018 aimed at preventing the illicit import of cultural goods from non-EU countries. The legislative proposal introduces a broader definition of at-risk cultural goods for importation, implements a comprehensive licensing system, requires importers to exercise a higher degree of due diligence, and grants custom authorities more power. The European Parliament adopted the agreement on first reading with 590 votes on March 12, 2019. Its final adoption by the Council is pending.  

International art dealers and their associations alleged that false assumptions triggered this prospective EU legislation and similar proposals in the United States. The Committee for Cultural Policy (CCP), a U.S. non-profit organization whose aim is to strengthen the public dialogue on arts policy, criticized the lack of clear evidence and quantifiable data to back the assumption that terrorist organizations finance their activities through illegal sales of art and antiquities. CCP disputed the existence of an actual market for these looted antiquities, labeling them “virtually unsellable.” CPP also doubted the feasibility and logistics outlined in the current EU proposal.

The art industry can be expected to lobby against legislation that they feel burdens them with administrative obligations and costs. But despite all speculation, the undeniable profitability of illicit antiquities trafficking has drawn the attention of ISIS and other terrorist groups—particularly when antiquities are within geographical reach—and has led to large-scale and organized looting activities in ISIS-controlled territories in Syria and Iraq. And while it may not be their most lucrative endeavor, strong indicators point to it generating meaningful income, which contributes to the organization’s survival.